Visual Stimulation

Turnover is going pretty well here, but it's always fraught with more stress than during the middle portions of each season. I'm now on-call fire brigade lead, and will be so every day until I go on R&R or redeploy. I'm doing my best to just think about the short-term periods to come, not the contract as a 13-month whole. My science turnover has gone pretty well, too. It's AWESOME not having to learn all this from scratch again. One downer is that just as I was leaving McMurdo I picked up a cold, and that's not making the altitude acclimation process any more pleasant. But, hopefully I'll get past that in the next week. Anyhow, before things pick up for the day, I'm delivering on the much-awaited promise of photos. They're kind of random, but whatever.

Old supplies inside Scott's Discovery Hut at McMurdo:

Roll Cage Mary, a tribute to a guy who died when his bulldozer plunged through the sea ice:

We get two two-minute showers per week at Pole. McMurdo folks live it up in relative luxury:

A Delta vehicle at the Long Duration Balloon facility outside McMurdo, with Mt. Erebus (southernmost active volcano in the world) in the background:

A peek at the Trans-Antarctic Mountains from my C-130 Hercules flight to Pole. Once past these, the terrain is nothing but the flat white expanse of the Antarctic Plateau (a.k.a. my home):

A very last-minute Halloween costume that turned out pretty well. I managed to sew that little water bottle satchel and throw together the other pieces of the get-up in about 45 minutes. Yes, without the proper gear you really feel that (-75F) windchill:

"Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory."
~Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr., Temple of Doom

At the drop of a hat

A fedora would be the appropriate head wear, in my case.

With about an hour's warning, and my laundry just put in the dryer in McMurdo, I got notice I'd be flying to Pole on a Hercules this morning. The laundry got mostly dry, and I made the transport time to the Ice Runway, and a few hours later the fedora had dropped to 90 degrees south latitude. I'm moved into my room, catty-cornered to my one from last summer, had dinner, visited the band room, played more games of pool (being 1) than I did all last year, and gotten to see a few familiar faces that were down here for the last 9 months.

"Well, I'm back."
~Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings

broken record, scratched CD,...

Nothing much here has changed on the flight schedule to Pole. Nobody has gotten in or out of there since I last wrote. McMurdo continues to fill up with people, with an infusion yesterday of 50 Aussies headed for Casey Station.

I guess I'm headed out to the LDB field camp to help set up the galley there, which is supposed to open for business tomorrow. If we get done with that early enough I will also go help open up the galley at the sea ice runway. Other than that, I'm not sure what will happen today.

"Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."
~Aldous Huxley

La indecision me molesta

Who would have known that THE CLASH would have so many years ago summed up my feelings about the situation NASA faces these days with the Augustine Commission's findings and recommendations? This recent news of their report's findings are certainly somewhat troubling, but not unexpected. It's the same story of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, not unlike a lot the last year I lived through. Anyhow, hopefully a decent plan can be agreed upon, enacted, and funded that will ensure I still have some chance of fulfilling this dream/goal/quest I started upon back in the sixth grade.

My Basler flight to Pole was most recently scheduled to leave this afternoon from McMurdo, but the morning's flight has been put on weather delay, so the subsequent flight is now in question. I suppose if we don't go today then we probably won't try to fly until Monday. I don't reckon most folks involved with air transport will be too happy if asked to work on their day off on Sunday (poor babies). This whole station opening push each year ends up butting heads with the realities of the weather during this time of the year, and delays are pretty much the name of that game and probably will always be so until they either start training Polies to be parachutists and make airborne drops on Pole, or we build a giant catapult here at McMurdo to fling people and cargo in a southerly direction, or we develop Star Trek transporter technology,... OK, shut up Ethan. Like the astronauts and pilots in "The Right Stuff", I'm finding that maintaining and even strain is paying off for me so far this year.

"You boys know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up...No bucks, no Buck Rogers."
~The Right Stuff

Still waiting

OK, so days have passed, and we've still only the single Basler into Pole. I'm still in McMurdo, and keeping myself nicely busy during the days. I've been working in the Berg Field Center (BFC), which is the equivalent of an outfitter's store back in the States. The BFC is where field camps get a lot of their gear, and the folks there do a whole lot of work to keep it clean and in shape and organized. It's a really nice workplace, with a fabulous view out over McMurdo Sound to the Trans-Antarctic range.

Yesterday we had like 40-knot winds here, which made life both chilly and interesting. Somebody got blown off their feet out front of the BFC, which was fairly singular in my experience here in Mac-town.

The earliest I might be flying would be Saturday. The weather at Pole is supposed to be improving, and tomorrow (Friday here) Pole has the potential for getting the 2nd and 3rd Basler flights completed. This would be a good thing.

"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm."
~Willa Cather

Weather, like other things, happens

The forecast isn't so great down here at the bottom of the world. We got one plane in yesterday, but now the weather is not cooperating so well. I probably won't be heading south before Thursday or Friday now, so am doing my best to keep the training ball rolling in McMurdo.

Last night I spent a couple hours washing pots with the DAs back in the kitchen. It was nice to see my old stomping grounds, and to re-amaze myself that I survived doing that for 4 months with sanity intact.

Other than that there isn't much else to report from your man in McMurdo.

"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?”
~Marcus Tullius Cicero

Treading water

Well, the last few days have been peppered with lectures and training sessions. A couple days ago I did a fall protection class, which covered most of the harnesses, anchor points, deceleration devices, and tactics one needs to use when working with the potential of a rapid release of gravitational potential energy (i.e. you might fall off something higher than 4 feet). I also attended the mandatory lecture required to do a good number of the hikes and recreational activities here in McMurdo, so am now good to go on that front. I might have an opportunity to go support some deep field science this summer, so I did my refresher course for Snow Craft (a.k.a. Happy Camper) yesterday afternoon. That included lectures about cold injuries, SAR protocols (here at McMurdo), setting up anchor points for tents/gear in snow and ice (pretty nifty stuff, that), using camp stoves, and (though I have virtually no prospects of getting do do so) protocols for flying in the helicopters down here.

Today, being Sunday, is a "day off", and it will likely be the very last one I have until if/when I actually get some R&R late in the summer. My Basler flight might leave on Wednesday, I guess, but the weather has been fouling up the nominal flight plans, as it always seems to do this time of year as the station is trying to open for the season. So, I'll keep trying to stay busy, and will probably put in a stint in the kitchen doing my crypto-profession, which is working as a dishwasher. I think most folks, myself included, are ready to arrive at their home at Pole. I've been underway for over 3 weeks now, and it will be nice to unpack my bags and stay someplace for a while. But, until then, I'll enjoy the journey as much as possible. At some point I'll start taking some photos, too.

"Endurance is patience concentrated."
~Thomas Carlyle