8/19
The storm rages on. Winter seems to have come right after everyone left. It's nice to be curled up in the bighouse on the couch with a tea, listening to some music and working on my stats while the blizzard rages on outside.
We're each assigned a day to cook dinner. Saturday and Sunday will be leftovers and on your own. Today was Storm's day, and he set the bar super high! He made artichoke, spinach dip with baked pita crackers. Pork tenderloin, sweet potatoes, broccoli, a salad with mushrooms and tomatoes, and baked some pre-made peanut butter cookies. He set the table for everyone and put a water pitcher on the table as well as a box of wine.
I keep *joking* that for my meals it will be ramen or cheerios, though I think I will try to make something halfway decent. Though nothing like Storms. Some people would absolutely love this portion of the winter season. Getting the afternoon off to work in a super stocked kitchen with nearly everything you could want. I'm sure Elisha would like it. But for me it's stressful and overwhelming. I'm used to the quick meals from Trader Joe's!
8/20/16
Tonight I had dinner with Storm and learned some interesting thing about him. He's from New Hampshire but he went to undergrad at Western State in Gunnison for economics. He later lived in Leadville for 4 years and got a degree in something related to recreation at Colorado Mountain College. And he eventually worked as an EMT on an ambulance. He was big into long distance mountain biking for a while doing some of the races bro does now like the Leadville 100, Montezuma's revenge, and some of the otehr 100 mile race around the west. He's getting ready to do a 24 day grand canyon trip, which he's very excited for.
8/21/16
Bro's Birthday!!
Today was our first Sunday without Hannah, which means our workload doubled. So instead of just working a couple hours on Sunday, I ended up having to work 6 hours. It was cold temperature wise, but no wind and the sun was strong, so I did a 3 hour ski in my t-shirt.
Today for lunch I made a yummy salad with 3 types of cheese, avocado, mushrooms, spinach, and kale (all organic). I also made an egg scramble with pretty much the same ingredients.
There's a couple of places we can get food here. The freezer trench which is a giant snow trench has probably enough food to last our group of 5 for 5 years. It has everything imaginable. From seafood to meats to pastas to chocolate bars to cereals to frozen fruits and veggies to nuts to different sauces. It's sort of like a grocery store, except all free! So it's fun to go shopping down there for what you want. I go for the high price items that I know I wouldn't buy back home. At night for snacks these days I've been enjoying macadamia nuts, almonds, and dried blueberries. We have a couple 10 pound boxes of macadamia nuts. That's several hundred dollars worth of them! I also get a chuckle when I go by the macadamia box b/c my dad and his fraternity brothers used to call their balls macadamians. So they'd go around asking "how are your macadamians?" There's lots of steaks and other nice cuts of meat. And there's shrimp and scallops and fish and even several boxes of crab and lobster. There are so many types of cheeses. Some I've never heard of. I imagine it being in the Longmont cheese factory and figure it's several thousand dollars worth of cheese alone. But anyways, the freezer trench has about anything you could want and has many things I wouldn't have even imagined we'd have. It's always a surprise what you find down there.
The other place to get food is the freshie shack. It's a walk in refrigerator and this is where you find our fresh fruit (grapefruit, oranges, apples, bananas, cantaloupe, kiwis, lemons, pears, and a few others). It also has all our fresh veggies, mushrooms, and leafy greens. Eventually all of those aforementioned things will either be eaten or go bad before we leave. But we will freeze some of it too. So right now we're definitely going heavy on the freshy stuff. The freshy shack also has some cheeses, all our liquid dairy (milk, cream, etc), and many, many eggs. And other random cooking things like pine nuts.
Today we had an incredible moon-rise! It was the first time I've seen the moon since Colorado. But this one was spectacular. It was near full, and I first saw it when it was low to the horizon and thus appeared very large. It also coincided with a beautiful sunset, so you had the sunset on one side and on the other side the moon was rising amid a pinkish and purplish glow. And up here at this altitude with the lack of air and humidity the moon is super clear and all its features can be seen sharply. I wish a picture could capture it so I could show you, but there is no way with my cameras that I could do it. When I went onto the MSF roof at night to do something to an instrument it was cool b/c the moon was right there and it was dark enough that you could see the green light of our CAPABL Laser shooting up towards the moon. The capable measures things about clouds like moisture, percent liquid vs frozen and cloud height.
