Insanity

So this was the last week of Winfly before the “hordes” from main body will arrive.  The last bit of quiet before all the groups come.  It’s nice having plenty of table options at the galley, always having open computers, and spots on the rack for our coats.  Winfly is a very calm and relaxing time, but the craziness will soon start with main body.  But with main body comes a lot of my friends back including Shuttle Elisha, Shuttle Jen, and Shuttle Cassa.

The food here has been so good and my lab/office job very sedentary, so I decided I needed to start a more intense workout scheme.  Cargo has started this weigh in thing to monitor weight loss and it’s a competition to see who can lose the most by Christmas.  I joined this and then joined some friends (FSTOP Chandra and Cory,  Cargo Twan, MC1 Kelly, and Shuttle Queen)in this intense cardio/core program called Insanity.  It has been very tough, but fun, especially since it’s with friends and we like to laugh at the people in the video.  But I pushed myself a bit too hard and strained my back, so I’m on recovery for a bit.

This week we had 9 Emperor Penguins head out across the sea ice a couple of different days, so that was cool to see.  They were the biggest group of Emperors I have seen here.  It still gets dark here, but much later at night.  Now about 10pm, and it’s definitely light when we head out to work.  But the lighting and sunsets are still amazing!  And now the moon is nearly full, so we’ve seen some gorgeous moonrises over the Royal Society Range and up over arrival heights.

This week I also had snowcraft 1 refresher (aka Happy Camp refresher which is the outdoor survival/camping class)  I took the actual training last year where you get to spend a night out on the ice shelf, but this one is just classroom stuff as well as tent, stove, etc set-up in one of the big garages.  I also had the field portion of sea ice training this week.  It was pretty cool bc we went out in a hagglund onto the sea ice and made a crack profile so that you can analyze whether it’s safe to drive your specific vehicle over it.  While we were out there, we saw the best fata morgrana I had ever seen.  Really amazing!  It was super cold too.  About -15 to 20F, and we were out there all afternoon, so we all had cool frost things in our hair, on our goggles, on our big red hoods, and on our face and neck gaiters. 

It’s been pretty cold lately.  -25’s of ambient temp and some -50F with windchill.  And one day we even had some -70F windchill.  It’s always amazing how cold it is and how quick it can affect things.  If you walk the 100mts to the galley after you’ve taken a shower, your hair is instantly frozen.  And if you walk anywhere, the liquid in your nose also freezes instantly and your nose gets hard and feels funny

Yesterday we had an all-hands meeting and they told us that they are going to allow the craft fair now, but that bc of funding cuts, there won’t be C-17 flights from the end of November until mid-January, which means there won’t be so much freshies or mail during that time.

Yesterday was a day of parties to celebrate the hard work being done at winfly as well as to have a final get together in the calm before the storm.   In the crary lab, we had a calm before the storm get together where we used liquid nitrogen to make ice cream.  In the galley, we had a luau with a bbq’ed whole pig as well as lots of icecream and other Hawaiian things.  There was a big carp shop party at night, but I wasn’t really feeling like partying, so I ended up just having a chill night and watched some daily show episodes.

Right now I’m watching the Wisconsin-Nebraska game.  Go Bucky.  Huck those Fuskers!