Eventful week

Well, this week has been jam-packed with all sorts of work and play thus far, and it's going to finish on up exactly the same way.

I got my big triple calibration for the UV monitoring project done this week, which took about 5 hours. It really is interesting how some projects are so much more labor intensive than others. But, at least that's behind me and the system is pretty much set for the summer.

I had my last day as dishwasher on Thursday. It wasn't too bad, despite there being a bit extra work for all the prep the cooks were doing for our sunrise dinner we had last night. It was a huge Thanksgiving dinner served family style, and was by far the most passing of food I've ever done at a meal. The machinist on station made everybody an individualized brass coin with their name and winterover number. The winterover number is determined by year and alphabetic order when people did their first winter at the South Pole. I'm number 1,203 person to spend a winter at South Pole. After dinner was over the bands had a relatively quick sound check for our concert Saturday night: Mother of Polestock. We had a bit of trouble with feedback, but eventually got things sounding pretty good.

During the day yesterday some of us got to teleconference into a meeting of the Association of Space Explorers. You, um, have to have orbited the Earth at least once to be a member. That's why conversation among this group could include phrases like, "OK, so most of us have flown on the Shuttle..." Good grief, was that cool! Our station science lead here at Pole gave a good presentation that explained what science and operations were performed here at Pole, and there was the connection made about how this is a good testing ground for a lot of topics similar to those encountered in space exploration. The ASE members definitely seemed appreciative of the challenges that working here entails, so it'd be nice if they could communicate that appreciation for high-latitude experience to the hiring folks for the new astronaut class.

Anyhow, outside of all this interesting stuff is a whole lot of report writing for the end of the season. I need to get back to that now. Later.