Goings on around town

Just some bits and pieces for you this week.

I'm still working on making my peace with the local bar (Gallagher's) being the epicenter of the social scene around here. I'm never going to be able to make myself go there to just hang out, but luckily some fun/interesting activities have been going on there. I joined a trivia team for a little friendly competition, I was recruited to play a role in a read-through of a play set in McMurdo (written by someone who washed dishes here one season; the organizer used random number generation to assign the roles, and I ended up playing Tom the maintenance man), and there was an open mic night full of friends and co-workers revealing their knacks for poetry, music and more. I was happily just an observer that evening, though if performing with the safety of being shielded from audience eyes by a sheet of fabric becomes generally acceptable, the idea of participating is less unappealing to me.

I also got to participate in a classic McMurdo tradition, the Skua Sorting Party. Which probably takes a bit of explanation. Skuas are the ever-present scavenging birds of the polar climes. And in their honor, the Antarctic version of Goodwill is called "Skua"--there are Skua bins in every dorm and a container set up that is Skua general--the place you can go to find a used article of clothing when your last pair of pants rip, or you need a half-used bottle of lotion, or you're wondering if anyone has ever brought purple stilettos to McMurdo (yes, they have) that you can use for a costume party. In the mass exodus of the end of summer, some of the hundreds of departing folks are not very conscientious about what they throw in the skua bin as they frantically clean out their rooms. The Wasties (those employed in the trash collecting and sorting business) faithfully collect the contents of all the Skua bins daily (if not more) during the end of summer rush, but there are those community members lacking in civility who have put their dirty galley dishes or outright trash in the skua bins along with everything else from their rooms, and there is no way the Wasties can sort it all. So one afternoon at the end of March, they invited everyone to come to the Waste Barn for a three-hour party to sort multiple triwalls of "Skua" into accurate bins: actual Skua (of course), or bedding/towels for Lodging, or landfill waste, or galley utensils, etc. And the bonus is, you also get to see all the really good stuff that comes through (like those purple stilettos) and keep it for yourself if you wanted.

So, here we have a still of the Skua Sorting Party in action, and then a video as a loader brings in a couple more triwalls for the crowd to attack.

Finally, if you're curious about what happens to the stuff that is actually trash and not Skua at McMurdo (and at Pole--as Pole trash is brought out to McMurdo and combined with what McMurdo produces), check out this article.