Pen Gwin's Antarctic Adventure

On The Ice Again...

2011-12-25T19:34:00.000-08:00

Unfortunate choice of post title-- now I have Willy Nelson playing in my head...

I didn't put as much effort into getting ready to deploy as I should have. Last year, I was "bumped" due to overpopulation at McMurdo. This year, the reports were that it was a similar season, so I really didn't think I'd make it down to the ice. The expected e-mail never came, and when it became clear that I was going-- I had to get ready in a hurry! Mimi is watching the house and cats, and Conan is staying with some friends in Boulder. When he saw me packing things up, he knew. He was so mopey for the last few days-- he rode all the way from my house to Boulder with his chin 0n my arm, looking up at me with those big, brown puppy eyes that dogs reserve to tear your heart out... I knew he would have a blast, but it was tough. Sure enough, when we got to my friend's house, he acted like he had been there a thousand times (though he'd never been). He couldn't wait to get inside. They have a new-to-them 5-month-old tricolor corgi, and it was a perfect arrangement. Conan would have a playmate, and the new pup would have a "big brother", at least for a month or so. Mimi says the cats are doing well-- as long as they get a certain amount of human contact, they'll be fine. Conan's keepers said that he's having a blast. (I just hope he's okay with leaving once I get back...)

The flight down is always brutal-- dropped off at the airport four hours before flight time, then a four-hour flight, a five hour layover, a twelve hour flight... and that's just to get to Aukland. Then we have to get our luggage, go through customs, and get on another flight to Christchurch. I didn't sleep well on the trans-pacific flight, and was completely exhausted by that point. We checked into our hotel in Christchurch, and I actually got a good night's sleep. Since the time difference is twenty hours now, the sleep cycle isn't too bad of an adjustment, provided you can sleep on planes. I did nowhere near enough of that. The shuttle picked us up at the hotel, and took us to the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center) at the airport. We picked up our cold weather gear, and had to endure another several hours of orientation videos and waiting before we could get on the US Air Force C-17 for McMurdo. We took off around 10PM. It would have been gravy, but the jump seats on the plane hit my tailbone just right, to where I never got more than 10 seconds or so of sleep before the pain would wake me up again. Sometimes there are ways to sleep on the floor, but there were just too many of us. I could get up and move around a little, but not much. The big, yellow hardware was the cargo pallet that I was staring at, strapped to my jumpseat for six hours or so.

Veteran Ice Folks will scold me for my whining-- a C-17 is like a soak in a bubblebath compared to some of the other transport to the ice. I just had a particularly hard time due to the lack of sleep. Very few things are as miserable (to me) as being completely drained, but unable to catch even a wink. A lot of folks like the jumpseats, but mine was not my tailbone's friend. It's still sore, a week later.

Enough whining about the trip-- I got here, and I'm in a nice groove of sleeping and working. I have run into a ton of old friends, and it feels a bit like home. I got a great roommate assignment, an OAE (Old Antarctic Explorer) who was a SeaBee in the Navy down here in the '70s. He has a lot of great stories to tell. The weather has been great, with only one day of snowstorms. The snowy, industrial picture is the view from my office window on last Thursday. I have plenty of photos of much nicer weather, which I will post soon.

Dear Broken Christchurch

2011-12-21T23:00:00.000-08:00

Sorry blog followers-- I haven't had reason to post in a long time. Life in Denver has been great-- Conan's well, I'm in month nine of a fabulous relationship, the cats are entertaining in that psychotic way that only cats can pull off, and in general life is good. I've been slated to deploy to the ice for a five-week stint, but frankly doubted that I would actually go. Population at McMurdo has been high, and only essential personnel are allowed to go. It looked so doubtful that I slacked on a lot of my pre-deployment paperwork and prep work-- I was pretty confident that I'd be bumped in favor of more essential activities. The days ticked down, and I realized that I'd better get it together! The last week in Colorado was insane, making preparations for Conan's boarding, paying bills, and all the other crazy stuff that happens when you're about to go off the map...

Mimi is watching the house, Conan is in good hands with a friend in Boulder, and (I hope) I managed to take care of all the loose ends before leavin' on the jet plane.

The trip down is always a grinding, laborious process, taking days of layovers and trying (often unsuccessfully) to sleep on planes. I don't need to go into the gory details, but suffice it to say that I ended up exhausted in Christchurch, New Zealand, with a day to kill before the night flight to the ice. Downtown Christchurch was devastated by last year's earthquakes, and I was more than a little reluctant to see the worst of the damage. Ice folks by definition spend a lot of time in "Cheech", and the city is near and dear to us. The people there are awesome-- Christchurch is one of my favorite cities anywhere. I knew it would be traumatic to see whole blocks of familiar buildings reduced to ruin, but I needed to see it.

As luck would have it, the day we had available to walk around was Sunday-- the only day when the "Red Zone" in the Central Business District was open for the general public. A fenced cordon leads all the way down to the front of the cathedral-- the heart of town. The cathedral itself is pretty much completely destroyed, but the crumbling ruins haven't been razed yet. A huge metal framework holds the front wall up, preventing it from toppling into Cathedral Square.

The damage is amazing, but it wasn't as emotionally wrenching as I expected it to be. Since the cleanup efforts have been going on for months, most of the rubble has been removed. Still, it's eerie to stand on a familiar street corner, trying to find bearings when so many of our familiar haunts are just... gone. So many buildings are gone that it is a completely different place.

The Cashel Street Mall was recently upgraded with granite paving stones, and trolley tracks running down the middle. Evidently most of the buildings along the mall were damaged beyond repair, and were razed long ago. In their place, freight containers have been stacked up, and turned into (quite stylish) replacements for the missing stores, cafes, and shops that died in the quakes. Painted in bright colors, the containers make an odd, European-looking hodgepodge of funky urban post-apocalyptic design. I like it.

The Kiwis are the most amazing people I've ever run across. They just keep their chin up, no matter what. I think a lesser folk would have curled up in a corner, crying. They talk about the devastation like it was a particularly rainy weekend. It's inspiring.

There's a Maori saying, "Kia Kaha", which roughly means, "stay strong". Kia Kaha, Christchurch.

Homeless Camping

2011-09-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

I get every other Friday off of work, which made this Labor Day weekend a four-dayer. Mimi had her daughter this weekend, so I thought it would be a good time for an epic road trip up to Montana to clear out my storage. Just me and Conan. When I went to winter on the Ice in '08, I crammed everything I owned into a rented two-car garage in Livingston, Montana. When I settled down and bought a house here in Denver, I still didn't really have room for a lot of that stuff, so I've been continuing to rent the garage. I have two tiny 1972 Honda AZ600 project cars stored there, and I've been meaning to get them home so they can find new homes. They are so small that I can actually tow one behind a passenger car on a tow dolly. I moved them (one at a time) from Prescott, AZ to Livingston using a Subaru Forester, back in '05.

We left my house in Englewood early Saturday morning, and made really good time to Billings. There was almost no traffic at all-- surprising for a Labor Day weekend. I picked up the tow dolly in the Billings Heights, and got to Livingston around 8 PM. It never even occurred to me that it would be hard to find a motel room... Livingston was 100% booked. Exhausted from driving all day, Conan and I were homeless. I suppose it was an option to go on to Bozeman and try to find a room, but we decided to camp out. Luckily, my storage garage has a lot of empty space, and tons of futons, sleeping bags, and linens. We made a cozy (if a little dusty) little nest on the garage floor, and killed the rest of the evening going through stored junk, getting ready for the trip back. Conan was in dog heaven, surrounded by the smells of his puppyhood. (I got him as a puppy when I lived in the Livinston house.) Luckily, I had thought to bring a small head light, so it was pretty easy to get around in the pitch-dark garage. The weather got down into the the 40s, but we slept quite well.

Turns out the only one of the two cars I could get out has seized brakes, and couldn't be towed. The other car is so buried that it would have taken too much time to extract it. I decided to return the dolly unused, and just fill my car with the most useful stuff it could hold. I'll have to return for the TBC (Tiny Blue Car) with some better tools to fix the brakes at another time.

No visit to Livingston is complete without a visit to the best dog park in the universe. The "nature" pictures are shot from the dog park. With great views of the Crazy and Absaroka mountains, the dog park is a recovered old landfill, right at the confluence of Fleshman Creek and the Yellowstone River. It's beautiful, and it's Conan's favorite spot. The weather was perfect, too. About 75F, and (freakily) not windy. For all its beauty, Livingston is almost always crazy windy.

Back safe at home now, another epic adventure complete.

Wonderful Weekend

2011-08-27T21:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't gotten to visit the Rockies as much as I would have liked this summer. Domestic duties, along with my LGC (Little Green Car) project and some professional advancement stuff, have left me yearning to spend more time in our beloved mountains. I recently acquired a '94 Mazda Miata, which has proven to be a total hoot to drive around-- a super fun car to drive in the mountains.

I needed a break from a brutal schedule of studying for a professional certification. Saturday was blocked out as "mountain time with the girlfriend". Mimi and I picked up some tasty picnic stuff and headed out. (Garlic olives, greek yogurt, fresh strawberries, blue corn chips, and bean dip. Yum.)

Stopped in Georgetown, Minturn, Leadville, Fairplay,and Buena Vista, and got back to my place around eight.

We've had some hot, dry weather in the Denver area for the last month or so, and rain is always welcome. We got hit with some serious late summer thunderstorms in the afternoon, and got the top up just in time to keep from getting drenched in Leadville. Had a xococotl (spicy aztec cocoa) while we watched the storm move through.

It didn't rain much at all (if any) down here in the city. Bummer. Still, all in all, it was an epic day.

Miatacross!

2011-08-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

Well, as I've said in previous posts, I've gotten hooked on autocross racing. I got a tip from the nice racer who let me race his Honda a month or so ago, and picked up a '94 Mazda Miata. That is quite the hot ticket for racing in the "E Stock" class, and the cars are relatively inexpensive to get into. I found just the car, put on the market for a very fair price, and jumped right on it. I took it down to Pikes Peak International Raceway last weekend and drove my second race-- first in my own car.

We hit some snags on the way to the race, and ended up getting there about ten minutes after registration closed. The venue is about two hours from my house, and it's just hard to get out of the house at 6 AM... The most important thing in a race is to walk the course beforehand, and memorize it. Well, I didn't get to walk it at all. I did talk them into letting me register, but I drove it blind. DNF'ed (Did Not Finish) on the first lap-- I missed several gates. There were several slaloms, and it was just a sea of random cones at first. I studied the course map, and did better on the next three runs. I still have hard tires on the Miata, and that was a big handicap. The same guy who let me race his Honda has some half-used race tires that he doesn't need, so he's going to let me use them up. Woo Hoo!

Love my little Miata, and I can't wait to get more practice! Woo Hoo!

Racing!

2011-07-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

I raced my first car today! I've been toying with the idea of running my LSC (Little Silver Car) in autocross events, and I've gone to a couple of races over the last month. I decided to give it a try. I picked up some half-used racing tires from Craigslist, and picked up some old steel rims. (I didn't want to thrash the tires I drive to work on every day.) For more information on autocross racing, see http://www.scca.com/contentpage.aspx?content=55

I got up early (for Sunday), and loaded up my racing wheels. I got to the track just in time for registration. It was all a little intimidating, but the race workers made me very welcome when I told them that I was a brand new guy. This is only the third race I’ve attended, and my first race as a driver. Shortly after registration we had an ‘all hands’ meeting, and we scattered to our various cars and duties. Everybody gets a work assignment—I was a corner attendant in corner three. The idea is when a racer displaces a cone, I put it back, and communicate any penalties to the appropriate folks. I was out in the hot sun for a long time, and really got burnt.
I hadn’t arrived in time to put my racing tires on, so I had to hurry and take care of that right after my work assignment. The heat was oppressive, and I had to really rush to get my car into the tech inspection area. I took shortcuts, and tried to switch tires using my VW jack, rather than using a floor jack. That turned out to be a bad corner to cut, as I ended up slipping the car off of the jack, breaking a bolt in my brakes. I didn’t have time to get it fixed before my turn in the third heat, so I put my stock wheels back on, and headed over to the grid with my helmet, hoping at least to get a ride or two. In trying to get my wheels sorted out, I had completely exhausted myself in the heat. It was over 90F out, and humid for the front range. It was pretty brutal.

I told my tale of woe to a couple of my fellow racers, and one of them offered to let me drive his car in the third heat! The car’s number was #1, and the guy’s class was “X” for Expert. It was an early-90s Honda Civic. It turns out that range of Civics is very competitive in autocross—it’s a good combination of handling and power for the slow, tight autocross course. I managed to change my registration so that I could drive his car. I had walked through the course twice in the morning, and by the time I had struggled with breaking my car, I had pretty much forgotten the course layout. It was very challenging to push a totally unfamiliar car to the limit on a course that I had never seen from a car. I think I did okay. Al (the car owner) rode along, and gave me tips. Like, “hey, the course is over THERE!”.
Great folks there—I’m sure I’ll be doing more racing soon. The whole scene was great—everybody was enthusiastic and helpful. I not only had a car offered for me to drive, but a woman I met in the morning was done with her car after the second heat, and offered to let me drive it, too! Wow. This stuff is fun.
I made it home okay on my damaged hubs, and will be getting that taken care of ASAP. I think I made the right decision in opting not to test my questionable brakes in competition. Lessons learned: next time, change tires early!

It LIVES!!

2011-07-08T23:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry to those followers of my blog who followed my adventures flying around Antarctica in helicopters and all... These days my life is quite different from that. A couple of months into a relationship, I'm busy, and happy. I have continued to be plagued by the habit of rescuing needy mechanical objects, with the intent of bringing them back to their intended glory. Six months or so ago, I adopted a wayward little Honda car, and have spent quite a bit of time giving it CPR over the last couple of months. Today it traveled under its own steam for the first time since 2004! I'm having a local shop square up some of the work I have been doing on it. It's so tiny, it's quite challenging to work on. They have the benefit of a lift and complete shop, so they can do in a short time those things that took me forever. I wrote to my girlfriend this morning, "I drove the Little Green Car!! I drove the Little Green Car!!". No helicopters or penguins, but life is good.

Furry Scurry

2011-05-10T06:52:00.000-07:00

Springtime is definitely here. The grass is growing, the trees are blooming, and we've had some fantastic weather. Last weekend was a big event-- the Furry Scurry at Washington Park, near downtown Denver. Thousands of people get together and walk a course to raise money for the Dumb Friends League. A loosely-organized group of friends with corgis formed the Corgi Crew, and we walked the course together. The event was quite chaotic, and many of our Crew members never found us. Nevertheless, our crew had a great time walking the course, meeting other folks and their dogs. Our pod of corgis was quite popular-- not much cuter than a bunch of stubby little dogs!

April Flowers...

2011-04-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

Great things happening lately. Conan is well, the job is still here, and my social life has really taken off. Lots of nice hikes, and times at the dog park. Life is good.

Corgis in the Springtime!

2011-04-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

I apologize to those of you who like to view my exotic Antarctic adventures, and are bored by my current, rather pedestrian life. I'll continue to post pictures of Conan and other friends, and continue this blog as a way to catalog my life, though it may not contain helicopter rides to exotic mountaintops at the moment.

One of the highlights of my suburban life now is the twice-monthly get-together of the Littleton Corgi Meet-Up. It's such a hoot to see dozens of corgis (32 was my highest count) frolicking around and barking at each other. Conan does seem a little reserved compared to his stubby friends-- he likes the corgi energy, but can only stand so much butt sniffing. He's a people guy, and his dad is learning to be more of a people guy himself. The dog park has started to get much more interesting...

Spring Hiking!

