Once a Shuttler, always a Shuttler

A line Sharona, our McMurdo shuttle supervisor used to always use. Still shuttling people around these days, but just by bike


6/12/16
First official Sunday up here. As techs, we don't have the day fully off as we still have dailies to do and also balloons to launch. They have movie theaters set up in the greenhouse and the big house and they played movies around the clock. At the greenhouse they played the Austin powers trilogy and a documentary on crosswords. In the bighouse they played a bunch of James Bond movies and The Martian. I watched a part of the Martian while I ate dinner, but otherwise was busy working on generalized mixed modeling in R for my thesis and went for a 5 mile ski. In a perfect world I wouldn't have my thesis to work on and Elisha would be here, so we could have skied together and then snuggled up on the couches to watch movies with the rest. This place would definitely be really awesome if I didn't have the extra stress of trying to work on the ole thesis b/c the people are really cool and a tight knit bunch.

6/13/15

I sat in bed last night as the building I was in was creaking and moaning in the wind, and it was a crazy realization to think I was there sleeping on a 11,000 foot chunk of ice in the middle of nowhere. Far from anyone and with no way to get out if I wanted, at least until the next plane at the end of June. But then the funny thing is I was wondering what Shackleton and Scott and Amundsen would think of us now with our tracked vehicles, ski planes, wifi, gourmet food, hard drives with 1,000 movies, hot showers, heated gloves, and boot driers. Would the be disappointed or would they be happy at how we had progressed and tamed what they had set out to conquer?

Today was our first full by ourself day of weeklies, and they went well. I went for a bike ride on the runway, but it was very difficult as the snow was super soft as we are in a heat wave right now (19F as the high). Some of the warmest temps they've ever seen here.

Today was martial arts monday and folks watched a couple of martial arts movies. I worked on my stats, but now I am up late watching the script of the Warriors vs Cavs game and Gators vs FSU baseball game with my roommate Thano. We have stayed up to "watch" most of the games of the finals. The bandwidth here is too small to stream a video or even stream audio, so ESPN has a thing where they write out the play by play and have a little animation of the basket. You can also sweet tweets of people watching the game.


Thano and I get along very well. He's a super nice guy. We have the same sleep schedule, both love to look at maps, both like sports, and both love to travel. He's a huge fan of diving and Indonesia and has spent 9 months there in the last 3 years. So we have lots to talk about there. He's currently planning a trip through Greenland and then on to Scandinavia after he gets off the glacier in August.

Today we had yummy chicken pesto pasta with mushrooms, tomatoes and fresh grated parmesan made from fresh pine nuts. If you haven't figured it out yet, the food is gourmet

This just in: Gators are heading to Omaha after beating FSU in the super regionals!

Denny's Grand Slam for the Gators!

biking the CO2 and trace gas sampler out into the clean air sector

the commute between TAWO and the big house

pulling Elissa back to the big house

shot Elissa took as I was biking her to TAWO

Jason and Elissa setting up the gas sampler

bike, sled, and gas sampler