woop woop!

It is 21 days till I leave!
Hurrah!
It is going to be so good to see green things and breath air with the smell of trees and flowers again.
Lots of memories...

Like, for instance, a couple of nights ago when we all hiked out to castle rock for the first time. We left around 9pm and got back around 3am. It was fantastic. Here is the view around 2am-ish from the trail.

When we got to the top of the rock, ther is a part where you can dangle your legs off over the edge and be hanging out over the full height of the rock, about 600 feet or something like that. Pretty breathtaking. Here is a photo of the rock with a little yelloe guy drawn in to give a sense of scale.

Yea! It was fun!

Honey dipped, gold plated Jesus

I had the best day on Sunday. Let me describe it to you.
I started out working on my robot costume, which I am building for my upcoming birthday party next week. Robot building is very relaxing as well as rewarding.
Then I drove my shuttle for 3 hours in the beautiful sunshine, window down, carefree waving to all the people walking.
Then rugby game time. Got to see some good takedowns, and some of my friends tackle some kiwis.
Good sport!
Next was penguin watching down at Hut Point where about 200 or so had gathered. The adelie penguin is the hyperactive, spasmatic sibling in the family, and there was much penguin antics to observe. It turns out that everything an adelie penguin does is cute. So after about an hour of being hit with wave after wave of cuteness we went and ate a big pile of beef.
THE END!

rip! rip!

It sneaks up every year.

Well here is an update. Tim, this will answer the number of different and somewhat conflicting rumors you have heard.
One, I am planning to stay longer than I thought, just not all at once. If I can get a job as a shuttle driver next year, I will do so and hold it for probably that year and the next.
Two, I did apply for a slightly better position here as a prep cook, and I was sadly passed over. I will tell you all details later should you want to know. I will remain an ambitious pot scrubber and plate rinser for the remainder of my time here.

We just got our first e-mails regarding our redeployment, which is the first step in getting out of here. Many of us share the sentiment that while we are excited about coming back next year, we really want to leave now and get back to the normal world.
Christmas is this next weekend, and so that means lots of preperation around the galley area for the next couple of days. Our thanksgiving was lots of fun last month so I have similar expectaions for x-mas. Lots of voulenteers come out and help, so the work load is alot lighter, and we get to do different food, which is a treat after the continual onslaught of chicken casserole this and beef carbonnade that.
Also the coming of christmas heralds the coming of the new year, which in turn calls attention to the fact that it will soon be my birthday, which is practically in the middle of january, which makes it only a couple of weeks till we are all in Christchurch partying it up.

The day before yesterday I got to go on my first, (and sadly probably last) boondoggle. A boondoggle is "morale" work trip that usually gets you somewhere cool, doing something cool while still under the pretense that what you are doing is actually something useful. The stellar axis project is someting you may want to google, they probably have more pictures and info about what this all is, but anyway the gist of it is this gal, Leta Alleghany who is a large landscape artist got a grant to set up these largish colbalt blue balls made of fiberglass to represent a portion of the southern sky during the solstice, which is actuall today. The big blue balls are of different sizes depending on the lumens of each star, the largest being 4'(Sirus) down to about 1' across. The pattern was laid out with GPS by an international team of consultant scientests and Leta herself. Our task was to further secure the 50 smallest balls so that they would not blow away in the wind that they were expecting the last couple of days. The first we saw of the field it was just at white-out conditions, so the effect was that the balls were just floating in front of us in space. Also with no frame of scale, it looked as if they could be huge, just like looking at the side of a galexey or someting. Once you got among them, you could see just how big everything was though, so I spent alot of time rolling around on the ground trying to imagine them huge and planetary. It was probaly the coolest thing I have done while I am down here, and I think the best boondoggle that has been or will be offered all season. I scored. The other cool thing is that I get to be listed in the project credits for doing my small part. So should I ever decide to break into the "careful placement of large geometric objects to enhance the natural landscape as well as make some fanciful statement about our place in the universe" scene, I will have a reference.


The distintive rock formation in the middle of the screen is Castle Rock, about 3 miles up the penninsula from MCM, Scott Base is just visible down and to the left from there as a blob of green buildings, and Ob Hill would be the next thing you would see if the picture continued any more to the left. You can see we were pretty far out from base on the sea ice. I think I was standing behing Sirus when I took this.

