Weekly snapshot #12

Nothing much to report this week, and you can consider no news to be good news. We're just cruising along through the first leg of winter, and things are calm and peaceful and so nice. Especially today, after we had 24+ hours of Condition 2 weather earlier this week. I shoveled off the delivery dock for the store this morning and found three bags of trash that had blown onto my dock and gotten buried into the snow in the melee. So this calm feels especially lovely.

Ladies' Soiree

Our very sweet physician's assistant for the winter organized a little evening get-together for all the ladies on station (plus the one woman among the Kiwis at Scott Base, out of their winter crew of 12), held in the store. We had a very fun, festive evening, and it's good to make sure to get connected with the other XX-chromosome people on station, since we number only 26 out of the total current station population of 133. About 3/4 of the women on station showed up, which was a great, silly, lovely time.

Weekly snapshot #11

The temps are finally dropping a bit! I know, I guess it's crazy that that is exciting to me, but really, the thermometer hovering around 0F was starting to freak me out a little. I like the variety. So here's this week's photo and weather snapshot, taken at noon today, and without anything else to add this week...

MOO

One of the easiest to grasp and most fun to watch scientific projects going on at McMurdo is MOO, the McMurdo Oceanographic Observatory. It's an underwater camera that lets us see what is happening beneath the sea ice right off the coast from the base. The best part is that they have the live feed streaming as one of our TV channels here (yes, McMurdo has TV--25 channels!--with news, movies, and other amazing things that would make you forget where we are). I've had to be careful with turning it on, though, because it's totally mesmerizing, like watching a campfire. More than once I've had it on the store and a growing crowd has gathered to just watch it with mouths hanging open, in an hypnotic stupor. You rarely see anything in the camera frame, but that's EXACTLY WHY YOU CAN'T LOOK AWAY. What if you take a break to pee and THAT'S the moment when a seal swims by?


This webpage lets you watch from wherever you are with an internet connection, but the image only updates every five minutes and is much granier than what we see on the TV feed here (plus now that it's pretty dark out you probably won't be able to see much), so you are less in danger of going into zombie mode like us, don't worry.


Also, here's an article with more info about the project.


Enjoy!

Weekly snapshot #10

It's downright gorgeous and balmy out, today. Temps in the positive! Wow!


And a beautiful moon standing guard this noontime....Enjoy!