"We were finally back home for a full day on Sunday, July 8th, from all of our travels: China (0724.html); St. Louis (0725.html); Salt Lake City (0726.html); and Calgary (0727.html). It was particularly nice to be back in church and singing the songs of Zion. We had excellent talks by Jordon Turner, Heather Turner, and Colleen Moore. Also Sister Sarlls and her daughter Samantha sang a wonderful song in the middle of the service. Colleen says things particularly nice, and I wrote three possible stanzas for Prime Words based on her talk:
It was nice to be back with my Primary Class. Sister Harlan had sharing time, and she was talking about genealogy. She still had time after her presentation, and asked if any of the teachers had an ancestor they could talk about. I found myself in front of the primary saying something like:
The kids seemed to like what I said, and Sister Harlan was ecstatic. She said she was going to have me talk about other members of my family next week. She was on vacation, and so obviously did not have me talk to the kids again. Although Sherrie Maddox told me her daughter, Sara, was home with bad allergies. I told her this was part of the legacy of Bengt Nelson, who partly left Sweden because he got so sick from the coal dust in the coal mines. I mentioned my allergies, Aunt Sara's allergies, Lynn Nelson's and other cousin's allergies. Sherrie asked if my kids had allergies. I said, "No, we were very careful to nurse the kids as much as possible, which seems to help.
Anyway, Primary class was good. Some of the trouble makers were not there, and they were pretty tame. I almost felt like they were listening to the lesson for a change. While I was waiting for Andrea, Aaron Boyce came up to me, with news that he is now in our ward. Aaron and I were Home Teaching companions for several years, and I taught him to drive. He got a law degree. Although he said he stopped practicing law because he was doing family law, and he got so discouraged and depressed with all that is involved in providing this service. I asked about his Dad, and low and behold, his Dad was right behind me. First time I've talked to John in years. So both of these Boyces are now back in our ward.
After lunch, I fell asleep. Guess my body was telling me to catch up from all of the travel the last few weeks. There were papers to catch up on, mail to read, e-mails, and "The Prisioner of Askahban" was on television. I ended up watching this with Andrea, reading Time magazines during commercials, and did not work on catching up the Thoughtlets. Paul called Sunday evening and said they will soon leave to spend a couple of weeks in Clear Lake as a summer vacation. It will be nice to see them again, even if it has only been a couple of weeks since we were in St. Louis for Dallin's blessing (0725.html).
Monday was a pretty busy day at work. George was still on vacation in California, and so I drove in alone. There had been an e-mail communication while we were in Calgary about supporting Object Reservoir and some meetings with YPF Repsol. Luis Viertel and were at Object Reservoir's office at 11:10, and stayed there until about 3:30 PM. Unlike my previous visit to Object Reservoir (../0608.html), John Mouton was there. It was nice to catch up. He is still the southern gentleman. I told him about going to Dirk and Carolina's wedding in his ancestors church (../0647.html). And the project with YFP-Repsol is very interesting, and very large (tied to extracting over 16 TCF [trillion cubic feet] of gas, which the country desperately needs). But I get ahead of myself. First thing in the morning there were a series of phone calls and meetings regarding Fred and Mike's upcoming trip to the Da Qing Oilfield in China. Then I was busy checking on GOK (Geokinetics) stock price on Ameritrade. Mike Schoenberg wanted me to give his son Brendon a ride out to the Park and Rice, and this was why Luis and I left Object Reservoir at 3:30 PM. Brendon and I were able to take the HOV, and so I made it to Geokinetics West by 5:00 and was able to see Diane Anderson about turning in the papers to set up a Merril Lynch account to sell my Geokinetics stock options using the new cashless option. I signed the papers, and left them with Diane.
When I got home Andrea had all kinds of questions about my day at work. She wanted to go to Men's Warehouse and buy me a new suit, as I have 7 safety pins holding up the pockets in my suit jacket, and a hole in the back of my pants leg, where the patch has worn through and shows my garments. We finally agreed to do it later. Then she told me about phone drama which had consumed her day. Once again she is being blamed for choices she had nothing to do with (0726.html and 0727.html). There is so much anger and hurt. It seems like every time there is any overlap with some folks, no matter how civil we attempt to be - even if there is no actual direct overlap with us - there is a whole new round of blame and shame and finger pointing and attempts to offend as others are offended. Of you 10 kids, there is only one place where we consistently have learned to expect this type of an attack after a visit, no matter how well the visit seems to go at the time. So much anger and hurt. Of course, the majority of us have feelings of anger and hurt, and we all need to read Elder Bednar's talk about being too easily offended regularly (0651.html). In fact, my reaction to learning about the phone calls was anger and hurt. I proceeded change my clothes and to go outside to mow the lawns. After mowing I attempted to start the edger, and once again it would not start. I was still angry and hurt, and did not want to deal with the edging the lawns, which in my mind is a very superficial activity (../0448.html). The quote from Henry Thoreau which comes to mind anytime the topic of edging the lawn comes up is "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root." Andrea had watched me struggle to start the edger, and proceeded to fire words at me about my not doing the edging when I came in, much faster than I could process. Did I want her to go buy a new edger? Was the fact it would not start the reason I had not edged the lawns for a year? Matt has no problems starting the edger, do we need to call him and find out how to start it? You made such a big deal about Matt not edging one day, and now you refuse to edge, what is going on? I can't take doing everything any more, why don't you sell this house and move into a condominium like you dream about? My response included a swear word, and then there was even more anger and hurt. And this did stop the questions about my day at work. In fact it stopped all communication for several days. Oh well!
