Thursday, February 28, 2008
Nelson, New Zealand
Erin and I were finally able to venture out of Christchurch. I spent my last day there at a beach near the city with Ashley, a friend of mine who's been traveling New Zealand for the past 6 months. Yesterday Erin and I ventured to Nelson on a 7+ hour bus ride. We'll be headed to Takaka tomorrow to meet up with our other beachhouse roomies! You probably won't be hearing much from me until I'm back in Chch on the 8th!Monday, February 25, 2008
Pics From the Last Few Days
Me wearing the play-dough penguin necklace Hudson made for me and sent to Antarctica!
The C-17 that took me out of Antarctica!
Inside the C-17... loading cargo just before take-off
Up in the air... just 45 minutes from McMurdo Station or so
We miss Ralph already... here Tad is hugging him good-bye.
Mmmm... plants... smells... wonderful... except for roses... they smell bad.
Dinner at Brewer's Arms. I had chicken, beef, kangaroo, and ostrich. And I cooked them all on a 400 degree stone. They were delicious!
This is my Dutch friend Tanja. We have been friends since I studied in Leeuwarden 4 years ago. She just happened to be traveling through Christchurch so we hung out for a bit.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Holy Humidity!!
YIKES! My hair is a giant frizz ball. I am finally in Christchurch, New Zealand after two days of delays. I spent my first full day in town yesterday mailing stuff home that I don't want to travel with for the next month, and then I did a little shopping. More to add to the pack.Wednesday, February 20, 2008
**WX CANCEL**
**WX CANCEL** is the notice we've been seeing on our TV scroll in regards to our outgoing flight the past two days. I was supposed to be leaving Antarctica yesterday, and I'm still here more than 24 hours later. We're hoping to be out tomorrow as it looks like the weather has cleared, but it's just like Wisconsin... "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute."I've got a few pictures to post from the past week or so...
This is the view from my office window. Minus the building (that's part of the Crary lab), it's a great view! Mt. Discovery is one of my favorite things to look at.
Me in my office. Jesse, my officemate, is sitting at his desk. You can see my ball chair behind me (I don't use it all the time). And Mrs. Grams' class might notice the big orange sign hanging near my desk!! That sign made lots of people jealous! ;)
On the GA's second to last night in town, we had a little party in our lounge. Andrew suggested putting on the Santa costumes that Matt and I still had from Santarctica. Then we started pulling out other random bits and pieces of costumes. Now Bamma and I have a box full of stuff for next year's "Costume Box"!
This is Andrew the GA. We'll be hanging out in New Zealand at some cool houses on the north part of the South Island with some friends of ours. Then the two of us will be meeting up in South Africa at the very end of March. I'm so excited to see what crazy adventures we find ourselves in!
This is my buddy Ethan in the Galley for dinner. He's a coworker of mine, and we pinset together at the bowling alley when both our schedules work out. I'm a big fan of this guy, and he's more than likely not coming back. But he's moving to Vancouver with his girlfriend (also a friend of mine) so I will have a place to stay when I finally get up to BC.
My friends at Scott Base invited me over for one last dinner with them last week. They told me that next season I have a standing date to come over for dinner once a week. :) I snapped this picture in the bar after dinner. When Shaz and Billee were chatting, Megan started making faces. Love this pic!
Friday, February 08, 2008
More Pics from the Second Season on Ice
You have to be nominated to have a land feature named after you here in Antarctica. Usually it happens to people who have worked here for 10-20 years. This year, a few people on station were rewarded for years of hard work here at McMurdo and in the field camps. One of my coworkers, Mike Ebel, was recognized by having some hills on the continent named after him: the Ebel Hills. Or as Mike likes to call them, the Ebel "Rugged" Hills. We had a surprise ceremony where one of the NSF Representative read the nomination entry that Mike's former coworker Jess wrote about him and presented him with a map showing the Ebel Hills. Mike works as a Utility Technician (UT) and has worked in Crary for the past 6 years (of his 20 years on Ice). So not only is he our coworker here in the lab, but he works with 15-20 other UTs at McMurdo who all came to surprise him. When he first walked into the room, he said "Wow. This is a big safety meeting." He didn't realize until the speakers stood up that we had cancelled the safety meeting to surprise him. When they were reading the nomination entry, he almost started crying. It was great to see such a dedicated, hard-working person be rewarded like this.
A few weeks ago, I was offered a boondoggle to "Room With a View" which is actually just a spot 1400 feet up on Erebus that has a great view, or so I've heard. When we were there Erebus was hidden in clouds but we could see out to the Dellbridge Islands in McMurdo Sound. It was a snowmobile trip and a day off of work which is all that mattered. Before we headed out to RWAV, we drove out to the Pegasus plane crash where I snapped this photo. If you click on the picture to see the bigger version and look closely you can read some of the things people have scratched onto the plane.
