The Days of Our Mcmurdo

11-28
Life has been proceeding as normal, or unnormal as things go here.  Of course with a small population (950 right now) and lots of crazy and mostly single people, there is lots of goings arounds and gossip.  As Cassa likes to always say, just another episode of "Days of our McMurdo" (after the soap opera days of our lives in case you didn't know)

With the population nearing the summer high and the holidays approaching, there have been lots of activities, and I have been incredibly busy.

A couple of weeks ago, we had the dodgeball tournament.  We made up a team of lab staff and grantees (aka beekers).  I originally didn't have much hope for our team remembering how bad we got creamed last year with shuttles and thinking we were all nerdy scientists.  The team consisted of Bev (my supervisor), Abe (the other lab assistant), and then Clint, Eric, and Laughlin from B-174 (studying the food web in the Ross Sea).  We dressed up in lab coats, wore lab goggles, and each wore one latex glove.  Our team name was, "bend over and cough"  We ended up going undefeated and delivering dominating performances.  Who would have guessed that the nerdy beakers would have walked in a smoked everyone?

A couple of weeks ago we also had the Crary lab Icecream social.  It was the height of our lab and grantee population, so we held a get together for all the scientists up in the Crary library with fancy cheeses and wines.  We also used liquid nitrogen to make some amazing icecream.  The best flavours being peanut butter, baileys, and kahlua.  The night was closed out by one of the popular bands here, "Condition Fun" a play on the weather term, condition one, given to the worst storms.  They write their own mcmurdo related songs (Ivan the Terra Bus) as well as take songs you are familiar with and add McMurdo twists to them (C-17 to the tune of Sweet Caroline).

Last week there were some Kiwi distinguished visitors that came down.  I had the honor of giving them the Crary lab tour.  When the Scott Base representative introduced them to me, he used words like, "chancellor", "magistrate" and "his excellency"  They were very nice guys though and invited me to visit them if I ever make my way through Auckland. 

Last week we also had the final run through of what we call the MCI (mass casualty incident) drill.  Our hospital here is capable of handling up to 3 emergency type patients, but if we have more than that, then it becomes a mass casualty incident.  This year I volunteered to be a member of the MCI response team.  I am a stretcher bearer, as is Abe.  Elisha and Mitch are runners and set-up.  This year we practiced 3 times before doing the final "live" practice with fake victims.  The victims are dressed up and have make up on to make it look like they actually have the injuries they have.  Interestingly, almost all the victims for the practice were kiwis, so we figured the accident must have been a kiwi vehicle driving on the wrong side of the road and getting run over by Ivan

Last week, Elisha and I also went on a pressure ridge tour to see the beautiful pressure ridges and melt pools where the sea ice meets in the land.  The pressure ridges are basically giant frozen waves that hae gorgeous blue colors.  When you walk through the pressure ridges, you feel like you are in the Antarctica that you read about in books with all the ice formations.  Last weekend Elisha and I also skate skied from Scott Base on the cape armitage loop and out to the ice runway and back.

The week of Thanksgiving was quite the week of parties, activities, and amazing food.  It started out on our Thanksgiving Day (thursday) with the Crary Lab staff thanksgiving party at hut 10.  We had brugers, brats, shrimp quiche, and tasty cheese, as well as delicious chocolate brought by Mindy's Austrian husband Reinhart.  We of course made more liquid nitrogen icecream.  On Friday (you all's Thanksgiving back in America), the Shuttle Family had a Hut 10 party.  This was of course a blast bc it was with all my current shuttle friends and shuttle friends from last year who have moved on.  We had Filet Mignon (yum!!  I had 3 pieces), portobello mushrooms, fancy cheeses, and then a tasty peanut butter/chocolate popcorn dessert made by one of the shuttlers.  We played the always hilarious and tear-laugh producing telephone pictionary game.  That night Jerod and I also led a Historic Hut tour to Scott's hut for some grantees.  In the evening we headed out to watch Shuttle Brian and his 80's cover band play some music at Gallaghers.  I tried to go to bed somewhat early because I was tired form the week and had the race the next day, but I was on the duty pager, and I got a page in the middle of the night because the aquarium was flooding.

