Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Rude awakening, sort of

Well, I got to do a middle-of-the-night check of all my projects equipment last night because we had a brief power outage here at Pole. All my projects were working properly, and it is nice to see that the UPS systems here actually can function properly. I generally don't trust these systems for some reason. Anyhow, it wasn't all that bad, and I was thankful that it wasn't much worse. The wind was really blowing on my way to ARO, and boy is there nothing quite like an Antarctic breeze blowing right through the vents in your goggles to wake you up.

The moon is down again, and it's like somebody turned the light switch off for the great outdoors. We don't really have all that long, just a couple weeks, until the sun starts glowing a bit on the horizon. I'll probably miss the night, as there is so much more to see in the sky without that pesky ball of fusion blotting it out with its glare.

The details of our redeployment off the Ice are plastic to the extreme. The latest dish is that we might all be delayed one extra week (weather dependent). I'm sure loads of us will take that poorly, but for me-whatever. I do want to make sure I have enough time to hang out and travel with friends in New Zealand before they and I separate paths. It will be nice to be able to put down the radio, get off-call, and just relax.

Here's to a future day without work!

1 comment:

Lilly said...

Poor Ethan, you need a vacation!

I was wondering if you know the work of scifi writer Greg Egan? I think you might enjoy his work. He lives in Perth in W.Australia and his books take hard science and use interesting and sometimes even amusing fiction to illustrate things like order of magnitude, time-space, gravity and other scientific theories.

I just finished one by him called "Incandescence" which is probably the weirdest book I've ever read, but he has also written "Axiomatic" , "Permutation City" and a number of others.