2011-03-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

We've had really strange weather lately. Luckily, the weekends have been nice. Went hiking last weekend with a friend from work, and a couple of her friends. We did a six-mile loop around Castlewood Canyon State Park, near Franktown (southeast of Denver). Conan was a trooper-- he would've been ready for another six. The mountains had a fresh dusting of snow, and the plants are just now starting to poke their little green heads out of the dry early-spring ground. We've gotten a light dusting of snow the last couple nights, so it's giving the undergrowth some nice moisture. Hoping for some more nice weather this coming weekend-- I'm looking forward to being more active, and getting rid of some of my winter pudgy layer.

Baby's Got New Shoes!

2011-03-04T17:37:00.000-08:00

I've received my income tax refunds now, so I allowed myself a treat. New wheels and tires for the Jetta. The old ones were heavy, ugly, and didn't handle well. They do pretty well in snow, so I'll run them in the winter. The new ones are a lot wider and sexier, so I'll run them in the summer. I know, it's pretty lame to go from globetrotting adventures to getting excited about new tires, but that's just how it is. Life in Denver is going well-- I've been meeting people, and expanding my social life. I had a horrible case of the crud over the holidays, where I actually broke something loose in my ribs, which took two months to heal up. Because of that, I haven't even gotten to go skiing yet this year, and it's already March. Going hiking with a friend this weekend-- should be nice.

Snowy Dog Park

2011-02-09T17:57:00.000-08:00

The winter has been very warm and dry here in Denver, for the most part. Just when when Conan and I had gotten used to running around the local dog park in a t-shirt (me, not him...), things got nasty. Several winter storms in a row, with lots of snow and sub-zero temperatures. We never let a little weather get us down, though. One of Conan's very favorite things is to running around in fresh snow!

New Toy, Cont'd

2011-01-31T19:27:00.000-08:00

Had a great time working on the odd little car over the weekend, with freaky warm weather. Almost February, and I was with Conan at the dog park in jeans and a t-shirt, wishing for shorts! Spent some real zen time taking the new little car apart and moving toward getting it running. Gunther and Jimmy watched from the dining room window, and Conan was tied to the porch during the great weather. The weather took a wicked turn, and it's crazy cold and snowy now. My usual 25-minute commute was over an hour coming home on icy roads today. We've had a very summer-like winter so far, so I'm not complaining.
The little car is an interesting story. The seller is involved in software testing, like me. He drives a Jetta, like me. I used AAA to tow the car over to my house (five blocks, free). The tow truck driver noted that the little green car has a 'Ceasar's Auto' decal. He said that was the first dealer where he ever worked as a mechanic. Now defunct, it was about seven blocks from my house. It also came out that he drives the same kind of daily driver as mine-- a VW turbo diesel Jetta. That's a pretty exclusive, tight-knit group of car geeks, for the most part. He gave me a couple of tips about my car, and I told him about the work I had been doing to mine.

The paint job on the little car is a bit odd. It's dark metallic green, with a white faded front end, with pretty intricate, multi-toned gold maple leaves all over it. I wouldn't have paid good money to have that put on, but it's a pro job. The interior is in almost factory-new shape. Not sure how that happened, sitting in the hot sun for seven years and all.

New Toy

2011-01-30T20:29:00.000-08:00

I've been getting back into an old mode of appreciating and modifying cars lately. With all my travel to the Antarctic, and other places around the world, my life-long interest in cars has been offline for a while. With a really fast motorcycle, the cars went even farther into the background. With Conan constantly with me, the bike has gotten pretty much zero time.

Now that I've gotten a cubicle job, and haven't had much use for the bike, I've gotten the car bug again. I've put as much money into my VW TDI as I plan to for a while, so I've got some extra energy for projects.

There is a great dog park about four blocks from my house, that Conan and I frequent practically every day. There was this little old Honda CRX parked in a yard just outside the dog park. I spied it from our dog park outings, and wondered if it might be a fun car to fix up. This is a high school kid's dream car, so I figured that they were hanging onto it. I couldn't imagine that they were open to selling it, and it still was there. I stopped by just after dark one day, and let them know that I was possibly interested.

Long story short, I picked up the car for $300! It hasn't run since '04, but it looks good. I've been spending the last couple of days working on the (seized) brakes, and scraping the nasty amateur tinting from the windows. I have no idea what I'm going to do with this car, but I love it to death. I've always wanted one of these. So far, I have less than $320 invested in it, and I'm guessing I could sell it for parts for $500, or running for as much as $1500. More to come!

Buddy, Betty, Jimmy, and Gunther

2011-01-17T20:47:00.000-08:00

Well, since my new cats are now about 14 weeks old, it is definitely time to get them fixed. Just to have a bit of fun with the folks as the Dumb Friend's League, I let them keep the original names of records for the kittens, Buddy (black tabby), and Betty (brown tabby). It was immediately evident on taking Buddy and Betty home, that Betty is, in fact, a boy. Not sure how that got past the highly competent vet techs at the buddy center... While they were getting altered, I took my new-to-me Jetta Turbo Diesel for a highway fuel efficiency test. I drove from the Buddy Center down in Castle Rock down to Trinidad, CO, and back without stopping. 45 MPG+ for the round trip! Not bad. I love the car. I'm just trying to resist spending a bunch of money making it faster-- rather reserving it for a high-fuel-efficiency commuter car. On my test lap, I went around 360 miles at 70-80 MPH without stopping. Took a little over half a tank. These little TDIs are really amazing. Here are some pics of the kittens getting bigger-- taken a week or so before I took the little buggers in to get 'altered'. By the way, they didn't seem to be too bothered by having their manly parts removed. I had hoped that it would mellow them out for a day or two. Yeah, right. I got the four AM face pouncing just like I always do. If they aren't trying to rid the world of imaginary eyelash spiders, they fancy a bit of a drag race across my countenance each morn. Bitches.

By the way, I've decided that Buddy's real name is Jimmy, and Betty's name is Gunther. I've tried all other names, and they just don't stick. Betty was to be Brutus for a while, then Bruno. I couldn't remember the names, which told me that they were not right. Gunther, though, is right. Not sure why. If any of you have good name suggestions for the cats, bring it on. I'm flexible, and the cats don't care what I call them.

Surrendered Man License

2010-12-27T19:49:00.000-08:00

Well, I've had to turn my Man Card in. I am a member of a listserv of folks who have Cardigan and Pembroke Welsh Corgis. There is a "Secret Santa" list, and I signed up this year. Those of you who have followed my blog know that I'm really close with my Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Conan. I'd hoped to hook up with other like-minded corgi 'owners' in the area, since they are the best dogs in the world. I received my Secret Santa assignment, and decided to make some custom pottery doggie dishes for Forrest and Morgan, two older corgis living in the south. I actually spent a Friday night at a paint-your-own-pottery store in old town Littleton, stenciling little paw marks on semi-fired pottery bowls for my SS assignment. I knew that doing so would seriously endanger my Man License, but I didn't quit in time. After all, real men don't spend their Friday nights painting pottery, and they certainly don't paint little doggie pawprints and bunnies on some bowls for some unknown chick's dogs in North Carolina. I think I may have to watch Fight Club six times, or eat some nails or something to get my status back as a self-respecting American male. It is all just so embarrassing.

Kittens!

2010-11-24T21:49:00.000-08:00

I want to apologize to any folks that follow this blog for any cool Antarctica content-- not much lately. I'll continue to document the cool new stuff that is happening in my life, and I'll weave Antarctica content into it when I can.

I've had cats for much of my life, but have adopted out my favorite recent cats to friends in order to pursue ice jobs over the last few years. Now that I'm settled down, I have been thinking a lot about expanding the Lee/Conan household to include a cat... I've decided to lay low for Thanksgiving weekend, which gave me enough leisure time to browse some cat rescues and 'pounds' today. At the Dumb Friends League Buddy Center in Castle Rock today, I found my newest roommates. A couple of mutt cats. 'Buddy' was listed as a two-month-old black domestic shorthair, but he's actually a black tabby. I've had quite a few black cats in my life, and I've noticed with several of them that their hair actually has a tabby pattern to it, if viewed in the right light. Buddy is really about three tones of black in a stripy pattern-- very cool. Betty is the same size and age, though the paperwork didn't show that they were littermates. Just dropped off at the same time.

One of the reasons I've been thinking of getting a cat again is that Conan spends all nine or ten hours a weekday here in the house, just waiting for me to get home again. That usually means a trip to the dog park, and making amends for those hours of solitude. I thought if he had a cat (or two) bopping around the house all day, that might make the waiting more tolerable. He gets nearly no mental stimulation for the whole time I'm at work, and I can really see it in his behavior when I get home.

I picked up the kittens today, and they've been bouncing around the house with Conan all evening. He grew up with cats, so he's very respectful of them. I think there are memories of claws to nose that are keeping him in line. It's interesting-- cats are such incredibly smart and adaptive predators, but their 'smarts' are so different from dogs. This transition from thirty years of being a cat guy, to a dog guy, to a dog-and-cat-guy are showing me some interesting variations in the way we all think. Conan is a very bright dog, and he surprises me every day with his facility for language and memorization. That being said, I've got to witness today that a cat a tenth of his size (probably way less...) could figure out how to get where they wanted to go in the house in seconds, where he may have never worked it out. Math, though.... dogs are much better at math.

I hope to post some more pictures of the new house and expanded family soon. I've been having some technical difficulties recently, which have prevented me from posting great pics...

New Wheels!

2010-11-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

Sorry Antarcticans-- no Antarctica content in this one. I'm getting more settled into my wee Englewood bungalow, and getting more used to the sub-urban (not quite suburban) lifestyle. Englewood feels a lot more like a small town than a suburb. I'm really liking it here. I still have about a half-hour commute to the office and back every day, and I've been doing it in my trusty old 2000 Tundra. Burning up a lot of gas, just commuting, and tons more when I visit friends in Montana and Arizona, and other road trips.

I've been thinking about getting a small car that gets good mileage, to take the heat off the ol' pickup, and to save bucks on gas. I've shopped the hell out of cars for the last couple of weeks, and found my ride. It's an '03 VW Jetta TDI (turbo diesel). It has nearly 100k on it, but it just got about three grand worth of engine work (new turbo/ manifold and new oil pan). These cars get about 50MPG in the city, and around 55MPG on the highway. I've had turbocharged cars before, so I know how to keep the car in its powerband and happy, so it's actually a pretty perky ride. It's not screaming fast, but I have a motorcycle for that. I can't wait to experience my first 600 mile tank! It's the GLS model, so it has the power sunroof, heated seats, heated mirrors, etc. Of all the options I would ever want on a car, heated seats are near the top. It's great to get in a cold car on a winter morning, and have a warm butt before my tires hit the street.

I've always been skeptical of VWs, having had a couple that were really crap. I'm willing to give them another chance here-- it could be that I've just driven them like a rented mule before, and broke them often. I'll try to be civilized with this one...

Corgi Halloween

2010-10-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

Well, I successfully closed the deal on the wee bungalow yesterday. The whole process has been so smooth, it's definitely like the Universe wants me to live in that house. I have the keys, and get to start moving in this evening. I can't wait. I'll get to be in my new digs for Halloween, which should be fun. I carved a special pumpkin just for the occasion (I'll post pictures of that later). I'm not planning on dressing up, and Conan certainly isn't, but here are some pictures of corgis dressed up for Halloween, sent to me from Conan's Godmother in Montana (the breeder where I got him, and where he spent over 24 months while I was on the ice and travelling.

Close!

2010-10-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

I close on my wee bungalow in Englewood tomorrow! Everything about the transaction has gone eerily smoothly so far, and I have no issues with the house at all. It's in almost perfect shape. There is one hitch, though-- I gave away most of my furniture when I went to the ice in '08, and was stressing about furnishing the house with no money. The sellers are self-moving to Portland, and really didn't want to schlep all their furniture out there, so I approached them (through two realtors...) about selling me some. They agreed to sell me pretty much everything except the homemade dining room butcher-block table and chairs. I'm getting the couch with two matching chairs, two leather bar stools for the breakfast bar, an end table, a side table, a 32" TV with matching stand, the really cool living room area rug, the overhead pot rack, a warehouse-grade 8'x4'x12' shelving unit in the basement, plus shelving units in the garage and shed. I asked them what they would ask for all that stuff, and they came back with a price of $540! For all of it! I doubt if I could have replaced just the bar stools for that. I am so stoked. I take possession on the Friday of my three-day weekend, so I'll have plenty of time to move in. Conan will be in heaven, too. He's been spending workdays confined to the kitchen of my temporary digs while the house has been painted. He's been wound up like a cheap watch from sheer lack of stimulation every day when I get home from work. Having a whole house to himself will make it much easier. I plan to get a cat very soon, too. My living arrangements (and global gypsy lifestyle) have kept me from having a cat for years. Conan grew up with my cats Chuck and Squishy, so he's a big cat lover, and will love the extra company. Woo Hoo!

Bought a House!

2010-10-10T14:54:00.000-07:00

Sorry there hasn't been any cool Antarctic content lately. I've been supporting the USAP from my little cubicle, and not too much sexy has been going on there. I was scheduled to deploy to McMurdo in November, to do some hardware and software testing at Black Island. Unfortunately, Mac Town is so totally overbooked that I got bumped. Projections are that the population will be about 175 over maximum all summer. Yuck-- in a way I'm glad not to participate in that. Though going to Australia and Hawaii for free...

The big news is that I'm buying a house! I'm making a commitment to settle down, at least for now. Still single, and really haven't done much dating out here in the 'burbs. Hopefully that'll change when I'm closer to the action, geographically.

It's a really cool little house. There is some confusion on the square footage, but it looks like it's about 800 sq ft on the ground floor, with one bedroom. In the basement, there are two nice little bedrooms, and a brand-new 3/4 bath. The couple I'm buyign it from totally remodeled the house six years ago, with a new kitchen, etc. The great thing is that they have very similar tastes, so it's exactly how I would have done it myself. It's in the middle of Englewood, west of Broadway, north of Belleview. VERY quiet neighborhood-- nary a crack house or meth lab on my street. I've gone through the inspection, and the inspector only found a few small things. Still in a little negotiations over the small things, but I'm set to close in 18 days. Can't wait! (Note: I never took the time to take good pictures when I've been there-- snipped these from the realtor's website.

Dog Pool

2010-08-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

I've been working with Conan, trying to teach him to swim. He loves the water, but just can't get past the sensation that there is no bottom under his feet. I've eased him into deeper water a couple of times, but he doesn't go there voluntarily. I saw a woman with a corgi at the Louisville dog park a few weeks ago. Her dog had a life jacket, and was a swimming fool. I got Conan a similar vest, and it does seem to give him a little more confidence in deep water. This weekend Scott Carpenter pool in Boulder is letting dogs swim free. I went there yesterday with my dad and Conan, and made a little more progress on the swimming lessons. Unfortunately, there really wasn't anywhere in this pool to ease him into deeper water. The shallow end is four feet deep, and the diving part is ten feet. Way over Conan's head. He was sniffing around the deep end, and accidentally fell in. He scrambled back to the edge and I fished him out. He didn't seem too freaked out, but I don't see him doing that sort of thing on purpose any time soon.

Bike Trailer for Conan (No Antarctica Content)

2010-08-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

Been just pluggin' away working in my cubicle lately, so not a lot of cool Antarctic news to post. I'll be deploying to Mac Town for a couple of weeks around Turkey Day, which will be right during the absolute population maximum. I might be sleeping in a broom closet.

