Frozen at the Pole

Adventures post-Pole

2010-08-10T12:27:00.000-07:00

This blog ended when I left Antarctica. If you happen to stumble across this little blog and are interested to know where we went from there:

http://thawingout.blogspot.com/

Adios

Final Post?

2009-11-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

Well, Krissie and I made it into Christchurch a couple of nights ago. Our flight from the Pole to McMurdo was atrocious. Well that last 30 minutes of the flight was. We hit some insane turbulence. The veteran Herc flyers all said it was the worst they had ever seen in the many years they have been doing this ice gig. It was so bad at one point it picked me up out of my seat. The plane was rocking and swaying and bouncing. Oh it was terrible. There were four of us who ended up needing to use the motion sickness bags. Unfortunately I was one of them... Man that was terrible. Most people after we got off the flight said they were all trying so hard not to be sick. Many of us were sitting there contemplating which piece of clothing we wanted to vomit in. Thankfully, one of us, the first of the four, flagged down one of the aircraft personnel for a bag. The other 3 of us followed shortly after. Oy vay...

Then we hit the Ice runway in McMurdo, phew.

Thank the stars above that they did not set up Willie Field this year and instead set up the ice runway. If we had all had to ride in Ivan the forty minutes or whatever it is back, we would have had a bunch more folks sick. The short 8ish minute ride from the ice runway was almost too much for us. I really really loathe McMurdo. It is a filthy filthy miner town. Cigarette butts everywhere, trash everywhere. It's dirty, in the literal sense. Filthy dirty snow everywhere. Now don't get me wrong, the natural area around there is still breathtaking.

To look across the frozen sea ice and see the mountain ranges and the incredible sky, is something to experience for sure. Coming off the ice runway (or back out onto it), to see Erebus with its giant vertical column of steam is worth whatever the costs are to get down here. But staying true to every visit I've had, the majority of the people there are arrogant and incredibly rude. I can't tell you how many times I had people just stop and turn right in front of me cutting me off without saying a word. I eventually just stopped trying to be nice and fell into the rude behavior. When someone was stepping in my way or cutting me off I simply pushed through them, bumping into them. I had just spent a year at the South Pole. I have no fuse, I get really ticked off really quickly. Putting up with rude, inconsiderate people was not going to happen this trip. I was really looking for a fight to be honest with you. Not the best idea, I know, but I was fed up with these people. While sitting in the galley the night we got in, there was a reasonable sized group of us Polies just talking and drinking coffee, etc. We ended up being there so late that many of us decided to wait for Midrats which was available to anyone after 12:30. While sitting there you could tell we were in some folks' usual spot. We were getting dirty looks and had people obviously talking about us -- further ticking me off. We had a group of helicopter pilots or medics, of which I am not sure, sitting at a table beside us staring and muttering about us. Now this isn't just a paranoid feeling I was having. At one point one of them stood up, looked over at our tables, and then went back and told his table, that we're not even eating (we were waiting for the allowed 12:30). That really ticked me off, and well, I won't tell you what I ended up saying to their table. Brian had to pat me on the back and tell me to "Calm down, Jeremy." He could see I was getting ready to explode. Though after that, we both were just staring at the other table, giving them dirty looks every time they stopped and glared at our table. I'm kind of glad Brian was there to keep reminding me to calm down. He's a great guy -- glad to have met him and had the pleasure of spending the winter at the pole with him.

Now don't get me wrong, not everyone was rude. There were a few people who were nice and actually responded when I walked by and said hello, or held a door open for us while we were carrying bags. It's a weird thing. A simple act of saying hello seems to be too much for most people, though it's really a US thing rather than just a mactown thing. Sorry, another rant I know. Mactown just gets me riled up. So moving on; more complaining, but this time about a certain company I shall call Big R...Once we landed in mactown we got in the transport, which then proceeded to take us to Building 155 and dropped us off. We then had no direction, no one told us where to go, no one let us know what was going on. We were dropped off and left to fend for ourselves. Absolutely ridiculous. It will be hard to come back to this organization. I truly hope when the new contract happens there is a deep and thorough reworking of the current system of chaos that Big R has developed. So after getting in there we found housing and saw that most of the guys were staying in man-camp. Great, a year at pole to be ended by staying in a stinky man-filled room. There were a few of us that decided we would just find a lounge to crash in. And that's what Marc and I ended up doing actually. We hit up Building 208, threw in a movie, and passed out. We were woken by a few people wanting to watch T.V. which I was fine with. This was their little world. I was just passing through. We were finally woken up by Krissie and our friend Sarah, who had been working in Mactown awaiting her time to hit the Pole. It was really good to see her again. We'll definitely miss her!!

We then shortly had to get ready to fly out.

We would have preferred some more time to spend with Sarah but were not going to stay there any longer. We tried to find her the night before but just kept missing each other. Thankfully we left when we did, because the folks who left the day after us from the pole got stuck down in mactown until supposedly Monday, due to a fuel leak in the C-17 that took us into CHC. Poor them.

It was soooo nice to have finally landed in CHC. My goodness it smelt wonderful. There was some sort of flowery bush around there that was just wonderful. And the humidity, oh my the humidity!! That felt good! I think we all had smiles from ear to ear while we were walking into the immigration/customs. I still had all my gear on while walking in there, not fun let me tell you. The smarter folks did what I had planned on doing, and that was taking all of their gear off while they were on the plane and just tossing it into the bag. I was too busy sleeping. Oh well, lesson learned.

Once we did get into the customs place, we found out that many of us did not apparently have our visa extensions completed and were given some trouble by the people at the counter. So some of us were freaking out because this was supposed to have all been taken care of while we were down on the ice. It seemingly wasn't. (As it turns out we were actually all taken care of and it was done electronically. It's just that the folks didn't see our stamps so they were freakin out. So we hit the CDC, dropped off all of our gear, picked up our South Pole t-shirts that I designed, then we were dropped off at our respective hotels.

We all met up at Bailies that night, a local Irish bar/pub. It was so nice to have fresh made food to order, a fresh pulled Guinness. And to sit outside in that wonderful fresh air. It was an amazing feeling.

And that about sums up our exodus; well, sort of...Krissie left her wallet at the South Pole, and I left my passport at the CDC...not the best start ;}

This will be my final "live" update to this blog. I will add one official final blog entry when I get back home in the states to sum up the adventure for the random folks coming across the blog looking for info about the pole. All future blogging about Krissie and my travels will be found here.

Thanks again for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!

Oh and I'm adding this cause it's cool. Took me five minutes to figure out the controls again, then another 5 or so to do this while I was waiting for stuff to print while still at the pole the day before I left.

Pretty sad that I couldn't spell Antarctica...stupid thing needs a spell checker.

On another happy note, Pip was freed, and finally able to see the pole.
There was a re-trial, and the key witness failed to show up. Hmm, too bad. My good friend Pip is once again among the free, enjoying the good life.

Second to last post

2009-11-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

:{

This will be the second to last post for this blog. I leave the South Pole today weather willing, the plane has left McMurdo and will be here in about 3 hours. I have almost everything packed and ready to go. I've mailed off the majority of the items I need to get back home, the rest of the little things that Krissie and I have we will be giving to Ben to send home once the Summer post office opens down here.

I'm not too sure how I feel about this, I am so ready to be out of here for my sanity's sake, but aside from that fact I don't want to leave. I love it here. I have had the greatest time of my life while down here. I met the girl of my dreams, I had an amazing job during the summer, in an insanely awesome location. My job during the winter was not the most fun, but it didn't matter I was spending the winter in Antarctica, the South Pole to boot! It was an absolutely surreal experience every time I stood outside and looked up at the sky. Something that can not be matched anywhere in the world, if you want to argue that point please come spend 6 months down at the south pole during the dark period. Then we'll talk. Only days ago I was lying in bed thinking about the past year of my life, how awesome it was and how much I will miss the place and people. I began to tear up. I've never been attached to any place like that before. I left family and friends without blinking an eye to come down here.

It didn't bother me at all that I would not see family or friends for potentially a year. But the thought of leaving this place, and potentially never seeing it again, or never seeing the people I spent the past 9 months with brought me to tears. I was pretty flabbergasted to see how much this place meant to me. I do hope that the people I would call friends keep in touch. Even if it's just an email here or there, or maybe just a facebook message (man I hate facebook). I hope I can keep it together when I get on the plane. You know gotta be manly and all (50's manly not the new age kind ;} )

The winter season is not for everyone. There was a group of people who would love to tell you how horrible it was down here, but they are wrong, and well whiney babies who just felt like pouting all winter when things didn't go how they felt they should go. Sorry but it's true. The majority of the people who were complaining and having such a horrible time down here were the folks who had either wintered before at the Pole or McMurdo or just worked at either location during a summer. They wanted it to be like "insert year of prior deployment here". I got so sick of hearing, well last year, or at McMurdo we did this. We didn't do it like that last year, etc. They apparently were unable to understand that this is not last year, this is not McMurdo. This is THIS year, this is South Pole Winter 2009. It can not and will not ever be the same as years before. You need to be able to accept that and move on. Enjoy the time, not dwell on how, possibly, better it was before. If you do that then you are setting yourself up for a large disappointment. You have to enjoy yourself now, and stop living in the past. And for those of us who did do that, well we had a good time. And that rant has gone on long enough, sorry.

Krissie and I will soon be beginning a slue of adventures off ice, though I can't imagine anything EVER topping a winter at the South Pole. However, these adventures might get a bit more interesting since Krissie is now currently in bed sick and was most of yesterday...stinking new people getting my little lady sick before we start our vacation!!

Now, I also wanted to say to all of you who have taken the time to read this blog, THANK YOU! Thank you very much for finding my little story down here interesting, and for those of you who have left comments I GREATLY appreciate it. It was really nice to know that there were some people who were interested in what I was doing. I may not have responded to all of them (I didn't I've been horrible about it) but I did read them all, and they all meant a lot to me. Thank you from the bottom of my frozen heart; not frozen in the bad way but, you know South Pole, cold, alright not funny.

Oh and anonymous, your respects have been passed on.

gotta go finish packing now

7 days

2009-10-27T16:35:00.000-07:00

7 days left, and counting! Our first Herc should be in today, hopefully.

Almost done

2009-10-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

12 days until I am scheduled to leave Pole. Must not think about not having a job, must only think of my vacation. My vacation that will destroy my savings...nope can't think about that either.

sigh.

Hmm

2009-10-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

I just walked outside in a sweatshirt, shorts, and crocs with no socks on. Have I lost my little mind, or am I officially immune to the cold? I thought it was funny that I saw and walked past Logan who was in boots, carhartts, hat, and parka taking out trash as well. My feet did get a little cold when I was walking through snow drifts. Crocs, apparently are not meant for winter travels...

It was only -45F out there witha 15kt wind at -80F.

A bit worried about how I will handle the insanely warm weather of a New Zealand summer, followed by the hottest month in the Australian summer.

100F in no way sounds pleasing to me at this point. I think that -40F is warm...

Forgot

2009-10-14T18:05:00.000-07:00

Forgot to say that I won one of the flags that surrounded the ceremonial pole all last season the other day at the video teleconference . I didn't go to it, but my name was selected in the raffle afterward. It's a pretty cool flag, it's the Argentina flag. The cool thing about it is that it was the flag that I placed back outside around the ceremonial pole when we placed the new flags out when the sun came up.

Pretty cool flag.

That's me on the far right placing the flag. Lee took this photo from inside the station. Talk about irony...

Twin Otter

2009-10-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

Well it's still here. It's a good thing that Krissie and I got moved out of our room when we did since the pilots had to spend the night here. The weather is not looking so hot right now, and I have no idea where they are in the repair process, so they may be here a while.

I finished a few photos from yesterday. They are watermarked like crazy and small because I don't want them walking off, if you know what I mean. I will eventually be putting them up on deviantart, sans the watermarks. until then, the couple of folks who read this thing will have to just suffer ;}

Here they are:

Robert, one of the science techs.

We had to tow the plane to the Otter Pits

Poor little plane :{

In my opinion, this is the best photo I have ever done down here. I absolutely love this thing!

WOOT!

2009-10-12T19:33:00.000-07:00

First planes of the season!

Pics tonight, maybe. First plane in was a bassler. Second plane in twin otter (twotter). Number of planes having left 1, number of planes still here with engine problems 1... GET OFF MY CONTINENT!!

The twin otter is having engine issues currently and has tried 3 times to leave with no avail. It's not the weather, those things are rated to fly at -90F, so dunno. It would be weird to have guests...especially since there are supposed to be women on the plane. 6 months of no physical contact with the outside world, 30+ males who have not seen any other women-- this could get interesting...

More Pics

2009-10-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

First off, let me say I've been having upload issues so I've made many of these smaller than normal, and I've compressed them far more than normal. So they may not look so hot, the colors are atrocious seen on a browser...Anyway moving on to the post.

More HDRs. I thought I would show an example of a real HDR. This image shows a normal exposed image next to the HDR. I like it.

You may notice that the HDR seems a bit blurry in many spots. That's because i didn't use a tripod and I ended up moving slightly between the three photos. Normally it would be very crisp.

Now this next "HDR" was made from a single raw file, so technically is not a true HDR, just like the majority of my other "HDR"s. I did no editing to touch this one up like I normally would to show a sort of default look. It's still pretty cool.

Notice Krissie's feet in the shot. How adorable can get she get? I mean seriously. She has to stand on her tippy-toes to shoot this shot. She's a keeper. Also notice that you can actually make out the yellow foosball players in the background in the HDR.

Okie dokie, now for another "How It's Made". The following three shots were used to make a true HDR.
Normally exposed shot, blech

Underexposed shot, kinda cool.

Overexposed shot, blech

Now combining the 3 exposures produce the following true HDR:

Very cool. Generally speaking it's a lame shot, but the balls sure look fancy-smancy!