Well I guess it's just merry christmas to everybody, hope everybody has a good, quiet, peaceful one with family and loved ones.

give it up

for turkey and turkey parts!
Ah yes the smell of turkey is in the air, filling my quivering nostrels with treptiphene induced anticipation of the 1200 pounds of gobble gobble we are about to proff up to the community organism. Today is in fact the big day, as with all holidays, we must wait untill the nearest saturday to celebrate and here we are. I was up late last night and could not sleep in this morning, so here I am in the computer kiosk updating my blog at 7:30.
I have not updated in a while I guess, as erin reminds me every so often, but I have been extremly busy, plus nothing really of note has happened latley. But I suppose that given the month or so that has passed between postings my life must have changed somewhat so here goes the update.

Well my friends and I are all getting along, I think the last blog was right before mainbody, and I have made some new friends from that group, but my main core of friends still is the winfly people. After meeting so many people it is hard to care about a few more. Erin knows what I am talking about. I have not been nearly as active a I thought I would be in terms of hiking and getting outdoors. It is pretty much go to work, come home, relax for a while, maybe go out for an hour or two, but 90% of the time its reading or a movie, then to bed cuz' nothing sux more than being tired when you are scrubbing pots 10 hours a day.
I am definitly feeling the effects of being in antarctica this long without the normal world to nourish and feed me. Meaning I miss home, and the ratio of thinking "what am I going to do when I get out of here" and "gee, antactica is so dang cool" is tipping.
Here is a schedule of a typical week:
MONDAY
go to work. scrub. wipe. drink coffee. wipe some more. come home. watch bad movie. read. go to bed.
TUESDAY
go to work. again with the wipe wipe. come home. work at the greenhouse for a while. read. go to bed.
WEDNESDAY
go to work. wipe. wipe. come home. drink some fine black velvet. come up with some crazy movie ideas with Devin. storyboard those ideas. laugh. read. go to bed.
THURSDAY
go to work. today in addition to the wipe I will scrub. and I will be inventive in my wiping and scrubbing technique. come home. think, "ah, today is almost friday, which is almost saturday, which is the day before sunday, which is my day off". watch tv. go to sauna with crazy people and get naked. go to bed.
FRIDAY
go to work. make jokes about the vast, VAST, quantities of meat that is consumed here on station. it is a meat carnival. a gathering of the meats. ask the cooks how they feel about all this meat. wipe. come home. party. its friday. that means burger bar at gallaghers. foosball. airhocky. billiards. shuffleboard. the house of games. sauna. naked. go to bed.
SATURDAY
go to work. work fast. get done with work. think "that wasn't so bad" "I could stay for more". go home. party. or maybe just a movie. go to bed.
SUNDAY
ahhhh a change... savor brunch, stack my tray with enough food to last me till 6o'clock and retreat to my room to watch the Sunday lineup of amazing movies and laze around in my fuzzy slippers. hmmm, today I might take a hike... nah, laying down is much better. think, "shit, it's 3. I only have 9 more hours of sunday left?", forget it and continue to be lazy. Maybe read, or nap, or both. whatever, its sunday and as we all know, sunday rules.

OK thats all I got
Happy Thanksgiving everybody, enjoy the company of your respective friends and family, remember to tell them you love them, then give them a hug, and a real hug, not one of those hugs where you stick you butt out so your junk dosen't touch.

Mainbody Update

LOOKING SW TOWARDS THE ROYAL SOCIETY RANGE. NOTE THE DISTORTION AT THE HORIZION LINE. DUE TO THE EXTREME COLD, IMAGES STRETCH AND INVERT SORT OF LIKE A MIRAGE.