In the meantime, I've been hanging around with Conan a lot while not at work. We go for about a half-mile walk every morning so he can water the fire hydrants and fence posts. Every evening, we go to the dog park after work. The good dog parks are about a twenty minutes drive from the house, so it takes a chunk out of the day, but it's worth it. I try to take him with me everywhere I go on my private time, within reason. I figure he sits in a 10'x20' dog run all day with no stimulation (outside of the occasional deer or squirrel encounter), so I owe him some quality time after work. I'm actually starting to get to know some of the dog park regulars, which makes me feel more at home. I've been an avid mountain biker for a long time, and just have barely touched my bikes since Conan came along. Hard to mix biking and dogging.

Well, I've found a solution. I found a bike trailer that is specially designed for hauling dogs around! I can load Conan up in the trailer, and ride to the dog park. I thought it might be a little scary for him, so I eased him into the idea. I put together the trailer in the middle of the living room where he could become familiar with it. I offered him a "cookie" (milk bone) inside the new contraption, and let him sniff around. I took it outside and hooked it up to the mountain bike. I unzipped the doors, and drew Conan into it with treats. I zipped him up inside, and agreed with him that this was definitely going to be a fun adventure. The trailer is a little small for Conan, but I think it'll be just right when he learns to poke his head out through the sunroof. Today I just pushed the bike with trailer and Conan in tow around the cart paths in the neighborhood for a half a mile or so. With him in it, it's going to be a load going up hills. The subdivision where I live is close to the Cherry Creek Trail, which runs from near Castle Rock clear down to the middle of downtown Denver. This fall I plan to spend a lot of time out on the bike paths with my little buddy in tow.

National Ice Core Lab

2010-08-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

This week I got to tour the National Ice Core Lab at the Federal Center in Denver with about 35 other polar folks. Really interesting stuff-- got to go back in the big freezer and see where they have ice from as far back as Little America 5 in the '50s. We got to ask a lot of questions, and we all learned a lot of cool stuff. For instance, we learned that the NICL has ice samples from the Vostok ice core, which contain frozen lake water from the boundary of the ice sheet and Lake Vostok. That means it has bio-organisms from a lake of liquid water that exists under more than two miles of ice! Maybe I'm an ice geek, but I think that is pretty cool stuff. Speaking of cool, it was about -35F in the warehouse. Same temp in the ice processing room where we saw grad students and technicians sawing, planing, and polishing ice cores to prepare them for experiments. The ice they are working on now is from the WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) Divide project. Some of the most important global climate research going on now is being conducted on ice samples going through NICL. Scientists can actually plot global temperatures from gas bubbles in the ice cores. By studying oxygen isotopes and dissolved carbon dioxide, they can make a chart of the temperatures on earth for thousands of years.

I'm bummed that I'm only slated to go to the ice for a couple of weeks this austral summer (around Thanksgiving). I'd really like to get closer to the science. See: http://nicl.usgs.gov/

Rocky Grass, Antarctic Links

2010-08-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

Pretty much settled into the Colorado summer, dodging thunderstorms and trying to find a nice, dry dog park. Went to a killer bluegrass festival last weekend-- Rocky Grass up in Lyons. The venue is a grassy meadow next to an icy creek, with a great band shell, and fantastic acoustics. I left my mandolin at home, since it was way too hot to ever leave it in the car, and I didn't have any other cool place to stash it. I met Bill Bussmann, of Old Wave mandolins there. He built my most recent mandolin, and it's a beaut. The festival was great-- Tony Rice cancelled, so David Grisman and some friends showed up unexpectedly. Quite a jam.

I've settled my plans to deploy to the ice this austral summer-- I'll be going down in the middle of November, and staying for a couple of weeks. I'll be sure and post an account of my mini-summer. In the meantime, here are a couple of links relating to the ice. Here's the Palmer station manager on Jeopardy: http://www.expeditions.com/Theater17.asp?Media=1368 . Here's an article about a recent recipient of an NSF Artists and Writers grant: http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contenthandler.cfm?id=2216.

New Antarctic Lynx

2010-06-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

Here are some cool new stories relating to the Antarctic: Pine Island Glacier, On NPR, And MSNBC. There is a lot of really cool science planned for this area. There will actually be helicopter support to events around PIG, and a huge amount of logistical support will happen in the next couple of years. I'm not personally involved in any of that planning now, but I may be at some point in the future. There is an old abandoned field camp out on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet called Byrd Surface Camp, which will be resurrected to support the PIG projects, and other activity out there on the ice sheet. The ice is racing out to sea in several areas like the area around the PIG, and scientists are very keen on finding out what is going on. If the ice sheet continues to pour into the sea, the result will be rising sea levels.

Abandoned in Antarctica

2010-06-10T14:53:00.001-07:00

Another cool story about abandoned bases and things on the ice: LINK

Glacier Germs

2010-06-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

Another bit of Antarctic science news: Glacier Germs

Another cool ice link

2010-06-03T08:47:00.001-07:00

A cool story about the race to the pole.

'Burbs, Ice Links

2010-06-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

Not much new lately. Pretty much settled into the new job, and getting used to living in the 'burbs. I go home every day and take Conan straight to the dog park. Poor little guy has to rattle around in a big, empty house for ten hours, so it's a big treat for him to go run around outside. There is a huge open space about fifteen minutes from my house where he can go nuts.

I'm even more removed from the ice than I thought I would be, working in the Denver office. We do get exposed to some news of ice science and such, and I try to keep pace. I keep track of a lot of ice friends through FaceBook, blogs and e-mail. Here are some recent items of Antarctic interest: Ice Cube on WSG, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, an author who has written several novels set on the ice, and a video of scientists tagging whales.

Antarctic Stations

2010-05-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

Here's a cool web site, with information on cutting-edge Antarctic stations: Stations

From Permafrost Land to Cube Land

2010-04-30T15:07:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm finishing up my third week as a full-timer here in Raytheon Polar Services Corp's (RPSC's) Denver headquarters. It's quite an adjustment after living like a gypsy, roaming from the south pole to the dog park. I started looking at houses as soon as I got hired, but it's too early for that. I want to save up some cash, and get settled into my job before I make that kind of financial commitment. I asked a coworker from the ice if he knew of anyone who might be looking for a housemate. Turns out he and his wife just bought a humongous house on a golf course in Parker, not too far of a commute from work. They had intended to have housemates, so I came along just at the right time. At the moment, they are renovating another property they own after work, so I almost never see them. I have a whole floor of this 5600 square foot house to myself. The floor is set up like a "mother-in-law flat", so I even have my own kitchen. It's a really nice house, and very reasonable cost, so I'll be able to save up a ton of money over the next six months or so.

The only downside to the new arrangement is that I'm a single guy living way out in the 'burbs. Very little opportunity to meet new friends and do fun stuff. Another bummer is that poor Conan is sitting in a big, empty house for ten hours while I work. Immediately after I get home, we go to the dog park. The only decent one around is a half-hours drive from my new digs-- things are very spread out in the extreme-southeast-Denver 'burbs. I can't wait to get my own place, where Conan can play in the yard while I'm work.

In my new job, I'll probably be deploying to the ice every year, but it won't be for four or eight months like it was before. I won't have the ability to travel as freely as I did when I was unemployed, but I will get out. I deliberately sought this job out so that I wouldn't have to leave Conan with (his) family for nine months at a stretch.

I'll still post on my blog, but my life will not be quite as sexy as it was on the ice and travelling. I think I'll probably post links and pictures of different science projects that I'm involved with and hear about. The Antarctic Program is as busy as it's ever been-- there is a ton of stuff going on, on and off the ice.

Conan!

2010-03-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

I've been back in the (mainland) states for a couple of days now. I'm spending the night in Sheridan, WY, now, after picking up my best bud in Helena. Conan has been patiently waiting for me while I've been working and traveling abroad. This our third reunion. He always is very glad to see me, but not particularly surprised. It's literally like I just left him for the weekend, and is quite happy to resume our routine of hiking around dog parks. I still have my wee house in Livingston, MT, though I haven't actually lived there in a long time. They have the BEST dog park there. Bounded by the Yellowstone river and Fleshman Creek, with nice woods. As a matter of fact, we had to stop using the park a couple of years ago because a bear took up residence in the wooded part. Nice views of the Absaroka and Crazy mountains from the park. On the way back to Colorado-- should be hangin' at the Louisville, CO dog park tomorrow.

Travelling Back to the Real World

2010-03-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

Now I'm back in the states. My travels took me to New Zealand, Australia, Tazmania, and the big island of Hawaii. The end of my travels was a little weird. Hawaii is not really geared toward economy travel, in my estimation. The resorts are definitely not my style, so I found my own way. I stayed in hostels, but was driving a red Mustang convertible (the only rental car available with I landed there). I learned that a traveller in a hostel with a car is a very popular guy, especially in Hawaii, where you really need a car to see the sights. I travelled around the island with an Italian tourist and a Japanese woman, splitting the gas and negotiating our travel plans as we went. I dropped of Daniella at the airport a couple of days before my departure, and ended up spending my last full day on Hawaii in the company of two Japanese travellers with limited English. We ended up going down to Kalapani at night, where you can see the lava glowing from the last eruption. All in all, it was a good trip. I was dying when I realized that I lost all photographic record of my adventure, including some really cool photos from Tasmania. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to go back there again.

Photo Nightmare, Drama

2010-03-04T01:09:00.000-08:00

I'm just now getting ready to leave Hilo after about a week on the Big Island. Most of my travels here have been very positive, with some huge exemptions. One day after arriving here, the big earthquake hit in Chile, and we were evacuated for the pending huge tsunami. Much of Hilo was wiped out by previous tsunamis, and they take it very seriously here if there is a large earthquake that might inundate the town. I was staying in a mixed (co-ed) dorm at a hostel here in Hilo when the tsunami sirens begun to wail. It was about 5:30 in the morning. A dorm-sharer got a phone call from the states that there was a huge earthquake in Chile, and there would be huge tidal waves. Shortly after that call, loud tsunami sirens went off in Hilo. I dragged out of bed and went to my rent-a-car. I drove to a spot about a hundred feet above sea level, and just waited in the car until the authorities gave the all-clear about 1:00PM. There was no tsunami at Hilo, but such a huge earthquake in Chile could have easily taken Hilo off the map if conditions were right. People were scared. I was disoriented, being awakened so early in the morning, and misplaced my main rain shell that I had been using. It wasn't particularly raining the day of the "tsunami", but I probably took it with me, just in case. We had good weather for a few days, and it wasn't until two days after the "tsunami" that I realized that I no longer had posession of my trusty jacket. Turns out I had put the SD card out of my camera in the jacket pocket, and hadn't gotten around to backing up those pictures to my laptop or hard drive.

Now, the jacket is gone, and all record of my vacation, including leaving the ice and the work I did there, is gone. I have pictures of working on the icebreaker, the fuel tanker, and the container ship, all gone. Tasmania: gone. New Zealand: yep. I guess I've learned my lesson, but it was a painful one.

Redployment, Travels

2010-02-23T16:38:00.000-08:00

I'm in Hobart, Tasmania now. I left the ice on the 11th of February, so I've been on the road for almost two weeks now. I got to be among the first folks to fly north on the Royal New Zealand Air Force 757. It's just like a commercial airliner, but the flight attendents wore camouflage. It took a long time to get us and our luggage loaded, but once that was sorted, the flight was uneventful.
I hung around in Christchurch for a couple of days, soaking up the humidity and warmth, and hanging around with southbound and northbound ice folks. Flew to Sydney, and hung around there for a couple of days. Next was Hobart, Tazmania. I ran into a fellow traveller who had a very similar agenda to mine, and we decided to team up for a tour of Tassie. Rented a car and headed up the east coast, checking out Wineglass Bay and miles of beaches. We made our way up to Launceston, and spent the night at a great backpacker there. I've been feeling a bit off for the last couple of days-- I think I got ahold of some questionable chow at some point, and have been in distress, making it hard to go on any major adventures. Best to stay close to the facilities, if you know what I mean... I also seem to be picking up a cold. After Launceston, we drove west to Cradle Mountain, and walked around a little bit there. Yesterday was a huge driving day, and feeling lousy made it worse. I felt completely whooped when we got back to Hobart. I returned the car this morning, and I'm going to be just hanging around in town, reading in the sun. Sorry about the lack of pictures. I need to find a suitable computer where I can get them off my camera and post them.

Changes

2010-02-06T12:16:00.000-08:00

There have been a lot of big changes this year on the ice. The galley (building 155) has been painted bright blue, from the foundations to the chimneys. It's crazy. The old T-site building has been torn down, the bowling alley has been torn down, the old buildings up on Ob Hill have been wrecked, as well. (Those buildings are frequently referred to as "the old nuclear power plant", but I think the actual power plant was removed along time ago. The remaining buildings on the hill are B-87 and B-126, an electrical warehouse and the old water plant. Just the bare frames remain now. Old T-site is in the cleanup stages, and where the bowling alley once stood, there is a vacant lot. Kind of sad to see the old buildings go. On the other hand, there are some positive changes. Three huge wind turbines are up and working above T-site, at the foot of Crater Hill. Another milestone of change is the arrival, unloading, reloading, and departure of the vessel. Our crew went out to the ship this morning and removed the radio telephones and wireless internet gear we loaned them for the brief time they are in port. They should be setting sail as I write this. Watching the cargo ship steam away from the ice pier is part of the official winding down of the summer season. A lot of my winter friends are coming in now. It's a bittersweet reunion, since I'm about ready to leave. I figure that I've spent 19 of the last 24 months down here. That'll probably do for now.

Pole Boondoggle

2010-01-27T14:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got a chance to make a quick trip to the south pole. Every department gets a few seats on these "sleigh ride" trips, to pass around to the folks in the group. In our department, the trips were prioritized by time on ice, so the highest likelihood of a trip would be to someone who has been coming down for a long time, and has never been to pole before. I'm in my 32nd month on ice, so I'm kind of a medium-timer. I went to pole to work back in 2000, before the new station was built. The old dome was still there, and was one of the wildest places I've ever been. Now the dome is gone, the new station is finished, and it's quite a different place from before. Since I had been to NPX (as the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is known), I was out of the running for a sleigh ride. At the last minute the guy who was scheduled to be the group leader bailed, so they called me. I guess my previous pole experience somehow qualified me to be the leader.

The pole station receives most of its fuel by air. New York Air National Guard LC-130s take off from McMurdo fully loaded with fuel, and offload a bunch of it when they get to pole. Some flights, like the one I was on, carry no cargo and very few passengers, serving strictly as a tanker. I talked to the pilot a little about it after we got back, and he explained the sleigh ride phenomenon. If the plane is completely full of fuel and there is still a little bit of available weight to take, they take as many people for a ride as they can, as a morale trip. Of course, very few people on earth get to go to the pole, so it's a real treat.

We loaded up on a Delta, and headed out to Pegasus. Everything moved pretty quickly-- we got on the plane shortly. There were nine of us on the trip, from a broad cross-section of the McMurdo population. Two of us were from IT, one from supply, one from the galley, a heavy equipment operator, a Kiwi scientist, an FEMC GA, a mechanic, and a cargo guy. The trip down was uneventful, and we got to see some fantastic scenery on the way. We even got to take turns going up into the cockpit. I went up there just as we approached the Beardmore Glacier. The picture that is taken straight out the front is of the Beardmore, though it's so huge and white you can't see it well. The picture just below the photo of me looks like it's nothing, but it was a really cool sundog that followed us. As the shadow of our plane moved across the tops of the clouds, it was surrounded by a bright rainbow ring. I guess the speck of our plane caused the light to refract around us like a prism. It took us about three hours to get to NPX, and everything was rushed. The plane sat in the fuel pits with props turning, offloading 60,000 pounds of fuel while we were on our boondoggle. They told me to have the group back to the plane, ready to board in 25 minutes. Considering all nine of us would want to have our pictures taken at the ceremonial pole and the actual geographical south pole, and get at least a brief look at the inside of the new station, 25 minutes was pushing it, to say the least. Luckily the pole is less than a quarter of a mile from the plane, and is pretty close to the station. I cracked the whip, and tried to get them to stick together and move along. (The picture of me at the ceremonial pole didn't turn out well, but others got pictures of me that I haven't received yet.)

