Last Friday post?

I can't quite believe this, but unless things go very wrong in the coming week (always a possibility, and I don't want to jinx it--hence the question mark in the subject heading), this should be my last Friday post from the South Pole. This is such a bittersweet time, I can't completely put words to it. I'm so grateful to have had this experience and there are some friends here that I'm going to be so sad not to see anymore in my everyday life. And this is the first place I've ever lived where it's not an option to just buy a plane ticket and come back to visit whenever I feel like it. That's a strange and sad knowledge. On the other hand, it has been an entire year now that I've been in the same two-mile radius and unable to venture outside without being covered head-to-toe in the thickest possible clothing. I'm pretty ready to get back out into the non-frozen world and resume traveling and see my family and friends--and greenery!

At this point it looks like there will probably be one more Tuesday weekly snapshot. But as this may be my last variety post, I figured I'd do it up.

I just raided my boss/friend K's camera and got a bunch of shots from her that represent kind of a review of the last month. First, she got some amazing pictures of the sunrise in mid-September:

Then there was the exciting time a couple weeks ago when we decided it was time to open the doors of the Materials/Logistics arch permanently for the summer, which involved getting them dug out by machine-with-bucket from the outside....

...and finishing the job by shovel from the inside. Let there be light!

We took a field trip out to "the berms"--the storage rows  in the backyard of the station--to knock a winter's worth of drift off the bottoms of the food crates that needed to be forklifted onto a big sled and pulled closer to the station so we could bring them into the arch and add them to our more easily accessible food shelves.

And our weekly food pulls have been getting much bigger as the summer season approaches. This is me after a particularly annoying food delivery where it seemed like if everything wasn't falling off the carts on the way to the elevator, the carts themselves were getting stuck on the flooring and taking two or all three of us to get free and moving again. So while K called the elevator, I took a little -70-degree nap on the ground. Plus the shaking of the big freight elevator as it descended the beer can felt pretty cool from this vantage.

Now we're getting more current. Yesterday, people who happened to be outside mid-morning got quite a shock when an unexpected aircraft was spotted over the South Pole skies. This is not a place where you see any air traffic that isn't headed directly for us, so this plane caused quite a bit of panic among those who spotted it. If it was about to land here with no notice, that would be pretty much unprecedented. BUT it turned out to be a fly-over by the NASA Airborn Science program.

And it took this picture of us from above, which I think is pretty cool. The biggest structure in the lower left side of the picture is the main station. The smaller buildings in the lower right of the frame is the dark sector and the telescopes. And then the long lines of stuff on the left side heading up toward the top of the frame are the berms, pointing to the area we call "the end of the world" in the top left. Finally, I'm pretty sure the structures in the top right of the frame are SPICECore.

Later that day, we got a plane that we WERE expecting. That Basler with the first eight summer people FINALLY made it to Pole, after a week's worth of cancellations. And while it brought us eight new people, it carried away six members of our winter crew, most of them leaving kind of unexpectedly since the much bigger LC-130s (Hercs) that were supposed to start making trips to and from Pole this week are also going to be delayed and the powers that be wanted to start getting some of the winter-overs out of here and onto their off-continent flights as originally scheduled. It was pretty sad to see this plane go along with a big handful of our crew members (minus, of course, the three that were medevac'd before now) and have the 2016 South Pole winter feel very officially over.

So, there you go. Like I said, at this point I'm still anticipating that I'll be posting one more weekly snapshot from the South Pole on Tuesday, but if plane schedules get back on track, I'll be gone from here by this time next week. Kind of blows my mind. We'll see how this crazy transition continues to play out....