Also, I've been playing around with textures in post processing of my photos. I've made a few photos of Krissie and I at the pool table. I hope you like em!

Look at that pool shark! Okay, Krissie stop reading here, move on to the next photo. Shh, don't tell Krissie but her face does not line up properly. I tried to blend in one of the normal photos to this one because she moved a bit during the 3 shots. Doing so made her forehead seem larger than it really is. Oh if you only knew how much time I spent on this photo you would understand why I just accepted it. Make sure she doesn't find out...

Oooh purdy

Mhmm.

And to my favorite:

Absolutely love this photo. Probably going to make a print of it and frame it when I get home. I think I'll get the print done on canvas to boot!

That's it. I don't know how much more I will be posting. I have a ton of stuff to do in the next few weeks, and not much time to get it done in. I have huge problems sleeping. In fact I'm currently running on another 24 hour period so far, two days ago it was 36 hours. The sun has totally screwed my sleep cycle up. That and I'm quite anxious about all the things I've yet to do. The problem is I've pretty much stopped caring about this job, which makes getting the things I need done incredibly difficult. Only a few more weeks and my replacements will be here. Phew!

Winterover Photos

2009-10-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we took a few more photos of the majority of the group for our winterover photo. We've never had everybody show up to the photos, which seems odd to me. But whatevs. If folks don't want to be in the photos then so be it. The final batch of photos we took I decided to bring my camera with me. We were going to be taking the photos on Dome Ridge; I don't know if it was named this prior to one of us naming it or if it's a unique name for this winter. It's just a nice spot behind the dome on a bit of a ridge that is nice for taking photos of both the dome an the station. One of my panos in the previous post was taken from there. Anywho, back on point. I decided to take the camera because I needed to take some photos inside the dome, and figured why not kill two birds with one stone. So while we were preparing for the photos I was taking the "Behind the Scenes" photos. I got some pretty nifty stuff, most of which I will be doing HDRs of, naturally. Here are a few I've completed thus far.

With this photo I feel like I'm getting closer to what an HDR typically looks like. I used the settings from this image and applied it to the others and it seems to have worked out pretty well, though I need to do a bunch more tweaking to see if I can improve upon this.

I hope to some day create images that are even half as good as the inspiration for my HDR photography, Stuck In Customs.

Every standing there looking purdy with Cully preparing to sprint over to join us for the photo. When I saw Cully run, I ran up to the line as well.

I LOVE this photo, the lens flare is insane and absolutely authentic. I couldn't photoshop something like this, I've tried and it always looks retarded. Such a cool effect.

Folks heading out.

Oh and I took a 360 degree pano while standing out in front of the dome. Kinda interesting I suppose.

The large corrugated? metal structure you see there in the middle is the LO Arch, the structure with the large T shape is the VMF Arch, and well the dome like structure is the dome!

Sunrise Photos

2009-09-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

Well I still haven't completed the couple of photos I've been working on, though I may not get them finished. I'm far too much of a perfectionist, and as such I keep trashing the work I've done. I doubt I will be getting any more sunrise photos, as the sun is pretty high above the horizon right now, and since we've been in a freaking storm the past week again there hasn't been much to take a photo of.

Anywho here are some more photos for your pleasure. Cully and I were asked to get some photos of the dome since this will be the final sunrise it ever sees. If all goes according to plan the dome will be torn down this summer. Though things rarely go according to plan down here...

First I though I would show how the HDRs are made, well at least what the images that it is comprised of look like:

This is the "properly" exposed image. I'm sure it's nowhere near correct, but it is the base from where I start.

Now I need an underexposed image and an overexposed image.

This is the underexposed image, which brings out the sun and clouds as they should look.

This is the overexposed image that shows what the dome and snow should look like.

Combining the above images creates the following "HDR"

None of the photos I have made that I call HDRs are true HDRs, but they emulate them well. I don't take multiple shots, i just create the photos from a single RAW image. Though to make things easier I will continue to call these pseudo HDRs, simply an HDR image.

A decent image, I'm not too happy with it but i got sick of working on it.

Another HDR

now when creating HDRs you have to be careful that you don't over do it. Though sometimes you want to overdo it to give it a more artistic feel to it. The following HDR was created in an over the top manner that turned it into a pretty cool image imho.

It looks like a pretty cool painting to me, so I kept it in this form.

Okay that's enough HDRs for one post, onto some plain photos.

This is a shot of ARO

This is a shot of a random antenna, I have no idea what it is used for.

Simple sunrise, nothing special here.

Another simple sunrise photo.

Off of the ob deck, meh.

Now for some I do like...

Very purdy, but it's cut off on the bottom. I forgot to add the other pictures when I stitched this image, oh well. Some other time.

A picture of folks removing the Scott Tent. I really like this one.

I love the colors in this one.

This is probably my favorite 'sunrise" photo, even though the sun is not in the image at all.

The following picture is also pretty cool, it is freaking huge. It is a pano made from 62 images. Yes 62 images, it was a pain in the tush to take because my hand kept freezing while waiting on the frozen camera to process the photos. It kept blinking at me "busy". Grrr.

That's the entrance into the dome. This is actually the only photo I have thus far of the complete dome. I couldn't actually post the full size image it is just too big, and I won't be able to put it on my flickr page because the file size is too large (I think, I could be wrong on that one). So to give you an idea of the scale of this picture I have made two 100% crops from the original. You'll have to click on them to see the actual full size of the crop.

This is just one of the diamonds on the dome...

Try and find this in the full picture!

Well that's it, I'm working on a couple of other HDRs but they are becoming a pain and I am getting sick of working on them. So they may never make it up here. We'll see.

Hawaii

2009-09-27T02:06:00.000-07:00

Well my grandparents should be just getting on the plane in Denver for their week long vacation in Hawaii I got them for their 50th anniversary. I hope they have fun!

I haven't completed the sunrise photos yet. Though after tonight they should be finished and put up tomorrow morning!

Snow

2009-09-22T23:58:00.000-07:00

There sure is a lot of it around here, sheesh. I haven't finished processing the sunrise photos that I have thus far so I thought I would throw up some recent photos of the sastrugi (essentially snow drifts). I will eventually get to the sunrise photos...Speaking of sunrise that dang fiery ball is intense. It was up in full force two nights ago around 2am while Krissie and I were in the galley: holy cow it is bright. For whatever reason I couldn't stop staring at the sun. It was the first time I had seen the actual sun in months, and boy was it beautiful. It was really beginning to hurt though, all the constant staring. Later on in the evening I was even able to see the full circle of the sun through some clouds. It was just surreal.

Back to the sastrugi:

Very cool.

I love this photo, it doesn't look like snow to me. If i were to change the colors and turn this into a dark greyish black you would think it stone (well I would anyway). Notice the layering that occurs, I also like this photo because it reminds me of the huge 3-4" everlasting gobstoppers that looked like this with the colorful layering as you worked your way through it.

Just purdy.

Well that's all! Hopefull I'll get some of those sunrise pics finished and posted tonight during our test satellite passes.

The Sun Has Arrived!

2009-09-21T02:49:00.000-07:00

We finally have the actual sun peeking its little head out, not just a refraction. Dang that thing's bright :} Photos tomorrow probably.

More purdies

2009-09-15T18:58:00.000-07:00

Well the storm finally went away, thank goodness. I was getting sick of digging out 2-3ft of snow from the BIF's doors.

Here's some photos of the fun. All taken with my little point and shoot, a very painful thing to go back to...

This was the last day of the storm, after I had just finished un-burying the front door. There was a long sigh when I saw this...

This was after about 10 minutes of digging, I found the bottom. Again a long sigh.

I had Krissie sit in the hole, it was quite deep.

The fun part of this day was that I was a bit hungover. We had just had Dave and Jude's birthday party the night before. I sort of forgot about needing to shovel the next morning--so I called Marc in for some help.

This was after we finally got one door cleared. During the summer this is completely flat straight out the door. There's currently a 5ft wall there...

Our gansta pose

Well the storm did die down, and yesterday I was able to go get some shots. More HDRs cause I love em. The regular pics look pretty dang nice as well.

The Scott tent, ceremonial pole and ARO in the far background.

Getting closer to Scott tent

I was trying to remove ARO from the shots. This one is quite noisy, I will have to try again!

And what has become my favorite photo down here so far:

I love this photo because it is natural. She wasn't posing, she was just trying to catch her breath and stay warm. I hate posed shots. The best photos IMO are those when you catch folks off guard, when you catch them actually smiling and having a good time.

Then when I was heading to bed around 2:30 I decided to take a quick gander outside on the ob deck. And this is what I saw. I immediately ran to the room and grabbed my clothes to go and get some photos.

This isn't a full HDR it's just a blen of two photos. I couldn't get the photos to come out quite right. This photo just does not do the scene justice. It was beautiful.

National Geographic Magazine

2009-09-13T03:18:00.000-07:00

Made it into the daily dozen again. I would GREATLY appreciate you folks (and every living human being you know with internet access) taking the time to go to the site and vote. This first time I made it I didn't really care, I just threw up a random photo i sorta liked. This time I picked one I thought might have a chance. And it is one of my favorite photos from down here.

vote what you think I deserve, though 10's of course are best. If I win I get on the cover of the magazine, so that would be pretty sweet.

I'm either in week 1 or week 2, I'm not sure which anymore. My photo is a black and white photo of ARO, which i can't get blogger to upload. I'm sure you can find it.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/voting-machine

yay me ;}

WHITEOUT!!

2009-09-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

Where is my Katey B? Oh miss Beckinsale save us please!

Had 37 knot winds today, just got back in from helping Krissie shovel out the BIF in a very fun whiteout. By the time I would get one section shoveled the other section had a half an inch of snow again...

The walk out to the BIF was no big deal, aside from the fact that we couldn't see where we were going. The walk back into the station however, sucked. We were walking straight into the 25 knot wind and blowing ice shards, not snow, ice shards. We were going to go through the VMF which was quite close and would allow us to walk indoors. However, when we got to the doors they were buried, so we have to walk back up the hill from the VMF and into the station.

Fun stuff

Side note:

We were asked by Warner Brothers to do an International video teleconference, where Kate Beckinsale would have been in all her glory. We would have been able to talk to her, see her and just make our freaking day basically but certain grumpy butts in the NSF said no. Why, because they hate Hollywood. And apparently have never seen anything with Kate Beckinsale in it...

Though I don't think any of the guys on station would have been able to speak or control the drool :}. Oh well.

Personally, I tend to follow the theory of it's easier to apologize after than it is to get permission before. So it's a good thing I wasn't the sys admin. I would have had a bunch of angry old farts back int he states, but a bunch of very happy polies ;}

Sunrise

2009-09-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

The sun is getting closer and closer to popping over the horizon. Here are some of the photos I took yesterday 9-8.

The photos are all HDR images. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, basically it's a layering of the same image taken with different exposure values.

This was taken off of the A4 Deck looking out towards Summer Camp. I thought the little arch thing there was pretty freaking cool.

This was taken from the A4 deck as well, through the railings. I really like this shot, not this photo per se, but how the shot is composed. I've tried to capture it a few times, both now and last summer. I still haven't quite figured it out yet though.

This was taken from the roof, the main building you see off center in the middle of the image is the BIF (Balloon Inflation Facility).

And now for my favorite two HDRs, they are almost the same photo, though the exposures are different giving me a different look to each HDR.

This was taken from the A1 deck.

Again from the A1 deck. This is my favorite version of the two.

Hope you liked em!

On a side note, I've been having auto focusing issues with the camera and this other lens and I've been unable to figure out why. Today I realized that I changed my auto focus to a selective auto focus which was only focusing the dead center of my images rather than a, well auto auto focus. Hopefully this will take care of the weird problems I've been having. Oh and I've noticed a bunch of weird spots on all my images that I don't recall seeing before, though when you shoot night shots it's hard to see something like this. It turns out that it's dust or something on the actual sensor. Cully gave me a good tip to figure out if it was the sensor, tried it and it did indeed seem to be the sensor. I then checked the manual on how to clean the sensor (I had no idea how to get the mirror to pop up) and was able to see little specs on the sensor. Cully's going to let me use some of his cleaning equipment to take care of it. It's not really that big of a problem since the spots are int he same spot in every image, I know where to look and can easily remove them in photoshop.

Whiteout

2009-09-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

Watched the WORLD premiere of the movie Whiteout last night. You poor folks in the "real" world still have what a week? Yeah we're pretty freaking awesome down here. Tripp worked directly with Warner Brothers to get us a copy of the movie and to have a WORLD premiere showing of the movie. It was pretty freaking sweet. If I knew nothing about this place, the movie would have been plausible and believable. However...watching while down here was just hilarious. We all had a really good time watching/heckling the movie.

Oh and for those of you who may see it and have never been down to the ice, it's totally real I swear. Everything you see! Man it's rough down here! Gotta go see if Tripp's up and able to make me a latte ;}

Oh and I decided to make pizza rolls for today. Back home, and a quite a few years back the local pizza place, Eaton Pizza (not a clever pun, it's the city I spent most of my life in), used to make pizza rolls and they were freaking awesome. Then they stopped making them because they said they were too much work/hassle. And I can attest to that fact.

This was the first time I've ever made a dough, for bread or anything. It's really simple when you have a industrial food mixer thing, forgot what they are called. The dough came out perfect last night. Krissie and I then went about making the rolls, the first few I made were completely non homogeneous, one was huge, the next was tiny, etc. When Krissie took over the dough pulling the sizes were far more equal. Well they looked pretty good when we were done. I have them in the fridge now to bake in about an hour from now.