The sleigh ride before ours had really angered the Guard guys. They had diddled around too long, and made the plane wait, which is a huge no-no. The plane offloads as much fuel as they can, leaving just enough to safely make it back to McMurdo with a little reserve. If they have to idle on the taxiway for any time, waiting for the boondogglers to return, they could actually have to refuel the plane to take off, which would enrage them. They warned us not to be late like the last group. There was even talk of ending the sleighrides due to their recent bad experience. I did the best I could to nag and cajole the wide-eyed sleigh riders back to the plane. We were a couple of minutes late, but they weren't tapping their toes and looking at their watches yet.

To me, the most incredible part of the trip is flying over the Beardmore Glacier. It is unimaginably huge-- something like a hundred miles long, and four or five miles wide in places (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beardmore_Glacier). That's the route Robert Scott took when he made it to the pole (but not back) in 1912. To fly over that massive river of ice, knowing that men dragged heavy sledges loaded with supplies over it-- incredible. The cravasses and seracs are pretty much continuous for mile after mile, and are so huge that we could easily see them from 20,000 feet above. Wow. The Transantarctic Mountains are just amazing, with huge ice falls, cravasse fields, and valley glaciers. The plateau above is a featureless expanse of white, clear to the pole and beyond. The ice sheet below and the Ross Ice Shelf beyond that (heading back to McMurdo) are pretty much flat and white, too. That is until you get to the strange lump of Ross Island, with it's huge volcano, and Home Sweet Home on the end of Hut Peninsula.

Tanker

2010-01-27T12:03:00.000-08:00

Our fuel tanker has come and gone over the last week. In its first attempt at docking, it pinched too much ice between its hull and the ice pier-- it took them about a day to get it docked right. It brought in five million gallons of fuel, which was offloaded through a mass of big fuel hoses. Our Comms department put wireless internet and two radio telephones on the tanker for their use over the couple of days they were here in port. The icebreaker continues to cruise around in the turning basin and the shipping channel, making ready for the American Tern, the huge cargo ship that's coming to bring us more stuff, and take away our junk and trash. Ship offload is a big deal here-- it's a crazy time with trucks running night and day, and supply people running around like chickens. My department will be really busy, too, but for other reasons. We are starting to fly out to round up all of our repeaters from mountain tops, and other gear from field camps. Never a dull moment.

F6

2010-01-19T11:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got to fly out to the McMurdo Dry Valleys to fix a radio telephone at F6 camp at Lake Fryxell. It was a pretty nice day, and we had good luck with the comms gear. I had a little bit of time, so I hiked from the F6 hut about halfway up to the Commonwealth Glacier. I was afraid our helo ride out would arrive before I got back, so I cut short my hike and headed back to the hut. We landed on Hjorth Hill on the way out to drop off a couple of techs, and again on the way back out to pick them up. What a cool job I have, getting paid to fly around in helicopters to exotic spots!

Rugby on Ice

2010-01-16T13:48:00.000-08:00

Last weekend we (the McMurdo community) answered the challenge to play the Kiwis of Scott base in a game of rugby out on the Ross Ice Shelf. It was an incredibly gorgeous day out there. I was wearing a long underwear shirt, and was hot, even with my jacket off. I basked in the sun while watching the Kiwis pummel the hapless Americans. I imagine most of the Kiwis grew up playing rugby, and probably none of the Americans had ever played it, or even seen a game before working in the Antarctic program. I think it's an awesome game. It's huge in New Zealand, so we get exposed to it quite a bit. There are two types, rugby league and rugby union. Most of the folks I know think only rugby union is the "real" rugby. Both are much more interesting than American football to watch-- much more action and less annoying penalties and breaks. For our ice game, a rugby field was set up out on the ice shelf, near Snowmound City, where the FSTP (Field Safety and Training) folks take us out to Happy Camper School. It's perfectly flat out there, which is why I suppose the Kiwis chose the location, though it was far from either of our bases. They were playing on about a thousand feet of glacial ice, floating on the Ross Sea. http://www.activenewzealand.com/rugby-rules.php

Hjorth Hill

2010-01-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

A week or so again, I got to fly out in a helo to fix a radio telephone at Hjorth Hill. We have a small comms hut there with various repeaters that look down on Lake Fryxell, in the McMurdo dry valleys. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Dry_Valleys, http://www.mcmlter.org/) It was a cloudy day, and not so hot for photos. It was relatively warm, though, and not too unpleasant to hang out there for a while. Particularly neat rocks up there-- I did some poking around while waiting for the other half of our team to get situated at the F6 camp on Fryxell, and start looking at the phone link. On the way out and back on the helo, we saw the icebreaker Oden, just beginning to open up the shipping channel to McMurdo for the fuel tanker and the big supply ship to come in. Seeing the icebreaker like that was a tangible reminder that the summer is coming to an end soon!

More Science

2010-01-09T22:43:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I got to install a wireless data network to some "beakers" (scientists) who are working on a program to map the topology under the ice. The project is called CRESIS (not sure what that stands for...). They have an 1100 pound remotely-piloted aircraft (UAV) that carries ground penetrating radar, and flies back and forth to get a profile of the rock under the polar ice. They have two UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) they use. The bigger one is 1100 pounds-- almost the size of a private aviation aircraft. There is some really cool science going on down here.

More Crozier Pictures

2009-12-22T16:38:00.000-08:00

Here are some more pictures from my recent trip to Cape Crozier. I didn't take the one of the leopard seal, it's from USAP.gov. (It was shot at Crozier.) In one picture you can see all of Mount Erebus, with its ever present plume. In that one we are over a shoulder of Mount Terror, headed back to Mac Town. The other mountain picture is Mount Terror-- the summit is a little hard to make out. In the picture that shows the Ross Ice shelf, you can just barely make out a dirty edge to the sea ice, way down in the distance. That is actually hundreds of emperor penguins. For scale, the ice shelf is about a hundred feet high over the sea.

Another Cool Ride

2009-12-22T10:40:00.000-08:00

About a week ago I got to go for another really cool ride at work. We have been having a hard time getting the wireless data service to the penguin camp at Cape Crozier working properly, so we went to fix it. We dropped two people on top of Mt Terror, and I was dropped off at the Crozier camp with a network engineer. Cape Crozier is the site of a HUGE penguin rookery. There are around 300,000 adelie penguins there, and a few hundred emperor penguins. Turns out we didn't have to do much on our end, so we got a chance to look around. The penguins are hatching right now, so we couldn't get very close, but got close enough to take a few telephoto pictures of some adelies. In the distance we could see the emperors on the ice edge, but didn't get close enough to photograph them. We saw a few minke whales playing in the bay. Some of the other techs are jaded after a long history of flying around in helicopters, but I'm still really stoked at the opportunity to get out of town. I'll continue to post pictures of my summer adventures. (Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Crozier http://noahstrycker.com/blog/2009/01/27/helo-to-cape-crozier/ http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/antarctica/terror.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Terror_(Antarctica))

Ride in the Blue One

2009-12-11T17:47:00.000-08:00

It's coming up on a month now that I've been back at McMurdo. It's going pretty well, but there have been a few down sides. One my cohorts on the trip down infected all of us with the "McMurdo Crud". It's really just a cold or flu, but for some reason down here it packs more of a whallop. I've had it for over three weeks now, and I'm finally shaking it. I have a great immune system, and I can't remember EVER having a cold for more than a week. I pretty much got sick the day I hit the ice, so I'm really looking forward to being healthy.

The job is way different in the summer. Now we have helicopters, so a lot of the time we are flying around to various exotic mountaintops to fix or install radio gear. In the winter it was more just hanging around the shop, fixing radios and charging batteries and stuff-- not too exotic. That's one of the reasons I decided to come back for the summer-- it's a much sexier job when the sun's up.

Earlier in the week, I got a chance to fly in the fanciest of the five helicopters we have down here. The regular stable consists of two Bell 212s, and two A-Stars. The Kiwis brought this beautiful new blue one down to replace their old 212. I believe it is a Eurocopter EC-130. We had to fly out to the top of Mt Aurora, to fix a VHF repeater that had stopped working. It was a very windy day, so the helos had been grounded for most of the day, waiting for calmer weather. In the afternoon they decided to make a run for it. We loaded up our gear, and took off from the helo pad. The blue helo is very quiet-- I guess they are used exclusively at the Grand Canyon for that reason. We flew out across the sea ice and the Ross Ice Shelf at about a thousand feet. Mt Aurora is the highest point on Black Island, where McMurdo's satellite earth station resides, along with a bunch of other communications gear. (http://tinyurl.com/y878bt2) We landed the blue bird near the top of the mountain in howling winds. The pilot shut down and waited for us to do our work. After a bit, he started back up again, and landed in a more sheltered location. Coworker Mike and I replaced the broken dipole antenna on the repeater-- it had failed from constant exposure to the insane winds that Black Island sees (we saw through our remote monitoring system that winds had exceeded 200 MPH at one time last winter).

After checking to make sure the repeater was happy again, we schlepped our gear down to the helo, and loaded up. That's probably about the sixth time I had ridden in a helo, and it was definitely the spookiest. The pilots here are incredibly good, ours included, but taking off and landing a helicopter in high, gusty winds is just scary. I will surely get to do some more flying this summer-- I'm looking forward to it.

Back at Mac

2009-11-23T18:57:00.000-08:00

What a strange and interesting life I have. Six weeks ago I left McMurdo, for a period of wonderful traveling. Seems like the blink of an eye, and here I am-- back again. It is so much warmer than it was when I left, and it's light all the time. The work will be quite a bit different, too. A lot of flying around in helicopters, installing and maintaining mountaintop repeaters and stuff. It'll be a nice change after the relatively mundane wintertime work routine.
I wasted no time in contracting the McMurdo Crud. There are always a lot of viruses making the rounds on the ice, and it's pretty much given that we will all be exposed to them, until we gain our immunity. I felt funky right on arrival, and it has escalated into the strong sensation of having a colony of rabid prairie dogs inhabiting my lung tissue. I went to the doc to get some cough medicine this morning, and he recommended that I take a couple of days off of work. There really isn't much to do in the daytime, so it's not a big treat to play hookie. I've been reading a good book about Lewis and Clark's expedition, which has helped to pass the time. Fingers crossed that the germs will subside, and I can go do some work.

(The first picture is Conan at his new/old home in Helena. The other are taken in the C-17 I took to the ice.)

Dog Parkin'

2009-11-14T05:36:00.000-08:00

After leaving Kauai, I headed to Oahu for a couple of days. I stayed in a big, funky backpacker on the north shore (near Sunset Beach). On my way out, I decided to have another little urban adventure. I stayed at the Honolulu YMCA. It was old and funky, and very cheap for Honolulu. I don't think I'll stay there again, but it was a fun experiment. I had a single room for something like $42.
My plane leaving HNL had mechanical problems, so American footed the bill for a nice room on the 19th floor of the Waikiki Beach Marriott. Not bad! I hung around on the beach for a while and nursed a bad sunburn from Kauai.
I came back to the states, and picked up Conan right away. We've been hanging around at dog parks near my dad's place in Louisville, Colorado. This morning we're back in Helena-- I'm sadly dropping him off at his parents' house for another few months. I got an offer to do a short summer contract back on the ice that I just can't pass up.

More Na Pali Pics

2009-11-01T14:48:00.000-08:00

These were taken by the "first mate" on our Zodiac.

Na Pali to the Big City

2009-11-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

I was so thrilled by my brief (but painful) hike up the Na Pali coast on the north shore of Kauai, that I thought it would be worth another day to take one of the cruises that see the coast from the ocean. There are different kinds-- sailboats, catamarans, helicopters, and some that use small rubber Zodiacs. I picked the last one-- sounded like more of an adventure. It was-- holy cow! We loaded about twenty of us, plus the captain and the first mate up at the boat launch (it isn't really a harbor) at Waimea. We had to blast through 5'-6' surf for about an hour to get around to the north shore, which was calmer. It was so calm, in fact, that we got to go into many sea caves that are almost always inaccessible due to high surf. I estimate we entered ten sea caves, including two that had a separate entrance and exit. I can't put in to words how awesome (and scary) it is to drive a boat into a pitch black cave with the surf surging up and down, navigating around to a separate exit. At one point Chris, the captain/pilot pulled in to a very cool cave with a waterfall splashing down through a "skylight" in the top of the cave. We took some pictures there. Chris said "this view was the photo that was on the cover of National Geographic’s special book on the most beautiful places on earth. I believe it. We then backed out of the cave, and proceeded back up the coast, where we entered a pitch dark cave. Turns out it was a "U" shaped cave, and we came back out where the skylight waterfall was. That was one of the most awesome moments of my life. You can see photos and videos at their web site: http://napaliriders.com/. In addition to the cool caves, the peaks and cliffs of the Na Pali coast are some of the most awesome geological features anywhere, and the clarity of the water is completely amazing. It is the color of Windex, and you can see the bottom through forty feet of water as though it were a bathtub. We went snorkeling with tiny Spinner Dolphins, and stopped at one point to tie up, bait some fish, and snorkel around them. Never having worked a snorkel before, it was a little frustrating for me. I haven't figured out the part of not drinking a gallon of water through your sinuses yet. It'll probably be more fun when I master that part.

After Na Pali, I explored some more of Kauai by land. I drove my slick rented Mustang convertible all over the place. The surf at Hanalei was very weak, or I might have spent more time there. I'm no surfer, but I love watching huge waves crash. It stayed dry for my entire visit on Kauai until the last day, when it rained almost all day. I used that as an excuse to explore by car some more. I spent my last night in Lihue to be close to the airport, and flew out without incident. Because of the way my tickets lined up, I was forced to spend a couple of days in Oahu, which I didn't really relish. I pictured hanging around all day downtown, trying to evade the tourists. What I failed to take into account is that these Hawaiian islands are TINY. I drove all the way up to the north shore of Oahu in less than an hour. I stayed at a big, funky backpacker at Shark's Cove, adjacent to Sunset Beach, and the famous Banzai Pipeline. I spent a little too much time on the beach yesterday, and I resemble a lobster today. A local bloke struck up a conversation about surfing and dirt bikes, and I stood around in the sun like a brain-dead lizard for an hour and a half chatting with him. When I got home, I was the color of a pomegranate. I checked out of my backpacker this morning and drove down to Honolulu, where I scored one of the strangest berths yet. I'm staying at the Central YMCA, right next to Waikiki. It's a dingy, ratty old building, with peeling paint and a lot of funk going on. I didn't see any bugs or anything, though, and the price is right-- $42 a night. Sometimes I like to take these little adventures-- get away from the tourists and hang with the locals. Plus, I can soak my lobster bod in the cool pool...

