Friday the 13th, 2012
Some cold weather rolled in again. The coldest it's been in a while. 15 degrees during my nightshift with windchill down to 2F. After work I walked out to hut point. The sea ice out by hut point is now starting to break up. There is a long channel of deep blue water with a few icebergs floating in it. The coolest thing is from up on the point I got to watch seals swimming around in the melt pools as well as a cute little Adelie peguin that I got to watch jump into the water and then best of all literally fly right out of the water. So cool to watch.
1-14-12
Shuttle Jerod hadn't seen a penguin yet and he wa kind of bumming. I told him he should join me for a man-date for my now daily walk out to hut point and I said he would see one nearly for sure. We got there and there were no penguins. "Go figure he said, I'm bad luck" I told him to be patient, that they were probably swimming around under the ice. We waited 15 more minutes and sure enough we saw a flash of white jump straight up out of the water, into the air, and then onto the ice. Right behind it a giant dark mass with a long neck and huge neck followed--a leopard seal! The penguin got away, but the leopard seal stalked him for a bit from the ice edge with his giant neck and body out of the water. Someone else had also seen the leopard seal today and at breakfast (our dinner) shuttle bill came running up all excited telling us someone had seen one. This is impressive b/c shuttle bill has been here for so many years that he hardly gets excited about anything Antarctic. But apparently they haven't seen one here in over 5 years, and we got to see one!
Moustache Roulette. Today was the day I would finally get rid of my ugly beard. Shuttle Dan had organized this even called moustache roulette with proceeds going towards prostate cancer research. Basically how it worked was Dan and a lot of the shuttlers from his night shift group had designed beards and drawn them on printout pictures of Brittany Spears with a shaved head. People would donate money to each moustache design and the ones with the most money would be the ones chosen to be shaved on people. There were 5 rounds of 5 people, then a championship round. In each round a razor was spun until each participant had been picked but one. The people picked would then get shaved by the barber Ildi or a guest shaver. The one person from each round not picked, would then go onto the championship with the result of one person not having to shave. The 5 rounds were divided into moustache weight divisions. With my weak beard growing capabilities (I had been growing since 1 oct), I was in the fly-weight.
There were some pretty crazy beard designs. My shaved beard ended up not being too wild b/c I had little hair to work with. I pulled the fuzzy circle, but since I don’t grow hair below my lip it just turned into a bigger goatee in which we added a racing stripe to try and make it a bit out of the ordinary. Dan, for example, got a penis shave into his. Some of the other cool ones included aurora australis, the tiger, ironman, and nose picker. Shuttle Fran, to support the cause decided to shave her beautiful hair for locks of love and she got a moustache (whiskers) shaved into the back of her bald head.
My friends told me they were excited to see me get rid of my ugly beard and said that now I look so much younger. I had a guest shaver create my moustache…Steph the mailroom gal that I became friends with on my deployment. She’s the one from evergreen. I may have had the ugliest and weakest beard in the roulette, but I had the hottest shaver!
This day , as I knew it would was going to turn into one of my longest days yet. After the roulette I worked on booking flights, on the FASFA, talked with my mom, signed up for pro deals, and did some other stuff. In the afternoon of the 15th (my middle of the night), was the softball tournament, and I had really been looking forward to it, so I was going to have to pull an all nighter. The tournament started at 11am, my 11pm and ended at 6pm (my 6am and when my work the next day started).
But it was well worth it! The tourney was awesome. The field was played in what we call the ballpark, a huge dirt parking lot for old vehicles that they had of course removed all the vehicles. The carps had built a little grandstand and dugouts and there was even a cool scoreboard that had innings, outs, and scores. They had someone bbqing dogs and brats, and the best part was the huge heckling crowd. The heckling crowd was truly AMAZING. Their chants and cheers and jeers were hilarious. When I'd come up they weren't too mean to me and would chant Beefcake and chant for me to take off my shirt. The grandstand was separated by a fence to protect the crowd from foul balls, and everytime there was a play they didn't like, a call they didn't like, or just felt like doing it, the very drunk hecklers would all chuck their empty beer cans at the fence. They'd then of course scramble to get them back to be ready to throw them again.
The playing field was all dirt and of course not even and hand warmers were given out to keep your hands warm in your pockets and in your glove, though it ended up being a nice day so it didn't matter too much.
Our Shuttle/ATO team won our first game, but lost our 2nd game to the eventual champions, so I joined the awesomeness that was the hecklers for a couple of hours before I had to go to work. B/c I had to stay up all of Sunday day, I ended up having to stay awake 38 straight hours b/c of the softball tournament. But it was awesome, and I wasn't too tired at work the next day anyways.
1-15-12
Weather was finally clear enough today to bring in the C-17, so it meant Elisha finally came back! We were all excited to have her back and ready to join the night shift.
I had my lunch out at the airfield today and I was hiding my van out behind the pax terminal during lunch to try and catch a quick nap, when I hear "Shuttle Guy, Shuttle Guy, this is Fuelie Ildi, what's your 20" over the radio. I told her I was at the pax terminal and she said she'd be there in 1 minute (of course all the shuttlers listening on the radio back at dispatch gave me quite the smile and jokes when I came back later that evening, asking me how my hot date with ildi in the pax terminal was). She came speeding up in her snow mobile, picked me up and then took me across the runway over to a big emperor molting on the runway. It was cool b/c he was sitting perfectly in front of mt. erebus so I got a few quintessential antarctic photos with him in the foreground and erebus in the background.
It was quite the penguin day b/c I also saw a cute group of 5 adelies out at the airfield and then a group of 15 sleeping out at hut point. We were really slow on sunday morning, so Spring let us all leave for a couple hours. I should have gone to sleep probably, but instead Jerod, Mel, and I went out to watch the penguins at hut point
1-17-12
My day off, and boy was I happy to have Elisha back b/c she is my fellow twensday (tuesday night/wednesday day) off person. Last twensday I was pretty bored b/c everyone on base was sleeping or working, so it was nice to have a night shifter off with me. We played some volleyball and basketball early in the morning with the day shifters and Zhibin and Brandon (the guys doing laser research from CU that seem to work days and nights unless it's cloudy) after their dinner and then went for a big ski and then watched a movie until the rest of the night shifters got off
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