Dream Silently

…there was an active person here. Yeah, and somehow I’m still around.

I ended up working last weekend so I stayed away from doing anything major on the computer. While there are a lot of things on my mind, I really don’t know what to talk about. For the most part, I’ll just talk about the project I’m doing for work.

The big one started at the beginning of this month. It’s taken nearly three weeks to strip and grub the area. When it first started I felt overwhelmed. Yes, me… doubting my abilities for being the lead on this project. On paper, the design looks tiny, unless you’re paying attention to the scale bar at the bottom. When you’re standing and looking out of it, you feel like stumbling.

I’m the lead on a tailings facility expansion, or tailings storage facility (TSF for short). For those where mining is a foreign subject (although, it’s still pretty foreign to me in some respects), the TSF is designed to hold a process solution that is gathered from a leach pad. A leach pad is something with a ton of dirt piled on it with any kind of mineral you can think of (primarily gold and silver for the mines I typically work at). Over the leach pad are pipes that send out a solution that breaks the rock down. The solution is piped to the TSF for final processing.

Or at least… that’s how I understand it.

I’m basically the client’s right hand ma… ermm, woman. I oversee it being built, perform CQA duties (controlled quality assurance) and I get a few people below me to manage. Well, only one currently and I think he finds it amusing that I’m in charge considering our age differences and my naivety. I’m getting another individual, probably a fellow engineer from Denver, hopefully because this project is being ran on both day and night shift. Night shift is going to be placing fill and if they are placing fill we need a person on night shift to oversee it or else day shift will be ripping out whatever they placed.

After our weekly meeting this week, our VP pulled me aside and surprised me. He said he was impressed with me because it seemed I had everyone’s confidence on the project. I told him I didn’t feel in the least bit confident.

In some ways, his comment to me gave me the missing confidence that I haven’t been feeling.

I wonder if I’ll one day look back at this and laugh quietly to myself.

ggrrr… wordpress is being a brat, so yes, I’m aware of the double post, but the stupid thing won’t let me delete it. Did I mention I’m browsing for a new CMS? Any suggestions? ~_~