Draining Lakes

It has been snowing pretty regularly the last several days.  It hasn't been sticking around too long though, I guess since it is warm enough to melt it.  It's funny because it often seems warmer during the 'day' and colder at 'night', even though the sun has been up since October 21st or thereabouts.  

I think weather is interesting.  Down here I like when on clear days I can look out across 50 miles of snow-covered sea ice to the mountains on the horizon.  Then again, I also like when it is clearly visible in town, but you can not see past the edge of the ice because wind is blowing snow around and making outside of town a solid blanket of white.  Most of the wind blows in from the south/southwest, and there are mountains surrounding the station from that side.  It produces a lot of interesting weather effects, like clouds that roll off the top of the hills and just create a rolling ceiling above McMurdo.

I think I might just stick with the February 2nd return date.  It seems like at this point it would be too much of a hassle to get into something else.  I am sure I could easily get into the Vessel Offloading, but I was told that is 12 hour days for 6 or more days straight with NO increase in pay.  Maybe if the pay went up, I would bite on that one.

I painted a doorway connecting the old UT shop to the new UT shop.  It now has a nice, bright, badly-painted yellow border.  

On top of that Ben and I found a much more effective way to remove the ducttape from the office trailers.  We pointed a heat gun at some of the tape residue and it started to kind of congeal and brown.  It wipes off easily with a dry rag, but you have to be careful not to just smear it.  We'll definitely finish by our January 10 deadline (of which I was only informed of today).

There are three runways out on the sea ice.  One is just called the Ice Runway.  The one I landed at when I came down was Pegasus.  There is also Williams Field, which I have been out to multiple times.  Well, Pegasus apparently has a large meltwater lake at it.  I think I heard it is not blocking the runway, but it is still in the way of operations.  So they want to drain the lake.

How?

There just happened to be a MASSIVE pump in the back of one of the shipping container milvans on Station.  So we cleared out the front of the container and then they brought a Pickle, one of the small old Navy forklifts, in to move it.  It wound up not being the right size so they had to bring in another loader which took care of it.  Funny, I don't quite know where they will move the lake too, since I was told the ice there is a hundred feet thick (that may be an exaggeration, though).  It also seems as though the water would roll back into the low point in the airfield where the lake used to be, so they would have to have a lot of hose.

Not to mention, what do they plan to do with the 3ft deep depression where the lake is?

I attended one of the redeployment meetings today.  They went over how we would be getting out of here.  Again I get to pick my hotel, but I also get pick how long I will stay extra in Christchurch (I figured I would not mind paying for an extra day to get in some souvenir shopping) and whether or not I want my flight to deviate from the default New Zealand - Colorado path.   I think I am a little too tired at this point to really do too much, so I think I will just come home and maybe sleep in for a week straight until I feel recovered.