Hello to my munchkins

You'll have to take my word for it that this is me standing next to the ceremonial South Pole marker with this message for my nieces and nephews.

SR (more recognizable and apparently less afraid of the possibility of frostbite) also wanted to say hi from the geographic pole marker.

Hi, Lovebugs!

Weekly snapshot #4

It's "warm" out, but man, is it blustery! I can't believe the photo of the view toward South Pole telescope turned out as clear as it did, because today's flight was cancelled due to the windy weather. This year continues to surprise with its varied weather, wind, overcast days, and even some snow falling, all of which is (as I understand it) unusual in a place where it's typically clear blue skies all summer long. Makes things a bit more interesting!

Golf at 90 South

SR found a set of golf clubs in a closet of recreational equipment that he sweetly took it upon himself to clean out and organize. So of course we had to go out and have him hit a golf ball at the South Pole. Which turned out to be easier said than done. (Dad, he requests that you not watch the first video, in which he both whiffs and somehow lets go of the club on his follow-through. The second video = success.)

Weekly Snapshot #3

A bit cooler again this week, but really, to me it's impossible to tell much of a difference between -28 and -14. As long as the wind isn't blowing and I'm bundled up properly, it's nice and comfy out. And today we got a plane in for the first time in nearly a week! There were five scientist winter-overs, some of them now here for more than a year, who had been scheduled to leave on Thursday and watched flight after flight get cancelled. I think by the time a plane was on the ground tonight, there was no more bitter left in the bittersweet of saying goodbye to South Pole!

Elephant Man

The Air Force is responsible for flying USAP participants in and out of Antarctica, and part of their contract is that a professional fire crew must be on hand at all times when a plane lands, is on deck, and takes off again in case of fire. So South Pole has a fire crew of at least a half-dozen people who have nothing official to do when there are no planes landing or taking off, which can happen for days on end. Lucky for the rest of us, our fire crew is an amazing group of people who go above and beyond to help out in any way they can when they are not on duty. This has been pivotal for me as I've been trying to get a grip on store inventory and moving things--especially heavy things like beverages--from one place to another. And there is some rearranging going on in the station, so that the largest storage place for store merchandise is turning into a maintenance workshop. I'm trying to move a ton of merchandise either into the store or out of the station, into the out-building pictured here. It's called the Booze Barn. :) At the same time, we're receiving our first of three big orders of the year, which arrives to the Booze Barn a couple of tri-walls at a time, needing to be unpacked and sorted.

So one day recently, a few of the firemen agreed to come out, helped me unpack a couple of tri-walls, and even brought the "Elephant Man"--the vehicle they use to go out and monitor the Air Force planes when they are here--over so I could take a ride in it back to the station and haul a bunch of merchandise back with us.

Only in Antarctica.

The Store

I'm still enjoying the relative warmth and humidity of the South Pole dish pit at lunch and dinnertime two days per week, when this year's stewards have their days off. But this summer, the majority of my work time is focused around this room, instead: the South Pole station store/post office. This first shot is the view of the store from behind the counter...

...and here's one looking back at my workspace from the back of the store. (That's outgoing winter-over M sitting at the store computer, trying to get me set up to update the recreation schedule on the overhead scrolls in the galley, as coordinating rec at Pole is also part of my job this summer.)

The store is open for 1-1.5 hours, five days/week, and on two of those days, right after the store closes I get out all of the post office materials and the PO is open for an hour. So the actual opening times total less than 8 hours per week--but it's amazing how the rest of the week is sucked up stocking, organizing, etc.

We are going to have to do some major reorganizing in the store this summer, as we are losing some of our already-precious storage space and will need to be able to keep more inventory actually in the store rather than in closets. So maybe I will have to post some "after" pictures at the end of the summer. But for now, you can imagine me tooling around in this room for a good chunk of most of my days, which so far is great fun.

Weekly snapshot #2

It's gotten dramatically warmer this week (yes, -14 degrees does start to feel warm!)...

...but it's been very windy with terrible visibility, which in my limited experience is unusual for South Pole. Last year I think I could easily count on one hand the number of days we had that look like this. But we've had a week of it now. This picture is taken from the same place as last week's picture, so you can really tell how terrible the visibility is in comparison. The distant buildings on the right are South Pole's traditional telescopes and the building on the left is the Ice Cube facility.

 Guess we'll have to wait and see how it looks next week!

Our room

It's pretty sweet having SR here with me this time, for many reasons--one of which is that we get a double room. And this double room has a loft bed, which makes it feel ridiculously spacious compared with the single rooms.

I love my little desk space next to an outside window. We have to board up the window at night to be able to sleep, since the sun never sets (for now). But with the usually-sunny weather shining in on me by day, it's a cheerful spot from which to compose these blog posts.

Weekly snapshot #1

It's hard to believe that now that I'm at South Pole, unless there is some sort of unexpected emergency, this is exactly where I will be for an entire year, now! Luckily, I have a long list of projects I want to work on while I'm here.

One of those was to take a picture every single day at noon, with a little sign in the corner saying the temperature and date, so that at the end of this year I'd have a record of what it looks like here at the same time every day throughout the year. But almost as soon as I got here, I realized that is probably not realistic, as work keeps us all really busy and I was certain to miss many days here and there. So then I decided I would do it once a week, which seems like an attainable goal. Though right off the bat I got tied up with something and missed my noontime appointment with myself. And then when I did go to take the picture, I realized it's impossible to photograph a legible date/time/temp marker in the corner of a picture of something much brighter and farther away. So after all this compromising, here is my offering to you for this week. That's the South Pole telescope in the background. I'll try to do a similar pair of shots, with the same vista, once/week for the rest of the year so you can see how the light and the temp changes as we go.