Tuesday morning there were all kinds of things to follow-up on related to Fred and Mike's upcoming trip to the Da Qing Oilfield. This ended up taking most of the morning. Lee asked me to attend a meeting about the Audio-Visual (A/V) systems which were being put in the new office building at 11:30 Tuesday morning. I was the first one to arrive. These guys make millions of dollars putting in systems with 10% of the complexity of what we developed at Continuum Resources. They have motorized monitors dropping out of ceiling tiles, wireless controls for connecting different A/V systems, and they provided us with a nice fajita lunch. I asked whether they could overlap two projectors to create stereo images, pointing out Geokinetics has no 3-D visualization software. Richard Verm picked up on this and made sure there were two projectors side by side for presentations. The Grant folks were running the meeting, and had already committed to the purchase. Like so many things in my brief career at Geokinetics,, it felt like I was being sent to comment on something which had already been decided, and where it was irrelevant whatever I said. The vision of the Grant folks was summarized with the statement, "You did the TGS center didn't you? What do they have that is not in our proposal?" Certainly a different way of thinking than I think. Oh well! I left this meeting and stopped by Sam LeRoy's office. Rose was in the office with him. They seem content as a couple. Sam has drilled two wells this year, one a success and one a failure. His 1/2 % override is enough to pay for electricity for a month. I told him about my visit with Jory Pacht (0724.html), and my efforts to pull Dynamic Resources out of mothballs. I also picked up "The Boss," which Sam and I are quoted in and which I had loaned to him (0702.html). Sam had not read it, and said he could not believe anyone would read a book so poorly written as this. Interesting comments. Maybe there is some anger and hurt behind the comments. From Sam's office I went to Object Reservoir for the actual meeting with YPF Repsol. It was amazing to see how much the presentation had improved from the previous day. Aura, the Venezuelan Ph.D. reservoir engineer, did an outstanding job of presentation. Luis and I were there as window decorations, and nothing came of our time there. After the meeting I went home and spent several hours edging the lawn. Marc Roulston came over when I was finishing up, and we ended up working on the Linux system until about 11:00 PM.
Wednesday was a more normal day. However, the morning was involved with getting stuff together for Fred and Mike's trip to the Da Qing Oilfield. I walked stairs for first time in a while on Wednesday. walking down and up 54 flights of stairs provides me an opportunity to think about things, particularly when there is a lot of anger and hurt floating around. The visit with the A/V company had made the Geokinetics move to 1500 City West, at the corner of Briarforest and the Toll Road, real for me. During my walk, I remembered when Alf Klaviness had taken me to the old restaurant site, slightly north of this, and suggested it as a site for a Walden 3-D community experiment. I knew there was an apartment complex there now. As I contemplated it, I realized this was probably one of my many mistakes, i.e. that I had not followed up on Alf's suggestion, and actually built a mini-archology at this site, which is 0 Deerwood Drive. Anyway, looking at Google Maps after my walk, I realized there was a site next to this which was still pretty large, and was within walking distance of the new office. Since it seems obvious I am not being driven out of Geokinetics, and since I have no money to de-mothball Continuum Resources, and since Andrea told me to sell the house and move to one of my dream projects, I decided to work on a map of the area around this site. So for the rest of the week, whenever I was not working on something else, I was capturing hybrid areal photos off of the web and merging them together to build a map between the new office and this site. The map I ended up with is 114.6 MB in size. It was an interesting project, and distracted me from anger and hurt.
