Ocean waves > Heat waves - 1-10-12

"I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass." -Bradbury


You know that sticky feeling you get when you get out in that nasty humid Central Florida summer heat that you just don't feel like you can get rid of?  I had that for a month when I was in Thailand, and I learned that throughy habituation you can pretty much grow used to it; live sticky.  You grow accustomed to the film, wet sheets, and constant sweat soaked clothes.  That was in Thailand, where I could pretty much run for 5 minutes and dive into a refreshing ocean if the urgent panic for a feeling of "cool" set in - whenever I wanted.  The brief respite from this heat on my month home between trips negated any sort of steps I had taken towards personally evolving to a state of constant heat and stick - to which I embraced.

The weather thus far has been suprisingly mild, and I have at this point all but forgotten what it's even like to be uncomfortably hot.  Then the heat tsunami struck, and on the one day that we had to get dressed up for a meeting and tour of Fluor, an engineering, procurement, construction and management company in the Forbes top 200 .  Fortunately the meeting was inside and the conference room had air-con, but unfortunately we had to walk who knows how many blocks on approach to their Brisbane office.  I do not mean to sound dramatic or anything, but on the whirl wind of changes in climate over the past several months, I am just trying to paint an image that it is hot - as hell - over here.  At least for now.

Enough trivial illustrations and on to what fortunate events our day held.  Started the day off running through air as thick as mud all through the city along the river.  Barely even noticed the heat, however, with so much to take in along the way.  Best way to see a city is by foot and best mode of transport by foot is to run.  Badabing badaboom.  In brief, we missed the National Championship, in which the apparent national champions - my bane, my hate, my state nemesis - Alabama trumped LSU wrapping up the season in an incongruous befuddlement; perhaps disappointment.  I don't really know, I am just regurgitating what word of mouth I may have ingested throughout the fall where little football was watched on my part, to my distress.

Fortunately, instead of witnessing a glorious dethroning, and personal end to our national champion reign - obviously eminent, dubiously resisted - we had our meeting with Fluor.  This was one of the most impressive companies I have ever had the pleasure to meet with and learn about.  I will not bore with statistics and rankings, but just to give an idea, their annual revenue in 2008 was 22 billion dollars.  This is a goliath of a company specializing in power resources, infrastructure, global services, and large government jobs.  In short, Fluor is a mammoth internationally present construction company in which they have engineering services interconnected throughout world offices where they provide in office operations 24/7.  Quite an operation they are running.

Fracking dramatization...for impactful illustration

Their current operation involves the construction of one component in an LNG production process.  LNG is Liquified Natural Gas, a recently developing process of cooling and pressurizing the Natural Gas to a state of liquidity for ease of transport and procurement.  I ahd never personally heard of this, but I have had many articles about the negative impact and generally speculative stance most have on our method of "Fracking" to extract natural gas.  It occurred immediately to me that these methods upheld environmental standards and regulations, trumping the methods in the states by a long shot. Strange what greed and money can make people do; or keep from doing what is right, in this instance.

Pretty influential day with not a lot of pictures because most of which are on my phone I happened to leave on a bus late yesterday.  Unfortunate turn of events, to say the least.

Cheers.