Trav's Travels: A Midsummer's Night Dream

“And yet,to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

6/18/16

In the morning I got asked to go help with a ramsonde on the skiway. My brother might know what a ramsonde is, but it's a device to measure snow hardness. Since a new flight period is coming soon, we need to check the runway to see what load it can handle.

The summer solstice is fast approaching. This year, because of leap year, it's on the 20th of June. Of course the longest day of summer means little up here b/c it has been one long day for a couple months now. But it's still something to celebrate. In Europe it's a big celebration and called midsummer (or midsommer). Our friends to the south, deep south in Antarctica, are celebrating mid winter. The winter-over crews down there are all small, and they send out invitations to all the other arctic bases to come join them for their midwinter party. They include us, so we've been getting pictures and invitations from bases around Antarctica from nations such as Japan, England, Italy, India, France, and Australia. We took a funny photo today in front of the Big House and will used that for our invitation.

Since Sunday is our only day off (well techs still have a 1/2 day of work), Saturday night is the party night. So although it's a couple of days early, the station manager decided we should have our midsummer party today. Parties here tend to not be as wild as Antarctica b/c there is a limited supply of alcohol (what you personally bring in ), but tonight our Station Manager, the boss lady, Kaija brought out quite a lot of bottles of whiskey and some bottles of wine much to the excitement of everyone on base.

After dinner we played some fun, active games, told some riddles (including the riddles to see if we could become members of the honorable order of Turtles) and jokes, and then played some charades type games. They had fired up the sauna earlier in the day, so eventually lots of people migrated over to the sauna. I went too, but to me saunas are kind of miserable. They had it up to 150F. I spent most of my time there on the floor where it's the coolest and took frequent runs outside to roll in the snow. Something I wasn't prepared for is the arctic sauna is definitely a clothing optional sauna. I was one of the few people wearing a swimsuit in the sauna! haha.

After the sauna we went back to the bighouse to try something called the table traverse. This is where you try to completely circumnavigate a table (including going under it) without touching the floor. Definitely a fun and hard challenge!

6/19/16

Happy Father's Day!

It was a beautiful and warm day today (high of 19F), so I tried to do a lot of outside stuff. In the morning we played some soccer and tossed the frisbee around. Then after lunch I went for a 9 mile cross country ski. I skied out along the clean air flag line. When I reached the end, I continued skiing for about a mile past the flag line just out in the open. We're not really supposed to go past the flags b/c you could get lost if there was a storm or loss of visibility, but today was a perfectly blue sky today so there was no worry of that. It's so crazy to just be skiing out in this endless expanse of snow as far as you can see on the horizon. All there is is blue sky meeting white snow. Just flat nothingness forever and ever. While you're out there you lose all concept of time, space, and distance. It's really a cool and strange feeling and very beautiful.

It's also kind of cool to think that I was skiing (once past the flagline) places probably no one had ever been before. That's pretty wild. There's not many places left in the world where you can step foot where no one else has ever stepped.

6/20/16
Happy Midsummer!

I had a very good solstice. The weather was really nice, meaning it was very sunny and not too windy. The sun here is so strong that as long as it's not windy it doesn't feel very cold and can in fact feel rather warm on your jacket.

After work I went out for a ski. It was so beautiful out that I went for a longer ski than normal. I came back for a quick dinner (lemon shrimp) and then took the bike out. I know there won't be many nice days to enjoy outdoor activities once the summer starts to fade, and I think it fades here pretty quickly. Today when I went out for the ski it was 4F (-12F windchill) and and 1F (-18F) for my bike. But the crazy thing is with the light wind, the strong solstice sun, and the energy I expended all I wore was some tights, a ski jacket, a hat, some gloves and standard athletic socks and I stayed plenty warm. It's a different ballgame though when it's not as sunny or more importantly when it's windy. If it's really windy then any exposed skin can frostbite instantly.

6/21/16

I worked a 16 hour day today. There's a radio cable running from the bighouse out for a 100 yards or so away from the bighouse. It's buried 3-4 feet deep in the snow depending on the drifts. They need to dig the cable up b/c one of the jobs this year is to raise the bighouse up (snow accumulates about 1 meter per year, so every now and then you have to raise it up). To do this they need to drive tractors around, so the cable has to be dug up. One of our duties as techs (when all the instruments are running well) is to help out with camp jobs (ex. building cargo pallets, cleaning the dorms, washing dishes, shoveling, etc). Well I volunteered to dig out the ditch. I worked solidly from after lunch until dinner at 6:30. and then I worked at it again from 9 (after our balloon launch) until nearly midnight

Today we had big old burgers for lunch and dinner was lambchops and then cooked eggplant with yummy toppings on top of it

6/22/16

After my daily rounds I worked more on shoveling out the cable. It takes a long time b/c you have to make a pretty big trench and the layers are tricky. The top layer is crusty from the wind. The middle layer is loose sugary snow, and the bottom layer can by super hard and nearly ice from the compaction. I guess they noticed my shoveling skills b/c I was called out to the fuel pits to help dig out the fuel tanks and bladders b/c they were quite buried. I was tired from all the digging, but I headed out for a bike ride today b/c it was beautiful (=no wind) and sunny. I ended up doing the runway twice b/c it was so nice.

Dinner tonight was chicken fried steak and stuffed peppers.