We also watched the shining at night. It's a fitting movie b/c there are some parallels to us now. Stranded alone and isolated in a cold and snowy place with just a few people and care-taking a facility. It's of course a very scary movie and we had fun scaring each other after it. It was even a bit scary to head over to the dark bighouse after the movie to work on my project
8/22
The exercise equipment--2 spinning bikes, a rowing machine, and some free-weights--have been moved into the big house so that they can winterize (turn off the heat and build up on a berm) Smobile. So that will be interesting. We'll be working out where people are eating, cooking, and hanging out. Tonight Marie made stuffed peppers with quinoa and a very good salad
8/23 It was my day to cook (traded with Nate b/c I have ICESat tomorrow which can go long). You get most of the afternoon off to cook. I made a couple of my favorite mama Guy recipes. I made chicken pesto artichoke pasta (with tomatoes and black olives) and her famous magic mushrooms. I also made a salad and then I made muskox trax icecream and peanut butta luva icecream using some of our liquid nitrogen. It was a smashing success! They all really loved it. Elissa said "I'm not just saying this to say this, but it's really good". Storm said, of the mushrooms "These mushrooms are f*cking amazing!" The mushrooms went quick, but I made a huge, huge portion of the pasta so that there would be some leftover for the weekend when no one cooks. So overall a big success! I know I ate too much. I'm stuffed!
8/24
Today was our long icesat traverse. We got back late and still had lots of work to do, so we didn't get to dinner until 8pm. Elissa said she couldn't make it to the big house for dinner without first cracking open a beer! haha. Nate made steak fajitas for dinner, which were delicious. There had been a huge strip steak (i think) thawing in the freshie shack, so he cooked that up.
8/25
It was Elissa's turn for cooking. She made crepes using the crepe pan that one of the french scientists had sent us for helping out with his instrument
8/26
Storm made quite a big meal today. Chicken Cordon Bleu as the main course with a really fruit and veggie filled salad. He also made some cinnamon pineapple dish, 2 apple pies, and 2 loaves of banana bread.
The National Park Service is celebrating it's 100th anniversary this weekend. I made a post on fb about it, and on of of the pictures I got a comment from Phil Higuera who I went on a couple trips doing lake cores to look at ancient fire history in RMNP. Phil was doing a postdoc at University of Washington. Since then he's gone on to be a professor at the University of Idaho and now at the University of Montana. They were fun trips! We stayed at RMNP's really cute cabin up by thunderlake and had Allenspark horsepackers lug his giant metal raft and core sampling stuff up. He was a cool guy. Really into backcountry skiing and mt biking. One of the trips in late September was so cold b/c we were sampling in this icy lake, getting all wet while a blizzard with high winds roared on. I remember coming home and then immediately going to a buff football game. It was chilly in Boulder, but not that cold. Dad was wearing a turtleneck and sweatshirt. And I was still bundled up in winter clothes, chilled to the bone. Anyways, he made a comment that really touched me and made me feel good. As I struggle both with this job and with my thesis and often not feeling like I am doing a good job, it was great to get a comment like this from Phil.
The storm rages on. Winter seems to have come right after everyone left. It's nice to be curled up in the bighouse on the couch with a tea, listening to some music and working on my stats while the blizzard rages on outside.
We're each assigned a day to cook dinner. Saturday and Sunday will be leftovers and on your own. Today was Storm's day, and he set the bar super high! He made artichoke, spinach dip with baked pita crackers. Pork tenderloin, sweet potatoes, broccoli, a salad with mushrooms and tomatoes, and baked some pre-made peanut butter cookies. He set the table for everyone and put a water pitcher on the table as well as a box of wine.