Kauai

2009-10-27T23:40:00.000-07:00

I'm melting. It is so much warmer here in Hawaii than it was in New Zealand or Australia. It's been between 80F and 90F and muggy since I got here. I won't go into great detail, but I've been to beaches all over the place, hiked the Na Pali coast, and have driven up to Waimea Canyon. I've had really good luck with accomodations, finding a very nice hotel room right on the beach in Kapa'a (first two nights), for a very reasonable rate. My travelling style has changed quite a bit from the start of my trip. At first, I was eating out of grocery stores, staying in backpackers in New Zealand. Now I'm cruising around in a rented 2010 Mustang convertible, eating in restaurants and staying in B&Bs. Part of the reason for that is that Kauai is just not geared up for backpacker-type travellers. Also, I've travelled quite cheaply so far, and I just want to spluge a bit. I was really craving a nice piece of fish, and drove around in the bigger towns looking for a promising place. Nothing looked inviting, so I decided to take my chances back here in Waimea. Right across the street is the Wrangler Steakhouse. Hmmm. Not the normal best bet for a vege-fishy-tarian like myself. I just had some of the best fish I've ever had there-- moonfish rolled in crumbs, cooked in butter and served in a creamy caper sauce with garlic mashed potatoes. Yikes!
I'm taking a raft trip back up the other (western) end of the Na Pali coast tomorrow, which leaves from Waimea. I have to be there at 6:30AM tomorrow, so I wanted to stay as close as possible. The only accommodations I could find were in a B&B. It's a HUGE suite (three rooms) with a Jacuzzi, and a king size bed. It's only $160 a night (which is way more than I would like to pay, but for this place it a bargain). The downside: no AC! It's right on the beach, so it should cool down nicely at night. It's already quite nice outside, but a little warm for sleeping inside. I have all the windows open, with fingers crossed. If nothing else, I can dump a bag of ice in the Jacuzzi, and sleep in that...

Sydney

2009-10-24T01:48:00.001-07:00

I flew back to Sydney from Melbourne today, saying goodbye to my funky Chinatown pub. The flight was uneventful, and I'm right back in the middle of good ol' Sydney. Not necessarily intentionally, I'm in Chinatown here, too. This part of Sydney is full of Asian students-- not sure where they go to school, but they're everywhere.
I had a nice visit with an Ozzie named Russell at a pub (Paddy McGuires) in the Haymarket district this evening. He related how he likes to go pig hunting in northern Australia, and what a rush it is. They bring two or three dogs, and track down the feral pigs. They loose the dogs on the boars, and the dogs capture them by grabbing them by the ears. In the summa, they just castrate the peegs, so they get noice and fat for next ye-ah. Then they'll catch 'em again, and dispatch them with a noice noif to the lungs. In the winta, they can sell them by dumping them in pig boxes, and get as much as AU$1.60 a kg. Profitable, that. He related how some (expletive deleteds) had captured peegs and cut one ear off. That means that when the dogs go after the peeg, they can't get a hold, and the peeg will sometimes gore the dog to death. I asked Russell why someone would go to all the trouble to go to the bush and capture a wild pig just to cut its ear off, and he replied that they do it just because they are (expletive deleteds).
An interesting country, this. (Note: Picture is not from here, it's a cool beach on Phillip Island, near Melbourne.)

More signs

2009-10-19T01:43:00.001-07:00

More crazy, random signs...

Signs

2009-10-19T01:18:00.000-07:00

I am so crazy about my funky little Chinatown neighborhood here in Melbourne. There are weird little alleys and sub-alleys all over the place, with weird little noodle shops and God-knows-what down there. I had greek food for dinner, and took a little sub-alley shortcut from the Greek Precinct to my Chinatown home. At one point I found both sides of the alley covered with the most bizarre signs. No way to tell what they mean, or who put them there. This has to be one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Melbourne

2009-10-17T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've been having quite the urban adventure lately. I flew from Sydney to Melbourne yesterday. I had pre-booked a room at a hotel here, not knowing much about the place or the area-- it was just relatively inexpensive and available. It turns out to be the coolest place. It's an old hotel upstairs from a pub in the middle of Chinatown. Melbourne is great, and this is one of the coolest parts of town.

My favorite coat ($200 Marmot softshell) was stolen out of my room in Sydney, so I was on a quest for a new jacket. It was fairly cool out (probably 50F), so the idea of travelling more with no coat wasn't too appealing. On my quest for a gear store, I heard a smoky saxophone calling to me from a dark side street. Turns out there was a fantastic jazz trio playing at a tiny cafe, just outside Chinatown. I sat for a while and soaked up the tunes. It was by far one of the highlights of my vacation so far. Today, there were a couple of guys playing Bolivian music outside the Queen Victoria Market-- also great. The QVM is a huge bazaar, with all sorts of different booths selling everything from leeks to leather jackets. Very cool to wander around looking at all the bizarre bazaar stuff. I even found a smoking deal on a new jacket. Now I'm ready for more adventure.

$300 Seashells

2009-10-14T01:30:00.000-07:00

I have been having really good luck with travelling. Pretty much everything has gone smoothly. Until now. I seem to save up my bad travelling mojo, and experience it all at once. Today must have been the day. I was set to fly out of Wellington for Christchurch at four o'clock this afternoon. I still had the rental car, so I had to some time to kill. I have several friends who make musical instruments (mandolins, mostly), who do inlay work with abalone shells. New Zealand is the home of the most exquisitely figured and colored abalone shells in the world, so I've been meaning to pick some up. I hadn't gotten around to finding a source for some during my trip-- I've asked around at jewelers, with not too much luck.
With my time to kill today, I hit a cybercafe and Googled "Paua Abalone New Zealand". I found out that a big supplier and processor is right near Wellington, where I was! I called them up, and told them I'd be right there. I hopped in the car and headed up to Carterton to Paua World. I got a smokin' deal on a whole load of paua pieces and six whole, unprocessed shells. I headed back to my guesthouse in Wellington, knowing I was pushing my luck for my flight. I had seen the airport bus many times going right near my hotel, and I know right where the bus stops are, so I thought I was golden. I gathered up my stuff, locked the key in the boot of the car, and headed down to the bus stop. I sat down there and waited for a bit. No airport bus. I finally asked an elderly gentleman if I was in the right place to get a bus to the airport. No, he informed me, I should be waiting a half a mile away on Courtenay Place. I hustled down there through pouring rain and driving wind-- got completely soaked. I got to the bus stop just in time for the airport bus. But it never came. I waited for over a half an hour, and finally it got there. I hopped on, and hoped for a quick ride. The bus wound through all sorts of random neighborhoods, getting caught in traffic and not heading anywhere near the airport. Finally we got to the terminal-- I ran inside and headed straight for the JetStar departures counter. One clerk was helping a very disgruntled customer, and it looked like it would be a while. The other clerk was shamelessly flirting with her boyfriend. I was starting to get perturbed. The flirter caught my stare of death, and dismissed Romeo. I told her what flight I was on, and she informed me that my check-in had closed fifteen minutes ago. I was really screwed. Their next flight was 4:00PM on the 15th, but I am booked on a flight from Christchurch to Sydney at 1:30PM on the 15th. All the tickets are non-refundable, and they are booked out of Denver, which due to the time difference could be of no help. My stress level escalated. I pulled out my itinerary, and realized that I didn't have any phone numbers for the Christchurch travel office, just Denver numbers. I headed over to the Air New Zealand counter, hoping that they had some more flights to Christchurch available. The counter was manned by one person. The worlds slowest man. He...helped...the...guy...in...front...of...me...for...an...eternity. Finally, I got to speak with the slow man. Turns out that they did have a couple more flights leaving for Christchurch today, and I could get on one for only three hundred dollars. I really didn't have any good options. I handed him my card. Declined. Turns out he wasn't using the machine right-- it did go through after...four...attempts. The plane I missed cost me $69NZ (about $50US).
So my little side trip to pick up some sea shells cost me $300NZ, or about $230US. I was very grateful to get a flight, though-- it would have gotten really ugly for my travel plans if I missed my NZ-OZ flight.
Now that we have gotten all the bad luck out of the way (knock wood!), I'm ready for some smooth sailing!

Emeralds

2009-10-11T23:01:00.000-07:00

I’m in the middle of the north island of New Zealand now. I hung around in Christchurch for a couple of days, soaking up the sun (and rain), and communing with the baby ducks at the Botanical Gardens, right across the street from my hotel. I indulged in Thai and Indian food, and walked around a lot, reacquainting myself with the town. The weather was kind of up and down—two really nice days and some not so nice. A big storm came in and dumped a bunch of snow on the mountains, so I made my decision to head north. I took a bus from Christchurch to Picton, where I got on the ferry to Wellington. I had never been to the north island before, except the Auckland airport. The south island is much more wild and interesting for hiking, and the north island is much more populated and less mountainous. That’s why I had never been as interested in the north island, at least until I ran out of things to see on the south island.
The bus trip was actually a lot more scenic and interesting than I thought it would be. The trip to Picton is composed mostly of rolling emerald green fields full of frolicking sheep, alternating with endless vineyards. Just about every place you could stand and take a picture on the south island looks like it could be a postcard. There were towering snow-capped mountains in the background all the way—it was incredible. (I’m at a backpacker with no SD card reader on the computer, so I can’t post any pictures just yet.)
The ride was pretty twisty, and at one point the kid sitting in front of my suddenly and without warning lost his breakfast all over the stranger sitting next to him. It was quite gross. I felt bad for the kid, as well as his victim.
We got off the bus and onto the ferry boat at the Picton ferry terminal. The boat was HUGE—almost six hundred feet long (http://www.interislander.co.nz/Our-Ships-And-Services/Kaitaki.aspx). The terminal had posted that the ride over to Wellington was expected to be quite rough. The straights between are famous for being stormy and turbulent. I thought such a huge boat would surely be immune from a little wave action. Think again. The boat pitched so violently that I needed to hang on to railings to even walk around. I saw many people doing their own quite disgusting impersonation of the poor kid on the bus. There were cookies tossed and chunks blown in all directions. I think I even saw someone praying to the Porcelain God, Ralph.
I hung around in Wellington for a couple of days, where I ran into a group of ice friends. We took in an Irish music set at a pub last night, which was nice. Decent food and culture, too. I could get used to this.
I rented a car and headed north this morning. I’m staying at a little town called Turangi now, near the south shore of huge Lake Taupo. I did a great day hike around an emerald green mountain lake, got some groceries, and headed back to my hostel. It’s a smokin’ deal if you’re ever in the Taupo region. $26NZ (about $18US) dollars a night, for a single room. It’s called the A+ Lodge. It’s in a quiet residential area. A little old and run-down, but very clean and well kept. They also have a dachshund puppy, which is a major bonus. That’s one of the worst deprivations of living on the ice. I didn’t get to so much as pet a cat for eight months. That puppy might have a bald spot by the time I get out of here!

Christchurch

2009-10-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back in the real world now. I got into Christchurch a couple of days ago, and I'm enjoying the baby ducks at the Botanical Gardens, and snorfing Thai food to my hearts content. I'll post more pictures as I take them. More soon.
L.

Mainbody

2009-10-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

Well, the big invasion is finally here. After our invasion of 300-some folks at Winfly, we kept a stable population of around 480 through September. The first flight of mainbody was supposed to come on September 29th, but some bad weather caused a delay. The Air Force tried again the next day, but had mechanical problems. Between the weather and mechanical issues, the first flight was delayed for five days. That is a really big deal, because the train of people flying into Christchurch doesn't stop, causing a huge pileup of folks there. I was set to leave on the fifth flight out, but the delays caused the schedulers to put all the northbound folks who were supposed to leave on the first four flights on the first northbound plane (yesterday). 140-some new folks came down, too. After a long winter of unlimited privacy and fairly mellow energy, it is quite unnerving to have a bunch of loud-talking tanned people invade. I'm ready to get out of here. My plane takes off tomorrow (weather permitting), so today is the big packing day. I'm not planning on coming back next winter, so I'm not leaving anything here. I am trying to travel as light as possible, so I mailed a bunch of stuff to the states, and I'm giving a lot of stuff away. I made the difficult decision to put my mandolin in the mail. I'd like to be able to play while travelling, but it is such an incredible pain to schlep a lot of stuff through all those airports and hotels. I think I made the right decision.
It was a relief for a lot of people that that first mainbody flight finally arrived. It's really a drag for folks to go through the emotional goodbyes, and find that they aren't leaving yet. Plus, quite a few of the winterovers did what's called a "winfly-summer-winter", meaning they have been here for fourteen months straight. Those people are READY to get out of here! I'm glad to go, but not in that big a hurry. Here the food, gas, and housing are all free, and it's a rude shock to transition to a life with so many expenses and no income. I'm definitely not craving that, but a little salad would be nice.

(These pictures were taken on one of my last working days. I drove a PistenBully up to the top of Crater Hill to repair a sick data circuit. Where you see me walking downhill, I'm decending from a tiny hut called the Doghouse down to a comms shelter called building 65.)

Medevac

2009-09-21T18:05:00.000-07:00

We're about 3/4 way through Winfly now. For those unfamiliar with the Antarctic program, an advance group of people come down in late August while it is still winter, to get the station ready to officially reopen. In between the last flight of Winfly and the first flight of Mainbody, the station is technically closed-- no flights in or out. Unfortunately, one of our Winflyers took ill, and a medevac was ordered. A Kiwi Herc (C-130 cargo plane) landed out at Pegasus field yesterday, and spirited the sick folks away. I happened to be out there at the time, and got to see the plane take off and land.

There were also some Aussies out there, working on their UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). I stopped in the hut they were working out of, and got to talk to them for a bit. They had three UAVs in the shop, and were rigging them up with electronic instrumentation. It's really fascinating-- the little planes have a wingspan of about nine feet, and are only about six feet long, weighing thirty pounds. The can fly them in hurricanes, though, and have flown them clear across the Antlantic ocean several times. They are equipped with Iridium phones for guidance, and regular radio remote control for when they are within fifty miles. They have GPS on them, and telemetry to track various functions of the engine, etc. The group lost one on the sea ice a couple of weeks ago. They knew from the telemetry data that it had lost fuel pressure. It's sitting out on the rough sea ice, miles from McMurdo. They are going to leave it out there, because it's just too hazardous to land a helo out there to retrieve it. The guys said that with out any special instrumentation, the bare planes go for about $70,000US. They don't have any landing gear, so they launch them from a special rack on the back of a pickup. The science group is studying sea ice. Instruments on the little planes measure light and radiation reflected from the ice between here and Terra Nova Bay, the location of an Italian base a couple hundred miles north of us. I don't know much about the grantees on this one-- I'm going to be looking into it.

Hack! Plague!

2009-09-17T20:36:00.000-07:00

Well, it was just a matter of time. Some tanned, loud-talking Winflyer must have breathed on me just right, and now I have the dreaded McMurdo Crud. Right after dinner a couple of days ago, I got that distinctive itch in the lungs, with the scratchy throat and woozy head. The germs were burrowing in. I e-mailed my boss to tell him that I might be sleeping in and a little late for work if I woke up feeling like death the following morning.

Morning came, and I was feeling pretty rough, but not close to death, thankfully. Congested head, itchy lungs, sore throat. Not bad enough to miss work, but not the pink of health, either. I've been drinking as much water as I can stand, loading up on vitamins, and sleeping as much as possible. I took a couple hours off of work today, and took the nap of a lifetime. Crazy dreams in my delirium-- kind of fun, actually. Playing hookie and letting my immune system do its job. I feel a lot better now. Hope I get those germy little gunk monsters on the run!

(Photos by Holly Troy-- no plague connection.)

BRRRRRR! Plague!

2009-09-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

This week we had the most heinous weather I have ever experienced in my life. Wednesday morning started cold and windy, and it got worse for about 48 hours. The worst wind was 52 MPH, and the worst cold was -51F. If those had happened at the same time, it would have been a wind chill of -104F. As it was, it got down to a WC of -95F. The wind chill stayed below -75F all day long, and was in the -80s for most of the day. Yikes. We were in severe weather condition two all day both days (meaning travel and work outdoors is limited, due to weather). In a typical trip just from my room to the galley, I would wear long john top and bottoms, fleece vest, huge "big red" parka, neck gaiter, big fur hat, warm glove and my hood up. I still froze in seconds, and all my gear would stay freezing cold for hours after taking it off. I put my big red back on after lunch, and it felt like I was taking it out of the freezer. The farthest I ever have to walk between buildings is about a quarter mile, but I froze badly out there. No real frostbite, but some painful frostnip. Any exposed skin will freeze almost instantaneously in those temps-- it's miserable. Today it has been around -25F, and the wind has stopped blowing (thank God!). I've been walking around town considering a t-shirt and flip-flops. Seriously, -25F feels like Florida after that weather.

