Okay here's a typical midwinter work day at the South Pole. This is a blow-by-blow account so read it when you've got some time. Or don't read it at all, unless you're curious about normal life here.
From 6:30-7am my sunrise alarm clock turns on and slowly gets brighter. I wake up sometime in this period and lie in a stupor looking at the light until my regular alarm goes off. Then I have a short period of sitting stupidly at the side of my bed looking at my toes until I haul myself up and get dressed. The flannel-lined jeans are the favorite now, they were too warm for inside wear in the summer but I'm living in them now. I have a cozy 5'8" by 9' room in the old station, it's pretty generic and beat up but I've got some colorful fabric and what have you hanging up so I have something to look at. Actually my room is one of only 2 that's in almost the original Alberta Trailer Co configuration (yep all the old buildings are trailers), and I like it a lot better than the rooms that have been rebuilt to have lofts etc. The 2nd bunk has been turned into a storage shelf and that's it.
The bathroom is down the hall, co-ed of course since the place was only built for guys. Then I walk outside and down the stairs and back in again - my office is almost directly underneath my room. Can't really beat that for a commute. In my 20 seconds outside I might get dusted with snow, the underside of the Dome is gathering its winter coating of loose frost. I might say hello to Lisae the Safety Chick (her words) or Don in Met (weather). The hallway and computer lab are dim, none of us needs a lot of light to get around. I do turn on office lights and open the door so the office warms up a bit - we run in the mid-50s. There's usually some email waiting and I get a phone call or two, usually easy questions (have you tried rebooting?). I run database transactions so our stock and inventory systems stay (allegedly) up to date. I could write a whole separate message about our inventory database but I won't. I make coffee and trade stupid early-morning jokes with Henry the Network Engineer. If people in the Dome have problems, I'll go over and visit; if people in the New Station have problems, I'll try to solve them over the phone or make an appointment for just before or after lunch. If nobody is having problems I have ongoing tasks like inventory or projects like rebuilding a laptop for the power plant. On the other side of the office Henry is rebuilding a server for our Active Directory system (not a Windows geek? You don't care). People know I do Comms, so if somebody's going out somewhere and needs anything done back here they can ask me to help. I'll set up a task I can do from a computer over there (it's just the next building over) and hang out by the radios. This might be the fire alarm techs testing in the Dark Sector, for example - they call in and ask me to disconnect zones on the fire panel, so the whole station doesn't get the alarm when they test.
At 11:30 I grab my coat (and hat, glove liners, mittens, face mask, and goggles) and head out of the Dome. The surface route to the New Station is shorter than the tunnel, and I like to get outside every day unless the weather is really awful. Today is decent, -74F with about 13 knots of wind. The main entrance to the Dome is closed with two big wooden doors but there's a small person-sized door that we clamber in and out of. When I walk outside I'm at the bottom of a pit: since the Dome isn't getting as much action as it used to, we let the entrance drift in with snow in between bimonthly-or-so visits from our Heavy Equipment Operator to take out the trash. I climb up the stairs (thanks Met guys for shovelling) to surface level and all of a sudden I'm surrounded by stars. There are some faint auroras today but nothing spectacular. No more sunlight, not even a glimmer on the horizon. The moon is a crescent, very pretty but not much good for light, so I turn on my red flashlight. Red is good here, not just because I like to see what's outside the flashlight beam, but also because most of the winter science is astronomy and they like to keep things quiet. That's also why the New Station looks like an abandoned spaceship, floating a story off the snow: it's bright and warm and cheerful on the inside, but all the windows have been blacked out. There is a round window glowing in the door to the Beer Can, that's for safety I think. I walk slowly over, or briskly if the wind is blowing. From the snow level it's just one flight of stairs up and I'm in a different world, as different from the Dome as New Jersey. Everything is bright and clean and straight lines and colors, oh my goodness the colors - the only explanation I can come up with is that the person who picked out the wall coverings was color-blind. We have these checkerboard accent areas, some are red-and-black and some are orange-and-black and upstairs by Medical it's red-and-purple. Very odd. In between there are plastic panels with horizontal ridges, ugly AND hard to clean! Whee.
