Trav's Travels: update on McMurdo life

11/10/17

It’s been a while since I wrote much about life at McM. Things are going well. We’re busy as usual but we both like our jobs and we have cool co-workers. The Crary lab is basically full now. The Crary crew is really cool this year. Carolyn is awesome to work with, and they hired a 3^rd lab assistant, Marci (who had my same job at Summit Station right before I got there, so she turned over the tasking to me for 2 weeks.), since we don’t have a supervisor this year. The instrument tech, Richard, is funny (and grumpy) as always. Linnah, the HazMat specialist is great. We worked with her in shuttles our first year. The research associate Neal is really cool. And then Mitch is of course so funny and one of my best friends here. Elisha and Wyn work across the hall in crary supply. You know what I think about Elisha and then Wyn is a cool guy as well. Carolyn is from Wisconsin, loves knitting, lives in a commune in Madison, worked at Palmer station for 7 years and has a masters in Microbiology. Linnah is from New Mexico, loves the outdoors,has also worked at Palmer, has a masters in geology, and is all about getting the lab staff out to do cool things. Richard is from Texas but works full time in Denver. He has a funny sense of humor, often gets grumpy about certain things, and won’t care about other things. Carolyn, Linnah, and Richard are all sailors. Marci is from Santa Cruz and has a master’s in earth science. She has worked in McM as a grantee several times. Neal has a lot of experience working at Palmer, the South Pole, and here. He has a good sense of humor and is becoming a good friend. Mitch is from Denver and is just one of the funniest guys around and always makes me feel funny as well. Wyn is from Wisconsin, is really into music, is in 7 bands down here, and is a hard-working and nice guy.

We’ve settled into McMurdo life. We have our room in dorm 211 set-up. We’ve been going to weekly volleyball, and doing our insanity workouts that Mitch organizes daily. I haven’t been going to basketball yet b/c of my finger, but hopefully soon. We’re signed up for swing dance lessons, which start soon. We’ve gone to a few travel log talks, including one about first ascent climbing in Greenland, and science lectures. There’s a group here filming for the BBC. They’re working on the next big Planet Earth. It’s going to be called 7 Worlds and will be about how the physical forces of each continent influences the life forms. They’ve been really cool to get to know and to talk about their experiences and the places they’ve been. They gave one of the science lectures and gave us an early screening of Blue Planet 2, which comes out in America next month. So that’s pretty cool.

We’ve done some hiking around the area and we checked out a couple of fat-tire bikes, which we rode on the sea ice the other day. Yesterday we skate-skied out to Scott Base for American Night (On Thursday nights the kiwi base opens up their bar to Americans). We went to one of the open mic nights last week where my old roommate Jerod sang some songs while playing guitar. There were definitely lots of talented musicians. At lunch they have this thing called Just Dance where people dance by following this Nintendo wii type thing. It’s pretty fun, and I’m trying to get Elisha to go more often.

I’m also going back and forth with Todd on drafts of my manuscript for publication, so that’s kept me busy.

We had our first big dance party during Halloween. Elisha and I dressed up as a Truffula tree and the Lorax from Dr. Seuss’ ‘The Lorax’ which is one of my favorite conservation books of all time. Elisha was the tall tree and I was the fat little lorax.

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The job is going well though. I feel much more relaxed than last time, probably because there is no supervisor and the crew is really cool. I’m being better this year at meeting and be-friending the different science groups, so that is good. The food is of course yummy, and we are of course eating too much of it! With more regular flights recently, we have gotten freshies, which is of course a big morale booster! The internet is really super slow and the phones haven’t really been working, but it can be nice being disconnected from the world.

11/12/17

Today I was hoping to bike out to Castle Rock, but the weather was pretty bad, so instead I addressed the comments that Todd sent to me for my paper this week, and sent it off to him. Last night the Crary group had planned to ski out to LDB, but a storm was predicted to come in (it didn't), so we couldn't go out. Instead Linnah bought a box of wine and we all shared that in the galley. We sat in the backroom of the galley for over 3 hours just talking and laughing. Our group is hilarious, so it was a great time.

They recently had put the observation tube in (a tube they stick into the sea ice that you can climb down into thus giving you the ability to check out the life and landscape under the sea ice), so Elisha and I checked it out during lunch. As always it's really cool. My favorite part is listening to the seals make their calls and whistles. It's this mesmerizing, slightly eerie, slightly scifi sounding call. I didn't see any seals while I was down there, but I saw some fish and sea angels. Elisha saw 2 divers (Paul Cziko and Henry Kaiser from one of the fish research groups). It's fun b/c they know her, so they waved to her and Paul imitated a mooning gesture.

11/14

Last night we went to another open-mic night and tonight we were invited by the Kiwi science techs for a yummy meal at Scott Base: Elisha's first time there for a meal. Always nice to get icecream!

11/16

It’s been snowing hard the last couple of days. The kind of snow with big flakes that accumulates. It’s rare to have that kind of snow here in McM because most of the snow comes blowing in sideways. And it’s such a dry place it hardly does snow at all. But this morning when I took the truck out, I had to actually wipe the windshield clear of snow. I’ve been excited all day. Something about a powder day!