2-8

What a week!  Since our work got rained out last Sunday, we rescheduled our shutdown work for Monday, which happened to be my 28^th birthday.  Two years ago I celebrated my 26^th birthday while on a business trip with my 2 construction coordinators, so Phil and I had talked about just making a few steaks and drinking some good Italian wine that he had squirreled away on Monday night – nothing big.

So Monday morning I walk in and my sweet team had made the cuuuutest card for me…

I spent the rest of the morning through lunch in the field getting the morning meeting kicked off and then watching the shutdown work we had going on.  I came back to my office around 12:30 and there was an inner-office mail package that had been slid under my door.  I don’t know how she did it, but Alanna had sent me a birthday card and it arrived perfectly on my birthday – magic!

Once we had finished all of our shutdown work, I came back into the office for a conference call with my boss.  I had just hung up the phone, and Rene was waiting outside my door telling me that we had a 5:00 meeting with our contractor that I needed to be at.  Typically meetings get scheduled a week or so in advance, so usually the first week back to work I inadvertently miss or am late to meetings that I’m not used to having on my calendar.  So I thought nothing of it and went to our contractor’s conference room.  We had a typical construction planning meeting, which I tend to get fired up in because of poor planning.  Anyway, I spent the better half of an hour letting them know that they have a LOT of room for improvement.  The project manager went to go get the updated schedule from his office and came back with the office manager holding a birthday cake….needless to say I was speechless!

The English cake selection in Cabinda is pretty slim....I like to think they meant it ;)

Phil had planned to make dinner for everyone, but we were so busy in the field with the rescheduled shutdown that he wasn’t able to, so we rescheduled dinner to Tuesday and I made plans to go on a walk that evening with Angela.  She came by a little after 6 and said she was going to change into her walking clothes, so I did the same.  Then Phil came in to ask if I would sew a button onto his shirt, and I annoyingly started to get a needle and thread ready to get that done quickly before our walk.  There was a lot of commotion in the hallway, which is nothing out of the ordinary here, but I walked out to find all my sweet coworkers and 2 of my favorite people in the operations group in the conference room with ANOTHER cake...I couldn't be more grateful for my Malongo family! 

Only in Malongo is it acceptable to be in shorts in the office...(this is after 6pm)

THE cutest.

Sweet Helder reading the card he made me

Our crews are working all day today and will most likely be working every Sunday for the rest of my hitch, so my days of afternoon naps are officially gone.  The good news is the sooner we get this work done, the sooner I can go offshore, and the sooner I can get my time in Angola over with so I guess I can sacrifice relaxing on Sundays for a few more weeks!  

I'm not really sure where the rest of the week went.  Other than being super busy with work I've been trying to keep up with my globetrotting boyfriend who's gone from LA to Istanbul to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and back to Istanbul in a matter of 6 days.  And yall thought my schedule was crazy ;)  I'll be able to sleep a little better once he makes it back to LA unscathed.  

12 days down, 16 to go!  xoxo...