On Saturday we had the 5k Turkey Trot.  It was a gorgeous day, and I ran in shorts and rolled up the sleeves on my wicking top.  I ended up doing really well, running the tough course (it's straight uphill the 1st half of the race as the turnaround is on the scott base pass) in 22:30 and finishing 5th overall in the men's division.  Out of American's though, I finished 3rd.  Elisha did quite well too, finishing 7th in women's.  The turkey trot is a fun race and includes lots of people wearing awesome costumes, and with 1km to go an aid station where I shotgunned a Coors Light thanks to SciCo (Science Cargo) Jenn.  After the race, as it was such a gorgeous day, Elisha and I skate skied out to the ice runway.  We made it back in time to grab a chai at the coffee house, grab a quick sauna, and then get dressed up for the big McMurdo Thanksgiving.  I sat at the shuttles family table for dinner bc as Sharona says, "once a shuttle driver, always a shuttle driver".  Plus crary didn’t organize a table for a “family” dinner.  The dinner was of course fantastic.  I got three drumsticks and lots of crab legs.  There was also pecan pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, and a huge assortment of fudge.

After dinner it was time to prepare our costumes for freezing man.  Jerod, Elisha, and I pre-funked at steph and jeff’s room where jeff was having fun making unusual cocktails.  His coral spawn drink complete with chia seeds and dried mangoes was tasty.  However, is Gin and Jerky, not so much. 

Freezing man (the Antarctic equivalent to Burning Man…google it if you don’t know what it is) was of course amazing.  Cassa was the planner behind the whole event, so I helped out a bit with the organization.  There were cool little booths set up around the big gym and of course face painting and plenty of dancing (and I always love the anonymous dance screen).  Everyone dresses up in goofy costumes and lets out the hippy from within.  I wore ice packs from the lab (to be a freezing man) and of course Cassa's disco ball that I wore last year as she would have been so disappointed if I didn't wear it again since it was such a big hit last year.

Because of Thanksgiving, we actually had a TWO day weekend.  Which is always greatly appreciated.  I spent the 2nd day relaxing for the most part.  Helped clean up the big gym after the party, took a hike around the arrival heights loop, and then watched some movies.

On Sunday night, I finally got a much needed haircut.  My hair had been in my eyes and bugging me.  So Elisha volunteered to cut my hair so that I didn't have to pay the barber (they are charging now).  She did a nice job and everyone says they could hardly recognize me.  I guess I look a lot younger and much different without the huge mop of long hair.

Yesterday I attended a fireside reading at the coffee house that I had helped to organize.  The writer and artist grantee that is here, Larissa, had wanted to share some of her work, so I arranged a "fireside" reading for her and a contract worker who had recently had her Antarctic poems published.  It was a cool little event that I think people enjoyed.

Of course volleyball and basketball, ballroom dance, insanity, and game nights have continued.  As well as some glee watching.

It's been getting very warm here of late, though it still hasn't quite broken above freezing yet.  I liked this weather report we had the day after thanksgiving...

Regional Summary	11/23/2012 5:25:34 AM
Fair weather, a few high clouds , light winds and sunny skies as high pressure builds in today. Hang up “big red” and break out the t-shirts and shorts as we may even reach the freezing point today.

Update on Antarctic Funger Games..the War on Fun

11-11-12

An update on how the new policies are affecting life on base bc a few of you, specifically Lael, are interested and want updates.