I baked one of them last night to see how they turned out, pretty darn good. They needed far more stuffing in them (cheese and meat), but aside from that they are really good, especially for my first attempt. I tried to make more dough this morning so I could make some more, but so far it isn't "proofing" correctly. I didn't measure out the yeast as precise as I did last night, so that's more than likely the reason. I also halved the recipe so, dunno, maybe that was it. Who knows. I'll try again next weekend.

Hopefully everything turns out, and folks like them.

Oh and the damn sun is coming up, making the sky orange. I have very mixed feelings about this. When I think about it I get a bit depressed: I guess it's because it's marking the end of the adventure. However, as soon as I go outside and see the blue sky and the light from the sun I uncontrollably start smiling and feel much better. I guess this is the what bittersweet feels like. I've never experienced it before. It's an odd feeling to say the least.

Here are a few photos for your viewing pleasure:

This was taken on 9-1, my nephews b-day :}. The bright orange you see is not the sun, it's a light on the rodwell there (the smoke stack). The sun was just starting to show its dirty face.This was taken while launching a balloon with Krissie, this was to my back.

And this was what was in front of me. Still very dark, with a full moon out. I still have not figured out how to take a shot with the moon looking like the moon rather than the sun...

The sun is coming up quite quickly now, expected full sunrise is 9-22 I believe.

This was taken on 9-4 just 3 days later, you can see the sun starting to turn the sky orange. It's very painful taking photos without that sweet lens, but you do what you can do.

WOOHOO!

2009-09-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

I'm officially an UNCLE!! On a minor note my younger brother Justin is also technically a dad now, but I'm an UNCLE!

Baby Corbin (Corbin as in Bruce Willis' character Corbin Dallas from The Fifth Element) was born 9-2 at 9:33am, I think, maybe it was 9-2 here and 9-1 there? hmm...

Freaking sweet!

Oh and my bro wasn't allowed to name the kid fully Corbin Dallas, his girlfriend refused. He never should have told her where the name came from... Though I would imagine she would have figured it out if she didn't already know. Stupid girls, can't you just picture that sexy Milla Jovovich saying Cohbin Dalluhs? Girls just don't understand stuff I suhware.

Congratu-freaking-lations, my brother! I'll be around eventually to begin the corruption. This is how you booby trap your daddy's chair, etc, etc. Oh, I can't wait!

Kinda Cool

2009-09-02T18:54:00.000-07:00

My cool little Pano made the cover of Gigapan magazine. It's an online magazine, you can see it here:

http://www.gigapanmagazine.org

That is all.

:}

2009-08-27T20:00:00.001-07:00

Well, since I don't think I've ever shown a picture with Krissie and myself standing by each other, and I don't plan on searching through my posts to find out, I thought I would throw this image up. It's one of my favorite photos taken by Mr. Benjamin Burke, title "Time Machine". It really shows the size difference between the two of us :}

Yup, I have my head shaved quite often down here! Sorry granny, I know you hate to see it :} Look at how ginormous I look compared to her. The photo was dubbed "Time Machine" because Krissie came into Ben's and my office during the summer and showed us the cool little battery powered disco ball she found in the Met office. We then went out into the hallway found a good source of sunlight and began to attempt to travel in time! We're amused by so little down here :}

We had a lot of weird looks from the folks walking through the halls: they were obviously just jealous of our cool doodad!

You can see the little light reflections bouncing around everywhere. Oh how the winter would have been different if our buddy Ben was down here with us :}

Hehe

2009-08-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

This is to you, all of you fine folks who i've ever helped with a computer/electronic type gadget. I'm hesitant to let the secret out, but it is time I come clean:

(click on image for the larger more readable version)

See original comic here, as well as other fun comics for nerdy people :}

http://xkcd.com/627

Frak

2009-08-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

So, got to -98F yesterday...Still no -100. If it doesn't happen this year then it will be the first time that the South Pole didn't hit -100F two years in a row. Global warming isn't real my tush!

I got things to do down here dang it, it better hit -100F

Oh well, so some good news: one of my designs won the t-shirt design contest. I figured at least one of them would win. They were pretty freaking cool if you ask me, though I might be a bit biased. There was only one other design that I thought would beat me, and I think it came close, or at least there was enough interest in it that they are going to see about maybe making two shirts. The rest were all pretty boring and/or trashy. Sorry to anyone who made them, but the f-bomb on a t-shirt is about as white trash as you can get...but that's just my opinion. I wonder how many people that statement will tick off :}

I made a few designs and though only one of them won the station's vote I will be making a couple of the others for myself and Krissie.

Here are the designs:

This was one sticker design

This was another sticker design, it was a last minute thing. I spent a lot of time making the graphic and then had nothing to do with it. It didn't look right on a t-shirt design, so I threw it on a sticker with some text.

And here are the shirt designs:

This was one design, the one I voted for. I think only one other person voted for it. This is one of the designs I will make for myself.

And this is the other version that was up for voting. I may make this one, not sure.

I had a bunch color combinations I liked but had to settle with a couple so I didn't flood the folks with options, and I chose to go with neutral colors to be more accessible to the community. Not everyone loves blue like me :} I will probably make a darkish blue version of the above white design for myself.

This is approximately the color I would like to use:

Here are just a few of the other designs using the above graphic that I really liked as well.

A nice ringer, though the company that I would be getting the shirts from doesn't have the color combination I like in the ringer style, I just think it looks good this way so I may look for another company.

And a jersey version:
This is close to the long sleeve shirt design I want to go with. It looks really good with a black and white long sleeve shirt, the sleeves being black and the gray you see above being white.

Now Krissie also had a design idea. She wanted the lost dharma thing with a pole in the middle. She even went to the trouble of drawing me a pole. I told her I though I would probably be able to draw two lines and a circle (the pole) freehand, without a reference ;}

Here's how it came out:
This is the other design that didn't win that we will be having made anyway. I don't want one, but Krissie definitely does. We battled over the back of the shirt for quite sometime. She wanted the crooked fading LOST intro font thinger, but I refused. It didn't go with the design at all. After I showed her the font she wanted on the shirt she agreed it didn't go with it. We went through many, many fonts even some free ones I downloaded to find something that appeased me, I mean her ;} She now likes to comment on the feng shui of t-shirt design as she puts my obsession with the flow of the design :}

I had, and still have tons of ideas for designs, I just didn't have time to put them all down. There were a few designs i just tossed because I didn't like the end result. Each one of these designs took me a good deal of time. You have no idea how long it took me to figure out how to get that stinking light reflection on the ball of the pole on Krissie's design. It wasn't necessarily difficult once I figured out how to do it, but I was teaching myself how to use adobe illustrator the whole time I was designing this stuff. A VERY painful process.

So I had one day left to complete all my designs. Two were done for the most part, but I had more ideas. That's one of my biggest problems, I can never shut off my brain. While going through the fonts for Krissie's design I came across a little lost logo that I liked. I thought I would try and turn it more South Poley.

This is the inspiration:
I don't like how there are folks in the black that just disappear because the design has all the characters completely black.

This is what I came up with:

If you notice I changed the design so that any shape in the black of the shirt is white and visible. The cool thing about this is that I used only the original font/logo I found. I just moved things. The exact details I will not divulge, mainly because the people reading this won't care :} If it's not obvious, it says POLE now instead of LOST. This was a HUGE pain in the tush, mainly again just because I needed to figure out how to do what I wanted. The actual process isn't too bad, now that I know what/how to do it.

And then, because I am NEVER satisfied with anything I do, and I had an hour left to complete the designs, I figured I should make it even more "Poley". What I decided to do was replace the cast with, well us. The design already was very difficult, but this next part was a nightmare. In a very large part because I was unable to save the files, photoshop and illustrator were corrupting the files, I nearly lost everything I did. There were a lot of not so nice words coming out then...

And without further ado, the winning design for the South Pole t-shirt design:

Pretty dang creative if I do say so myself :}

and here is the version I like, and may make as well:

Check these out

2009-08-17T17:13:00.000-07:00

I recently uploaded a couple of panoramas to the gigapan.org site on request of the South Pole Doc Ella. It's a pretty cool site actually where you get to explore panoramas that folks upload, make comments etc.

here is my profile, take a gander at the panos

http://www.gigapan.org/viewProfile.php?userid=22637

Frozen Pictures

2009-08-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Just thought that I would put up some photos of what I look like after coming in from snow stakes. These photos were from last month.

I was having a hard time seeing while trying to finish the snow stakes; my head lamp was dying. I called Krissie and had her bring my camera and some new batteries.

I don't wear goggles when I'm outside, they are a pain in the tush due to the very short amount of time before they completely fog over. And my glasses fog up instantly when I am outside with my gaiter on. I just have a little slit that I see through, unfortunately it was starting to freeze over making it quite difficult to see anything coupled with the dying headlamp.

The ice coverage was beginning to melt in the short amount of time I was indoors, which meant I could start to see again, yay!

You can see my eyes now!

A closeup; here you can see where my skin is turning white above my eyes. Most of the ice in front of my eyes has melted away in this picture. I had to go back outside after this and take a few more measurements, when I came back in and took my gear off there were ice chunks on the gaiter still after 2 hours of sitting in my warm office...

I love this place :}

Purdy Pictures

2009-08-09T18:03:00.000-07:00

Well the lens I had been using has been broken, it was in the capable hands of Robert to epoxy it back together. Apparently he brought his own super epoxy from home with him this summer. He's an engineer what do you expect.

So I may or may not be getting any more amazing shots. As it turns out the optics on the lens are messed up along with who knows what else. I took it out last night to try and get a photo with it and the pictures all failed miserably... Though I wasn't sure if it was the lens or the camera that was having the issues. To figure this out I borrow Tripp's lens and took some shots with it and they turned out fine, they will be at the bottom of the blog. Oh well, at least the camera is fine...

So unfortunately I was left without a lens this last Friday I think it was, maybe Saturday when I saw the most amazing auroras I have ever seen. The aurora's weren't super bright nor were they super colorful, but they were moving so incredibly fast it seemed surreal. It looked like a green river in the sky, the way the color was just moving throughout the length of the aurora. Needless to say it was indescribable, something you have to see for yourself. The sky was crystal clear as well which just added to it. Oh how I wish I had a camera then...

So here are some more pics from back when I was able to get some shots, continuing on from the previous pictures.

This photo is a shot of the Balloon Inflation Facility (BIF). This is where Krissie launches balloons from every morning. This happened to be on 7-24 her birthday.

Another shot of the BIF on Krissie's B-day, I converted about half of the images I took into my "moon" shots because again they were blown out from the lights. I didn't think about taking the shots after we shut the door, I was just shooting as she came out. There is a little video I made of this too that turned out pretty cool, if I can shrink it enough I will post it, along with the other picture videos I have made.

Would ya just look at that adorable little thing? Definitely an alien launching some sort of probe...

There was a pretty cool aurora hovering over the VMF when we were walking back from the BIF, personally I think it's the star child from 2000 space Odyssey planning his next move over the station... Do you see the face of an infant? If not well yer just blind, it's there I saware. The bright lights on the right are the VFM, not to be confused with the VMF... That's where folks go to fuel up vehicles, that should be enough to hopefully explain what VFM means :}

This is a few minutes later when a LMC tracked vehicle was entering the VMF

And this was a shot of Doc Brown in the DeLorean taking off out of the VMF at 88 mph! If you don't get this reference then I am very sad, very sad indeed...

This was that afternoon, pretty nice and quite bright auroras then.

Still the same afternoon. This is the Scott tent and the ceremonial pole.

Yup same afternoon, this is one of a few photos I took during a time lapse sequence.

And another shot from the time lapse.

It started getting very large and bright and purple, and then the battery froze...

This was from the 7-28, this is the geographic south pole marker. The moon was only a small crescent but still incredibly bright as you can see...

Same day, just a bit further back. The moon looks like the sun...

Pretty nifty shot if I do say so myself.

Then it stayed bright with no auroras, and the stars muted to the point of not being visible for the next little while until the moon finally decided to go away. Though I went out to get some shots while the moon was up, I really like how blue the skys are when we have the moon up.

Looks like daytime doesn't it? This is one of my hero shots with the hood up, though I rarely if ever wear the hood up.

This is what I normally look like if I'm going out somewhere, snow stakes, etc. I really love that my foot prints are really the only ones visible in the scene.

Nice little shot of the station.

Me playing around with the exposure long exposure.

Again playing around with the effects of the long exposures.

I originally planned on going all the way out to SPT to take some moon photos but got way too cold. It's entirely possible that my clothes fell off while I was taking photos... Though I can not confirm that.

Though if such a tragic event were to happen, then this would have been the temperature at the time
I would imagine this to be quite cold if one's clothes were to fall off; though I, of course, would have no idea personally.

Last night I decided to go test the newly repaired lens, and the pics just didn't come out how I would have expected them. I was a bit worried that the camera may be the problem, but was very hopeful it was just the lens. So I went and found Tripp and asked if I could borrow his lens for a couple of shots to confirm this hypothesis. These are the photos that I grabbed with his lens.

The black on the left side is the station, you can see a couple of little meteors. As you hopefully know yesterday was the Perseids meteor Shower which was supposed to be an amazing show in the northern hemisphere.

And without the station in the shot.

That's all folks, unless I can borrow a lens from someone there won't be anymore night shots, but we will be getting flooded by the evil sun in a few short weeks anyway...Stupid sun, who wants ya?

Thawing Out

2009-08-07T23:24:00.000-07:00

The first blog entry has been completed. It is a small portion of the itinerary. So for the two people reading this (mom) go check it out.

http://thawingout.blogspot.com/

Off Ice Blog

2009-08-05T21:56:00.000-07:00

I've created a new blog for Krissie and my travels and experiences while off the ice. The address is oh so clever:

thawingout.blogspot.com

Man I am one clever fella!