Thursday morning first thing I met with John Gillooly to talk about the missing Processing Report for the Da Qing project. We also talked about an e-mail I had sent to him just before we left for Salt Lake and Canada regarding use of my Landmark license. In this e-mail I told him that access to my Landmark license was not part of my salary, and if Geokinetics wants to use the license, the price is 25% of an interpretation project, or $4,500 per month, which ever is higher. John assured me he is my friend, he is not going to react to my e-mail, even it was based on anger and hurt, and in his opinion the Landmark license should be considered part of my salary. We agreed to disagree. The important thing is I got a commitment from him, and from Barry LaRose, to put together a Da Qing processing report by before Barry left the office on Friday.
Later in the morning Mike Schoemann had me meet with two consultants who work for a company with a 3-D survey in West Africa. GDC did pre-stack depth migration on 2-D lines across the area, and now have a 3-D survey to do the same type of processing. I will be interpreting some horizons on this survey for them. It wa an interesting discussion, and I got a basic introduction to the seismic data. One of the guys had recently retired from Chevron, and remembered me from meetings when I was at Landmark. I missed walking the stairs because the meeting went through lunch. Fred was talking to Lee Bell later in the afternoon, and I overheard him say Harry Mack died in England on Tuesday. Fred, Lee, and I had each worked with Harry when we were at Mobil. I proceeded to get up and jump into the conversation, attempting to cheer Fred up by describing a funny experience with Harry. Mobil's first in-house 3-D seismic survey was at Pinedale, Wyoming. I was working with the field crews at the time. Harry Mack was at the research lab, and designed the survey. His design was based on setting out the geophone receivers in a rectangle, and using vibrators and dynamite shot holes to shoot from the corners of the rectangle to the opposite corners, and from the midpoint of each side of the rectangle to the midpoint on the opposite side of the rectangle. Harry made a point of stating that this design could be repeated in adjacent squares and the entire United States could be covered with 3-D seismic data using this design. The funny part is if you draw this out, you realize it is a line-drawing representation of the British flag. Then Fred told how an analyst came to the lab and asked Harry how many line miles there are in a 3-D seismic survey, vs a 2-D seismic survey. After thinking about it for a minute, he said, there are infinite line miles in a 3-D seismic survey, because you can slice a 3-D seismic survey in any direction you wish to.
I was busy working on my map of the area around the new office, when Mike Dunn turned around, walking to the conference room, and invited me to attend a meeting with Luis Roca and Alfredo Guzman, which was just starting. Drives me crazy (translation: anger and hurt) how decisions are made at Geokinetics. The meeting was interesting. Guzman retired from Pemex and is starting a new company to support an opportunity in Mexico. Pemex is Schlumberger's largest client worldwide. They have a US$1.5 billion project to drill 500 wells in the Chicontepec area. Guzmann's presentation included several slides which confirmed what I had presented to Dave last year about Cantrell (../0644.html and 0706.html). The next Pemex bid is for US$1.0 billion to drill 350 wells, and Geokinetics is being approached to provide the geology and geophysics team to help with this project. It was a very interesting presentation and concept, and it looked to me like Luis Roca was pretty close to a conflict-of-interest in how it is being pursued. I asked what I consider the key question of the meeting: "How do you propose Geokinetics become committed to this project? By purchasing shares in a Mexican startup?" The answer was evasive. I was the first to leave the meeting at 4:15, and left because to catch my car pool with George Schultz. When George dropped me off at the house Andrea was gone, and so I took the Saturn and drove down to 0 Deerwood Drive to check out the site next to the Apartment Complex. It is 7.1 acres, covered with trees, next to a riverbend in Buffalo Bayou, and the birds were singing up a storm when I was there. I got quite excited about attempting to get a new community project started there.
Friday morning there was an article in the Houston Chronicle about the Katy Independent School District's discipline policy. I quote from page B1:
As I read this, I am still find anger and hurt about how the school district insisted on giving Paul a felony, making him miss his graduation dance, and putting him in A-school because he was looking at an eclipse on Beck School Property. The same thing happened with Matt, when that kid was picking on him, and Matt took him out, and had to loose his place in the Rennisiance Dinner. I know Chu and Dongning Zhang have the same kind of anger because of their son being treated the same way when he brought his martial arts sticks to school to show a "friend." They just pulled their son out of school, and sent him back to China to finish High School after KISD charged him with a felony. Everyone does not have that option. Oh well.