Since the invasion of the Winfly workers, us winterovers have been dreading getting sick. We passed around any germs we had at the beginning of the winter, so it was literally impossible to catch a cold or flu for the last five months or so. The arriving people all just went through New Zealand, which is in the peak of their swine flu epidemic right now. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we are in a perfect set-up to all get sick now. I imagine our immune systems are compromised, too. Bad food, no sun, no germs to keep us tough. We're sitting ducks. I know a lot of us have been keeping a sharp eye out for anybody coughing or sneezing. So far, nobody is obviously sick-- that's good. However, one of my coworkers went home to find his new roommate home sick with a sore throat. I dread what comes next. The management has been nagging us nonstop to wash our hands a lot, especially when entering the galley. Truth is, not everybody does it, so the managers decided to appoint some "hand washing cops". Departments must send four people at a time to stand between the hand-washing sinks and the galley entrance. They monitor who isn't washing, and nag them into doing it. Personally I don't mind someone watching me wash my hands if they feel like it, but I am infuriated to be "volunteered" to be a cop. Luckily, my manager took pity on us poor leftover winterovers and didn't put us through the humiliation. We've been through enough, he said. Grown adults nagging other grown adults to behave like grown adults against their will-- it rubs a lot of us wrong. I think the managers finally got that-- there haven't been any cops out for the last few meals.

Think I'll throw on some flip-flops and go for a stroll...

Nacreous Winfly

2009-08-27T20:57:00.000-07:00

We are well into Winfly now. We have had four flights come down, raising our population from 153 to over 500. It feels very crowded and crazy now, though I have to keep in mind that the McMurdo population can top 1200 in the summer. Yikes.

If it weren't for the freshies, it would be tough. We've had fresh salads, pineapple, bananas, and kiwi fruit. I've been gorging on it after seven months of frozen yuck food. I feel healthier already.

Along with the "orange people" (winterovers' term for the loud, tanned invaders) and freshies, we've been having some nice nacreous clouds lately. I took these on a trip back to Mac Town from Pegasus, where I was installing a new antenna on one of the air traffic control buildings. It was -47F out there at the time, and a little breezy. I ended up having to fiddle with some cold metal hardware for a long time, and I got really cold. It took me hours to thaw out. I froze some more today-- NOAA is having problems with some of their satellite equipment, and I had to go up on top of a building to check it out. It was -20F and HOWLING wind. I got an "ice cream headache" just from the wind on my forehead. I have about five weeks left on the ice, and I'm hoping I don't have to get that cold again.

Sun and Freshies!

2009-08-22T00:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went out to Pegasus to finish up some work on a radio antenna. Day before yesterday was the official first sunrise, but it was very overcast on that day, so nobody saw the sun. Yesterday I didn't get out to the runway until after 2, and I didn't even bring a camera. I didn't think I'd get to see the sun that late. Turns out it was still up, and I got to see it again-- the first time in four months. I got these pictures from Chad Carpenter, an electrician working on the power plant project. Awesome.

The flight, after being delayed for two days due to weather, got here at 12:36 today. I scored three bananas and an apple! After months and months of every day being the same, we now have some new inhabitants. Ten people left on the flight today, and about 130 new ones came in. It's going to take some getting used to. We joke about the "invasion of the orange people", but in reality it is nice to see some new faces. I lucked out and didn't get a roommate yet. That's going to be the biggest bummer after having a single room all winter. Six more weeks, and I'll be flying the friendly skies again!

Black Island, Winfly

2009-08-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

It has been a very eventful week. Last Monday I got to go on a traverse to Black Island. The BITF (Black Island Telecommunications Facility) is our satellite earth station-- our link back to the real world. McMurdo isn't a great place for a satellite station, due to Mount Erebus blocking our view. BI has two "golf balls"-- big kevlar geodesic enclosures for the satellite dishes. There are a few small interconnected buildings, including a bunk house, kitchen, equipment room, and generator room. I had never been there, so it was a nice road trip. I went with my coworker, Antz Powell (http://antarcticimages.com/), a mechanic, and the safety guy. We took off from McMurdo about 9AM in two Pistenbullys.

Black Island is only about 20 miles away as the crow flies, but it is a six hour journey in a Pistenbully. The ice shelf is badly melted out on the "front side" (facing north, toward McMurdo), and is unpassable. We had to go between Black and White islands, around the back of Black Island and up to the station over land. Pistenbullys are designed for grooming ski areas, and are not at all suitable for long trips over rough ground. The driver's seat has a shock absorber, but (my) passenger seat is rigidly mounted. Riding in one is rather like falling down the stairs for six hours. Ouch.

On our trip around BI, we turned into the sun, and were driving into one of the most incredible sunsets I've ever seen, for hours. This time of year we basically have six hours of sunrise, six hours of sunset, and twelve hours of darkness. As of this trip, the sun hadn't broken the horizon yet. There is a phenomenon called Fata Morgana, caused by atmospheric layers on the ice. Objects are stretched and distorted vertically, so that an island might look like a mesa in Monument Valley. The Fata Morgana I saw during that long sunset were incredible. Islands on the horizon were stretched into mesas, then into rabbits and dragons, geysers and clouds. (No, I haven't lost my mind yet-- it really is that wild.)

BI is one of the windiest places on Earth. We have a monitor in our shop in McMurdo that displays environmental data and various measurements of the equipment there. The station is unmanned in the winter, so we need to be able to keep a close eye on the empty station to make sure everything is functioning properly. I frequently look up at the monitor to see that the winds are over 100MPH there. Luckily, the weather was good for our trip. When we arrived it was about -20F and calm outside, and about -30F inside the bunkhouse. Antz lit the Preway (heater) and we had the place reasonably warm in a few hours.

Once we got the place warm, it was a nice cozy spot. Both of the nights we spent out there, I slept great. I was just out there as more of less a 'safety buddy'-- I didn't have much work to do there. I haven't been reading much here in Mac Town, but I took that opportunity to get caught up. I devoured a thriller/mystery book called Oblivion by Peter Abrahams. A gripping read.

Tuesday afternoon Antz and I took a Pistenbully down to the 'front side transition'. That's where there is a road that comes straight from McMurdo to BI. It is so extremely windy near the island that gravel is stripped away, blowing out onto the ice shelf. In the summer the sun heats the dirt and gravel, causing huge melt pools. There are holes four or five feet deep, and ice blobs that are as big as twenty feet high.

The Pistenbully ride down to the front side transition was brutal. It was only about three or four miles, but the road is bad, and the Pistenbully transmits every pebble right up your spine. I took a few pictures down at the transition, and hiked back up to the base, leaving Antz to drive back alone. It was about -30F out, but I was hiking hard, so I was toasty warm. My glasses frosted up at one point, so I took them off. The plastic frames were so cold that they snapped in two. Thank God for some Super Glue back at the BI station, or I would have been in fuzzyland for the rest of the trip.

We had an uneventful trip back, except for six more hours of spinal compression. Yesterday was supposed to be Winfly, the first flight into McMurdo for six months. The flight had a 24 hour delay, and was delayed again today. We've lived without fresh veggies and mail for that long, so a lot of people are looking forward to the flight. There also is a lot of dread of the massive influx of folks were are getting. It's a hard adjustment from living with 153 people you know well, to 550 tanned, talkative newcomers. Stay away from my coat hook!

Final Radio Darts

2009-08-15T20:55:00.001-07:00

Sunday now, getting caught up on my blogging. Friday was the final night of Radio Darts for the season. It's a tradition that goes back a ways, from what I understand. The idea is, a crew of us yanks heads over the hill to Scott Base every Friday, playing darts with the Kiwis. The South Pole station plays us, and gives us their scores over HF radio. The Pole folks haven't shown up for darts this year, so we've just been playing the Kiwis.

I'm a mediocre dart player at best, but I still have a good time. Now that Winfly is almost here, we're putting an end to darts for the season. It'll leave an empty place on Friday nights, but I'm sure there will be other things to do. I'm never at a loss for things to do here.

Final Trivia Night

2009-08-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

Thursday was the final trivia night of the year. Trivia has been a high point of my season here-- it's always a hoot. My coworker, Keith "Grump" Roberts (in the blue Hawaiian shirt) is the mastermind behind the trivia questions, and is the emcee of the proceedings. My team squeaked out a win this time-- there is a lot of tough competition.

My team is called 32W, because there are 32 winter seasons between the six of us. My parters in crime are Antz and Christine Powell, Lisa Welfare, Sean Halsey and Shandra Cordovano. We have a good mix of music, movie, history, and geography knowledge between us, so we usually do okay. It also helps that Antz is a long time coworker of Grump's, and is sharp at spotting trivia questions that have been asked before.

We've been having a huge push of work lately. Just four days until the first plane of Winfly arrives (weather permitting). There has been a lot of prep work needed to make sure we're ready for the huge influx of population we expect over the next week. I spent a good chunk of last night and today breaking down my room to get ready for an (ack!) roommate. I had it quite pimped out, with a king sized bed with four mattresses, and was living in style all winter. No more. Now it's a dorm room for two. Oh well, at least we'll get freshies.

Pegasus

2009-08-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

Well, I just passed the six month mark in my season. Two more months to go! It has been rapidly getting lighter out-- the first sunrise will be in nine days. The activity level has really been ramping up, too. Have to get all the radios and wireless data networks up for the massive influx of people. Our population is going to go from 153, to over 500 over a couple of days. There is a lot of anticipation of the freshies that are coming down, but a considerable amount of dread, too. Lots of tanned and talkative tourists about to descend on us poor, pale, trembling wretches.

A lot of my work over the last few days has been getting the Pegasus airfield up and running. Several of the buildings there have wireless internet, which is all removed over the winter when the runway is disassembled and stored. This picture of me was taken by coworker Dave Benson who was helping me fix an antenna mast that had snapped off when the building was moved from the storage berm to be repositioned.

We've been having killer nacreous clouds lately. They are irridescent, pearly stratospheric ice clouds that are only seen near the poles. I haven't been able to get any good pics yet, but I'll try. To me, the PSCs are quite a bit more spectacular than the auroras. On a good day, the whole sky looks like it's on fire. It looks a lot like mother of pearl, or abalone shell, except the colors are bright orange, pink, blue and white. The picture of Mac Town was taken about 11 AM from the Pegasus shortcut road, about a mile out. The huge hulk you see behind the town is Mt Erebus, a 12,000 foot active volcano. It's hard to spot in that pic, but there is a plume of smoking coming out of the top.

RIP Greenhouse

2009-07-21T02:29:00.000-07:00

Well, right after I posted pictures and text about how much I love the greenhouse and hope it stays around, guess what? The greenhouse is to be closed.

There are a few players in this drama at McMurdo. Gary is the station manager. Bill is the NSF station manager. Angie is the boss over food services, which covers the greenhouse operation.

On Wednesday, everyone who is involved with running the greenhouse was sent an e-mail from Angie which was forwarded by Gary (the station manager). The gist of the e-mail was that a decision was made in Denver to close the greenhouse. No mention of who made that decision, or why. The story is that someone in Denver decided we could assure a greenhouse technician job for next winter was to forgo a greenhouse technician for the summer of '09-'10. It was presented to us as a choice between having a greenhouse in summer '09-'10 or winter of '10.

Because everyone's jobs will get really busy during Winfly (August 20 to late September), it would be better to just close the greenhouse before the Winfly folks get here. Again, it is not clear who made that decision, or why.

A meeting of all the greenhouse volunteers was called to explain the situation, and to give a forum for us to discuss the issue. Around 20 folks showed up for the meeting. It was, in my observation, a very emotional encounter. A lot of us have put a lot of work into nurturing our little green babies, and it is not a small deal that a decision was made by someone 9000 miles away to pull the plug. Some were clearly furious, and several were close to tears. Evidently, one of the workers who actually has greenhouse tasking on the weekly duties went up to the greenhouse and 'terminated' a bunch of plants without giving notice to the folks who were tasked with keeping those babies alive. Some among the group of us assembled were quite stunned that plants were ripped out without the knowledge of their caretakers.

It may seem strange for folks to get choked up about the death of plants. If you haven't been here, don't judge too quickly. There are no plants on the continent-- certainly not around here. Having a haven of light and humidity, with greenery everywhere is a major solace to an ice-ravaged population in the wintertime. I literally can't imagine working down here in the winter without the greenhouse. It is like a tiny island of the real world, in a vast wasteland of dry, cold, and dark.

I know the folks of Denver and Washington probably look at the greenhouse as 25K Kilowatts of drain, yielding a small amount of lettuce. I would remind those bean counters that we have NO PLANES FOR AT LEAST SIX MONTHS. Would you like to go that long without eating a plant that has been dead for less than six years? I don't think so.

LONG LIVE THE GREENHOUSE!!

Greenhouse Pics

2009-07-12T23:36:00.001-07:00

Greenhouse

2009-07-12T23:16:00.000-07:00

With the worst of the power drama behind us (we hope!), the greenhouse is evidently safe from the power axe. A high point of my week is always going up to the GH on Wednesday afternoons. I test the pH and nutrient levels of all eleven hydroponic systems, and do other little daily tasks like filling the humidifiers.

The greenhouse is a little island of light and humidity in dark, dry McMurdo. It is so dry in the buildings around town that it's crazy. Relative humidity in my dorm is around 1%. Antarctica is by far the driest place on earth, and warming up that cold, dry air makes the RH even lower. In the greenhouse, there are hundreds of plants breathing out moisture, and two humidfiers, so the RH is around 20%. Still pretty dry by stateside standards, but pretty nice by Antarctican standards.

The power plant problem resulted in a lot of lights being turned off to keep power consumption down. It has made McMurdo kind of spooky and strange. Some friends have even reported a spike in depression from being in the dark all the time. I haven't noticed that, but I have been jumping at shadows. The whole town is one big, scary dark alley. The greenhouse is a nice respite from the gloom.

Power Drama

2009-07-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

This winter there is a big project going on to renovate the power plant. Last year we had the old power plant and the new power plant, with working generators in both. Some Einstein back in the real world thought it would be a great idea to take all the generators out of the old power plant, and use just the two generators in the new power plant to light up the town.

The problem there is that generators have to be taken down for maintenance quite regularly, and we could be screwed if something blew up. Well, guess what? One of the new generators broke down in a big way over the weekend. It will take weeks to fix. We can barely power the town on one generator, if we conserve power. There is a smaller backup generator called the "Cat in a can" sitting outside the power plant. It's basically a generator installed in a milvan (freight container). It is notoriously unreliable, and shuts down in blowing snow.

Since we really don't have a power supply that is adequate for the town's needs, it's a pretty big deal. It is very cold and dark here this time of year, and it would be a real bummer to be powerless. The NSF station manager called an "all hands meeting" yesterday to lay out the facts. We have to have a contingency plan for what to do if the remaining big generator packs it in. Worst case scenario, we could possibly have to winterize the dorms we live in to conserve power, and all move in together in building 155 (the big, central building with the galley, offices, and dorm rooms). If we had to figure out ways to light up the town with no real power plant, there is even the possibility that we would treat it like a big medevac. In that case, we would prepare the now-winterized runway for an emergency flight. We would probably fly a bunch of people out months early, because there wouldn't be much point in being here with no power (not to mention the safety factor). It's very unlikely that it would come to that, and people aren't particularly freaked at this point. We do have to be ready for problems, though. Part of our emergency plan involves getting the word out that we have a power emergency underway. Everyone is directed to power down all possible equipment at home and at work, and huddle up at a predetermined location.

