A looooong day

Well, the good news is that I did not melt!  Other good news is that we all survived the day, and I came out of it with only a few blisters on my feet and really nasty hair after wearing a hard hat in 95 degree heat outside all day!

It was definitely quite a day, that's for sure.  I am still completely amazed at this terminal; for one thing, it's freakin' ginormous!  Another thing that's really awesome is it looks like the drawings we did of it!  There's definitely quite a sense of accomplishment when you design a PLC panel, and when you go to the site it looks exactly like your drawing.

I spent most of the day working with Justin on completeing our mechanical bill of materials list.  We were all over the terminal, though we did try to do things sequentially so we weren't running around quite so much.  Luckily he volunteered to crawl around, up, under, over, etc to hunt down part numbers for me.  I wouldn't have minded doing that, except for those stupid coveralls we had to wear!  Let's just say they're not built for a woman... the fit wasn't too bad except that the crotch was halfway to my knees; if the waist had been in the right spot the leg length would have been perfect for me, but since it was all whacked out I was walking on the bottoms of my pant legs all day.  I pity the poor sap who gets to dry clean those when we get home, both because of mud and because by the end of the day we were all pretty stinky!

Just for the record, yes mother I drank lots of water... I lost count, but I'm pretty sure I went through about 6 20-oz water bottles throughout the day!  It was freakin' hot out there, and the only shade is when you're up next to a big tank or something.  But luckily we had work to do in the buildings with a/c a few times, and under the load rack canopy, and places like that so we could get a little break from the blazing sun.  We had a heavy rain in early afternoon which momentarily cooled things off, but then once that storm got over it was more humid than before so it really didn't help anything.

We had a bit of fun about midday when Justin noticed the propane system leaking.  Conveniently, he's the one who designed it and today was the first day they were receiving propane.  So he had to do some running around to figure out why stuff wasn't working right... turns out having solenoid valves backwards and not plugging something that should have been plugged just isn't a good idea!  But they were able to get the problem resolved by mid-afternoon, at least with a temporary fix on part of it.

We ended up staying at the terminal until probably 7pm local time, and then went to Lone Star for dinner once we drove the 45 min back to Tuscaloosa, with one of the guys from our client company who's actually building the terminal. So I just got back to the hotel a little while ago and boy am I beat!  I also feel really disgusting after being so sweaty... I think I'm going to bathe before going to bed!

So tomorrow we'll be up early again (I got up at 5:45am local time today), then head over to the terminal for the morning.  Our flight out of Birmingham leaves at 5pm, so with that being a 2-hr drive from the terminal, we'll probably take off around lunch time.  And with any luck, I'll be home to Findlay before 11pm!