So mainbody is pretty much all here. The times of quiet and privacy are gone. Work is much busier, we have about double the DA's and cooks running around. So far all the new people seem cool, but it will be nice when they all know what the hell they are doing and are more of a help than a hinderance.
I really felt more at home when the new people got here, it was a sort of sophmore syndrome, where you are the one that knows whats going on both in terms of work stuff and the social scene. Definitly I am still maininly hanging out with the winfly people from work. It seems like we are all about the same level of crispy at this point.
We got our 3rd and 4th roommate here yesterday morning and now have a full room. One is in cargo and the other is the greenhouse tech for mainbody. Maybe we can get the inside line on choice veggies.
I have been pretty sick for the last couple of days and it has been pretty much sleeping in bed and reading for 48 hours straight. I did help Erin a little bit do the sunday run, cleaning the bars and such after saturday night partys as part of my voulenteering efforts to get a janitor job next year.
Life continues at its normal pace here in general though.
Hanging out with friends or just watching movies in the room. It is a fine line to have a lot of fun staying out with your friends and going crazy not getting enough rest though. If I had the energy I would be out till 2 every night.
The new people that I hang out with the most are all from the west coast mainly in portland actually, so we talk about seeing each other in the real world.
I cannot really beleive that my time down here is already almost a third over with.
Well thats all I got for now folks... its back to bed for me so I can go wash dem dishes tomorrow.

Winfly

Winfly is drawing to a close here. On tuesday we will get our first planeload of new arrivals from Chch.
Winfly has been a very laid back experience. With 400 some odd people here it has been very slow and quiet. You can always get a computer, do your laundry and find some private time whenever you want it. This is all about to change drastically.
In about 10 days the population will roughly double in size. This means that the base will be active, really active, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Some new folks I have talked to have expressed an anxiety with the approach of a tidal wave of people. All I know is it will be crazy. This is a particulary busy year for the NSF it seems. There is a new project being started this year here called A.M.A.N.D.A. or atomic muon and neutrino dector array, I think.
It will be packed with people up and about all the time. I am working at the burger bar here on station a couple of nights a month and with all these people here I could be potentially make $100 bucks in tips a night.
Also we get 2 more roommates sometime this next week, and we just finished rearranging our room to accomodate the new guys a little more. It's very cramped but we still have single beds (no bunkbeds) and have managed to carve a lounge space out of the remaining space.

I will have my first voulenteering experience in a couple of weeks as a janitor.
I am pretty sure that this is the job I want next year. I really like the independance of the job, and since I know 2 janitors this year it seems the most likley. For backup apps, I think I will apply for the greenhouse tech. That would be my dream job, or maybe somthing is housing (dealing with resident housing issues in some capacity) or possibly supply (there is cold supply for food, central supply for office supplies and other things, and some other supply I dont know yet). I realize that it is only 6 weeks in, but I really want to come back, so the sooner I am sure I can come back the happier I will be.

The weather has been beautiful here the last couple of days. Yesterday I went X-country skiing up towards Castle Rock, a formation up on the Ross Ice Shelf side of the island. It was windy and cold, but unbeleivably beautiful. Everything was pristine glorious sunshine, and you could see all the Royal Society Range crystal clear. It was fun to be on skis again, if only for a short while. We got pretty cold fast and had to turn back after only about 45 minuites.

Well, mainbody should be crazy, but fun. I think if anything the time will just fly by even faster. The weeks seem to be flying by so far. I start the week and before I know it it's saturday.

Greenhouse Fun

So in order to break up the monotony of washing dishes and picking up after the residents of Mctown in general, we DAs are periodically tasked with an odd assignment every so often.

It can be something unexciting as shoveling the snow off the steps around station (not to be knocked though, as it gets you outside), to todays task: working in the sweet-ass mctown greenhouse.

Working with the greenhouse maven, Karen, we sorted and harvested the lettuce that was ready (ripe? can lettuce be ripe?) into big trash bags to be served at tomorrow night's dinner.

All items in the greenhouse are grown using a large hydroponic system. Film feeding is the way the plants receive nutrients. Meaning that the plants roots are being constantly washed by a thin film of neutrient rich water solution fed up to one end of the long 15' PVC pipe by pumps and gravity runs it past the whole row of whatever plant they happen to be growing at the time.

The solution is checked and corrected as needed, several times daily by Karen to ensure that the PH is right (4.9-7.9 or so) and in some of the troughs, that the temperature is right. The various stations are kept full of water by a main water tank that delivers water as needed though a system of tubes, pumps, and manifold stations.

Misters keep the humidity up in the rooms, as the plants would wilt and without proper healty leaves, the plants would crash and die. But even with the misters, the leaves still wilt some so it is a little tedious.

Anyway,
it was a very welcome diversion to the everyday actvity here. Check the usual photos and videos at Flickr and UTUBE for more.