I've been trying to come up with something appropriate to follow the 2-minute showers email, but there aren't too many more examples of how grievously we suffer here. If I were a good enough writer to really describe Thanksgiving here, for example, you'd all be running to the job fair next April to get signed up. It's our first real holiday, far enough into the season that we're getting to know each other. There's a ton of amazing food and enough community goodwill to go around the room two or three times over. The Disco party of course was completely indescribable. The time since then has been "work mode" but even that hasn't been dull: the new station is going up, we have two field camps out (a first for here), and there are all kinds of smaller projects going on.
I got 20km out from station on a snow-stake run, measuring annual accumulation with the Meteorologists. That was way way different from our normal Dome-centered existence: that far out the station is a very small dark dot on the horizon (we wouldn't see it at all except that snow stake line ended on a slight rise) and it was just us and our little diesel vehicle, a cute little German ski-resort "Pisten Bully" ("Slopes Fellow"? German-speakers?) that is unfortunately not happy at our altitude (oops). We were having a great time on the way out bouncing over sastrugi, piling out at each snow stake, doing our measuring job, and piling back in again; but when we were done with the last stake, we each spontaneously walked away in a different direction so the mutter of the diesel engine died out and everybody stood, sat, or lay down on the snow and thought their own thoughts. About 20 minutes of that and everybody turned and walked back to the Pisten Bully. I can't say what anybody else was thinking and I'm not even sure what I was thinking, but it was a quieter trip back to the Dome.
I also got to visit one of our field camps. They're drilling holes in the ice this year, to hold sensitive seismic instruments for the USGS. It was great to get to visit out there, they're all neat people and the camp feels like a camp instead of a station. Also if you're riding there or back in the sled behind the snowmobile and you lie down, your head is about 6" off the ground and the sastrugi look really cool sliding by at 35mph.
We're finally noticing Christmas coming up. There are little fake Christmas trees sprouting inside the Dome and tacky but cheerful decorations in Comms and the Galley. Some of us care about Christmas, and some of us just care about the two-day holiday. I usually either sleep lots or not enough here, and this year is a "sleep lots" year; so I'm looking forward to two consecutive days of sleeping in.
Anything else? I was offered a primary Winter job but turned it down, because it's a less interesting job than the one I'm an alternate for. It did give me something to agonize over for a few days since there's a great crew here for the winter and it's appealing to winter sooner rather than later. But for once I'm turning down an immediate experience in favor of what I hope will be a better experience next year (or this year if either Drew or Shayne drops out, but it'll take something major for either one of them to go home and I don't want to see that because I like them both). I'm having a great time at work, I'm lucky to have great co-workers who support my desire to learn more and a boss who wants to hire me for the PC Tech job next year, so it's even part of my job description to cross-train with Drew (this year's tech). I'm getting around the station more and doing more advanced problem-solving so it's not just the same old same old.
Enough of this, it's time to go peel potatoes for our Christmas dinner.
Take care everybody,
-Sarah
ps - [later] Only two potato-peeling-related injuries. Yahoo!