This season, my friend Bill wanted to make a movie for the McMurdo Film Festival. We had to shoot "on location" one day away from town. I snapped this pic of Bill and Ralph (in the background) trying to set up a shot. The movie turned out extremely well and was a big hit at the film festival on Monday night. It was titled "In Search for the Southern Yeti".
Ethan, my coworker, and I are camera nerds. All season we talked about the new camera gear we were both getting. I finally bit the bullet and bought two new lenses for my Rebel XTi. One is a super wide angle that Ethan used to take this picture of me at work. This is the computer I use to program key cards (the size of a credit card) for people to get into their offices and labs and to access the building outside of regular work hours.
Longest Chain of Katies in Antarctica Poster
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Getting Dark Already?
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
My Upcoming Travel Plans
A few people have asked where I'm headed next. I'm still on the schedule to leave here the 19th of February, and I'm not planning on starting back at the fireworks store until May 19th. That's three months of being on the move.Here are the tentative plans:
Feb 19-23: Christchurch, New Zealand area (Bamma's birthday, meeting up with Ashley)
Feb 23-29: somewhere in New Zealand (hopefully meeting up with Tanja at some point)
Feb 29-Mar 3: Puponga - house rental on the beach of Golden Bay
Mar 4-7: at another house rental (actually an old shearing shed converted) on a 1000 acre farm, 10 minutes walk from the beach
Mar 7-9: road trip back to Chch with friends that shared the house rentals
Mar 9: fly to Auckland and sleep in airport
Mar 10-20: Tonga with my friend Tirzah
Mar 21: fly from Auckland to Los Angeles to Chicago to La Crosse, WI
Mar 22-26: Wisconsin
Mar 27-30: the Netherlands
Mar 30-31: Johannesburg, South Africa
Apr 1-May 13: Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi, possibly Zambia & Botswana
May 14-15: Johannesburg, South Africa to La Crosse, Wisconsin
May 15-18: home
May 19: River Falls & Prescott, WI
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
P Spill *censored* Poster for the Waste Barn Party
We also made a video introduction of our band before we took the stage. It was very "David Letterman-esque" as Jimmy Large took the stage and the rest of us didn't show up. So he runs off stage and the movie starts. He finds Poopsie Starfish in the craft room, and Poopsie runs off to find Mashed Potato in a bathroom. Mashed Potato finds me at Hut 10 being fanned and fed grapes by some handsome men, and I find Peaches Delite giving an instruction course in the computer kiosk. By that time, we've lost Jimmy Large again and the boys find him in the Waste Barn break shack and Peaches and I do "the call" to get the attention of Tasty Crumbles who's up in the Greenhouse wearing a sombrero and poncho. Tasty Crumbles takes off his sombrero and is automatically shaven with slicked back hair in his blue tuxedo jacket. Then we all come together and do this incredibly long walk towards the camera as a group. As we're walking, there are clips of us with our stage names. Jimmy Large is shown as just a headshot with the name Jimmy. Then he does a Chewabacca "howl" and the word "LARGE" drops onto the screen. For my name shot, I walk out and "see" my name is not bright yellow like it's supposed to be. I swing my hip to my right to turn the "Boom" bright yellow, and then I swing my hip to the other side to turn the other one bright yellow! (Apparently a couple of my guy friends kept doing it all night, they thought it was so funny.) Mashed Potato flips his long blonde hair down and licks a bottle of honey and his name flies in across the screen. Poopsie Starfish jumps out of the Waste Barn and does a karate chop which cuts up his name. Peaches Delite says her name slowly and it comes out in the color peach. And Tasty Crumbles does a little "ole" spin in the greenhouse and his name appears. Then we finish walking down the road together, past the camera, and into the Waste Barn before our poster picture appears. We take the stage in the order we entered the Waste Barn in the video. Everyone was cheering and screaming and laughing by the time we got up there... it was great! Ralph must've spent hours editing the whole thing because there were tons of sound effects and music playing in the background. It was a HUGE success!
Monday, February 04, 2008
Arrival Heights
Bamma, my roommate, told me early in the season that her friend Brian Nelson (aka B. Nelson) was going to be my coworker as he was the new Research Associate for Crary Lab. Brian arrived in late October, and he's been hanging out in our lounge ever since! ;) He needs to drive up to Arrival Heights every day to check some of the computers and experiments being conducted there. So one Sunday in November he offered to take Andrew and I up with him with the added offer of a hike up to Second Crater. Arrival Heights is a specially protected area, and all visits must be documented and supervised by Brian. He did his work, and then we went out for a quick hike up the First Crater and then over to Second Crater (creative names, eh?). I think it was Second Crater that had what we called Crater Lake. Really it was just a bunch of ice that looked like it covered water but in the shallows there was just ice a few inches above rock. No water whatsoever. It was a great afternoon.
Looking at the ice over the rocks
Andrew and Brian "skating" on Crater Lake
More ice over the rocks
All the sparkles on a sunny day!