I will be posting to it occasionally while we are still one the ice with our to-date travel plans. And then once I am off the ice I will try and get photos and such uploaded for our adventures.

New pictures will be coming shortly

More Purdy Pictures

2009-08-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

This is a selection of shots from July 16th to the 23rd. I took a bunch of photos as usual that will eventually end up on my flickr page. Until then, enjoy this small collection.
The following 4 photos were taking on the 16th of July. I decided to go out and take some shots of the telescope one night around 10pm so bundled up and headed to the scope. I was lucky enough to find some interesting wispy auroras when I arrived that were not visible from the station.

This is a shot looking back towards the station from SPT. The building on the left with the incredibly bright light is MAPO, it's where I took the pictures for the Moon civilization post, same night actually.

This is SPT. The dang thing was moving on me ruining my shots. I didn't really notice this at first until I started looking at the photos. The camera would freeze so I would go into SPT warm up, let the camera defrost and then go out and try again.

Notice the light aurora on the ride of the image. The building in the background is ICL, and that big bright ball int he sky is Jupiter ( or so I've been told).

This was taken on my way back to the station, by that time MAPO's light had been turned off. You can see the green haze that was present all around me. I've never seen an aurora that was sort of just a film across the sky. To the naked eye it looked cloudy, but it was actually the auroras.

The next three pictures were taken on the 21st of July around 11:30 or so.

It was quite dark outside and next to no aurora was visible to the naked eye. The sky was incredibly clear however and full of stars so I decided to go out and take some photos. They all turned out quite dark, but still pretty decent. This photo you can see a small meteor going through the milky way at the top of the image. And the large ball of light is again Jupiter.

Just the Milky Way with a slight aurora haze through it.

I decided to go out to ARO since I had never been there to take night photos, and I really wanted some photos of the LIDAR. This is ARO, the straight green light is the LIDAR, essentially a laser pointed at the sky. Cully has an insanely cool picture of the lidar on the station pointing up into a swirling sky of stars from a 25 minutes or so exposure. I'm sure it will be making it into the National Geographic Daily Dozen next month, and honestly as cool as it is, probably win. Not gonna tell him that though his head's too big already.

The next two images were taken the same "night" though technically were taken on the 22nd early in the morning. I went in to let the camera warm up and once it was good to go I came back out around 12:30am. The shots were completely blown out because the light was on at ARO and I didn't think it would be a good idea for me to go fiddling with switches in there until I found the right one to turn off the outside light. So I turned them into more moon shots. Something I am find works beautifully if you have over exposed images and bright light sources.

I love the flair effect, very spacey

I like this shot because of the large bright star sitting on the end of that pipe thinger on top of ARO.

The following 4 images were taken the same day the 22nd during the afternoon around 2:30pm.

The colors were incredible, I had never seen pinks so brilliant in the sky or my images. This is the Scott Tent folks put up to sleep in sitting next to the pole. The image confuses me because it looks incredibly crooked with the horizon, but the pole is vertical.

Just a nice shot of the crazy colors looking out into oblivion. There is nothing in that direction for 900 or so miles.

I also really wanted some shots with the dome, something I had not done either. So I made my way around the dome as carefully as possible. There are a bunch of very large drop offs that would suck to fall in. The hill to the left is the dome, a bit crooked but still a pretty cool picture.

And here's the dome, the big ball of light is again Jupiter. The plume you see in front of the station there is the exhaust from the power plant.

The next 4 images are from the same day again the 22nd, but this time between 11pm and 12ish am. I was doing my snow stakes that night, a very late start on them around 10pm when I noticed the craziest deep blue I had ever seen in the sky. it wasn't green, it wasn't turquoise, but blue. I had never seen that color before, it was so cool. I stood out there for a while just admiring the aurora when I started to think, hmm should go get my camera and capture this. But then I decided, no, I need to finish the snow stakes. They needed to get done. So I just kept working away at measuring the snow stakes when 15 minutes later it got quite bright and even cooler and I said, screw it, time to get the camera.

By the time I had made it inside, grabbed the camera, realized I forgot the battery, ran and grabbed the battery, realized I forgot the card, ran and grabbed the card the aurora had nearly dissipated. This is what I was able to capture of what was left. The pictures do what I saw earlier that night no justice, oh well.

This was not magically created in photoshop, the blues you see are real and were so much more amazing while I stood out there in awe.

That's ARO's blazing porch light.

So the aurora died away not long after this, I took the camera inside and finished the snow stakes. I then began to tell Krissie the story of the crazy auroras when she said Lance (the other meteorologist) just told her the auroras were crazy out there. He had just taken an ob. So to investigate I went out to the ob deck and checked, and wow the auroras came back and in full force!

So I grabbed the camera which had thawed out in the time it had taken me to complete the snow stakes and went back out. This was technically now the 23rd as it was 12am when I headed out. here is a sample of what I caught.

The sky was full of blues and purples, it was crazy.

This is a shot of what was directly over my head. I pointed the camera as straight up as I could. This is Krissie's favorite.

I like this simple image because of the drastic colors in the aurora. It looks to me like a flame, from a butane torch at the top tip, where it is the most blue.

I learned the next day from Cully when I told him about the crazy colors I saw the night before that what I was witnessing was the largest, strongest solar wind we would ever see this season. It was at the maximum strength( k value I think he said) and would never be that powerful again. Wow was I excited, I was out there for this event on accident!

This next shot was on the same day, though during the afternoon. I took a time lapse from this spot and made a little picture movie. The camera unfortunately froze up right when the aurora was getting strong. Cully had called out the aurora, but by the time I got out there it had nearly dissipated. Funny thing he said when I got there, "I know my camera is going to freeze right when the aurora picks up and gets strong". I laughed and said ya that would suck, and well guess what. My dang camera froze right when the aurora started to really get bright :{ Oh well. The video is really cool because I also caught greenhouse Joe in my pictures and you can see him taking photos and then walking back to the station with the headlamp.

This was the final image of the time lapse, this is right when the aurora started getting bigger and brighter. Oh well, guess I just have to come back down here again ;}

more photos to come...

Goodbye my family

2009-07-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

Cully will probably be killing me tonight in my sleep.

He was super excited about getting into the National Geographic Daily Dozen competition where you are allowed to send in one photo each month of competition to see if the judges will select your photo.

Here is the link to the site, where you can see the photos;
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/your-shot

If they select your photo, then the world votes on it through their website at:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/voting-machine

Now after I went to the site to check his photo out I discovered you can vote for the photos, he didn't think you could do that yet. So i sent him an email letting him know how and where folks needed to go to vote for his pic and that I voted for him with the highest mark.

While checking out the site, I got to thinking well, maybe I'll send in a photo just to see what would happen. With no notion of ever making it, Cully's damn good at what he does, I'm an amateur at best.

Well today as I came back to check on some panos I was building I noticed I had an email from Cully. This is very odd he RARELY even responds to my emails, he generally just ignores them/me. Well the subject line was "I hate you by the way". Hmm seemed even more odd now, apparently he was mad that I sent in another photo of the south pole. Hmm, how did he know this, then it clicked I discovered that my photo was on today's chosen slot for the Daily Dozen. Oops. So the first and only picture I've ever sent into them got selected, what are the odds of that?

So voting wraps up in two days, all voting has to be done by the 1st of august. I don't think he needs to worry too much, I have basically a day and a half to get folks to vote for the thing. I'm not too worried about it really, it would be cool to win but whatevs.

So now I'm afraid Cully is going to kill me in my sleep, just joking, maybe a little. Gotta see about getting that lock fixed on the door ;}

Do I feel bad, no. He didn't tell anybody that you could do this until after he made it into the selection, had I known about it prior I would have sent the photo in long ago.Now that I know about it, I have each months submission planned and ready. The competition has arrived Cully, the competition has arrived.

Small Planets

2009-07-29T18:14:00.000-07:00

So to start the deploy of the insane number of pictures I have to put up I will begin with something called small planets. They're very cool IMHO (in my humble opinion) and I've been trying to get as many shots as I can to create them. To make them you need to start with a 360 degree panorama, or sometimes good wide angle shots will work, from there you do some fiddlin in photoshop and voila you have your small planet. Here are the few I've created so far.

This is McMurdo, the large protruding building there is the church. This was taken the first day I arrived on "Antarctic" soil. Technically McMurdo is on an island and not on the continent, but whatevs.

This is the South Pole outside of my Jamesway J-12 during the summer a few days after I arrived.

This is a shot from SPT, it's not a complete 360 hence the odd line. But the colors and makeup of the original Pano were awesome so I went with it.

This was a few nights ago 7-28, the pano this came from is pretty amazing if I do say so myself, and this small planet isn't so bad either ;}

This was around 2am the next day 7-29, the sky wasn't as cool then. There wasn't much of an aurora and with the moon getting brighter each passing day it blows out the stars, but still pretty cool I spose.

Here are two very small versions of the night panos the small planets above were created from. They will either eventually be uploaded to my flickr account while I am here, or after. We will see, the originals are huge. I tried making a 16bit tiff, but figured it was probably not worth it when the file size was going to end up being 4GB...

Anywho, here they are:

This one is from 7-28 around 2:30pm

And this one is from 7-29 around 2:30am. One of the nice things about the moon coming out fuller and fuller is that the sky turns to a very beautiful dark blue in the shots. I'm really going to miss the darkness, the sun should start coming up in 3ish or so weeks :{

Stupid sun who needs ya? Well maybe me if the sunrise is even has as beautiful as the sunset was. I've seen some auroras with a sunrise so that would be pretty sweet, we will see though.

More photos to come...

Magnum P.I. Party Tonight!

2009-07-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

Well my little lady turned 30 yesterday/today. Yesterday here at the pole but officially today in the US. That's right got me a cougar, seeing as how I am only 27... ;} (I wonder if she will let me keep this post...)

Yesterday she won the race to McMurdo, beating out some major competition. The race to McMurdo is a little historic event down here at the Pole where you have the option of biking/rowing/running the equivalent distance from the station here back to McMurdo, 840 miles I believe it is. She accomplished this in 5 months. The closest person behind her, Brian, is 150 miles away still. She kicked some major butt. And now to finish off her birthday weekend we will be having a Magnum P.I. Party at the Limey Beaver Pub tonight. Hawaiin dress is highly recommend along with a MUSTache as she put it. If you refuse to shave one, then you have to wear a paper one. We'll see how many people will do this, I hope everyone goes along with it, should be fun. This will be the first and absolute last time I will EVER sport a mustache. The facial hair's not too long right now so I should only look completely ridiculous instead of absolutely.

Went climbing today at the little bouldering cave we have down here with Mark, wow am i out of climbing shape.

I'll try and get caught up with the aurora pictures I have here tomorrow, we'll see. Not sure if I should spread the pictures out over a few days or just drop em all down in on looong post. hmm

Frakkity Frak Frak

2009-07-23T21:42:00.000-07:00

So walk all the way out to ICL (very long walk).

Setup the tripod/camera in an ideal position.

Turn on said camera remove lens cap, don't want to be forgetting that thing on!

Notice rear lcd is staying on and lit, hmmm.

Rear lcd says, No Card.

Jeremy says, well my grandparents read this, so let's say I yelled out shucks.

Not too upset at this point it was a good little walk, and no auroras in the sky.

10 minutes into walk back, see 4 large bright falling stars in the direction I would have been shooting, sky EXPLODES with an amazing aurora.

Aurora continues to get brighter and brighter and bigger and bigger.

Call in aurora to station on aurora channel.

Get back into station confirm with folks location and best possible locations for shooting one of the largest brightest auroras I've ever seen.

Grab card, plug into camera.

Sigh as the camera is now frozen meaning I get zero photos of amazing aurora.

Tear off gear in office, and sit here typing this.

Probably the fourth of fifth time I have done this, lame.

Proof of Alien Civilizations on the Moon

2009-07-17T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here at the South Pole, I was able to use one of our super telescopes to view a secret hidden Moon society. That is right, a civilization living on the Moon!

Here's the proof.

Some sort of base camp, with what would appear to be a housing for a high powered laser

An attack on the station!

It looks to have survived

Some form of rover tracks can be seen heading over a hill

Eek! An alien's shadow! They knew we were watching!

It's entirely possible that I am getting weirder every day I am down here. I can neither confirm nor deny this.

Anywho, about to go outside and finish my snow stakes, current weather is only -92.2F, a bit warmer from the -96.7 we saw earlier today. Will it hit -100?? I hope so, and for no reason in particular ;}

July 14th auroras

2009-07-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

There was again a pretty good showing of auroras on the 14th. I didn't get out until the afternoon and missed out on hours of good shots, but the ones I did manage to get will suffice. I liked the ones I got last month better, but you do what you can. The first hour I was out there with Krissie I took a bunch of really cool shots, I then walked inside after being too cold to continue and noticed my focus ring was nowhere near where it was supposed to be... I apparently bumped the dang thing while I was heading out causing all the shots to be completely out of focus. They were tossed immediately preceded by an emphatic "Dammit!" I froze my hands for nothing... Well I suppose it was a lesson well learned, always check the focus ring.

We then went back outside to a different spot to take some more photos, and this time I made sure that the focus ring was where it was supposed to be. The shots were alright, nothing special. I just have too high of expectations now I suppose. Here are the shots from the second outing. *Note that for the 4 people who read this blog, I have changed the way I comment on photos. I now comment beneath the photos rather than preceding the photo; it just felt wrong before.

The red alien orbs and line you see there in front of the station were, well aliens naturally. I caught the little buggers doing some sort of recon on the station. They immediately fled after the shot, or it may have just been Krissie walking towards me with her headlamp on. If you look to the left of the station you can see both a bright red orb, and a yellow triangle. The bright red orb was either Nathan, or Jude with their headlamps on or a combination of both and the yellow triangle you see is the Scott tent with some form of light in it.

