Hokay here's just a regular day.
The alarm goes off. Since my roommate Kerry gets up early to work out (ugh!) I have the luxury of hitting the snooze button twice. Eventually I roll upright and climb carefully out of the top bunk, fighting the mental image of toppling off in my sleep-laden daze. While I'm dressing Kerry comes back in and we exchange morning grunts. I go down the hall to the bathroom and then head out. GWR, the building I live in, has an external stairwell with windows. I stop briefly, mesmerized by the lighting on the glacier to our west: the sky is overcast but the ice, bare of snow at the end of summer, glows above a dark and choppy sea. Small floating icebergs also catch the light. Several crabeater seals treat a conveniently-shaped bergy bit near shore as their private lounge.
Outside, I head out along the wooden boardwalk that allows us to ignore the rugged landscape between our main buildings. I leave GWR at ground level and enter the 2nd floor of Bio. I drop my jacket off in the cheerfully cluttered workshop that I share with Chuck the Comms Tech, and head straight for the coffee. People know by now not to try for conversation with me at this point.
My morning routine - email and antivirus news - is interrupted by word of a broken printer. I research the issue online, figure a workaround, start a parts order. I also troubleshoot some issues with Firefox and our internal website, hit the Monday crossword hard at morning break, and recover some files from a dying hard drive on a researcher's laptop. That gets me to 11:30 when I take an early lunch hour: I like to work out with nobody in the gym. It's turned sunny so I get to open the door. Working out is dull but I'm listening to Horatio Hornblower radio drama. Back in the office after a brief lunch I wrap up the laptop work and help some people with questions.
Routine works fills in up till afternoon break, then I get together with some other OSAR (Ocean Search and Rescue) members for a survival cache swapout. We have caches on several of the islands inside our routine boating area, and we're working through changing out each one with new contents (food, water, radios, tent, etc). This is work but it's also considered a bonus because it's nice to get out, so we take turns on these trips. Today we're going to Cormorant Island, southeast of station almost at the boating limit, and it has turned into a ridiculously gorgeous day. We suit up in regulation floatcoats, load the 3 cache barrels in a big zodiac, and vamoose. I'm driving and I'm happy.
On Cormorant we dodge three fur seals. They're tetchy and known to be agressive when cornered so we don't cut them off from the water as we walk back and forth with the barrels. Eventually they flop off in a huff. After the work is done we sit down for a few minutes. Most of the penguins are gone but we count 7 Adelies and 1 chinstrap. The displaced fur seals are cruising around just off the shore, climbing up on rocks and sliding down again. Cormorants cruise around but not in numbers like they used to have - not doing so well locally, we could talk global warming but the day is just too beautiful. We just appreciate a little bit. The nearest coastline to us is all glacier-covered, and just down the Peninsula we can see ranks of mountains. We see some small glacier calving, nothing big.
On the way back we cruise past some large icebergs. It still takes me by surprise how something that big and substantial can move right along with the current, or just roll over when I'm not looking.
I get back to station in time for our weekly IT conference call. This week it's all about issues at the other stations so I cut out and let Curt, the network engineer, represent us. Dinner is excellent as always. Afterwards I struggle a bit to catch up on personal correspondence - sorry everybody - working on it. Then I nab a borrowed Peru guidebook and head for the comfy seats in the GWR lounge, but walking through the galley I'm sidetracked by the sight of new firewood coming in from the scrap bin at the carp shop. While Sammy is toting wood I get the fire going and the process lures in a few more people. I wind up spending most of the evening on the couch, intermittently reading and chatting. Ryan and Peter play guitar and sing a little bit. Rebecca is working on a hooked rug of her own design with whales and water. Julie and Austen talk sailing, Tim and Nikki talk travel plans. There are big windows on either side of the wood stove and we watch the weather turn back to stormy, low pressure coming in. By the time I walk back up to GWR it's spitting rain and blowing 30 knots. Oh, and it's dark: sunset this time of year is just past 8pm.
I'm invited to the bar but I decide to make it an early evening. I read a bit to wind down and turn the light off at 11pm. That's it.
Best to all,
-Sarah