Friday morning at work there were more meetings China. Dave Johnson stopped and talked to me about the meeting with Guzmann, and also about how disappointed he is Geokinetics is walking away from China. Later Luis Roca came by my office, and we had a detailed discussion about the previous day's meeting with Guzmann. I was showing him some of my previous work, when Lee and Dave joined us. It turned into a 3 hour discussion about Guzmann's proposal, and statements from Dave that closing Geokinetics' participation in this project is Luis Roca's primary responsibility. During this conversation Mike called to say the typhoon in Japan forced him and Fred to postpone their flight to Beijing by a Day. I called Jialin and let him know this. Andrea called and told me a Fed-X package arrived from Landmark. I told here there had been e-mails from Marti Berryman last week saying this was coming. I must admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions regarding Guzmann's proposal. During the discussion, Luis Roca asked if I could go to Mexico City next week to meet with some of the Pemex people regarding some of my work I had showed him on data mining (0729.html). I told him Andrea liked to travel with me, and he said this would be fine, and if we stayed over Saturday, he would arrange to take us some interesting places. It was lunch time when the off-the-cuff meeting was over, and so I walked the stairs. In the afternoon I finished up my map of 1500 City West to 0 Deerwood Drive. When I got home, Andrea took me to look at rock for the bathroom counter top. Then she went to purchase drapes for Matt's room, while I went to Kinko's and arranged for printing the 0 Deerwood Drive air photos/map. We went to see "Transformers" in the evening. Lots of action. Other than an unnecessary discussion about masturbation, it was a typical lots of violence movie. There were funny lines several places, and I enjoyed the movie. It is not for Grandkids until they are older, like 12 or 13. I went back to Kinko's and picked up the three copies of the map I printed after we got home. There was also a Da Qing Processing report from Barry LaRose that I stayed up and edited and resent out. It was about 1:00 AM before I made it to bed.
Saturday morning I mowed lawn. Then we went to another place to look at rock sheets for bathroom counter top. There certainly are a lot of pretty rocks at these places. And they come from all over the world. The ones I liked the best were from India. From here we drove down to 1500 City West for the field trip walk I had told Andrea about since she called me Thursday night while I was at 0 Deerwood Drive. We parked at the community center, and walked into the subdivision to the north. It was sprinkling, and Andrea did not want to have to wash her hair again, so we only walked a couple of blocks before we went back to the car. During that couple of blocks, she quickly backed down on her comments about selling the house. However, not about how the house can not be sold in the condition it is now in. She does not want to move this next year, especially if it interferes with her teaching seminary, which a move to Memorial Ward would do. We walked around the property, and she was not all that excited with the property. There were workers at the gate when we came out, and they said the property is scheduled to have a house built on it. Oh well!
From here we drove the back way to Kirkwood, then to Memorial, Dairy Ashford, I-10, and out to Katy Mills Mall to watch Nancy Drew. I enjoyed the movie, and it is appropriate for all Grandkids, especially based on other movies I know the Grandkids have seen. Cute movie. The lead is Emma Roberts, a niece of Julia Roberts. First time I've seen Emma in recent years. Because Grandma Nelson was Emma Lambson Nelson, the name has always been special to me.
We came back from the movie at Katy Mills by way of the H.E.B. on Highland Knowles. They have these little sampling trays all over the store, and after Andrea had tried the third one, I said, "So is this lunch?" Her answer was an immediate, "Yes." We bought a pre-cooked chicken, and there was a lady there giving away a loaf of white bread, a salad, and a large bottle of coke. We got our fee stuff, after she explained the marking program to Andrea. Meanwhile, Andrea had a piece of pork roast and a salad, and so I had one. I started to eat it with my fingers, and a guy with a microphone gave me a bad time and told me for sanitary reasons I needed to use one of the free forks the store also provided. They kept talking about free food, and it was kind of a surreal visit to the grocer store. When we got home we ate the chicken and coleslaw. It was after this I noticed the Federal Express package Andrea told me came on Friday from Landmark. There was a nice waterproof black jacket and a letter in the package. The letter reads:
I read this letter, and for a millisecond found my mind creeping towards anger and hurt, and before the self-pity took over, I said to myself, "Money and the fame were not why you went through the struggles associated with founding Landmark Graphics, nor any of the other companies you have formed. Always remember, you did the best you could, and you did it to make the world a better place for your kids and your grandkids." As I write this, I am reminded of the story of a rich man and his faithful servant who went hunting ducks one day. The ducks flew up, and the rich man shot twice, wounding one duck and killing another. The servant started after the closest duck, which was the dead one, and the master said, "No, go after the wounded one first." Later in the day, the rich man was talking to the servant, and said, "Why is it that I, a person who does not believe in God and a person who is very worldly, have so much money, while you, someone who believes in God, attending church every week, and strives to live a good life, struggles and barely makes ends meet?" The servant replied, "Satan is real, and he says to his servants, go after the wounded one first."
In the evening we went to see the chick flick "Evening." It was the most chick-flick movie I've been to that I can remember. And yet, there were three quotes, which I wrote down on my swallows counting sheet, which fit right into this week's theme.
Don't those of you who read these words agree these three quotes, even if they are from a chick flick, provide a pretty good summary of the concepts and feelings of anger and hurt?"