I come from the land of the ice and snow.

Okay, so I've been in Antarctica for a week now.  I would have posted sooner, but I've been working 9 hour days and just vegetate most of the evenings.  We're 18 hours ahead here, so making phone calls back home requires very complex math (add 6 hours, subtract a day).  I'll get through to someone on a phone at some point.  Hopefully my calling cards aren't drained by then.

Here is a quick photo of the Windsor Bed and Breakfast hotel I stayed in.  It doesn't look like much, but apparently they have FORTY rooms.  On Monday, the day of our flight, we were to be on the shuttle to the Antarctic Center at the Christchurch airport by 4:15 or 4:30.  I actually got up before 3am because I was having some very strange dreams caused by a strong need to pee. So I just stayed up once I was up.  We piled into a couple of shuttles and were promptly...well, shuttled.

Here I am in the building of the Antarctic Center for the people actually flying down to Antarctica.  The Center itself is actually a tourist attraction, but I didn't see that section if we were even near it.  I am wearing all issued clothing here.  I should have gone with my original plan to dress in my street clothes with the required exterior Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear on over, but after watching several others pile on the long underwear and having one particularly bossy fellow traveller (who by the way has never been to Antarctica, but BRAGS about having been in Iraq) tell me to wear other stuff I ended up going along with the pack and piling on some of what was in the two bags.  I ended up being a little warm for the flight, but was fine once on the ground. 

Mid flight.  This is the passenger section in the front of the C-17 we flew down in.  The seats in the middle are on a large plate on a set of tracks in the floor like all the cargo.  When the plane got bumpy, the plates shift, so anyone there got a little more jostled.  I wound up sitting on the row along the left side, under a power outlet (which apparently I could have used, but never did).

In the photo above is a large wooden box stacked atop large rolls of a plastic material (fuel bladders, I heard).  My seat was lined up on the left of that last roll of plastic.  Despite having gotten up so early, I didn't get any sleep.  I talked with other passengers as well as you could in a cargo compartment that wasn't insulated for sound (I wound up wearing the earmuffs I brought with me the entire flight) and after a bit I watched a movie on my PSP with another coworker.  In the middle of the photo above are several people sitting on a short crate of science things playing Scrabble.

Here is one of my first views from the plane.  I don't know if that is part of Antarctica or not, as we were maybe halfway through the flight at that point.    We had plenty of views of snow and ice for quite a while.  Eventually we got told to buckle in for landing.  it is an interesting experience landing in a plane when you have no idea where the ground is.  I kept listening to the plane noises to give me some kind of hint as to when we would be getting close.  For an ice runway the landing at Pegasus was quite smooth.  Apparently Fleet Ops has been doing a kickass job at keeping the roads and such in good repair.

A photo taken through the filthy window of Ivan the Terra Bus.  There was a large greeting party outside the plane, which amused me.  One of the first things I immediately noticed about the Ross Sea was that we were on a massive flat area.  I think I heard that the ice runways are usually on SIX FEET of ICE.  Looking around it is just flat 'land' as far as you can see, with mountains containing the whole thing like a giant, flat valley.  It is all very surreal, but fun to just stare at.  McMurdo base is on the edge of the sea, so you can see all the way across in good weather.

A photo of McMurdo on a good day.   The place is like a small town.  There are several dormitories and plenty of shops.  I found out I was assigned to the Carpenter shop.  It has been an interesting place to work, and I like all but one of my coworkers (there are only a handful now, at least until Mainbody arrives in the summer).  Working in the Carpenter shop is good because we can access to tool and scrap lumber to work on craft projects in our spare time, and I've been told it is where you want to work if you want to get out because they do a lot of work setting up field camps.  I look forward to that, and taking the Happy Camper course which clear you to work outside of the main stations.  Happy Camper consists of 24 hours of roughing it in the wilderness.  You have to make shelters in the snow and then sleep in them.  You also have to pee in bottles, since the USAP does not like people 'leaving things behind', even if they've collected later.  Odd, since we're driving about in gas and diesel trucks and all sorts of stuff probably blows out of McMurdo in a strong wind.

I think I have adjusted fairly well to living down here.  One of the only problems I had was a bad headache on Thursday or Friday supposedly from not getting enough water.  I'm better now, though.  Also, the day we flew down I started having allergies on the plane, and by the end of the night my I was sneezing constantly and had all sorts of sinus pressure.  Great way to spend you first night in McMurdo.  But by the next morning I was fine.  I still have minor sinus problems, probably from all the dust in the stations and the sawdust in the carpenter shop, but it isn't bad.

A photo of McMurdo in Condition 2, taken from the carpenter shop.  It was actually bad enough at one point you couldn't see much beyond that first yellow container on the edge of the hill.  The whole carpenter shop would occasionally shake in the strong wind which blew up the fresh powder from the day before.  Normal days with no restrictions are Condition 3.  When the weather gets bad and you might not be allowed outside and might have trouble seeing is Condition 2.  Condition 1 is so bad they don't let you outside.  If Condition 1 hits, you stay indoors until it clears.  Supposedly they only had one of those so far this year.  

Work in the carpenter shop (Carp Shop as it gets called here) isn't bad.  I tend to do a lot of cleanup chores on my own since they are simple and I like keeping tool chests organized.  Some of the other guys in there like that too, since they now tools fit in the drawers AND they don't have to dig through a pile of things stored in the wrong drawers just to get what they need.  I was originally supposed to work with welders, but apparently Raytheon is going through budget cuts from the National Science Foundation so projects were canceled.  I guess since I was already cleared to work they decided to keep me and just put me where they needed me.  Since I'm down here for Winfly/Springfly we do a lot to open the research camps.  One of the projects we've been working on is for the camp that studies the seals.  We have been repairing older boxes for containing seals for observation.  Yesterday I also helped stack on a pallet a plywood 'corral' for holding the seals.  I also shovel snow!  A lot of the snow is built up from over the winter and such, so you can't just use a snow shovel on it, normal shovels work better.  I enjoy shoveling snow so it isn't too bad and it is fun to dig around in some of the larger snow drifts outside buildings.

All in all it hasn't been too bad down here.  The worst I've had so far was when I was woken up just before midnight to the sound of my roommate drunkenly urinated on my shoes and wardrobe.  That has been worked out but I still put in for a roommate change since that is just not something anyone needs to experience.  

The cold hasn't been too much of a problem, just wear enough layers and you're fine.  My only problems with it are when the wind picks up.  That windchill is annoying, and can make need to cover your ears and nose.  Indoors are warm, and the workshop can be a little too warm with all the layers I wear up there.  Since I need to go in and out all the time I cant do much more than just take off my jacket.  Quick trips outside I can go without my coat for too long, and can sometimes walk from the 155 building which houses some dorms, the store, the computer labs, the cafeteria and other central offices to the 191 carpenter shop without gloves or a hat on.  Otherwise I guess I'm enjoying myself so far, and I may be eating just a little too much in the cafeteria which has so had pretty decent food.  

I'll start uploading some photos, but maybe not too many at once due to bandwidth sharing and restrictions, and I'll start posting more on here whenever I have time!