Weekly snapshot #18

Everyone is anxiously awaiting the midwinter flight that was supposed to be here on Wednesday, but which was delayed till Saturday due to Air Force aircraft availability. Now there's supposed to be a storm rolling in that could cause a significant further delay. (You can kind of see in this photo that it's snowing lightly right now.) But runway prep and flight preparedness meetings are happening as if we're getting a plane tomorrow...and barring a pretty significant streak of awful weather, we should at least have had the big event by this time next week. It will be nice to get in some mail and some fresh food. Plus, there's a relatively large swap-out of personnel happening: 24 of our crew of 133 are leaving, with 25 fresh ones coming in to pick up the reins. That's a lot of new energy to hit the station in the depths of the winter season, and I imagine it will be pretty amusing to see all of us who are pretty mellowed-out at this point trying to interact with people who have just recently had a lettuce salad and seen a child-age person and felt the rays of the sun on their skin.


We're on the upswing, now, though! The days of this darkness are numbered, and with how fast the season has gone from my perspective, it's not going to be long before there are literal rays of light in these weekly snapshots...