Weekly snapshot #42

The moon is back!

And if this snapshot had happened a few days earlier, you would have seen temps in the 30's. (The negative 30's F, that is--but for us, that's disorientingly, oddly warm at this point.) Spring is definitely on its way....

And by the next full moon, the sky will be quite light, just a week before sunrise. Very bittersweet, knowing this really special (to me) winter is nearing its end.

Plastering

We recently had a particularly entertaining time at our regular weekly meeting for the medical emergency response team down here, when we got to learn to do casting--or, as our Kiwi doctor calls it, "plastering." (One of the best parts of this team is hearing our American PA balk or be totally confused by half the stuff our NZ-trained doc says.) Still casts are casts, and we had fun messing around with them.

My attempt was highly unsuccessful; it's the one on the left in the picture below, and because of some less-than accurate instructions I was given when wetting the plaster roll, it never got saturated and therefore never set. But I already could have told you that this experience on the medical team was not going to lead to me discovering a latent desire to work in the medical field, so...oh, well!

My favorite part of the whole thing was this great moment caught on video when it was time for the casts to come off. (No humans were harmed during the making of this clip.)



Weekly snapshot #41

The wind has been even stronger this week than last, and a few days ago it reached 30 knots. The cold and dark here has started to feel so normal--dare I say even comfortable--that it's kind of fun to step outside into a gust and have it slam the realization into my face: I am at the South freakin' Pole!



Unfortunately for you, nothing at all in this week's snapshot. The wind blowing snow around makes visibility pretty awful.

As a consolation, here's a blurb and pic that one of our NOAA reps just sent out. This taken with an (obviously) much longer-exposure camera, looking back at the station from the NOAA facility about a kilometer away. It's a good reminder that sunrise is on the way (we WILL see the sun again, someday!). The igloo he mentions (which can be seen on the far right of the frame, on the same level as the station) is this mammoth thing constructed by a group of the guys here over the past couple weeks. (They also slept in it a couple of nights ago.) I'll see if I can get some decent photos of it for a future post before they have to tear it down this weekend. Anyway, from NOAA:

"Screen capture from the NOAA webcam during a lull in the winds this morning.  Note the faint glow of twilight above the station and continuing to the right edge of the image.  Note also the brighter glow from the illuminated igloo."



Yoga at 90 South

I know I've posted about teaching yoga down here before, but I just had to share these two things.

We've got a great little group of 5-7 people who have been coming to yoga really consistently once or twice/week all winter. It's so much fun to get to work with same people for such an extended time, and to see them improve and change along the way.

At first we were doing our classes in the gym, as we do during the busier summer season. But as you can see from this picture, the gym tends to be the coldest place in the station and really was not at all conducive to any floor work, much less final resting pose.

So, since both the station doc and PA are regular attendees, they offered up the medical center as our new, regular yoga locale. It's way cozier and works surprisingly well. With the smaller space and our small group, things sometimes get a little silly, though, as they did one recent week when I fulfilled a request that I play a "female empowerment" mix during class and, among other Three Stooges-esque behavior, this happened....



Weekly snapshot #40

How on earth did we get to #40!?!? Boggles my mind.

Most striking aspect of today's snapshot--the wind!



It's actually pretty warm out, but those seventeen knot gusts blew the heavy door to the station observation deck back against me when I tried to open it and made it difficult to hold my camera steady to take this picture. As a consequence, you can't even see the stars that are out. Just dark, dark, dark. Happy August!