Because of being short staffed at the Vehicle Maintenance Facility, they have decided that Rec trips will not happen this year bc they cannot spare vehicles on Sundays for them.  So this means no tours out to the Pegasus crash site (I went last year), no trips out to Cape Evans and the historic hut there (last year, we couldn't go bc of sea ice conditions), and no trips to the ice caves (again, couldn't go last year bc of poor sea ice condtions).  This is the newest additon to the Funger games.  Well that and they have decided they will no longer be giving work center food for snacks unless your work center works the majority of the time outside.  And in that case, they will only be giving powerbars.  It may be better for the health of the station, but considering there is no place to buy snacks, it's kind of sad.  They used to give us tons of food like candy bars, cliff bars, chips, crackers, cookies, nuts, dried fruit, chocolates, and sometimes trail mix.  I'll be okay bc I'm good at taking excess food from the galley to be used later, especially fruit, but this could cause some issues for people.  Soon there won't be freshies (fresh fruit and veg) as there will be no flights from thanksgiving until near the end of January.  The winter-overs are also bumming bc they used to get 1 two day weekend each month, but Lockheed has threatened to take that away.  The big parties have also been a bit lamer this year bc of new alcohol policies and the building codes.  One of the best dance parties last year, the homecoming at the BFC, will not happen bc that building has been given a fire code of having a maximum of 17 people.  So obviously you can't have a party there this year, sadly!

But have no fear, we have still been having lots of fun and working around it.  Elisha, Cassa, Jerod, Stef, Jeff, and lots of others have started taking ballroom dance classes.  It's pretty fun and we're actually learning stuff bc the instructor is a professional.  As he said, classes like this back home would cost nearly 50 bucks a session.  So it's a treat.  Cassa has also been sponsoring game night at the coffee house, which has been fun.  I'm actually currently at the coffee shop now.  This year they decided to not allow alcoholic beverages to be sold there, so there are no cool alcoholic coffee drinks with baileys and kahlua and such, but bc of this, they have made all the drinks here free, so that's nice.  Elisha is a barista right now, and she has been making me lots of special drinks as I sit here doing internet chores and doing some christmas shopping.  Very tasty!  And she has been playing Josh Ritter, which I appreciate.

Of course basketball, volleyball, insanity, movies at the coffeehouse, glee, and ping pong continue unhindered

Wastey (as in he works for Waste, not is a wasted guy) James has been organizing these awesome dance parties on Saturday nights that sneak by some of the rules.  He has been labeling some as a dance fitness class.  But they started getting really big and he wanted only the hardcore and serious dancers to come, so he has now been advertising them as math club.  They are sweet bc he has 1 from 8pm to 9pm right after drinks at dinner, where we all dance crazy.  Then another one from 1130 to 1230 after the bars close.

Debates and discussions about all of this have been intense, interesting, and amusing in the galley.  A lot of people are very upset about how they can enforce select government rules (fire and building codes) only for select events (for parties but not for all-hands meetings or science lectures) and not enforce others that would have to be followed back home (handicap accessibility, labor laws (we work 60 hour weeks without OT).

Today was my day off, but I didn't do much bc they had an airfield show where you could view the planes.  I'm not super into seeing the inside of the planes, and I've seen plenty from the outside with shuttles.  Abe was super excited to see them, but he was on Sunday duty this week, so I volunteered to work for him so he could go.  It made me feel good to see how happy he was to go.

It was fun to follow the election from here, though there was really not much talk about it here.  People were too busy and pretty much everyone here wanted the the same person to win.  Well maybe it was the NSF backed Antarctic Support Contractors vs the Air National Guard with who they wanted to win.  But there is always some tension between them and each was probably voting for the guy that they thought would continue to give them a job.  Science vs Military. 

