Thursday, October 1, 2009

At the Mountains of Madness

Well, yesterday was my appointment to take the psychological evaluation required for people spending the winter at Pole. The first exam was 567 true/false questions, and the second exam was close to 200 multiple-choice questions. Once done with the written exams, I had a pretty brief interview where they asked me a number of questions about my background on the Ice, my personal behavior and history, and a variety of pretty pat (at least for a tame guy like me) other questions about things like alcohol and other substances. I'm still trying to get a call into their office to find out whether I am officially sane in their eyes or not, but hope to get through their busy signal here at some point.

Today we don't have any training scheduled, so people are just taking it easy and making the best of our surroundings. Tomorrow our group of 8 will begin the fire school portion of the pre-deployment agenda, which will undoubtedly be interesting. It is a different academy from the fire school in 2007, so maybe I'll learn something new.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
~H.P. Lovecraft

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