The Galley is nice though, almost too nice but I shouldn't be one of those obnoxious nostalgic people. It's long and skinny with the serving line along the left wall, and we can chat with the cooks across the counter. If Don has control over the music it's mushy 1970's; if Rich has it, it's oldies; if Keros has it, it could be anything. The food is almost always totally awesome and the variety is impressive, so they can play whatever music they want. Once I load up I have a choice of tables: with 75 people here there are definitely groups, but the social boundaries are fuzzy and you get some wildly varying and eclectic conversations depending on who's sitting with whom. Some tables have a crossword puzzle going and I can usually contribute.
The store opens at noon most days so I mosey downstairs. Half the store is still filled with stacks of beer (cans only, bottles were sold out a long time ago) and soda. There are shelves of videotapes and DVDs, all free but you have to check them out. We have limited options for alcohol and toiletries; we sold out of Bombay gin last night and some folks feel strongly about Bombay vs Tanqueray, but I think they'll get over it soon. I bought one of the last bottles, mostly so I can wait a month or so and then taunt Jason with it. Sometimes I look at the toiletries shelves as if something new might show up, don't ask me why. We have snacks too but I don't usually bother.
If I have any New Station tasks to do they're usually in the computer lab, so I walk back upstairs. Several people work up there so I get to trade taunts and insults with them and anybody using the public computers. The lab is big and bright and nice and it could also be in New Jersey, especially with the windows blacked out - standard office furniture, cubicles, you've been there. Oh except the chairs got frozen on the way down and the casters all broke, and the hydraulics froze so they don't adjust up or down. Oops. We've been having some trouble with bad ports on our Cisco switches in the New Station, current guess is static issues - also it's hard to get a good ground here, sitting on almost 2 miles of snow and ice! Ask the electricians about that, if you have a spare half hour.
Back down to the Dome, outside again unless it's windy or I'm carrying something awkward: there are more doors in the tunnel route, but they're easier to manage. I try to have projects scheduled for the afternoon, something to keep me moving around a bit. Right now we're getting our good-bandwidth satellite window starting at about 4pm, so I save all my Internet tasks for late afternoon. On my desk now I have a friend's laptop and mp3 player, I'm helping him get it set up. One of the things I like here is that we can help people with their personal gadgets, it's lower priority than work-related items of course but we can generally make the time.
Today is Saturday, which is a regular work day here but we have our departmental safety meeting and housemouse (town cleanup) so it's a short afternoon. The safety meeting is fun because IT is a good group: me and Henry on the computer side, Sean the Comms Tech and Eyvind the Satcomms Tech on the comms side. We ran through the official safety videos so now we have reruns or watch the MST3K versions. Railroad safety! What to do on a date! We drink soda and I bring something from my stash of good snacks, thank you Mom and Dad. Then I go back over to Upper Berthing for housemouse, it's a bit of a contest to see who gets there first and starts cleaning. That's the end of the work day so we usually finish up with a beer in the hallway and then walk up to dinner in a small mob.
We don't have any special parties or events this weekend, but people tend to clump in a few places. There is a very silly bar in the New Galley, it looks more like a breakfast counter than a bar, but it gets some use. The bar in the Dome is more what a bar should be: dark and smoky, wood instead of plastic. Some of the big smokers are quitting in a group, starting this week, so that might change the bar, um, atmosphere (cough cough). Some Saturday nights the bar scene is conversational and some nights it's got crazy dancing and hollering. Oh and it's not a commercial bar - it's BYO and we all take turns bartending. We don't have any scary drunks this year but there are a couple people who aren't really welcome, like the electrician whose idea of a good time is getting drunk and grabbing people or the carpenter who gets drapey. I like them both just fine when they're sober. And don't worry Mom and Dad, I do drink when I'm in the bar but I learned a long time ago not to try to keep up. I'll socialize for a while, and when I feel like leaving my bed is less than 100 feet away. I go to sleep happy, knowing that I can sleep in and there will be latte's served in old Biomed (berthing now) in the morning.
If any of you made it this far I hope you enjoyed it, this is my life and it will be for another 6 months. It's quiet and routine but I'm pretty much happy pretty much most of the time, and when I leave in November I'll be plenty ready for a change. Thanks to the folks who write me back, I like knowing what people are doing out there.
Best,
-Sarah