I find myself doing a lot of thinking on the short walk to work in the morning. If I don’t write down what I’m thinking quickly though I find myself loosing the thought. (I now contend my short term memory is only good for about fifteen minutes)

Anyway, before I forget, I was wondering about midnight shifts. We are at the time of year here when we have continuous bright daylight. The next sunset won’t occur until February 20, 2008. I read somewhere that light and dark affect our sleep patterns. In spite of that my body seems to react to mid shifts just like it would back home. I do sleep in a blacked out room so that may also play a role. Thankfully I work very few mid shifts.

We also had a flurry of activity yesterday. We have a policy that no personal business should be conducted on business only computers. Unfortunately we have a couple of guys who think they are exempt from that policy because of their vast knowledge of computers. One of those geniuses infected our computer with a virus yesterday. Our IT guy worked for several hours battling the thing. By noon we were back up and running but it meant a whole lot of extra work for us. The bad news is the virus is back this morning so it looks like we are in for another long day!

Cheers

Sorry I haven’t written a blog in a few days but the weather has cleared and we are flying around the clock to try to catch up on the backlog of people and supplies that has built up over the last few weeks. I’m also training new controllers so from the minute I get to work until the second I leave I have a trainee welded to my hip. It’s rewarding watching them learn to control in this very unusual environment.

As I said earlier the weather has cleared and the temperature for the last few days has been in the +20’sF and the wind has been relatively calm. Very pleasant conditions compared to what we have been experiencing. As I’ve told you before there are no paved roads or surfaces of any kind here just varying sizes of volcanic rocks. As the snow melts it creates a kind of snowy, icy, slushy mess much like we had in the spring in Minnesota when I was a kid. The only difference now is I walk around the mud puddles instead of walking through them (Well most of the time).

I you’ll permit me I’d like to give you a brief glimpse of a typical work day. I get up at 5:00 AM get dressed and head over to the dining facility. I have breakfast until 5:30 then head to work. From 5:45 until 2:00 PM I’m at work. After work I spend about 2 hours at the gerbil gym. By 5:00 I’m back in my room to call Deni for about a 30 minute chat. At 5:45 my roommate and I watch an episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation(We call it “going to church” because so many people do it and there is daily Catholic Mass at the same time). With no commercials that ends at 6:30 when I head over to eat dinner. Eating and table talk usually last until around 7:30 then it’s back to the room for some reading or TV or over to the coffee house for some cribbage a glass of wine and fellowship. Many other scheduled activities also occur after dinner like science lectures, bingo, ballroom dancing, live music concerts, travel log presentations, yacht club meetings etc. I’m usually in bed by 10:00 and then back at it again the next day. I’m on this schedule Monday through Saturday right now but could go onto a rotating shift anytime.

A friend on mine here, Bob Zook, who was an electronics maintenance guy, last year for our air traffic control equipment, has returned this year with his wife Stacy Kim as a National Science Foundation grantee. Bob calls himself a gizmologist (I hope I spelled that right). He’s an amazing and very creative man. So much so that when he talked last year I seriously questioned if he really had been all the places he claimed to have been and done all the things he claimed to have done. Have you ever known someone like that? Well it turns out he has and this year he and his team are field testing an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV). His ROV is made out of a six inch diameter piece of PVC drain pipe about 50 inches long. Of course it has been modified with thrusters, cameras and other electronic gear. He has used remote control car controls to control the vehicle. His side thruster props are powered by model helicopter motors and for buoyancy inside he uses glass jars. So far they have had it down to 200 feet below the ice. The big advantage to his ROV is that it can be lowered into a 7-8 inch diameter hole in the ice which can be cut using an auger much like ice fishermen use up north. The difference is that the ice is 5 to 20 feet thick. Other ROV’s that could be used require a hole from 10 inches to 4 feet in diameter. These larger holes take anywhere from 4 hours to 24 hours to open up. Because the holes are so large they can’t use an auger and must use a melting process so in addition to being time consuming it uses lots of fuel. One of the things they have been able to do this year already is locate some undersea experiments that were placed on the floor of the sound as far back as 1967 (The year I was a sophomore in high school so it can’t be that “far” back). This is just another truly interesting group of people in a fascinating place.

Well we had a good flying day and finally got some people and cargo moved around. It felt good to get in some actual controlling for a change.

One of the ongoing events last year was ballroom dancing classes. You may or may not know it but I am a big fan of, Dancing With the Stars, so this sounded like fun to me. Deni is always after me to learn more ballroom dancing so I decided to give it a try. The class is taught by a young couple who took up ballroom 3 years ago so they could dance at their wedding. They are not professional teachers but were really trying hard to get our feet moving in the right direction and with the beat. When Deni and I have taken group lessons before the instructors always wanted us to alternate partners. I’ve always resisted that even though Deni encouraged me to dance with others. I figured if I was going to embarrass myself I wanted to do it with someone who loves me.

I was surprised when I arrived and there were 16 men and only 10 women. I’ve noticed that if there are more women they will pair up and one will lead and the other will follow. Men seem to be able to resist that urge and wait for a partner to become available before they will dance. I was very pleased when I danced with a woman who was less talented than I was! We spent an hour going over three basic moves. Hopefully I’ll retain some of the knowledge until next week.

Sunday night I attended a live classical guitar performance by wto of our local musicians. The first set was mainly Grateful Dead tunes and the second was predominately original songs. I’m always amazed by the quality of music we are treated to.

Thankfully our new priest arrived Saturday so I was able to return to my normal lector role on Sunday. When I left church I was amazed at the bright sun, warm temperature (28F) and relative calm winds. After brunch I headed out for a walk down to Hut Point (about a 15 minute walk from town). My intentions were to hike up a hill called Arrival Heights. It’s a long gradual upgrade of volcanic rock that leads to a great vantage point for watching arriving ships. Of course the sound is still frozen over but it will be the first place you can see the ice edge as the season progresses and the sound slowly transforms from ice to water.

Short Blog today. Looks like good (relatively speaking) weather today. Full flight schedule. I’ll let you know how it went tomorrow.

Ann Curry, her crew and the Arch Bishop should all be heading home today on the outbound C-17.

As I walked to work this morning I noticed a light blanket of clouds draped over Mt Discovery. The mountain seemed to be saying, "go away and let me sleep in you know it’s going to be another day of bad weather". The sun even peaked out through a sliver of a crack between clouds seemingly asking, "can I come out to play today". The answer was a resounding no as the clouds slammed back together. The good news is late last night we were able to launch three C-130’s to the South Pole. All three completed their mission much to everyone’s great relief. I was in the coffee house when the word came down at about 8:00 pm that we were a go for launch. It was very reminiscent of war movies I’ve seen when a currier runs into the pilot’s ready room, there is a flurry of activity as everyone is notified of the mission, people say their goodbyes and head off to get on the airplanes. All of today’s flights are currently on weather hold including the C-17 from Christchurch. We are so far behind now that the Air Force has positioned 2 of the C-17’s in Christchurch so if there is a break in the weather they can start round the clock operations.

There is some good news though. The Arch Bishop and our Priest returned from the Pole so it looks like I’m back to my traditional role as a lector for Sunday’s mass.

On the Ann Curry front, hurray, she made it to the South Pole. They almost got stuck there though as she wanted to extend her time there to send a live report back to the States. Because of their delayed return to McMurdo they almost missed a small window of good weather for landing. But what’s the old saying “All’s well that end’s well” or as pilots like to say “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing”.