A real Antarctic Field Science Day

11-4

The base has these things called morale trips (aka boondoggles) for the contract workers to do something fun every now and a very long while to help out with something that scientists need an extra hand on.  Usually it's dive tending (which is what Jerod and Elisha did this year). As a shuttle driver, our boondoggle was to happy camp.  Happy camp is required for most work centers, but not for shuttles, so that was our boondoggle.  Some workcenters don't get the option to do many boondoggles because they are too busy (shuttles).  Also, you need to have some seniority to get the good boondoggles (flights to help dig out fuel caches in the mountains or on the plateaus). 
The problem with our work center is that Bev believes we shouldn't really get boondoggles from the Chalet (the Chalet is where the NSF reps are and the ones who give the boondoggles for the scientists) bc if the lab is getting boondoggles, people around town might thing Crary is getting favoritism.  However, there is one way around this..the so called "emergency" morale trip.  Because of paperwork (it's always the paperwork down here isn't it?), a grantee needs to request the need for help 24 hours in advance.  Sometimes they forget or have last minute good weather and need someone.  If that's the case, they can't go through the chalet and the Crary lab staff "has" to do it.  This is how mitch, abe, and bryan got boondoggles to Dive Tend for Andrew Thurber and Stacy Kim's group.  I have been offered a few dive tending boondoggles, but the thing is, is that you only get 1 or 2 boondoggles a season likely.  So you have to play a bit of a gambling game to see if you should take the boondoggle or hold out for a better one.  I'm not too interested in dive tending, so I've been holding out on that one.  The boondoggle I hope for the most is a sleigh ride...a trip to the south pole.  This isn't necessarily directly through the NSF, so doing a grantee help morale trip doesn't necessarily hinder your chances at that, other than if your work center only gets say 2 sleigh rides, then the 2 people most likely to go would be the 2 people with the least amount (or less cool) boondoggles.  Boondoggles in the past have included flights to the dry valeys, flights to different areas around the continent to help dig out fuel caches, flights for aerial studies with grantees, and helo flights up to Mt. Erebus.  However, these are very rare, so again it's a gamble as to what you hold out for.  If you keep turning things down, you may be too busy when the next comes along or there just may not be a next one. 

Anyways, Ross and Rachel (Rachel is the Phd adviser to Ross at Dartmouth.  They are studying how bromide is transferred in the snow, and how this bromide is causing the ozone hole over Antarctica) have become pretty good friends with me.  In fact, I like them a lot, and I really hope that my advisor-advisee relationship can be as happy as theres.  They wanted me to go out on a cool boondoggle with them, so they purposely waited until under the 24 hour deadline for the NSF chalet so that their trip would be an emergency morale trip, and I could go.  I still had a pretty good inner debate as whether I should take it or hold out on it for something better, but in the end, I figured it wouldn't affect me getting to the south pole and since I really liked them, that it would be awesome.  But after talking to them, I decided to take it!

Their plan was to go out on the sea ice and take some ice cores as well as take a lot of snow samples and measure ice thickness.  The sweet thing about going with them, as I would find out, was that they had some data collect, but not too much, so we could have some fun.  Also, they think a lot of the NSF regulations are just crazy too, so they were totally willing to look the other way on some things.

So bright and early in the morning, we loaded up their supplies and sled in a truck and headed down to the ice to load up snowmobiles and attach the trailer.  I have been officially "trained" on snowmobiles yet, so I'm not technically allowed to drive one, but Rachel said I should!  So that was fun.  First we sped out to their furthest away field site.  I'm not sure how far we drove, but maybe 25ish miles?  At first the ice was fairly smooth, but as we got closer to the ice edge, the ice got very rough and there were lots of cool ice features around that we had to navigate through.  The last several miles we went much slower, and it was like going through an obstacle course.  The cool thing about being on the sea ice is that you can basically drive where ever you want.  But as we got closer, there were large cracks and obstacles that we had to avoid and find safe paths through.  I would almost describe these features and finding our way through it, very similar to biking on the slick-rock of Utah.  You are free to bike whereever, and the bike can handle it, but sometimes you run across features that you can't cross or you have to navigate around.  All the snow drifts and ice chunks allowed us to have some fun catching pretty big air as well.  And it was just a fun and exhilerating experience to be out there on the snow mobiles, pulling a sled and maneuvering through the sea ice without a road or track.  And it was cool bc we were really far from town and civilization.  There wasn't safety flags or roads or anything like that.  We were truly on our own and having to make real decisions for us.  There were seals all around the cracks.  Especially the crack Big Bertha, which could potentially be dangerous to cross, so we had to find a safe spot to cross it.  It felt like being on those TV shows where they are filming people up near the Arctic circle taking sleds and snowmobiles to get around on the ice.  I LOVED it!

