Monday, February 18, 2008

Dig Dug

I likely mentioned a few weeks back that I did a bit of shovel work to get some science equipment out of the field for decommissioning. Well, I finally got a few pictures of this rather large hole I cut and dug by hand to get it out.






I just took pics of the hole by myself to begin with, but ran into the conundrum here in the Flat White of not having anything to put it in scale. A few days later I got a co-worker to snap a couple pics of me in the hole when we were out at ARO doing our daily checks. I had a lot of fun digging this out; the ramp reminds me of the entrance to an Egyptian tomb or someother subterranean (what do you call under the ice?) structure. It's too bad I now have to find time to fill it all in to mitigate drifting.



Last night was all guitars, or reasonable facsimilies thereof, for me. I had a really good solo practice session with a real guitar in the band room. I've made the step to playing with a strap while standing up so I can get used to that for the performaces we'll have. I played for about 90 minutes, and then moved on to one of the lounges where some guys were playing the game "Guitar Hero 2", which was a lot of fun. It really is nothing much like playing a guitar, though. It all came to a crashing end when somebody tripped over a cable and knocked the Playstation 2 to the floor. Rock stars...

Today we're breaking down Summer Camp, which naturally-given its name-isn't used during the winter. There are several other winter station closing activities like taking down skiway marker flags, setting up flag lines to outlying buildings, and breaking down the fuel line from the flight deck to the fuel arch that are in the works right now and are being tasked to people on a volunteer basis in addition to their normal jobs. I've got another stint in Comms scheduled for tomorrow, so hopefully there'll actually be a flight or flights for me to work.

4 comments:

David Taylor said...

How would there be any flights in the winter?

Scott said...

I thought all the flights were done. Or do you work flights not destined for the South Pole Station?

EthanG said...

South Pole actually has better radio contact with the flights sometimes, so we're used as a back-up to relay communications to the aircraft if McMurdo can't reach them. So, yes, these are just flights between McMurdo and Christchurch, New Zealand. We won't be seeing any aircraft here at Pole until mid to late October.

Aaron said...

Somebody get that man a snow blower!