This shot if you look closely at the stairs you will see a very bright white light in a sort 7 shape. This was again the little aliens, only a different group with a very different lighting schema to their ship, or this could have been Ella walking back into the station with her headlamp on (white I might add, tsk tsk tsk)

This shot you can see someone going out onto the upper deck, well you see the light from the open door anyway.

Just a station shot

Same basic shot as above only shifted to center the station a bit to also show the warm glow from the alien spaceship that just landed, or the VMF. There is a theme here if you haven't noticed ;}

Krissie and the station. Two problems with this shot according to her: one she is lit up, two the station is in the shot and she for some reason doesn't like the station in the photos. It's unnatural she says. My retort, well you're unnatural so there!

She apparently only wanted to be silhouetted, and not lit up for all of these shots. Something she failed to mention when we started taking photos. I blame her! Yes you, I know you are reading this, I blame you :P This shot you can see the two different shadows from the two different lights I used.

I finally agreed to get shots without the station, sheesh.

Same pose, a pose she apparently hates and is contemplating a redesign to, but a different shape in the aurora.

The shot that she wanted, all silhouetty.

And a good ol shot of the aurora. You can have your summer heat, I'll take the purdies.

So we then went back in the station. After the camera warmed up a bit I decided to go out and try and take some shots of the tent to see how they would turn out so that Krissie and I could go out there and get some shots in front of it. While I was heading out there I ran into Francis who was also going to the tent. We both then ran into Cully who was taking shots with the tent. Now Cully was supposed to be in dishpit, but apparently some folks just don't care about dishpit duties! Not really I just want to give him crap since he always gets AMAZING photos, jerk... So we all were taking photos, Cully threw his white headlamp into the tent so it would show up all nice and purdy in the photos. There wasn't much in the way of auroras at that point compared to earlier when Krissie and I went out, but they did start to come out over the station. I was getting very annoyed while out there because all the photos I was taking out there were very dark, and I couldn't figure out why. When I got inside I noticed while out there trying to turn on the light on the camera displays I ended up changing the F-stop on the camera to a smaller value (larger number, smaller iris) which naturally made the photos much darker than normal. This meant that when I upped the EV value when I got in they were incredibly grainy, I was not pleased. Thankfully I was able to remove the majority of the noise post processing. You have to be careful when you do this, because you can really ruin a photo if you go overboard. Here is what I ended up with, meh.

As you can see it is a very dark photo, I could have upped the EV more but it just turned into a grainy noisy disaster.

Another supper dark image :{

This was Francis' headlamp shining on the tent while fiddling with his camera.

The person in the red light is Cully, and Francis is the dark silhouette next to him, the red light in the background is ARO (atmospheric research observatory, i think anyway)

Uber dark still, the lights in the background are ICL, and building 61 which is across from MAPO

Decent photo, Krissie likes this photo because the aurora looks like a sombrero or the spaceship from Independence Day.

This is one of 3 of these photos I actually liked, Krissie's Silhouette, the solo aurora, and this. Francis and Cully were packing up shop to head back in the station, when I asked if Cully would walk around the tent with his head lamp on. This is how it turned out. You can see ghosts of Cully making it around the tent which is awesome and you can also see in the left of the image, the path that Francis took with his headlamp walking back to the station. It took me a while to first, notice the red light on the left, and then to figure out what it was. Pretty freaking sweet. Though still too dark, grrrrrrrrr

This was another pretty cool shot, though way too dark for my tastes. This was a shot of the little devilish aliens shooting Cully in with a tractor beam from inside the tent! We had no idea they were in there the whole time we were shooting the photos, thankfully the aliens misjudged Cully's weight and were unable to bring him in. They then flew off in utter shame, as they should, or this was Cully entering the tent to retrieve his headlamp.

I am very disappointed with these photos, I really debated whether or not I should post them, or even add them to our internal server where some of us place our photos for all to see. I have the unfortunate personality of an absolute perfectionist. Unless whatever it is I do is perfect it is total crap in my eyes, like these photos. I unfortunately have to be amazing or the best at whatever I try to do and if I'm not then I'm not satisfied. Now I suppose I could say that this is only the sixth time I've ever photographed anything with something that wasn't a point and shoot, and only the sixth time I've ever tried to photograph anything at night. And I'm currently practicing with a professional's camera, the Canon EOS 1D Mark II, not exactly your typical point and shoot. Even though this may all be true I still think I should be able to shoot the exact same photos as Cully or better preferably. It doesn't matter how many years he has been doing this. I only target Cully here because personally I think he is the best photographer we have on station, and I would kill to take the shots he does. I spose the only way to get better is to first make mistakes, and second practice...

Oh and a lot of us are getting quite spoiled out here now, we only want to take photos of "good" auroras. We don't really care to even go outside to look unless it's something worth taking a photo of. Marc was telling me the other night he heard over the radios someone call out an aurora with a reply from someone else, well is it any good? When we first got here many of us, myself included ran out to see any aurora we could. I was so excited to see a barely existent blip of color in the sky at first, and now I simply go out to see if it is photo worthy.

And on a side note having noting to do with the auroras, I've recently found something slightly disturbing about myself. I've been spending a lot of time figuring out what Krissie and I are going to do when we leave here, and well nothing excites me like it used to. I used to look at photos of New Zealand, and any place remotely tropical and dream of going there. Oh how I would have done anything to be able to go to Hawaii. Now that I've been here, a year at the South Pole by the time I leave, nothing is remarkable anymore. They are simply places I could go hop on a plane and see. And what I see may very well be a carbon copy of every other beach I've seen, every other lake/forest I've seen. It's hard to explain, and just well very weird. I wonder if this is how people who travel all the time feel. Now don't get me wrong, it's not like I've lost all interest in the outside world, I still am incredible excited to be in Sydney for New Years, and I can't wait to see Sydney and Auckland and the like at night, but the old things I used to crave are gone. I don't know if this will change when I leave, or if everything will be compared to my experiences down here at the pole.

I suppose this is what you call one of those life changing experiences and I welcome it with open arms. I've never really been happy before, and now I am. I've always felt like I've simply been existing, not living. And now I feel like for the first time I am living my life. Life's pretty cool once you start living it...

Me no likey VB

2009-07-11T00:11:00.000-07:00

*preface* Do not bother reading this unless you are into long technical geeky stuff like programming.

Man I have a new found appreciation for languages that don't suck...

I just finished* writing a program that will automate a very tedious and mind numbing portion of my job. It took me a very long time to get everything working, not because the program was overly complicated, but because I had to teach myself the language as I went. The language--the dreaded Visual Basic...

I know, I know. Why would I choose to go that route when there are so many more far superior options? Well basically I landed in it on accident. I was working on trying to do some macros in excel by using the record macro option when I ran into a snag and asked Jonathon Miller (the Aurora tech) offhandedly, "don't suppose you know anything about excel macros". I wasn't seriously asking because I didn't think anyone here on station would know how to work with them, but as it turned out he is an excel wizard. So I had him come over and help me with a problem I was having when he revealed to me I could just write the macro instead of using the record option. This was actual code... Holy crap, I just didn't realize that! So many ideas then flooded into the ol noggin. And thus I started my little adventure into the VB world. Jonathon was a big help initially with the first part of what I was trying to do. He was able to show me how to cut my 30 line recorded macro into about 6 lines of actual code. Man that recorder is handy but very inefficient. The other reasoning for sticking with VB is that I needed something that would just work on all of the computers without needing to install anything special. This current prog (macro) can just be dragged into anyone's excel startup folder and simply work.

So here was the problem I was trying to solve. Every weekend I have to go into out networked drive and create new timecards. To do this I have to first open up my computer, navigate to the drive, traverse the folders to get to the timecards. Then I have to open each person's individual timecard folder make a copy of the current timecard and save it to their individual "Old Timecards" folder. Then I have to open up the first timecard that I made a copy of, change the date of the timecard, and also go through and delete all the old entries from that week. Then I save the timecard, then I rename the timecard to match the date I just changed for the following week. Then I do this for every person on station who turns in a timecard. This process is by no means difficult, it's just mind numbing, tedious and a waste of my time. This is something that a program can and should be doing for me. The only question now was how...

I had never seen VB prior to that first realization that an excel macro was actually vb code. So to say the least I had a bit to learn. The program ended up taking me about 48 hours worth of actual time to get to this finished* state. I say finished* because it's functionally complete, but still needs a bunch of polishing yet, such as error handling, modifying it so that any ol person can come up and click a button and have it work, etc. The code that I have written right now, had I known VB prior would have taken me maybe an hour to write. Man it is a painful process trying to learn a new language with limited internet access. The internet was generally down when I would code, which made things very difficult. Microsoft's help is semi-useless.

I broke the problem up into pieces like any good little programmer. I had a bit of code I could open each timecard and use to save a copy to their old timecards spot, change the date and delete the contents. I then worked on a bit of code to traverse the folders of the respective employees. I then worked on a bit of code to change the file date of the new timecard file. This last step consequently caused me to lose 7 hours worth of work and all of my prior code. It was late and I just threw in a function without saving or backing up my work, and it ultimately permanently deleted the file that stored all the macros(my code). I tried a file recovery on it but the file had already been over written by the time I got through the recovery. Thankfully I had an earlier backup that was just missing the 7 hours worth of work. This isn't the first time I've done this either, I remember while in my Computers and Components class deleting 12 hours worth of assembly code, now that is painful. Once I had all these modules working standalone I began adding them together piece by piece until I had a completed little app.

I ran the program on the live server for the first time last night and it barfed, even though it worked perfectly on all the "test" servers! well the problem was a couple of people had their timecards open which caused some major issues. This was sort of a blessing in disguise, after I got over the annoyance of the timecards being open I realized this was a very normal thing that could happen all the time and the code needed to be able to cope with it. So I wrote some error handling for this type of event. And now what once took me I don't know how long, takes a matter of seconds. And now that I have a better loathing-understanding for VB the next item on the todo list should go a bit easier, well in theory anyway...

Is it a bad sign when you get all tingly with excitement when you realize that you can do something with the program? Last night while I was finishing up the code I was going through the earlier mentioned websites I had saved to the drive when I came across something that got me incredibly excited. I could add a function to my code that would check to see if the persons timecard was complete (54 hours or greater) and have the code send out an email to the person letting them know if it wasn't complete! Oh my goodness I was excited. I believe I was saying, "oh, god, oh god this is awesome, oh god oh god". I then immediately emailed myself about this so I would not forget. And an hour later I had forgotten, I noticed an email from myself in the ol inbox and couldn't for the life of me remember what it was for. Then I opened it and got excited all over again. God it feels good to be a nerd! Now the question is do I set it to spam the crap out of their inbox, or send a friendly reminder... Every mailbox has a size limit here, once you reach it you can no longer get any emails, so if I send out a 5K message in a loop of say 1 to 6000 that should fill their inbox completely blocking all incoming and outgoing email traffic, hmm yes then set a filter on my machine to autodelete any message sent with given subject... You know speaking of inboxes that reminds me, I got in "trouble" earlier this year when Tripp was trying to trim down server space and came across my mailbox size. We have a limit of 30MB I think it is, well during the summer as IT I removed my limit, and was sitting at a little over 600MB when he came to me ;} Man I miss being in IT...

Woot!

2009-07-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

Krissie and I are now officially going to be in Sydney Australia for New Years Eve! I started poking around the interwebs looking for hotels close to the Sydney Harbor Bridge (where the fireworks are fired on New Years) and happened across something called the Harbour Parade of Lights. The Harbour Parade of Lights is a select few boats who get invited to light up their boats with ropelights/etc and sail down the harbor prior to the fireworks on New Years. Some of the photos i have seen of it are incredible. They have pirate ships! Krissie calls them tall ships or something ridiculous, they are obviously pirate ships. Anyway moving on...

So these boats not only sail down the harbor prior to the fireworks show, but they also sit on the water next to the bridge the entire time fireworks are going off. There are two fireworks displays, one at 9pm for families, and then of course the event at midnight for New Years. And we will be there for both as close as any bystander can possibly be! We will also be served dinner and cocktails the whole time on the boat! It is going to be awesome. Here is the official confirmation!

And here are photos of the boat and what we will be seeing that night, oh god this is awesome.

The boat is called the Starship Sydney, the largest all glass boat in the world (all-glass is what they call it though obviously this is not quite true)

This is inside, I have no idea what it will look like on the night we will be on it, they change the interior around depending on the occasion.

Side deck?

Another side deck shot, this one though you can see the Sydney Opera House (something I've wanted to see my whole life, well at least as long as I can remember (which lately isn't saying much)) and the Sydney harbor Bridge, where the fireworks will be shot. Can you even put something in parenthesis, inside of a parenthesized statement. I'm at the pole I can make my own words/grammar up if i want to!

This is an amazing shot from the top deck, I can only hope I will be able to get shots like this while there!

Top deck still, with the bridge in the background

And this is what we will be seeing...

Look how close we will be, look at those dang boats in the water. This is how you do New years (though Times Square is still on the to do list...). Look at those poor saps NOT on the boats watching the fireworks ;}

Yup it is going to be awesome!

Oh and side note unrelated to this post, I've recently discovered I am going through Polar T3 Syndrome, thanks Francis for making me look that up, jerk! I don't really feel like writing about that in this post, just thought I would throw that out there and give my mom something else to worry about :}. Let's just say I now understand what it means to be toast, suck...

Amazing June 24th Aurora's

2009-06-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

Date has been corrected for the few folks who read this thing :}

Yeah I know a week later I get around to posting about it. Well really a week late is pretty good for me...