When we finally reached the farthest out field site, we were set to take an ice core.  We couldn't get the badger drill to run, so we had to do all the coring by hand.  We set up all the pieces and then took turns cranking away.  I had to laugh bc it was like insanity (the workout) had prepared me for it.  The ice where we were was about 2m (6feet) thick.  After we had taken out the ice core, taken temperature measurements at different levels of the core, and packed it up, we then measured ice thickness and collected snow for analysis. 

At this point we were as far out on the ice sheet as they needed to go for their research, but they wanted to take me close to the ice edge to try and show me penguins as they had seen some along the ice edge when they had a helo ride earlier that week.  Problem was that one of our snowmobiles was eating a lot of gas and was at 1/2 a tank.  So Rachel said, "we have a few options.  1. We don't go out there.  2. You two go out there and I'll wait.  3. We all go out on both snowmobiles and risk one running out of gas, and 4. We pile 3 of us on one".  Option 4 was against snowmobile protocol, but we decided for that option.  So we drove out another 3 miles or so until we got near to the sea ice edge.  It got a bit nerve racking being out there on the thinning ice, but they knew what they were doing.  When we parked the snowmobile and went my foot, the ice was pretty thin, and a bit slushy.  We walked out on some very recently formed ice (ice that if a big wind or storm came up, would break out).  On this ice there are these really cool ice formation called ice feathers.  We got down on our stomachs to look at them and to eat a couple of them (very salty).  These things are what Rachel had done her PostDoc on as they had originally thought bromide may be passed into the air by these.  Unfortunately there were no penguins, but it was a totally cool feeling to be out there on the sea-ice edge, standing on thin ice.  From where we were we could see the open ocean.  Also, since we were so far from town, we had some unique views of Erebus as well as some different perspectives of the dry valleys and the Royal Soceity Range. 

It was a cold day, about -5F ambient with -25 to -30F when the wind picked up.  And rachel was so nice, like a mom.  She had made us big piping hot thermoses of hot cocoa.  After we left the sea ice edge, we backtracked and stopped at about 5 other sites to collect samples and measure sea-ice thickness. 

They still wanted to show me penguins, so towards the end of the day, they decided to skip some sites and do those at a later date and instead take me on a detour to another place that they had heard there were penguin sightings.  This detour took us by Big Razorback, Inaccessible, and Tent Islands.  Cool rocks sticking out above the ice.  It also took us passed the Erebus glacier ice tongue.  These are where a lot of the fish huts are set up for the grantee groups studying fish.  We didn't see any penguins there, but on the way back to base, we caught up to an Emperor Penguin sliding its way along the ice, so that was cool.

All in all, a super sweet day.  It was great to get out of the office and out into the field, into the real Antarctica, and to help out with some important science.  Wish I could do that a lot more.

It's Sunday today, last night we took it pretty chill.  I had a fun dinner with Clint and his adviser Stacy and a few other people from their team.  They are lots of fun and they brought some good wine from the US to share with us.  Clint and Stacy are like Ross and Rachel, and they are some of my favorite grantees. I went to a dance party for a bit with the grantees.  Then hung out with Cassa (and Spring) for a bit while she had breakfast (she's on night shift now) and we chatted and caught up on gossip.  As she always likes to say about all the drama here: "The days of Our McMurdo" after the soap opera.  After that I headed back to the dorm and watched a movie with Jerod, Stef, and Elisha in the lounge

Hilarious...Antarctica #6 on top 10 deadliest places in the world

A couple emails I sent to co-workers and to my mom

Dear Bev,

Can we take an office boondoggle to the new McDonald’s at Scott Base?  Pretty Please!