I keep *joking* that for my meals it will be ramen or cheerios, though I think I will try to make something halfway decent. Though nothing like Storms. Some people would absolutely love this portion of the winter season. Getting the afternoon off to work in a super stocked kitchen with nearly everything you could want. I'm sure Elisha would like it. But for me it's stressful and overwhelming. I'm used to the quick meals from Trader Joe's!
8/20/16
Tonight I had dinner with Storm and learned some interesting thing about him. He's from New Hampshire but he went to undergrad at Western State in Gunnison for economics. He later lived in Leadville for 4 years and got a degree in something related to recreation at Colorado Mountain College. And he eventually worked as an EMT on an ambulance. He was big into long distance mountain biking for a while doing some of the races bro does now like the Leadville 100, Montezuma's revenge, and some of the otehr 100 mile race around the west. He's getting ready to do a 24 day grand canyon trip, which he's very excited for.
8/21/16
Bro's Birthday!!
Today was our first Sunday without Hannah, which means our workload doubled. So instead of just working a couple hours on Sunday, I ended up having to work 6 hours. It was cold temperature wise, but no wind and the sun was strong, so I did a 3 hour ski in my t-shirt.
Today for lunch I made a yummy salad with 3 types of cheese, avocado, mushrooms, spinach, and kale (all organic). I also made an egg scramble with pretty much the same ingredients.
There's a couple of places we can get food here. The freezer trench which is a giant snow trench has probably enough food to last our group of 5 for 5 years. It has everything imaginable. From seafood to meats to pastas to chocolate bars to cereals to frozen fruits and veggies to nuts to different sauces. It's sort of like a grocery store, except all free! So it's fun to go shopping down there for what you want. I go for the high price items that I know I wouldn't buy back home. At night for snacks these days I've been enjoying macadamia nuts, almonds, and dried blueberries. We have a couple 10 pound boxes of macadamia nuts. That's several hundred dollars worth of them! I also get a chuckle when I go by the macadamia box b/c my dad and his fraternity brothers used to call their balls macadamians. So they'd go around asking "how are your macadamians?" There's lots of steaks and other nice cuts of meat. And there's shrimp and scallops and fish and even several boxes of crab and lobster. There are so many types of cheeses. Some I've never heard of. I imagine it being in the Longmont cheese factory and figure it's several thousand dollars worth of cheese alone. But anyways, the freezer trench has about anything you could want and has many things I wouldn't have even imagined we'd have. It's always a surprise what you find down there.
The other place to get food is the freshie shack. It's a walk in refrigerator and this is where you find our fresh fruit (grapefruit, oranges, apples, bananas, cantaloupe, kiwis, lemons, pears, and a few others). It also has all our fresh veggies, mushrooms, and leafy greens. Eventually all of those aforementioned things will either be eaten or go bad before we leave. But we will freeze some of it too. So right now we're definitely going heavy on the freshy stuff. The freshy shack also has some cheeses, all our liquid dairy (milk, cream, etc), and many, many eggs. And other random cooking things like pine nuts.
Today we had an incredible moon-rise! It was the first time I've seen the moon since Colorado. But this one was spectacular. It was near full, and I first saw it when it was low to the horizon and thus appeared very large. It also coincided with a beautiful sunset, so you had the sunset on one side and on the other side the moon was rising amid a pinkish and purplish glow. And up here at this altitude with the lack of air and humidity the moon is super clear and all its features can be seen sharply. I wish a picture could capture it so I could show you, but there is no way with my cameras that I could do it. When I went onto the MSF roof at night to do something to an instrument it was cool b/c the moon was right there and it was dark enough that you could see the green light of our CAPABL Laser shooting up towards the moon. The capable measures things about clouds like moisture, percent liquid vs frozen and cloud height.