Anyway, on the 24th there was an amazing display of seemingly non-stop auroras going on. They were incredibly bright, so bright they were reflecting off the station! I had never seen anything like this the whole time I've been down here. Thankfully, I finally have figured out how to take night shots so I threw my gear on, grabbed the camera and a tripod and took off. I was outside a total of about 4 hours just chasing the aurora around. The photos you will see are the ones I submitted for our sitrep cover photo. We send a sitrep down to denver/nsf every week. Up til now Cully has been stealing the show with his awesome shots, hopefully a few of these will make it into the foray. Almost all of the photos I took turned out really good, I just love seeing the milky way in the photos. It seems so sci-fi.

This is Destination Alpha (DA), the main entrance into the station. You can also see the silhouette of DSL in the background.

This is shot from under the station looking towards DA.

I tried to get a full shot of the station from the southern side, but the darn exhaust from the power plant blurred and dulled the images too much. This was as far as I could go behind the station and not have the exhaust affect/effect (can never remember which is correct) the shot.

This is the ceremonial pole, with DSL in the background again, with a B&W version as well. Some of these shots look really cool in B&W

Same basic shot as above, just a little further back to show more of the actual pole, not just the sphere.

After I was satisfied with the station shots, I went inside let Krissie know I was going back out for more photos rather than stay and eat lunch. I decided to head towards the telescope. It seemed like a good idea since that's where the auroras were heading for one, and I really like the shots we have hanging on the walls with the scope and the auroras.

It was really just insane what the auroras were doing. This is heading towards the scope down the flagged path. DSL is in the center and the other red light to its left is the IceCube Laboratory(ICL)

Here's looking back on the station, I really love this photo. If only the milky way or an aurora would have been there, oh well.

I somehow forgot to take any spare batteries when I decided to take the long trek out to the telescope. And with that being said of course the dang battery I had froze up on me part way there. Granted I could have turned around and gone back to the station to get the spare batteries when I realized I had forgotten them, but I was worried I would miss the auroras over the telescope if I did that. So I had to wait inside the main building of DSL while I tried to defrost the one battery I had that was freezing. I decided keeping it down the front of my pants was probably the warmest spot on my person, which would warm the battery up quicker allowing me to go back outside as soon as possible. Let me tell you that was one cold battery! Erik was there so I chitty chatted with him a bit, had some hot apple cider and some graham crackers and then headed back out side to get the last few shots before the battery went ca put again.

This is DSL, I really wanted the scope to be pointed a bit more downward for my shots, but apparently their "science" is far more important than my photos!

This was shot with no external lighting and is well, very dark. I do like B&W version a bit more than the color, but whatev.

Thankfully I remembered to bring my headlamp with me and was able to use it to brighten up the shots with the scope. Now whether or not I was technically allowed to do this is unknown. I only thought about that after I got back to the station and looked at the photos thinking, hmm I hope that didn't screw anything up for them. I think I was safe since they are not actually looking for anything in the visible light spectrum. I'll have to ask Ross or Erik about it, and see if there were any "anomalies" that night with their data...

My headlamp has white leds and a normal light bulb with a red film covering it since we're supposed to just use red lights outside. This shot was taken with the red portion of my lamp.

And this was taken with the white, shh don't tell anyone. I only had it on the scope for a short period of time. I have another photo where the white light was on it the whole time, but this one just looks better imho(imho means in my humble opinion mom ;} ). The other one looks like a normal day light shot with a night background superimposed, kind of cool.

This photo I started with the white portion of the lamp and then used the red portion.

And the final photo for this long blog is one of ICL, a very distant ICL as the shot was taken from DSL. I wanted to get closer but my battery died not long after this photo. It would have been really cool to get some shots of the lab with that amazing aurora hovering over it. Oh well, lesson learned.

Now I hope these photos have helped to answer the question of why I wanted to be down here for the winter season :}

Pip's Jailhouse Jumpsuit

2009-06-26T23:38:00.000-07:00

Per a request, Pip's prison getup:

Pip's Imprisonment

2009-06-25T19:05:00.000-07:00

Well here it is, the post explaining the absence of Pip. The story begins months ago. I walked into my office one day and found pip being assaulted in a non pg-13 manner by a larger insidious male penguin with a filthy smirk. I immediately rushed to his aid and thwarted his attacker. After a bit of consoling I was able to calm him down and get him to come out of hiding. Not but one day later the same attacker returned! I could not believe this rogue male penguin was stupid enough to try this again!

I again was able to remove the scoundrel from pip and again had to console the poor feller. Now while this had been going on some crazy woman obviously working with the rogue penguin claimed that what I was seeing was a legitimate business deal. And that she was a representative for the Flightless Birds Escort Service of Antarctica, saying that Pip requested this individual! Total lies I assure you. I know Pip, he would never stoop to such a level.

Now the next day I returned to find Pip safe and sound. Thank goodness. Unfortunately the attacker was found later that same day in multiple pieces. Someone had seemingly removed the poor fellers head. My guess is that this attacker was not only targeting pip, but others and one of his victims finally took a stand.

I returned to my office the next day to then find Pip imprisoned! I could not believe my eyes. Where was the trial? Why wasn't I called upon as a witness?? I was later informed that Pip was not tried for the murder, but actually tried as an accomplice to the murder; and apparently I was the one who would be charged for murder! Apparently the only reason i wasn't thrown in my own prison was because they couldn't create one large enough for me. Absolute lies, there was no evidence to prove this, only circumstantial surmising from the prosecution!

Here is where Pip has been living the past 5 months. a travesty I tell you!

you can see he is on 24 hour watch by an armed guard. This prison is so ruthless that they even have another inmate guarding him. This is inmate 18, i don't trust him with those crossbows. He has already made multiple threats on Pip's life.

Unfortunately I have not been able to get Pip acquitted of the charges. So there he waits in his black and white jumpsuit, wrongfully imprisoned until I can figure out how to get him out of there...

But wait who is this? Possibly some friends. Possibly devising a plot to rescue Pip from his terrible nightmare? Only time will tell, only time will tell...

Interim Post

2009-06-12T23:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite ready for the Pip post yet, but had to throw these photos up. We took our midwinter group shots today minus a few folks who didn't feel like showing up...

It was pretty cold outside as usual and i somehow forgot to take my gator, holy cow my face was cold.

The photos were taken by Patrick Cullis (Cully), using Tripp's fancy new 5D Mark II body and his own lens. They turned out amazing. Thanks Cully!

Outside the dome, with the station in the background. Notice a shooting star in the sky as well. This photo is just awesome it really ticks me off that it was too much to ask for everyone to come out and be in the photo because we're not going to be able to use these, or so I assume. Leave it to the few to ruin it for the many...

And this is inside the dome.

More Night Photos!

2009-06-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

So I've been working on the night shots and have finally figured out what was causing my problems. The problem turned out to be that I had the lens set to a focus beyond infinity. Yeah, think about that one for a bit. When I moved the focus back a bit to sit on the exact line of infinity then it worked. Go figure...

So here are some photos that were slightly out of focus prior to figuring out my little problem.

This is standing on the main deck where we have a red light out. very blurry.

I picture the sexy devil in the photo saying, "Heya baby, come here often?" mainly because of the picture following it that I sent out in an email reminder for timecards (there's a cat theme in timecard reminders that was started last winter and as much as i wanted to kill it, many folks protested so i keep it going).

Here's the cat I'm referring to:

I found a nice little surprise when I got back in that night, I caught what seems to be a satellite going across the sky. I was very disappointed that the pictures were so blurry, but they're still kind of cool.

The next four images were all taken one after another, and luckily I got something in the sky, satellite or alien spacecraft??

Picture me roaring in the following photo, cause well I did.

Here are a few more semi blurry photos of the station:

I don't know why, but every night photo I've taken has been when the moon was up and full so there are very few stars. I'm going to try and get some star shots next week or so. One of the DSL guys sent out an email with plots of the moon's position in the sky while we're here.

You can see the exhaust from the power plant in the right.

Now once I finally figured out that I was bending the laws of physics and trying to shoot beyond infinity I was able to correct and get some decent photos for once.

Ohh look at this sexy beast sporting the latest in ECW trends!

Oh look it's daytime...I was having fun playing with the settings, and exposure times. I really like the blues in the sky, quite purdy imho.

And here we have another shot of the station with the moon, shocking. This one does have the dome in it though. Might as well absorb all the dome inclusive photos while you can, they have planned to remove it this coming summer...

A shot with the pole

A couple of days ago we had a SAR(search and rescue) drill, where Krissie and I played the role as the victims. The scenario was that her and I left in the morning to go do snowstakes and never came back. The scenario would continue with Krissie leaving early as she was cold, while I finished the stakes only she never made it to the station and when I returned I got lost. One of the steps during a search and rescue is to pull all the window covers and turn all the lights on so that if someone is lost out somewhere they would more than likely see the lights from the station. This was the only time we had the covers off since it started getting dark, and will be the last time we have them off unless something real were to happen. Knowing this, as soon as the drill was completed I grabbed the camera and went outside to grab some very rare shots.

And here they are:

You can see a couple of people silhouetted in the windows on the left.

Man I wish the moon wasn't out, this would have been so cool with a star filled sky.

Oh there's a star!

I tried to get the dome in this but, whatevs

There's Jude, one of the docs on station grabbing photos too.

It really looked awesome seeing all the lights on through the windows. I'm glad I got these photos when I did, they shored the station up shortly after.

I think that's long enough for today, stayed tuned for the next blog regarding Pip's wrongful imprisonment!

Pictures

2009-05-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

The majority of my photos are now up on flickr, you can get to them here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22826465@N04/sets/

I don't have any of my new panos there and won't until i get them all perdied up.

Signs of a South Pole Winter Over

2009-05-28T02:09:00.000-07:00

I got to thinking today, man no where else in the world (I imagine) would what i just said make any sense.

This morning Weeks pops in my office and asks if I've seen the weather today. I could hear the wind terrorizing the station so i assume a miserable day and guess probably -80's. Well when i bring up the weather page i was quite shocked. It was only -27F with a windchill of -59F and a 16kt wind. That's pretty windy but those are summer temps. So i go outside wearing jeans, t-shirt, hoody, and my crocs (with no socks of course) and just stood out on the observation deck. I then said what in most circles would make no sense, god this feels good. I stood out there for a few minutes basking in the warmth seriously contemplating taking the hoody off because it was too warm with it on ;}.

Imagine coming inside after a 100F summer day and standing in front of your open freezer door, or maybe an air conditioner blowing straight in your face. That's how it felt being out there only the complete polar opposite ;}.

You couldn't really see anything because it was soo incredibly cloudy there was no light from above (hence the warmth), but dang it felt good. I wonder how New Zealand's summer is going to feel when I leave here :}

Now you have to keep in mind that not even two weeks ago it was -87F with a windchill of -130F when i was doing snow stakes. The weather down here is almost as topsy turvy as Colorado's. I still remember when a summer outdoor concert at fiddlers in June was cancelled due to a snow storm...

Oh how I am beginning to hate pool. I lost again tonight 3-0, this time I did not throw the cue I just hit the 8-ball in on my first shot cause I was ticked off and just didn't want to play anymore. I just have lost the touch. I don't see the shots anymore. 3 weeks ago I was on fire; I saw every shot and made most of them, now I am lucky to make anything. It makes no sense to me. I don't recall ever just forgetting how to do something like this. I practiced and practiced until I was getting quite good. And now I have a very hard time finishing a game when I'm practicing by myself. I'm thinking it's just a bunch of pent up anger/aggression from how bad I've been playing, being annoyed that my body seems to be falling apart since I've come down here, and the fact that I have a very hard time lately trying to get to sleep. It's actually becoming a large issue down here many folks just can't sleep anymore. This is such a big issue that Denver has become aware of it and has some things in the works to try and combat this problem. Personally I'm trying to get a workout routine going again. I know I will feel much better if i can get back into shape, both mentally and physically. So tonight after such a horrendous game of pool (exponentially worse than the last game I whined about) I hit the gym and completely kicked my own butt. It's impressive how out of shape I am, but i will hopefully get it back by the time i leave here. It's very hard to get back into things after so long away, but i'm sicking of hearing myself comment on well 6 years ago i was (insert lame comment about the past). I finally came to the realization that i was that guy, that guy i hate who sits around doing nothing dwelling on the old days rather than getting off his tush and doing something about the present. Well no more. I may not get back the body I had six years ago, but i'm sure going to try.

Off to watch BSG, i just completed the second and final season of Green Wing today ( a brit comedy that EVERYONE needs to try and find and watch) i will be forcing everyone i know to watch it when i return :}

Stupid crappy Pool!!

2009-05-21T04:02:00.000-07:00

So last week i beat cully 3-0, granted he scratched on the 8-ball in game two then got ticked off and hit the 8 ball in directly when given ball in hand ( a bit shocking at the time). I understand however how cully felt after the lastest round of pool tonight. I lost 0-3 to Francis tonight, threw my cue twice (i have a bit of a temper), which was better than me snapping the cue in half i think, and on the third game i had already given up and was just trying to hit the balls off the table...

My excuses are, well i woke up 30 minutes prior to playing, umm my "breakfast" was digesting, and ok fine i just sucked it up tonight. Pool is a funny game. It is much like golf where it is is a huge mind job. If you miss a couple of shots you really think you should have made, or just missed so dramatically that you are questioning the laws of physics it really takes a toll. You start missing more because you are thinking about the last shot(s), worried about the next shot, then you start doubting you can even make any shot which makes things even worse. It's a very large snowball effect. And to top things off I'm very grumpy in the mornings so the losses weren't sitting very well with me. I haven't played this bad in months, it was embarrassing.

