House Mouse Day

There's not a whole lot going on today that's out of the ordinary. I do have to do both of my "house mouse" cleaning duties, though. Residents of Pole contribute to cleaning most of the common spaces in the station, including bathrooms, lounges, quiet reading room, etc.

I spent a good chunk of my evening yesterday unpacking the three boxes (of four) that I mailed to myself, so now I definitely have plenty of gear to last me through the year. I really hope that the fourth box, which is full of books, arrives sometime soon though. It has my copies of "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings", and even though there are some copies down here (except "Fellowship of the Ring"; I don't think I've seen that one yet), I'd prefer to read my much-used, much-traveled volumes. I'm also looking forward to reading three new books I splurged on including "Spook Country" by William Gibson and "Devil in the White City" and "Thunderstruck" by Erik Larson. It could just be that the media mail rate I used to post that to the Pole APO is simply slower (because it's so much cheaper) than the other mailing rate I used for my mixed-contents packages.

I saw a weird thing last night. The wind totally stopped: 0.0 knots. That seems to be a pretty rare occurrence here. Pole doesn't get the huge winds like at McMurdo, because the winds are born here. Catabatic winds are caused by cold air descending and picking up speed the air drops. Here at Pole, on the high interior plateau of the continent, the air gets super chilled, and slides down from this altitude (9,300 ft ASL) to McMurdo, accelerating as it goes.