More of the same

A lot of the same still going on. McMurdo is still melting and there are large puddles and streams all over the place. Any of the dirt that is dry kicks up a lot of dust any time a vehicle goes a little too fast across it. Temperature today is 32f, which it has been for the past week or so. I routinely walk across town in just a tshirt when it isn't windy.

My 26th birthday was Thursday. Not really too spectacular, and I was worn out from cleaning out another boiler room. I managed to avoid working American Night shuttles and wound up at Gallagher's Bar where a few people bought me drinks. I also wandered around in a tshirt and swimtrunks and my Crocs flipflops.

We got new mattresses on Wednesday. They were kind of like an early birthday present. For an hour I helped the housing department and some other volunteers haul the new mattresses about the second flood of my door while carrying away the old ones. I was tired when I wandered back to my shop for a meeting.

Right now I am playing Firewatch again on a Sunday.
Firewatch had been turned over to someone else so that they could preform that duty while I was sent inside the fire suppression water tank. Initially my supervisor had intended to keep me on Firewatch and for us to constantly switch back and forth whenever I had to go into the tank, but that seemed excessive given that the key-card I use to get into half the building needs to be reprogrammed every time someone else uses it, as they are linked to your name. I pointed this out to my supervisor and he just had us switch permanently. The other guy is a GA as well, but the UT shop supervisor had decided that the other GA was probably not as small as I am and that he would have trouble wriggling into the fire suppression tank.
The fire suppression tank is a piece of work. A cylinder maybe seven or eight feet around a somewhere around 20 or so feet long, the tank qualifies as a confined space. The entrance itself is just barely big enough for me to get my hips through with the safety harness on. I had to be fitted with a respirator mask to keep dust out of my lungs, and wear a full-body suit to keep the dust off me as well.
I worked with two painters from the carpentry shop and another GA from either the plumber or welder shop. Decent guys, but I don't think liked having me around, as they have been recently doing more work and never requested me back.
Anyways, you have to rotate out workers as it is a confined space. We were only allowed to work for 30 minutes at a time before coming back out for a break. A couple days we went in one-at-a-time while another day we went in two at a time when we wouldn't be getting tangled up in power cords. Climbing in was not fun since the opening is tiny and you have the harness on. Once inside you clip on the air sampler box which tests for toxins
and beeps when you need to GET OUT NOW. The exit gets sealed up behind you as it creates a seal so no dust escapes. The foam seal has a hole in it for a large hose which is hooked up to a HEPA vacuum which filters the dust out of the air from the tank before venting into the attic space above Crary.
The first thing we had to do was grind the rust and bad paint off the inside of the tank with an electric grinder. This was awkward since the grinder was heavy and the tank is rounded which makes it hard to get close to some of the walls. Later on we went through and scraped off bad paint with a combination of brushes, a smaller grinder and a metal blade.
I never got too hot in the tank, mainly because I only wore shorts under the full-body work suit I had on, but sometimes my face would sweat. I think the other workers were getting too hot, but they were wearing jeans and tshirts while in there, too.

I got moved onto other tasks too. The foremen in the FEMC building 136 which houses most of the trades underwent relocation to some trailers outside. I had worked on these trailers before. Now they were ready for the administrators and foremen to move in. There was a lot of moving old furniture and boxes into the new spaces. The trailers looked like little more than portable offices you would see on an construction site
but with what looks like a door to a large commercial refrigerator.
I must have been the only person concerned with tracking mud in as I was the only one trying not to walk through all the mud everyone else did. At one point a large box got pulled through the mud and then carried into the foreman trailer.
The empty space back inside the building will most go to the UT shop which I am in. They will be getting an extra workroom which used to be the office for all the foremen. The smaller admin office will be turned into a computer kiosk for the tradespeople to use.

Today I am back on Firewatch and about to go back on another round. Sunday is usually a day off so I am taking a shift today. Luckily I'll get a comp day for it, a day off for the one I have to work now. It is pretty empty in here though there are people in the labs.

Only one real problem lately. The guy that took over Firewatch for me came by my room the other day to inform me he wanted me to show up an hour earlier to get the building keys from him. Unfortunately the power of being Firewatch has apparently gone to his head and he now thinks that he is Czar of McMurdo or something and helped himself to my room. I do not remember him knocking, but he opened the door on his own without waiting to be invited in.  Later on he gave me an attitude as if I was at fault for sleeping in my room and that he would would try and get ME in trouble if I reported him.