Lights, cameras, & action

If you would like to see what the aurora australis has been up to here at Pole this season, check out this webpage for links to movies from cameras I support this season.  There have been some auroras pretty much every day, even if they have not been as big as I have seen them in the past.

The weeks really seem to be clipping by at a rapid pace now.  There is still a long time to go, but that is OK.  It was recently announced that opening will be targeted for October 27, with from one to three LC-130 flights (no Baslers) depositing a bunch of pigmented and energetic invaders in 1-3 fell swoops.  No winterovers are currently scheduled to leave on opening day, but there is plenty of time for tickets on the Plane of Shame to be sold.  We are supposed to find out in several weeks what the new redeployment process will look like.  Hopefully personal travel flexibility is not done away with in a misplaced effort to cut costs, since the employee-travelers absorb the extra expenditure and the prospect of visiting vastly different lands and cultures after a year’s sequestration here at Pole is always oh-so motivating.

We will be having our mass/multiple casualty incident (MCI) drill this month.  I get less and less spun-up about that sort of thing, since you really just respond in the same way and adapt to the (typically) more difficult specifics of the scenario.  With 2.5 years of doing the fire brigade leader gig here, I think I have “started” to figure out how to get the job done effectively.

“Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.”

~Cato the Elder (234 BC - 149 BC), from Plutarch, Lives