Well, the timing of the all hands meeting was fortuitous. Today, we had our power emergency. The Cat in a can quit working, and the power went out to part of town. They put all the load on the single generator, and it couldn't handle it all. The power to part of town went off again. I had to turn off all the lights and nearly all the equipment in my building, and move up to a coworker's office in another building. There has been quite a lot of drama going on, and I get to follow it all. Being the radio guy, I can monitor all the traffic as it happens. Just a minute ago I heard a technician on the radio saying he was out in a PistenBully, looking for generators out at Pegasus (the now-winterized runway facility). They're putting as much electrical load as possible on backup generators to take the heat off of the broken power plant. Crazy. There is nobody I know here who didn't think it was an insane idea to go down to two generators. One blows up-- major problems. Oh well, at least it has been interesting lately. I have my fingers crossed that it doesn't get any worse. I know we'll be fine no matter what, but the first thing they will have to do if our power production goes down any more is unplug the greenhouse. It's my favorite place-- the only bright and humid place to go down here. I go up every Wednesday and balance the pH and nutrients in all the hydroponic tanks. It would just kill me to let all those plants die. Fingers crossed!

Edit to add: I mean this post to be an anecdote about the buzz and the drama in McMurdo, and how it affects me personally. Someone closer to the action at the power plant told me that there are some minor factual errors in my account. Not surprising, since I don't work at the power plant, and don't have inside knowledge. I should have added a caveat from the start that my account is just the "word on the street" about how the drama unfolded.

Midwinter Dinner

2009-06-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I've gotten behind on my blog posting. It's been a week and a half since our big midwinter celebration. Everybody gets dressed up, and the galley puts on a gourmet feast. It's quite a shindig. It's so dark and cold here this time of year that the midpoint of the winter is a very significant milestone. It's ten days past the solstice now, and I think I see a little lightening in the sky. The lightest time of the day is about 1PM (it's a long story why it's not noon...), and I see a faint purple glow on the horizon. I'm very much looking forward to seeing the sun again.

I've had a round of fierce insomnia in the last month or so. Not quite as bad as last year, where I didn't get a decent night's sleep for two months. Finally went to the doc and got some mild sleeping pills, and I've been sleeping my brains out for the last few days. A lot of folks have that problem down here. Our circadian rhythms are kind of in free fall for a couple of months. Add to that the fact that our diets are less than ideal, and we get zero vitamin D, and you have a recipe for some sleepless nights. I credit the fact that I'm doing better than last year to taking a multi-vitamin.

This picture was taken at the midwinter dinner. These are the the IT guys, with me hiding out in the back. That's Eric, Mark, me, Joel and Grump in the back. In front are Ken, Mark, and Antz (http://www.antarcticimages.com/).

Crater Hill, Revisited

2009-06-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

Tuesday I went back up to the top of Crater Hill in a PistenBully. It's still a couple of days before the solstice, but I was so impressed with how incredibly dark it is here this time of year. We left around 9AM, and got back by 11AM, and it was as dark as the bottom of a well the whole time. The PistenBully has pretty bright headlights, so everything is fine as long as you only care about things within the headlight range. It's a very eerie feeling to have everything be gone outside the perimeter of light.

Navigating the top of Crater Hill involves some tricky maneuvering. After a long and bumpy ride from town, the trail from T-Site to the buildings on top of CH runs practically vertically up the hill. There's no way in a million years a wheeled vehicle could make it up that hill. The PB makes short work of it, but it was a little spooky when I lost traction on some wind-drifted snow. At the very top it is necessary to execute a quick 90-degree turn to the right, lest you plunge down a cliff into a depression.

We really lucked out on the weather. It was about -20F and calm, which is bikini weather for the top of that hill-- it is frequently scary windy up there. In this picture I didn't even put my gloves and hat on-- that's pretty balmy for this area in the middle of the winter. Whenever leaving town like this, we are require to at least bring all our ECW (Extreme Cold weather Gear). I wore jeans with long johns, Carhartt coveralls, long underwear top, big red coat, neck gaiter, ECW boots (Baffin boots, in this case), and my fur bomber hat. If it had been windy, I would have added a balaclava, goggles, and a fleece vest. Our big red coats are seriously warm-- I rarely find the need to wear more than a t-shirt under mine in town.

It was so incredibly dark that I completely missed one of the communications shelters I was trying to go to. It was outside my headlights, so it was just gone. There was even a half moon, but it was impossible to see anything but a million stars. We had to stop and stab our flashlight beams out into the darkness to locate building 66. There are fiber optic cables running all over the ground up there, which I didn't want to run over. We parked a hundred yards or so away and hiked up to the hut.

We checked on the conditions of the buildings on top of the hill, which was our main objective. We don't get up there often, and it's a good idea to go up periodically to make sure the buildings haven't blown away or drifted full of snow.

On the whole, a successful trip, but I always feel that I have acquired a gray hair or ten when I make that PistenBully trip.

Whew!

(Sorry about the quality of the photo. Some much better photos were taken before this, but didn't save, due to a cold battery issue)

Lee

Crazy Nightmare

2009-06-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

A couple of days agoI had the wildest dreaming experience ever. I slept okay the night before, but I woke up too early and couldn't get back to sleep, so I was tired that morning. I took a power nap at lunch like I often do. I usually sleep very lightly, and can wake myself up at any time. This day I laid down, and immediately started having really intense dreams. They were all in color, with a lot of music. I was in a mall at one point, and the Muzak was really loud. The themes of the different "scenes" in the dreams were lots of loud sounds, music, and really obnoxious people. Several times I ran into someone I didn't know who would come up to me and start poking me in the chest, and wouldn't stop. I had to scream at several people to leave me alone. At one point I was in a school, and we were just coming back from a break in the class. There were about a dozen severely retarded and/or crazy people milling about in the hallway, annoying people. One really creepy guy followed me back into the classroom, and I had to scream at him to leave me alone.

This is where it gets crazy. I had been hearing the music all along. I thought "I'm dreaming. I must be really hearing music, and I'm just transferring it to my dream". After a while, I realized that the music had woken me up, and I started to think of turning it down so I could sleep better. I got up and went over to the stereo to turn the music down, and realized that I wasn't in my room! I was in somebody else's room, and there was some construction going on in an adjacent room. There were some guys in there laying down some flooring-- they had come in and turned on the stereo. I went in there to talk to them. I explained to one guy who looked like he was in charge that I wasn't supposed to be there. I explained that to me it is June 15th, and I'm supposed to be napping in Antarctica. I don't remember what he said, but one of the flooring guys started poking me in the chest and being really rude to me. So I left. I was really freaking out now, because I was in someone else's body, far away, and I had no way to get back. I struggled and strained to wake up, but I couldn't. I tried standing up on the bed, which I knew would wake me up. Turned out I was just standing on the bed in my dream.

I started to get really worried that something had happened. Maybe I had died in my sleep, and that's why I couldn't wake up. Ususally if I'm having a lucid dream all I have to do is think about my breathing, or the pressure of the pillow on my head, and I'll wake up. I don't know how long it actually was, but it felt like I was in a panic, trying to wake up for about ten minutes. I had no way to get back into my body. Finally, something shifted and I was able to wake up, completely freaked out.

There is a very loud air handler vent in my room, pointed right at my bed. Evidently I had gotten so submerged in the white noise that I couldn't hear it anymore, and couldn't get back to reality. I think that was why there was so much music in the dreams. The last song I heard before I woke up was by Queen (it sounded like from the vocals), but I've never heard it before. I was hearing it, loud and clear, in stereo. Crazy.

After waking up, I had to go back to work. A wild coincidence after having an intense, disturbing dream with loud sounds-- on my way back to work via the Crairmaster, I was (I thought) all alone in the building, about halfway down the ramp. The fire alarm went off, with a claxon right next to my head. I jumped about two feet in the air!

What a crazy day.

Crairmaster, Links

2009-06-04T18:54:00.000-07:00

I think I've probably posted about the Crairmaster before, but it's been a while. In between the center of town and my office, there's a big building called the Crary Lab. It's not too far out of my way to go through the building rather than around it (especially on cold days). I decided some time last season to implement an exercise plan using Crary as my workout machine.

Crary is located on a hill, with the aquarium in phase III at the bottom, and the library at the second story of phase I. Starting about two-thirds of the way through last winter I started doing laps of the stairs to keep from turning into gelatinous goo. It has always been hard to be religious about going to the gym here, but I have to go to and from work several times a day-- it was a natural! (Plus I don't really get sweaty just doing four laps up and down three flights of stairs, don't have to change, etc.) It's really like four ten-or-fifteen-minute workouts a day. I just leave for work a little early, grab four or five laps on the way down. Coming up to building 155 for lunch, I grab some laps on the way. Same with going back to work, and going home at night.

Well, last year I averaged about twelve laps a day, and got 1410 laps done by the time I had to fly out of this lovely town. This year I started at the first day here, so I'm smashing old records. As of this minute, I have 1538 laps so far this season. I calculate that works out to 4,602 flights of stairs. That's almost sixty thousand vertical feet! Keeping stats on my Crairmaster laps has helped to keep me engaged. If I had no idea how many laps I had done, I might skip a day, or slack off. My average is just over 13 laps a day, so stay trudging so as not to hurt my average.

Too much time on my hands? Maybe. (Note: I copied this picture from the University of Chicago's web site. It is pitch dark here 24/7, so a photo wouldn't mean much.)

On another note, I've spotted some cool links about Antarctica, for those of you so inclined:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8079767.stm

http://www.antarcticstation.org/index.php?/home/

Kiwi A-Frame, RIP

2009-05-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

It's so sad. On Saturday the great old Kiwi A-Frame out on the ice shelf burned to the ground. It's about a twenty-minute Hagglunds ride from Scott Base, out past "Snowmound City", where the field safety training folks conduct "happy camper school". I stayed out there with some friends a couple of times last year. It was a funky little hut-- cozy and old.

The Kiwis were trying to get a heater lit, when evidently some fuel sprayed out and caught the place on fire. Nobody was seriously hurt, but one guy did get his face singed a bit. Unfortunately the remote location and flammable materials meant there was going to be know way to stop it, once it lit.

Here's a link to my blog post last year: http://pen-gwin.blogspot.com/2008/07/frame.html

And the Kiwi news story: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10574378

(Picture from the NZ Herald website)

Town Photo

2009-05-18T23:44:00.000-07:00

Antz Powell took this photo of all of us in town about two weeks ago. It's hard to tell in the picture, but we're all stacked up on a gigantic pile of snow. I'm in the top row, right hand side, in a black jacket.

Cookin' in the dark

2009-05-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

Holy cow it's hot in my office! This funky old building is set up to have the heat cranking all the time, with no thermostat. It's almost always fine, because it's usually windy here, which keeps the heat just right. We've had some calm weather the last few days, so there's no wind to strip the heat from the building. It gets outrageously hot in my office whenever the wind slacks off. It was 89F in my office when I got to work this morning. In one particularly hot room, it was 92.7F the other day. (There's a digital thermometer in there to record our "indoor weather".)

On the other hand, the calm weather is great when I'm outside. It's been around -20F for the last few days and feels balmy because the icy wind is gone. It's pretty much pitch dark all the time now, and it's cool to be able to go outside and look at the stars. The brightest time of the day is around 1PM, and it's not bright enough any more to wash out the brighter stars. We've had some very faint auroras-- looking forward to some bright ones.

Goodbye to Pegasus

2009-05-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Went out to the Pegasus runway today to retrieve the last of my communications gear for the winter. Fleet Ops keeps a trailer out there as a warm up shelter. It has wireless internet, a radio telephone, and a VHF radio. The "singlewide" as the trailer is known, is pulled up on a berm of snow for the winter, and most of the gear is removed to keep it from freezing over the winter.

Pegasus is our "blue ice" runway. For some reason snow is continually scrubbed from the area, exposing the hard blue Ross Ice Shelf ice. It's perfect for a runway, because it's not being constantly drifted over like other places on the ice shelf. http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/support/landstrp.jsp

I had hoped to get some good pictures, but it was slightly cloudy and pretty dark. We've had a full moon lately, which is awesome. The path of the moon is crazy here-- it goes around the sky in a flat circle, so it is sometimes up for days without setting.

Here's a picture I took around 3:30PM today. There was just a hint of pink light on the horizon. It's really starting to get dark now!

Article About Our Big Storms

2009-05-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to an article about the big storms we had a couple of weeks ago: http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contenthandler.cfm?id=1768.

It has been incredibly nice lately-- temps around zero and calm for almost a week. That's almost unheard of around here... (knock wood).

Darker...

2009-05-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

It seems like it has been getting a lot darker here lately. Today is day 85 on ice, and the sun has been down for about two weeks. There is a bit of dark twilight in the middle of the day, but it never gets as light as in the picture of me above (with the moon).

I haven't been getting real depressed or anything, but I think there is a "circadian rhythm thing" going on. My body doesn't seem to tell the difference between day and night, sometimes resulting in nasty insomnia at night, and being horribly tired by day. I have a "happy light" on my desk, and I stared into it for a while first thing this morning, after a bad night's sleep. Should help to reset my rhythms.

I was really dragging at work, so I grabbed a bite to eat for lunch and went up to the room for a power nap. Zonked right out, and slept for about twenty minutes, with dreams and everything. That's a great feeling, to have 3-D lucid dreams in color, then go back to work.

The weather has been really nice lately, after the hellacious storms of a couple of weeks ago. It's just a little below zero now, and calm. I love it when the wind stops blowing, which doesn't happen too often here.

Breezy

2009-04-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

Our communications with the "Real World" go through the BITF (Black Island Telecommunications Facility). My coworker, Antz Powell (http://www.antarcticimages.com/) is in charge of keeping the satellite communications gear out there working.

There is weather monitoring gear at BI, and the weather folks here keep tabs on the wind, etc. there. Black Island is across the bay from us, about fifteen miles roughly south of us. BI gets a lot more wind than we get here on Ross Island-- 100MPH winds are not uncommon there.

During our last big storm (last weekend), it really got howling out there. The weather station reported that winds peaked out at 192 knots (221 MPH). Breezy!

Snowy April

2009-04-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

After the last post we got another big storm, breaking the record for snow in a 24 hour period in April again. 20 inches this time. Snow generally doesn't just fall here, though. It's so windy that we get ten foot drifts here and there, with little snow in between. I don't know about the statistics, but I think I've seen more snow in the last two weeks than in the previous twenty-some months on ice. There is a drift the size of a school bus in the driveway to my shop-- about ten feet high and forty feet long.

It snowed all day yesterday and all last night, and it wasn't particularly windy. I had to wade through ankle-to-knee-deep snow to get to work this morning-- very unusual for McMurdo. This whole continent gets on average less than two inches of precipitation a year, so it's a big deal that we've gotten about four feet of snow in the last two weeks. Some drama in the last storm, too-- we had two fires in the firehouse, and off-continent communications were down for 16 hours, due to power failures.

Some time in the last couple of days (I lost track) was the last sunrise. We still have a bit of light in the middle of the daytime, but the sun is no longer getting above the horizon. This weekend will be the first Polar Plunge of the winter. The Kiwis will hack a hole in the sea ice so we can jump in the sea water. Woo Hoo!

Digging Out

2009-04-15T23:26:00.000-07:00

It's now Thursday (Trivia Night! Woo Hoo!).

Sunday and Monday were the big storm. We got 14 inches of snow, which was the record for a 24 hour period in April. It's really hard to measure snowfall, though, when it is literally horizontal. The winds were crazy, and the visibility nil. I spent all day Monday in my room, as travel was prohibited.

