Q&A & sastrugi

Q (from L.W. in Washington, D.C.): "I'm curious to hear more about your daily life and your job."

A: Since the USAP is paying lots of money to bring and keep us all down here and they want to keep us out of trouble and maximize bang for their buck, summer work schedules are pretty intense and keep us all very busy and tired. Everyone on station works at least 10 hrs/day (with an hour’s worth of break time), 6 days/week. Lucky for me, since I like a lot of variety, my work and schedule shift several times during the season. There are three of us stewards, and we rotate through three work assignments. For the first 4 weeks here, I was on janitorial, which was mopping lots of floors and doing lots of laundry on a 7:30am-5:30pm, Mon-Sat schedule. In early December, I switched to a split shift in the galley. So for 5 weeks, I was working 5am-1pm and 6-7:30 pm—mostly spending my time in the dishpit, but also wiping down tables in the dining area and maintaining supply and cleanliness on the coffee/tea/juice/ice cream/cereal line. Now, for the final five weeks of the season, I’ve switched to the evening galley shift, so I’m doing dishes and the juice (etc.) line from 11am-9pm, and now my day off is Thursday rather than Sunday.

So my typical day is pretty much spent working! It’s actually been a struggle to find enough time to sleep between work and all of the other fun things to do. I’ve been teaching yoga twice per week (though with my new dish pit schedule, just once per week), taking guitar lessons from someone here who is offering them, trying to visit a lot of the science projects that go on, reading, writing, exploring the fun stuff squirreled away in the Arts & Crafts room, making sure I get enough exercise, and so on. And people are always organizing movie nights or playing card games or board games or pool or cribbage. Really, it’s overwhelming how much there is to do and how quickly the days go by!

Finally, the photo of the day: I took this picture of a sastrugi, which is a snow/ice feature created by the wind. This is a pretty tiny one; they can be enormous and make traveling across Antarctica exceedingly rough. Beautiful, though!