So, I’m writing this from the plane and I’ll copy and paste it to tumblr when I get to wifi. Anyways, I’m heading back to Providence after my second deployment. It was a good trip. Started out rough with the whole 5 hotels in 6 days, then eased out with one hotel in five days. And I just switched from numbers to letters. Anyway, after I left Cameron and seemed to take the impromptu team leader position of what my coordinator called the “Tar Ball Rangers,” he gave me Thrusday as a standby day, until about noontime.

I don’t like working late. I want to get it out of the way and over, because it makes the day seem like it was longer if you leave when its light out and return to base or the hotel when its dark. But the trick of it was, I was going to be officially a team leader, well of myself and a kid I was working with for the past five days. So it wasn’t going to be much of a stretch. There was a boat that got decon’d at Mobile and supposedly had oil under the floorboards. NRDA, they’re the people who do human uses and stuff, wanted a HotShot, like me, to go take a sample of the oil for finger-printing. The catch was it was under the floorboards. So, I was given supplies and told to wait until we got a call. Either I’d go out shortly or in the morning, or not at all, if the team in the area could gather the sample. I didn’t get a call, so by 1900, which is when my coordinator leaves the command center, I called and he said I’d be the first to know.

That brings us to the next morning, I had gotten a call the night before to sleep in New Orleans so we could use my room in the Entrix Dorm, a.k.a. the Microtel in Houma for some deploying people, so I agreed because by 0800 I hadn’t heard of any mission. I packed up and got ready to leave the hotel, it was 1030 when I got my phone call from Paul, the one I worked with on my first deployment. He wanted me on his team to do some tarball work in an actual hotzone. The team was leaving at 1415 to get to the site for 1600, yeah, late, but hey, better than sitting around until I could check in. So we went, Paul and his partner and me and mine, who was Shanawaz, the guy I was working with in Cameron and who I was supposed to team lead.

We made it down to the staging area, got suited up in waders, booties and like three pairs of rubber gloves to hop on UTVs (ATVs with a bed in the back, like a pick up truck, not like a bedroom) and search for oil. We had two points and one was in waist deep water. But we didn’t find any oil after a 15 yard circle search of the spot. We called Paul, the big team leader and let him know, then moved to the second site.

Here we found a sediment deposit, basically a mud ball, but instead of being water, it was oil that held the sand together, we collected it, called Paul and went to rendezvous back at the staging area. We filled out our labels, and chains of custody then went back to Houma.

We made it to Houma at about 2000, and I changed, said my good byes and good lucks and see you next times and drove to New Orleans, Got there, slept, got up at 0600 and made it to the airport by about 0700, what? I like to be early. Now I’m on a plane to DC, maybe I’ll see where Huessin lives from the plane? And then off on a puddle jump to Providence and back to Danielle. Finally.

Now, on the second leg of my trip, but guess what? The guy sleeping in the seat next to me worked for Entrix and was heading to Philly. Yeah, sure, he was NRDA but it was cool to see someone else doing the same job I am doing on the same flight. Anyways, flying from DC to PVD!!