We awoke Tuesday to find up to ten foot snowdrifts all around town. My work building had a seven foot drift over the door to the AGE shop. All this week the major challenge has been to avoid being run over by the ubiquitous loaders mining snowdrifts all over town. There is so much heavy equipment trying to dig us out right now that it's pretty scary to be a pedestrian.

Most of the snow has been scooped away now, and we're getting close to a more normal winter. That was the biggest storm I've ever seen down here, but far from the biggest one we've had.

Condition One

2009-04-12T15:42:00.000-07:00

Big storm blowing through right now. It's been really crankin' for the last 20 hours or so. Last night the wind speeds got as high as 90 knots (104 mph), rattling my dorm something fierce. Didn't get much sleep.

We have three designation of extreme weather here. Condition three is normal weather-- no restrictions on travel. Condition two means the weather is worse-- no unnecessary travel and no recreational (hiking or skiing) travel. Condition one comes in if we have sustained winds over 55 knots, wind chill under -100F, or less than 100 feet visibility. When "Con 1" is called, we have to stay right where we are-- no travel permitted. In previous Con 1 storms, there have been incidents like a huge fuel tank exploding (not on fire, but the top was ripped off), and sheets of plywood flying through the air like playing cards. One even stuck in the wall of one of the dorms.

We never did have a condition one last winter, until just after the first plane of Winfly arrived. Condition one was called this morning, and I'm stuck in my dorm. I went over to the galley for breakfast, and was directed by my boss not to go to work until the weather gets better. I'm glad I came back to the dorm-- it's not too bad to be stuck here.

Here's a good illustration of what condition one is like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2SeEzxMuE. It was filmed by my coworker, Antz Powell, featuring his wife, Christine. This is the entrance to my dorm. Pretty much what it's like now. Yikes.

Bye Bye Sun

2009-04-06T19:35:00.000-07:00

We're just about out of sun now. It's pretty much pitch dark when I leave my dorm in the morning, and it's getting pretty dusky when I leave work. It's pretty light in the middle of the day, but Hut Point Ridge obstructs the sun until the afternoon. This picture was taken about 4PM on March 28th. I'm gazing into the sun for one of the last times.

There's a webcam up on Crater Hill looking down on McMurdo at: http://www.usap.gov/videoClipsAndMaps/mcmwebcam.cfm. It's pretty snowy and gray out there right at the moment. I'm not sure if the webcam is sensitive enough to see the town lights in the winter-- we'll see. On a nice day you'll be able to see the Royal Society Range (picture from http://www.usap.gov/.

I'm not looking forward to the darkness, but I'm not dreading it too much, either. It is what it is.

Trust

2009-03-27T22:49:00.000-07:00

Over the hill at New Zealand's Scott Base, there is a team of workers who are taking care of artifacts down here. There are three explorers huts here on Ross Island, with a lot of cool gear and food left inside. (There are three that I've heard of and have been to-- there may be others.)

It's really cool to go into these old huts and see the laboratory equipment, reindeer-skin sleeping bags, and cool junk the explorers left behind. The big expeditions were those of Robert Scott and Earnest Shackleton. Roald Amundsen was the guy who actually made it to the pole first, but he didn't have any bases near here.

You can see the AHT's site here: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/antarctica-blog/. The blog shows pictures of the conservators in action, as well as some other activities taking place over there.

(Picture from the AHT's site)

Crater Hill

2009-03-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

I got to check out a PistenBully on Saturday and go up to the top of Crater Hill. PistenBullys are tracked vehicles normally used to groom ski trails. They are not really designed to drive on bumpy, rocky roads, so they beat you to death.

Crater hill overlooks McMurdo, so it's a natural place to put radio repeaters-- the kind of stuff I work on. It's a killer hike to walk up there, especially carrying tools. The PB works pretty well for that. A coworker had to go up and look at some network equipment, ASAP. He hadn't been to PB training yet, so I agreed to drive. It's actually a LOT more fun to drive a PB than ride in one. The driver's seat is on shocks, and the passenger's are solidly mounted. A PB will rattle your fillings out if you're not in the driver's seat. One good thing about them, though-- they'll climb up a wall. In the picture here where I'm outside the PB, there is a hill right behind me. If it were a ski slope, it would be a double black diamond. The PB drove up it like it was nothing.

It was fun!

Skua

2009-03-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

We had a skua-sorting party at the Elephant Barn this week. A little background: in the Antarctic program, all waste gets sorted into different bins. There really isn't a category for "trash"; everything is either food waste, plastic, aluminum cans, etc. The USAP is very good about hauling everything out of here, and getting the most good out of it. If something cannot be recycled, it goes in non-recyclables. A good example would be some paper or plastic that is covered in duct tape. A waste category that only exists here is skua.

A skua is a big, scary grey seagull. They hang around all summer, trying to scrounge food or dead pengies. They are all gone now, but were here till about a week ago. I made the mistake of walking out of the back of the galley with a galley bowl of chow as a "doggie bag" for eating later in my room. The skuas know this drill, and are ready. Twice I was dive bombed by a hungry skua. They know if they fly straight at you, there's a chance that they'll drop your chow, and they can pig out. I don't know the reason the waste category was named after the bird-- maybe the opportunistic nature of the birds.

Skua is the big Antarctic Salvation Army. If I don't want my funky old bathrobe any more, I don't throw it in the trash, I put it in skua. The skua bins are full of clothes, books, room decorations, etc. The waste department collects all the skua and puts it in huge cardboard boxes, called triwalls. They pile up all summer, waiting for bored winter folks to sort the stuff out.

We had the skua sorting party to sift the trash out of the valuable stuff. We threw away tons of rags and funky opened food-- stuff like that. The bonus for attending the skua sorting party is that we get to claim any cool stuff we find. I got a wild shirt, a couple nice towels, and a bunch of fake plants for my room. I'll take some pictures when I get it more decorated.

For those of you that are into words (like me), the skua term is an interesting one. It can be a noun, an adjective, or a verb. "I went down to skua to see if I could skua some tupperware." "I left the back of the galley, carrying my skua tupperware, and was accosted by a skua, right next to the skua bin." "I'm going up to skua central to see if I can skua some previously skua'd plaster skuas." "This isn't a new bathrobe, it's skua."

Cold, Hot, Trivia, Radio Darts

2009-03-20T02:40:00.000-07:00

It's been a crazy last couple of weeks. We had a system come through that gave us some insane winds for a few days. One day last week it was -15F and blowing up a storm-- wind chill of -54F. That's just nippy, any way you slice it. I hate that kind of weather, but you pretty much have to get used to it in the winter.

I have a longer "commute" than many in Mac Town. I have to walk from my dorm to building 155 for breakfast, then down to my office in B159. See earlier posts for references to the "Crairmaster" between meals and work. I broke my previous record and got twenty laps in one day! The Heavy Shop took away the antenna riggers' truck that I had, so I was a complete pedestrian. I had a lot of errands to do around town yesterday that took me around/through the Crary lab, hence the high count of stairs climbed.

This may all seem very strange and pedantic to someone in the real world, but it all makes sense down here. If I didn't include a regimen of doing the stairs on a regular basis, I'd be even more of a couch potato than I would ordinarily be. Face it: twisting screws on radio casings is not a workout.

After our frigid week, the wind stopped blowing. The wind almost NEVER stops blowing around here. My workplace is an old Navy building, poorly insulated. The amount of heat produced by the boilers is usually about right for the ambient conditions.

If the wind dies completely, there is no feedback loop to tell the boilers to take it easy. We experienced some -2F days lately with no wind-- it got hotter'n hell in my building! The summer Comms boss's office is the worst then. It was 92.7F in there when I got to work on Wednesday. I opened the front door and all the windows to try to get it down to a tolerable level.

The town needed some volunteers to move some furniture around. As a fool, I signed up. I helped move extra wardrobes and dressers out of the dorms into a Milvan (cargo container, like you see on ships.). I got so hot from moving all the heavy furniture that I was all sweaty. It was still fairly cold outside (by Real World standards, about 0F) that my hair froze in a crazy array of crispy crinkles. Whenever I went inside, I'd have to doff my rabbit fur hat to keep from passing out from the heat.

I've never gone from so hot to so cold, so many times. I thought my skull would crack!

I have a theory (unsubstantiated by science, so far as I know...) that going from a cold environment to a warm one is the root of our crazy spaciness, as we all experience it in the throes of winter. (http://www.sciencestorm.com/award/9418466.html). Our bodies are saying "Oh, it's really, really cold out here!", "Oh, you know what? It's really, really warm in here!" several times a day, which seriously jacks with our endocrine system.

So far, it hasn't been that bad. The days are days, the nights are looking more like nights, and the sun is definitely going down.

If I could only figure out a way to shoot darts!...

Coffree!

2009-03-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

Today is three years off of caffeine! I found myself incredibly burned out on drinking too much coffee three years ago and gave it up. I had the headache from hell for two weeks, but have never looked back. More energy, sleep better, and don't have that Wednesday afternoon crash and burn.

Woo Hoo!

Month

2009-03-10T14:38:00.001-07:00

I'm officially a month into my winter season now. 31 days. It seems like it's been, oh, about a month. Later on in the winter, the phenomenon of time compression will kick in, but it hasn't done so yet. I found last year that my days were so similar to each other that they would run together. I've heard others comment on that, too. They'll say things like "Last thing I remember it was Tuesday. Now it's August!".

It is definitely starting to get a little dark now. It's pretty normal daylight during the day, but twilight in the middle of the night. We'll have sunlight clear into May-- I'm enjoying it while I can.

To help with the darkness, I mailed a desktop tanning lamp down to myself before I left the states. I was very stoked that I wouldn't have to turn that horrible translucent pale color this winter. Those lights aren't cheap-- this one was over $200. Last night I was moving it, and I noticed that it was ruined in shipping. ARGH! All the stuff I shipped down looked like it had been tossed down two flights of stairs. Not a big fan of the USPS right now!

Jello

2009-03-02T12:24:00.000-08:00

I've had some inquiries from friends back in the real world about a Jello wrestling incident we had down here. It was over the summer (way before I got here). I understand there was indeed a jello wrestling match that was awkwardly discovered by some Fed types on a tour of the station (after the fact-- they saw the rubber mats and bins of used Jello).

Here's an article about it in the Denver press: http://www.westword.com/2009-02-12/news/jell-o-wrestling-is-a-firing-offense-at-the-south-pole

We have, ahem, no such silliness here in the winter...

Snowing!

2009-02-28T20:24:00.000-08:00

We're having a warm, snowy day here, which is really unusual. This is by far the driest continent on earth, and we just don't get a whole lot of snowfall. Right now it's +12F and snowing pretty hard. We almost never get weather like this. It's a nice change. This picture is taken from my dorm roo, looking out over the VXE-6 transition. On a clear day, you would see Mt Lister and the Royal Society range of the Transantarctic mountains in the background.

Pengies and Radio Darts

2009-02-27T20:22:00.000-08:00

Day 19 on ice.

The pengies came back for one last visit. I heard through the grapevine that there were a couple of them in town, so I headed out to check it out. Pengies are no big deal at all in the summer-- they're very common. Around this time every year, they go somewhere else, and I never even saw one here last season.

One was with another one, just hanging around in the middle of the road. They are very tolerant of people, since they don't have any land predators. The rule of thumb is that you aren't supposed to get so close to them that they react to your presence. These guys would have bumped into me if I hadn't moved away.

Except for the last two days, the weather was pretty nasty for the last ten days. The bitter east winds were unrelenting for about a week. It was around 1F, so it wasn't that cold out, but the wind chills were getting down around -40F. Thursday it was zero F out there, but it felt like t-shirt weather because the wind died down. It's pretty constantly windy and nasty here, so it's great when the wind lets up a bit.

I'm settling into my work rhythm now. I know it's going to be a long, cold winter, so I'm hunkering down for a long stay here. It's still daylight about 24/7 now, though the sun is technically setting in the middle of the night. The path of the sun here is so different here from what we're used to in the states, that it's hard to describe. The sun will rise for the last time sometime in May, so there's still some daylight left.

Yesterday was the first weekly Radio Darts game. We went over to Scott Base and played darts with the Kiwis. The idea is to get South Pole on the HF radio, and play them too, but their radio wasn't working. I love radio darts-- it's some of the most fun I have down here, though I'm a mediocre dart player. The fun is giving each other grief for style, bad shots, etc.

Tomorrow is Sunday-- my one day off. Woo Hoo!

Happy Monunday (Day 7 on Ice)

2009-02-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

It's been a week now, back on the ice. Seems like I never left. I'm even in my old habit of climbing the stairs in the Crary lab. (See the article on page 7 of: http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/pastIssues/2006-2007/2006_11_19.pdf.)

The Crary lab is a sprawling science building that is more or less on my way to work. There are three phases (buildings, really), connected by a long hallway. The lowest point is the aquarium in phase three, and the highest point is the library, upstairs in phase one.

In the constant war against getting fat down here, I've taken up the "Crairmaster". On the way to work in the morning, I do three or four laps of Crary, from the aquarium to the library. Sixty-nine steps in all. Last winter I did over 1400 laps in my last three months here. I figured out that was over 50,000 of elevation. It's a lot handier than going to the gym--I just do a couple of laps on my way to work, a couple on the way up to lunch, a couple coming back from lunch, and a few on my way home from work. I've been doing 12-15 laps a day lately.

With the all-you-can-eat-American-comfort-food diet here, I need all the help I can get. It also helps that I quit eating meat three months ago. I'm doing an eggs/dairy/veggie/fish diet, which is working out great, and removes a lot of the temptations at the galley here.

So why happy Monunday? There is a 20-hour difference between McMurdo and US Mountain time. Right now it's 8AM Monday morning, which makes it noon Sunday in Colorado. Monday here, Sunday there, hence Monunday. The days of the week are Sunturday, Monunday, Tuesonday, Wedsnuesday, Thursnesday, Friursday, and Satriday. So now it's Monunday mornternoon. (Yes, it is possible that I have too much time on my hands...)

Home Sweet Home (Day 2 on ice)

2009-02-09T13:52:00.000-08:00

I got up early yesterday, and schlepped all of my stuff down to the Christchurch airport. We got on the C-17 transport plane about 9:30, and took off about 10:30-- they were having a hard time getting the plane started, I guess.

C-17s are great to fly in, especially when they add rows of forward-facing passenger seats, as our plane had. There were only about 40 of us on the plane, so we all had tons of room.

We landed at Pegasus runway at about 3:30. It's eerie to land in a plane with no windows. You never quite know when to expect the "bump". The flight was uneventful, as was the ride to town.

It's weird to be back. I was only gone for 115 days-- in some ways it feels like I never left. That's not exactly a happy thought in such a harsh place, but it is good to see a lot of friends from last year.

There is a little bit of a superior feeling being a winterover. We feel like we are coming back to real Antarctic experience, and the summer weenies are leaving. "It'll be cold and dark! We're outta here!" they squeal as they run for the exits.

My job will probably be quite a bit more boring than it was last year. In winter '08, we had what they called "extended season". An extra flight came in in April, so some special science could be conducted after the normal station closing time of late February. I got out in a helo to take down a repeater, and there was quite a bit of activity in those last couple of months.

This time I'm coming down earlier (early February as opposed to late February), and there's not much going on. The repeaters have all been brought back, and the helos are already winterized. Time to settle down for a very low-key winter, I supposed, and just be very grateful that I have a job.

(Photo was taken by Peter Lund early last year. No, I hadn't gained 100 pounds since you friends had last seen me-- I was just wearing a LOT of clothes. It was nippy.)