Busy week

Well I finally got to move into the dorms at Western New Mexico University. Last week we stayed in a little hotel called The Copper Manor Motel. I don't really recommend it to anybody, there must have been a few drug busts there because you could see that after the doors were kicked in they got bandaged up. I didn't have internet access that week so I haven't been able to update this thing, but I actually got to do some real work this week, well kind of. My first real day was on Tuesday but it only ended up being a half day because we moved all morning and that sucked too. The rooms we live in aren't that great there isn't air conditioning and as of right now there is still no smoke detectors in any of the rooms just wires where they are supposed to be. I thought this would be a step up from the The Copper Manor but boy was I wrong. At least The Copper Manor had air conditioning, fridge and TV. The dorms have nothing in them but a bed, dresser, desk and some internet access. Well getting away from the living situation and getting to the work side of things, work is pretty sweet. I already have about 7 projects that I get to do. Three of them are pretty big projects the rest of them are just things I can do in my spare time.

The biggest project I have is one with a feed pond that will lead into the SX for separation. What I understood from the description was that the turbidity of the feed pond is quite high so they can't keep much pregnant leach solution (PLS) in it. This is a problem because the stockpile that is being leached is a good ore and with copper selling for near four dollars a pound this is a good project to be put on.

Besides the projects I haven't got to do much yet. I did get two free lunches this week which I thought was really great. The first one was my first day at the SX it was steak, corn on the cob, shrimp and other foods. It was really good too and a lot more than I expected for a free lunch. The other free lunch was on Thursday and it was at a Mexican food restaurant called Jalisco's and it was very good too. I also got to take a trip into the mine and see some of the stuff in it. The haul trucks are enormous and so are the bulldozers and other tractors in there. In a big truck it makes you feel like just a little car.

Today I got to learn a new program that is the most time consuming thing I have ever done. The rocks in our stockpiles are supposed to have a P80 of 10 inches. This just means that 80% of the rocks on the stockpiles need to 10" or less. To use the program you have to get two scaling balls and put them on your stock pile and take a picture but the picture needs to be on a flat surface, hard to do when it is on the side of a hill. Well anyway once the pictures are taken you load one of them into this program called split image and it can actually use the scaling balls to tell you the size of the rocks. There is an automatic setting that will outline them for you but the picture conditions have to be low light and hardly any shadows. Not really going to happen in the mine so I had to outline every rock on the computer with the program. Took about two hours but I did get good data and they liked it. So we are going to start using the program in the SX so the mine will begin to blast differently and get smaller pieces of rock to try and leach.

Well as for me its Friday and I will probably just go to sleep early, well after going out to dinner for the I don't know what time since I left home. I never thought I would miss a fridge and microwave so much but all will be better once this weekend is over. Some of the room mates who don't live 12 hours away more like two are going to go and get some fridges from home and a microwave. This means we can save some money by not having to keep going out to eat.