http://listverse.com/2008/04/08/top-10-most-dangerous-places-on-earth/  (#6)

Sincerely,

Travis

PS: I do realize we have little chance of survival in those regularly -100F temps, but I promise the McFlurry and playpen will be worth it

PPS: Does the lab have a gun we can take?  As one commenter pointed out, there may not be people living in Antarctica, but the polar bears here can be rather dangerous

PPPS: Shouldn’t we be ranked as 2^nd most dangerous, right behind Iraq?  We do have to ride in the Kress Vehicle to and from the airfield as well as go weeks at a time without Frosty Boy.

 

http://listverse.com/2008/04/08/top-10-most-dangerous-places-on-earth/

This is just hilarious.  And the reason why you just can’t believe too much of what you read unless you know it’s a credible source.

Almost everything he said about Antarctica is wrong.  From what I understand, there are several rapes a year here, which is a lot considering the population.  The coldest I have seen it in all my time here was -30F with -65F windchill.  Most certainly doesn’t regularly drop below -100F.  I think the south pole maybe gets a few days like this.  If exposed to those temps, you most certainly will not die what with all the gear you have to have down here  We do have a hospital.  Scott Base most certainly has no McDonald’s.  I would say Antarctica may actually be the safest place on earth bc there are hardly any people, no traffic, few diseases, clean water, clean air.  Sure the weather can be bad, but they have us over prepared, over-trained.  They have incredible search and rescue and first response (unlike what this says), rigorous checkout procedures so people know exactly where you are supposed to be if you don’t show up, radios, back up radios, survival bags, etc.  Also, the severely limit what you can do.  You can die on a mountain just outside of Denver, but here, you can’t climb that mountain

Oh and I liked one person’s comment later on saying that Antarctica would be dangerous because of all the polar bears

Michael Phelps visits Antarctica

11-02

The last week has been filled with parties.  One of my best friends down here, Chandra, who works for the field safety program left a couple of days ago.  She did a short contract this year so that she could be back earlier to teach her wilderness first responder courses and other outdoor safety things.  We originally bonded last year when she would ride front seat in my delta when I took the Happy Camper classes that she taught out into the field over field biology (she got her master's at Western Washington).  It was sad to see her go, but her boyfriend Cory threw a good party for her at the BFC building complete with lots of White Russians.

The next day, one of the grantee advisers threw a cool surprise birthday party for her grad student Ross.  It was a fun party with all my favorite grantees at Hut 10.  One of them had brought glacial ice, so we had whiskey on glacial ice

Then of course we had our big Halloween party.  I went as Michael Phelps, complete with his blue shoes, jammer, goggles, phelps cap (homemade), headphones, and gold medals, though I decided not to shave my legs (you have to have some protection from the biting Antarctic wind.  Plus 6 weeks of insanity workout to try and acquire a swim body similar to Phelps'. 

My friend Dacre had one of my favorite costumes.  A Kress Vehicle transformer.  Cassa was a jackalope and part of the Noah's Ark Rejects group..animals that were rejected by Noah's ark: jackalope, unicorn, mermaid, trilobite, centaur.  Elisha and Steph went as amazonian women.  They are both very tall and thin (above 6 feet) and they added really high heels (I think 8inches) so that they towered over everyone.  Then they did their hair and makeup and wore clothes that are apparently amazonian
The party wasn't as wild as last year (people think maybe bc of all the talk of reducing alcohol and bc of building code issues), but still lots of fun

Last Sunday it was actually warm enough out on the sea ice to go for a skate ski.  The temps had climbed to the high single digits and the wind was fairly light.  So Elisha and I skate skied out to the new location of the icerunway, our first ski of the year.  This year the ice runway is in a completely different location than last year because of some huge cracks in the sea ice where it had been last summer.

Here's a few pics from Halloween.  Hopefully more to come later.