It's getting pretty dark out! The day after posting last week's snapshot, I saw a few stars for the first time in 5+ months. So exciting. Now I need to start using a (red light) head lamp while walking around outside, or I'm tripping over snow drifts I can't see. The ground is always changing, based on wind and whether our heavy equipment operator has been out dragging, etc. I'm still trying to take the outside route to and from work every day (a five-minute bit of fresh air as opposed to walking "indoors" (it's still -50F, regardless) down the beer can, which smells like poop), and it's still very enjoyable, though spending an hour outside today helping to shovel the six sets of stairs that lead into/out of the main station as part of our regular station maintenance was not super-fun. But also not as awful as you might think. Mostly it was just hard to see because goggles fog up but if you take them off the wind hurts the skin almost immediately. And my fingers and toes are extremely glad to be back inside. Such an experience. Anyway, here you go! It's clear out now, so it's not because of blowing snow that you can't see to the telescopes. Now it's just getting legitimately wintery.
Thanks for sharing your blog. It's been a few years since I was there, but my last trip when the beer can was really smelly it was because the hole to Lake Patterson was open. I had to go down with our safety person and cut a 4 inch thick piece of insulation to stuff in the hole. Maybe the hole is open again?
ReplyDeleteThe hardest part about working outside was keeping your "googles" from fogging up. Never did figure out how to stop that. Keep up the good work. And enjoy your winter.
Thanks, Glenn! Some days it smells like poop, some days it doesn't. Got to have some sort of suspense down here, right? And thanks for catching my typo. :) Fixed!
ReplyDeleteI'm going to call them googles from now on -- skiing googles, swimming googles-- much more fun to say.
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