For some reason i have a huge issue with side pocket shots, i miss 90% of the shots i take at them. And tonight was no exception, i missed 3 side pocket shots in a row, not feeling too good at that point. Then i had ball in hand the 9 ball sitting maybe 4 inches away from the side pocket. I said "i just need to sink this easy side pocket to gain some confidence back". I miss the shot, you CAN'T miss that shot, and then my cue went a flying... Still pretty ticked off. I know i suck at pool but this was just ridiculous. In my defense at least i don't umm "rearrange" the book shelves like my buddy Marc does when he get's upset :}

Ugg

Oh and i have recently found out that my girlfriend was trained by jedi knight monk warriors in the art of Connect Four. You know the simple child's game we all played, well she is a master. I could not beat her once... I swear she was floating with her legs crossed while we were playing, with a slight glow in her hands every time she played a piece.

Oh i finally got a night shot of the station. I've been playing around with a big fancy camera that the station has, a canon 1D i think it is. Giant bugger, i still can't get any shots of the dang sky, the other night it was just incredibly beautiful out. To see the milky Way and all the surrounding stars is just surreal. The sky feels like it is in touching distance. I'm going to work with some of the camera-ey folks here and see what i am doing wrong while trying to take night sky photos.

Anywho here is the only picture i took that is remotely post-able. There aren't many stars in the photo since it was a full moon. That dang thing over powers the rest of the beautiful sky.

Meh

2009-05-09T22:41:00.000-07:00

Not much to report on really. We started a pool tournament that's going to last 10 weeks I think. Last week I played Weeks and won 2 out of 3 games. We have 2 divisions in which we will play every person in our division once and we will play one person from the other division once. After we have gone through these games we will be ranked and being the championship matches. We play 3 games each match, regardless of the initial wins: meaning if i win the first two games i still have to play the third game. We will be ranked first on number of matches won, then by number of games won. I almost beat Weeks 3-0, the final game i had a full table cut shot with the 8 ball sitting on the rail. I hit the ball nearly perfectly. I didn't have enough speed on the 8 ball and it sat hanging over the pocket, which Weeks then easily pocketed. Grrr

Next week I play Cully, really not sure how that's going to turn out he's pretty good.

That is all I have to say about that.

It's going to be a long few days

2009-04-26T21:28:00.000-07:00

Oy i'm tired. I worked last night from 8:30pm until 5:30am this morning, tried to sleep but couldn't. Got maybe 2, max 3 hours of sleep. Got up at noon, went and worked in the Dish Pit until 4, I'm going to go attempt to work out now at 5, then i have to work in the store from 6-7, then i may play volleyball till 9ishpm, and then i have about 6 hours worth of work left to finish up timecards so i should be up until 3ish am. Then i have to work in the dish pit tomorrow from 10am -8pm. Oy

Oh did i mention i frostbit my nose again, or maybe frostnip i really don't know the difference. It has been red all week and peeling so me thinks frostbite. This was from a wonderful alarm we had go off in one of the outbuildings last week at 1am. We were outside for 3ish hours in -87F temps, 25knot winds at -128F windchill. Pretty cold let me tell you. It was interesting to see just how hard it is to try and use radios when you are wearing mittens. I had to take my mittens off frequently because my battery kept freezing, lucky me i forgot to wear glove liners so my hands were jsut exposed. And since I'm Team 1 lead I'm on the radio a lot. My frozen hands coupled with the frustration of trying to use a radio with mittens made for a very interesting night. There was one good thing that came out of the event, it for the first time felt like winter. Between the blowing snow and the smoke from the generator exhaut and the very dark conditions it was, well miserable and i loved it :}

The Sun's Finally Outta Here! Well Sorta...

2009-04-19T03:43:00.000-07:00

About 2 and a half weeks ago the sun finally showed us it's purdyness for the last time. Now all we are STILL stuck with is a little light from the sun. I am very bitter about this, i just want that dirty old sun to get outta here! Twoish and a half weeks ago I went out and helped Robert Fuhrman one of the science techs at one of the two vaults he monitors. These are just wood "buildings" so to speak that are now quite buried under the snow. They are considered a confined spaced so require at least two people to be there if someone is going into it so that the second person can stand and watch for any problems outside of the confined space. We took turns doing this so I could go into the vault. Very boring in there as this particular vault just held a 32port router, but still i can say Iwent down in one of the vaults at the south pole.

Not to long after that we had the sun's final hurrah:

It was quite difficult to get any shots that did it justice as usual, particularly the shots I was trying to get of the waves you could see flowing across the sun. Apparently it's the earth's atmosphere that does that, or so Ross with SPT said while we were all looking at it through one of the telescopes. I did take a video of it, though my camera is not quite adept to shooting through a telescope. You can kind of see the waveyness here:

Maybe a couple of days or so after this, not quite two weeks ago we had our first star!!
It looked like a little burnt pixel in the sky :}

Here is my photographic evidence of the star encircled in red because it is doubtful that you can see it. These were taken around 3ish PM:

This is what happens when you forget to turn the flash off and are exhaling around the same time you are taking the photo...I just thought it looked cool

And here is the South Pole's first naked eye visible star, oh it was a good day ;}

Around 7ish Pm or so I think I was able to find the star again and take this shot again encircled in red:

We have a bunch more stars now but it is still quite bright out I can't wait for the sun to get the heck outta here. Also last week I saw my first aurora ever! it was, well it was really kinda lame because we had a full moon which was insanely bright as well as light still from the sun. The good thing is as lame and dull/dim as it was the folks who've worked in Mactown all said that was as good as the auroras ever got there...Oh i can't wait for darkness, new moon here I come!!

During the winter we have to have every window boarded up so no light shows through because the light will screw up the sensitive science experiments we have going on here during the winter. So not only do we have to board up all the windows we also have to make sure any light we have outside is red, flashlights, headlamps, station lights, etc.

One of the unfortunate results of having all the windows boarded up is that the majority of us who work inside don't know when there are auroras or anything else of interest going on outside. To combat this we have folks call over the radios on an all-call that there is an aurora at whatever spot it is located. Thankfully there are a few folks who are always outside at some time or another. I've seen a total of 5ish different auroras thus far.

I got to do snow stakes again last week which was pretty fun doing it out in the dark. Well let me backtrack a bit, the first day I went out it was a disaster I got ticked off and came back in and decided to do it another day. The first time I went out, my goggles froze up right away, when I went to take them off I pulled off my headlamp, the cable on the headlamp was frozen fairly solid so i couldn't get the lamp back on my head it sort of stuck straight out over my shoulder and drooped a bit, not only that the elastic headband somehow got all twisted up as well. Then I was out there in mittens that i have never worn before trying to get all this stuff resituated, not very fun with essentially a thumb and one giant digit. The next day that I went out I was more prepared, I kept the battery pack for the headlamp in my back pants pocket to keep the batteries warm I snaked the cable up through my back so it had my body heat to keep it warm, and went out without goggles. I asked one of the winterovers from last year what they did about goggles after my whole fiasco and he said they just didn't wear them. If you cover up your face so that just your eyes are exposed then it wasn't so bad. He was right, aside from when I was walking in the wind it wasn't all that bad having a part of my face exposed. All in all the second attempt went very well, I fell a couple of times and slid on my back down some stuff but I didn't get hurt so that's a good thing. Even with a headlamp on it's very difficult to walk throughout all the drifted snow, it's amazing just ow the snow drifts. The only bad thing I suppose was that being out there for 2 hours in -80F, -120F windchill is that it really messed with my knees. I found out about a week ago that I have tendinitis in my right knee (from all the jumping in volleyball) so the awkward walking in the snow did not help this.

I hate doctors, well not them personally more that I hate going to the doctors, so for me to go means something is really bothering me. My knees always would hurt after playing volleyball and i didn't really think anything of it because I knew why they were hurting. Constant jumping up and down on a hard surface is not good for the knees especially when you don't warm up at all before hand. But about 3 weeks ago my right knee was hurting to the point that I couldn't put much weight on it when it came to pushing my weight up. I could walk fine but when I had to go up and down stairs I had to use the rails and arms to support most of my weight. Also trying to stand up on something like a chair was impossible. Still I didn't go to the doctors. It was when the weight from my big blue boots was hurting my knee just from walking I decided to go. It's feeling much better now though except for the minor setback of snow stakes.

Oh had my two 1TB hard drives seemingly stolen from my old desk. I left them on the floor at my old cubicle, and when I went to grab them the other day they were gone. And of course no one has any idea what could have happened to them. I suppose it is entirely possible that I was bored one day and decided to hide them from myself, but probably not too likely...I'm really hoping they are just misplaced and that someone didn't actually steal them...Though I'm not hopeful.

Getting quite dark here...

2009-03-29T02:47:00.000-07:00

The view out my window is beautiful yet again. The sun is no longer there on the horizon but the colors it has left are amazing. I wonder how much more of this i have to see before i get to see some stars. Man i would love to see some stars.

The sun was getting lower and lower, this was the second best view i had from my room of the sunset. Again around 12:30am

Krissie and I decided to go up on the roof to get some shots, this is the sun shown in between the sun globes. Met uses these to track the path of the sun and such, the sun shines into these and burns a path through a piece of a special piece of paper that sits in the curved portion you see surrounding the globes. They're not quite effective at these temperatures or with the sun this low naturally...They were taken down not to long after this shot was taken.

Krissie
Myself
And here was the best view of the sun i had all season. Mainly because the sun was gone and should not have been there. Naturally i grabbed my camera to go get a bunch of photos. This was when i frostbit my whole hand. Lame.
As you can see in the photo here after a certain point we all switch over to the clear lenses for our goggles. Once the sun gets low enough the orange tint becomes a pain in the tush.
It was crazy beautiful. The sun had this really cool mirage effect going (well that's basically what it was so it makes sense) it is very hard to describe. I've never seen it before and probably never will again, who knows.

Here is a the same shot above essentially just zoomed all the way in. You can see that the sun is just a little sliver that sort of line going through it was shimmering and moving like a mirage or heatwave. Second floor of the station. I was standing on the ob deck when i took these photos here.

You can see the telescope and the sun in this shot.

The stairway into DA (Destination Alpha), the main entrance to the station. DSL seen in the background.
Taken from under the station.

DA's stairwell again

Yup same stairwell

I liked the stairwell ok...

Through the stairwell, a little different than the others ;}
Pic does this view no justice :{

This one does however...

Well i hope you liked the shots, they are the last shots of the sun i think i will be seeing. Hopefully i will be able to get some nice photos of the sky. If not i will just put a bunch of pictures made in mspaint to resemble the sky ;}

One fun little side note for this blog; I've been growing out my nails as of about two weeks ago. This is only the second time in my life that i can remember having any sort of fingernails. It's very very painful to let them grow back in after so many years of being a nailbiter but not as painful as having them it would seem. You see all summer i would walk down the hallway running my fingers down the hall's walls. Well there are these seams every few feet for the wall material, and about 4 days ago i was walking down the hallway running my fingers along the wall as usual when it got caught in a seam. A bright flash of light in my vision and incredible pain the ensued. This was not the first time i had done this, i did it a few days earlier, did i learn my lesson apparently not...This time however i have. My finger was bleeding it cut into my finger tip rolling the skin under my finger nail, it split my finger nail 1/3 of the way up and halfway across the nail. I had blood splattered on my palm and finger ( not a lot but it did splatter). I was this close to cutting off all my nails again... The finger was black from the blood and such for a few days, i recently cut the broken part off and superglued up the cut. It doesn't look too bad right now, just lame. I was going to put a pic or two up, but they were kinda gross. Stupid dang fingernails...

South Pole Sunset...when will it end ;}

2009-03-27T03:37:00.000-07:00

So the sun has gone down, i thought it had disappeared completely until yesterday when it was magically back. It's an illusion with a name caused by another thing that I can't remember. Either way it is cool. I was staying up for work and following the sun and taking pictures every hour or so after midnight when it is on the N-NW track around the station. It was really unbelievable how beautiful it was. The sun was really not fully there it was more of a sliver, a shimmering wavy sliver. Very cool let me tell you. As the sun began sitting many people were getting to be quite grumpy or just in a bit of a funk. The impending darkness, the increased cold all that good stuff takes a bit to ingest. I've taken many photos of the sun as it progressed further down and will be slowly adding blog entries with them. I really don't feel like a big ol entry ever ever again. So here are a few to start off with. This is out the exit of the second floor in the A1 wing where krissie and i have our room. This is looking out over the arches with the power plants ever present steam stack making some purdy little puffs.

Looking through the railings from the same exit stairway. One of my favorite shots.

I'm not really sure how many days after the above photos i took these coming pics, i think it was only the next day but i am not too sure about that. The sky was beginning to get very pretty. This first shot is from the same location as the other two.

This is a shot from the roof looking over A2 Wing in the foreground. The little mount doodad you see ther on the edge used to hold a webcam with a live feed folks could get to over the internet when we had satellites available. It kicked the bucket in the beginning of the summer unfortunately.

My new office has a window there with a pretty nice view. It was really cool to be able to watch the sun as it got lower and lower day by day. It was also very cool to have the moon out that window. It's amazing how clear everything is down here, the moon was very very cool as well. This was that night around 12:30am

We have 3 major meals over the summer, sunset dinner, sunrise dinner and umm the fourth of july i think ( not sure on that one). The dinner was amazing, i didn't take very many photos, and forgot to take any photos of the meal itself. Oh well. We had roasted leg of lamb (this was the first time i had ever tried lamb, not sure how i feel about it yet), grilled asparagus, an amazing salad and rolls to start the meal with, dang can't remember what the other side dishes were. That's what i get for not taking photos. It was all very good, but then, oh then they brought out the desert. It was a small mini cupcake sized spice cake with 3 wedges of apples topped with an amazing caramel sauce and then also topped with a sweet cream sauce. Wow, it was quite honestly one of the best deserts i've had anywhere, and i get around... Thank you Francis!! We ate all of this in the nicely decorated galley with the warmth of a crackling fire.

And this was the view out our windows, the pictures do it no justice.