We also watched the shining at night. It's a fitting movie b/c there are some parallels to us now. Stranded alone and isolated in a cold and snowy place with just a few people and care-taking a facility. It's of course a very scary movie and we had fun scaring each other after it. It was even a bit scary to head over to the dark bighouse after the movie to work on my project
8/22
The exercise equipment--2 spinning bikes, a rowing machine, and some free-weights--have been moved into the big house so that they can winterize (turn off the heat and build up on a berm) Smobile. So that will be interesting. We'll be working out where people are eating, cooking, and hanging out. Tonight Marie made stuffed peppers with quinoa and a very good salad
8/23 It was my day to cook (traded with Nate b/c I have ICESat tomorrow which can go long). You get most of the afternoon off to cook. I made a couple of my favorite mama Guy recipes. I made chicken pesto artichoke pasta (with tomatoes and black olives) and her famous magic mushrooms. I also made a salad and then I made muskox trax icecream and peanut butta luva icecream using some of our liquid nitrogen. It was a smashing success! They all really loved it. Elissa said "I'm not just saying this to say this, but it's really good". Storm said, of the mushrooms "These mushrooms are f*cking amazing!" The mushrooms went quick, but I made a huge, huge portion of the pasta so that there would be some leftover for the weekend when no one cooks. So overall a big success! I know I ate too much. I'm stuffed!
8/24
Today was our long icesat traverse. We got back late and still had lots of work to do, so we didn't get to dinner until 8pm. Elissa said she couldn't make it to the big house for dinner without first cracking open a beer! haha. Nate made steak fajitas for dinner, which were delicious. There had been a huge strip steak (i think) thawing in the freshie shack, so he cooked that up.
8/25
It was Elissa's turn for cooking. She made crepes using the crepe pan that one of the french scientists had sent us for helping out with his instrument
8/26
Storm made quite a big meal today. Chicken Cordon Bleu as the main course with a really fruit and veggie filled salad. He also made some cinnamon pineapple dish, 2 apple pies, and 2 loaves of banana bread.
The National Park Service is celebrating it's 100th anniversary this weekend. I made a post on fb about it, and on of of the pictures I got a comment from Phil Higuera who I went on a couple trips doing lake cores to look at ancient fire history in RMNP. Phil was doing a postdoc at University of Washington. Since then he's gone on to be a professor at the University of Idaho and now at the University of Montana. They were fun trips! We stayed at RMNP's really cute cabin up by thunderlake and had Allenspark horsepackers lug his giant metal raft and core sampling stuff up. He was a cool guy. Really into backcountry skiing and mt biking. One of the trips in late September was so cold b/c we were sampling in this icy lake, getting all wet while a blizzard with high winds roared on. I remember coming home and then immediately going to a buff football game. It was chilly in Boulder, but not that cold. Dad was wearing a turtleneck and sweatshirt. And I was still bundled up in winter clothes, chilled to the bone. Anyways, he made a comment that really touched me and made me feel good. As I struggle both with this job and with my thesis and often not feeling like I am doing a good job, it was great to get a comment like this from Phil.
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| first moon we have seen here in Greenland (looking east) |
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| surnise during the moonrise (looking west) |
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| moon over the MSF (also note my ski tracks. The only "downhill" skiin on all of the station) |
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| MSF roof instruments. This is the view you get on one of the webcam links I have given people. Notice the moon and the green laser light. That's from CAPABL laser of CU that measures cloud stuff |
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| Mr. Gnome helping with food prep |
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| entrance to the freezer trench |
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| my shopping cart at the freezer trench |
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| some of the cheeses in the freezer trench |
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| some of the dried and frozen fruits and nuts in the trench |
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| more frozen fruits |
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| the candy! |
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| inside the freezer trench |
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| end of the freezer trench |
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| Mr. Gnome and the magic mushrooms. Gnomes love magic and mushrooms! |
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| Mr. Gnome and the 2 flavors of ice cream ingredients |
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| food prep |
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| Mr. Gnome overlooking liquid nitrogen |
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| making the chicken artichoke pesto pasta |
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| finished product. Forgot to get a picture before most of the mushrooms were gone |
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| Storm gave 2 thumbs up to the meal |
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| the peanut butta luva and moskus trax icecream, staying cold outside |
3 comments:
Yay! Mr Arctic-Gnome! Good job on your dinner, looks delish!😜
We will never again think of Macadamia nuts in quite the same manner as before! And hey, do you 'spose those magic mushrooms are in any way similar to the ones I tried in college back in the 60's?!?
hahahaha!
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