Here is a zoomed in shot of the sunset, Karate Kid anyone?

So i will keep posting more photos of the sunset every few days, and you damn well better enjoy them. I came in last night after taking some photos on the roof with my hand complete frost bitten. I was up there it went totally numb to the point that i couldn't put my out glove on over the liner because i couldn't tell where my fingers where. i had to wrap my arm around the rung of the ladder to get down. I've done this before when i went into the ice tunnels so once you've had it once it's very easy to get it again. And man did i get it. I've never been in so much pain from the cold before. When i got in all of my fingers were white. It was the weirdest most uncomfortable sensation in my finger tips when i was swinging my arm trying to get my hand to warm back up. I can't even begin to describe it. I then was thinking about the incident and asking myself, well was it frostbit or was it frostnip, what's the difference. So once i was able to use my fingers again i looked it up and because quite confused.

There were many conflicting sources of information, and what i found very interesting was that frostnip can occur with temps starting at and below 59 degrees F, and frostbite can occur starting at and below 32 degrees F. So i began to wonder what they had to say about -74 degrees F... I had my hand out of the outer glove for no more than 2 minutes more like a minute and a half and it did this to me...

One of the coolest things about being down here i think is my breath in the freezing outside. It makes the coolest sound when you blow your breath out hard. Have you ever heard a blow torch or maybe even a bunsen burner, that's what it sounds like. So cool.

Holy Cow This Is Soooo Long...

2009-03-13T04:11:00.000-07:00

Well I did it; I've caught the blog up for the most part. It should be easier from now on to keep it updated as it won't feel like such a daunting task. Also the internet is up starting at 8:15pm right now so that helps a bunch. With that being said however this entry is freaking enormous...
Never again will I have an entry this large, nor will I ever let it get that far behind *knock on wood* Dates are generally unknown for most of this stuff, but I don't think anyone really is too worried about that :) And it is entirely possible that the timeline here is completely off. Either way, here goes.

Here is just a random pic of the carp/siding work that was done on the station. It was really weird for me to get here to the pole and see the station black. All the pics I saw of it were well the color of plywood, I had no idea it was waiting on siding. And now this pic is quite outdated as nearly all of the facing is completed.
I left off with Christmas dinner, well after dinner, maybe before hmm dun remember; I gave Krissie her Christmas present. I spent a ton of time making the wrapping paper myself; measuring and aligning making sure that when I wrapped the present it would turn out, well as you see here. She is obsessed with Mario, hence the paper, and the excitement ;}

Oh aint we just the cutest?

Yup, Dr. Pepper. What a weird present you may be thinking to yourself, well stop thinking; you are wrong. You see we don't have Dr. Pepper here at the South Pole. Travesty, I know. I had Ben call down to McMurdo and talk to the folks at the store to see if we could Guard Mail Dr. Pepper, they said sure. Well we told them it was for someone’s birthday, and blah blah blah, anywho I gave them my CC info, and they Guard Mailed it down. She was quite surprised :}

The next day was the annual "Race Around the World". This is a race held every year on Christmas where folks have the option of either racing seriously (winner gets a trip to McMurdo to compete in their race thing), or to ride in a vehicle, heavy equipment, etc, or to just walk/jog it at their own pace, or dress up, create a chariot wear costumes, you name it. Basically just have fun.

Now I would like to now interject my little protest. You see they do not time the vehicles during this race; this is just down right rude. We not only won the race in our vehicle, we kicked everyone’s butt! Granted we were the only ones actually racing while in a vehicle, and granted we were the only ones making the Vehicle Maintenance folks angry with our driving, but hey we deserve some sort of recognition. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to squeeze a Piston Bully in-between a Dozer and Folks running on the trails, very tricky maneuvers. I don't even think we hit anyone! We also got kicked off the track and told to park the vehicle as we kept going after our allotted 3 laps. 3 laps pshh not enough, we wanted to get everyone a chance to drive the thing for a lap; unfortunately we were only able to get 4 of 5 folks a chance to drive the course. Oh yes one other note that belongs in my formal protest. Not only did we lap people, make record time, look awesome doing it; we also did chinese fire drills after ever lap. We all jumped out of the bully from the front seats and the back and raced around the thing...As you can plainly see we were robbed and deserve some sort of recognition!

Here is the course for the race:
Now I’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself here, first off I need to tell you about the night before the race. I spent 14 hours the night before getting everything prepared for my masterpiece, (which ticked Ben off consequently as he had other plans...sorry dude but I had a vision) I whipped up a keen sketch of the bully as Santa’s sleigh. I don't have that awesome sketch anymore unfortunately so you will just have to believe me when I say it was umm keen. So the plan called for reindeer mounted at the front and presents and decorations on top to represent Santa’s bag o' gifts. The first thing I needed to do was make the reindeer. I learned rather quickly that I do not know how to draw reindeer. Krissie spent most of the night helping me get everything done, she's awesome. Here we are cutting out cardboard shapes that loosely resembled reindeery type things.
I also had some help from Mallon, and Sara. Thanks folks! Both Krissie and Sara kept telling me oh no don't be upset they look good, they look fine, god I hate it when people try and make me feel better and don't just come out and say, umm those look like some sort of sick dog, or maybe a sheep. Thankfully Mallon was there to play that roll ;}.

Now you may be asking why I would have spent 14 hours doing this, how could it have possibly taken that long? Well let me tell you, it is incredibly difficult to do any sort of carpentry type work in an electronics shop... I spent so much time scrounging around the station looking for parts and tools it was ridiculous. I eventually found an old broken pallet that I could steal wood from for the mount; I found a worn hacksaw in our shop and a crow bar. I could not find a real saw; a claw hammer or anything that remotely looked like it should be used with wood. Try taking nails out of a board with a crow bar...not the easiest or most fun thing in the world to do. While I finished all the reindeer, Krissie worked on wrapping boxes for presents and then decorating. We made a few trips out to where the bullies were parked so I could first see if this was even going to be possible. Yes I decided to check this out after I had most of the work done...
Then I realized I didn't bring any sort of measuring device, and then blah blah, I ended up having to go out there 6 times total. This was a 10 minute walk out to the things each way. Once I was satisfied with my measurements, I decided to try and find the wood I needed, yes again after I decided I was going to do this. Found the old pallet, fought and kicked with it in the shop until I finally said screw it, it's 4 in the morning no one will know if I go down to the carp shop and use the equipment. So I did. Then I couldn't find any wood screws, only sheet metal...Then I couldn't find anything to mount the dang thing with. Bunch o’ problems let me tell ya. I eventually went down to the UT shop and stole a bunch of nuts/washers/bolts, shhhhh. And then when I had no energy left whatsoever we had to go mount the dang stuff. When I took the mount out to the bully I was feeling pretty good. The mount looked solid; everything finally seemed to be going right. HAA!! So when I got out to the bully and looked down to where I was going to test fit the mount I noticed something. I noticed something very much not good. I had been so dang sleepy that I failed to realize that the place I was measuring and building this mount for was angled...

The dang thing was angled down (the face of it was pointing towards the snow, not straight ahead). Thankfully and luckily I built my mount to run at an upward angle to give the "illusion" that the reindeer were beginning to fly, taking off if you will. I thought I was quite clever. Now of all the crap that went wrong this was the most mind boggling piece that seemed to work out in my favor. The angle that the plate on the bully was almost exactly the same angle on my mount, so they cancelled each other out. I am talking so close that when they came together the mount looked to go out perfectly straight... oy vay!

Victory! Now moving on.

That red nosed sheep with flames coming out of its head was Rudolph!
Oh crap, forgot the best part. Tripp went out to warm up the bully and get it prepared so he could later bring it over so we could mount the stuff. One problem...wouldn't start. The bully we were given to use would not start...

Did I mention how much time I spent working on this little project? THE FREAKING THING DIDN"T START!!!! AHHHHHH!!!! I was far too tired to be mad; it was quite comical to me really. After all the crap that I went through all night to get the thing done, it was only natural for this to happen. So I walked out to the bully again, I was able to get it started thankfully. It would have been unfortunate to see the station burn down on Christmas and all.

So anyway, here's Tripp getting the presents all setup on top in the roof rack.
And here are the 3 sides of presents in Santa's bag
And here it is in all its glory!!
We all decided that we needed to wear our Big Reds and Santa hats, well most of us anyway, Ben was very angry and refused, meh what can you do. The rest of us look cool in our Santa outfits ;}
Going clock wise starting at Rudolph we have Tripp, Ben, Krissie, Devon, and myself.
And here I am disassembling the rig.

Fancy smancy...note the two angles countering each other and the straight resulting mount :}
Cause I’m coolAnd everyone who participated received one of these bad boys
For new years we were to have a concert, and various drunken fun. I busted out these two shirts I ordered in for Krissie and me. Now I know you are thinking wow you two are disgustingly cute and incredibly dorky, maybe even thinking lame, well yer just jealous. This pic is super dark because we were trying to take pictures of the lights on the shirts.
You see the shirts were bought cause they are pretty much Zelda life meters; they even have a special little feature that make us even more disgustingly cute. When we are close to one another, or get within a certain range all the hearts (life bars) on the shirts are fully lit. When we walk away from each other the lights begin to turn off until you only have half of them lit. God I’m such a nerd and I love it!! Everyone loved our shirts :}
Here is one of the three bands that played that night. We didn't go to any of the shows, not sure what we did, I think we all just sat in my old IT office and chitty chatted. We did go in however to see the dance crew
A group of folks had been working together, probably for a month working on a show, recital, thing. And they were all quite good. It was great. Here is the T-qualizer I ordered as well, modeled and worn that night by Mr. Benjamin "Jazz Hands" Burke. Ok not his nickname, that's just for if he reads this thing ;}
After the dance thinger one of the firefighters asked me if I would go out and take a group photo of them by the pole, naturally I said buzz off fire boy!

Here is a cool shot I took that night (1 am btw) with the geo pole, the dome, and our Christmas tree.
Here’s a close-up of the tree, perdy awesome.
And here's a group shot of the firefighters (current ones at new years, they rotate every 3 weeks between here and Mactown) and their ARFF
The next day they moved the pole to its new geographic home (it shifts 30ish ft a year, I think that's right anyway?)
Personally I think the new pole topper thing is quite ugly, but eh to each their own I guess. I don’t have a pic of it actually, that should tell you something as I take a picture of every dang thing I see…

Thought I’d throw in an intermission :}

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INTERMISSION #1
DOO DEE DOO DEE, DAH DUH DEE DO DOO

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So where to next, oh yes we went down to the ice tunnels. Odd to only go down now right? Meh I was in no rush they were going no where. It was quite cool in there, no pun in tended…or was it? They are well just a tunnel carved out of the ice, snow really, but really really hard snow. You need to check out with comms when you go down there and give them an estimate as to when you will be back in case something happens. They do have cctv down in the tunnels at various points which is also kinda cool. I always wanted to call in a panic call to them and make things flash in front of the cameras, alien-esque and pretend to be pulled off camera. Sounded cool, never did it oh well. Anywho, it’s really cold down there, it’s -60F pretty much year round which is pretty cold. I didn’t really think it would be a big deal personally, I later found out otherwise…Here is Krissie’s back as we go down the tunnel. There were 5 of us that went down there total: Tripp, Erin, Ben, Krissie and yours truly

There was a random hole in the wall right towards the beginning of the little journey, and naturally one of us had to get into it. Here is Tripp demonstrating
Like I said it is pretty much always -60F and one of the things to do is get your photo with the giant thermometer that is down there. I took one photo this where I didn’t smile (normal for me of course) Krissie complained so I gave her my what up dog lame pose as seen here :}
Krissie naturally looked far cuter than I, but that’s really just due to the lighting IMO…
Throughout the tunnels there are escape hatches that go to the surface, kinda cool, kinda scary thinking hmm why would they need that. Then you here the dozers driving over head and you remember where each and every one of these things are as you pass them…
There are a few things carved into the walls of the ice tunnels left by various groups of folks over the years. One of the most famous is the hog’s head left by the fist crew to inhabit the new station, here is be modeling with the piggy.
And throughout the tunnels there are maps letting you know just where you are in the tunnels. Oh one thing to note, the pic of Ben and the piggy above shows him with a flashlight, there are normally lights that you can flip on in the tunnels but we chose to go in the dark and only go by flashlight, more interesting that way. Well actually Ben knew there were lights none of the rest of us did until we left and he told us yah it’s cooler with flashlights though. Oh Benji…
I had another pic here but decided it may offend some folks and/or get me in trouble. You see there are various tunnels that sorta go nowhere, and at the end of them some folks were nice enough to print out some little posters that had well, the jist of what they had on them is you be screwed this tunnel goes nowhere :}
Now the other staple item to see is the pike, the frozen fish that has quite an interesting story behind it, many rumors go around about it. I have no idea what is real and what is not. There is a little letter there with it telling the story of the pike, but who knows. The jist of that story is that someone somehow got it from McMurdo down to the Pole in one piece and now it has a new home here with us.
Funny little note, Ben refused to touch it, I however did not feel the same ;}
Here is the group of us with Mr. Pike, not to be confused with Mr. Pike, my sitcom buddy over the summer :}. It’s awesome trying to take pictures in an enclosed environment where every breath you take fills up the space and totally blocks out the photos. As you can see in our photo. All the haze is our breath.
We went on to various other spots, and then were heading back out when Ben and I realized we missed a couple of tunnels, he wanted to go check them out so I followed him while the rest of the group went on out. This was at the end of one of the tunnels; these are the infamous poop-cicles. That pipe to his immediate left was an old sewage pipe and the steam coming off of it floated up to the ceiling froze, and made cool little poop-cicles.
This is what the tunnels looked like when you turned the lights on, this is the same tunnel as the poop-cicles.
A few times throughout the year we had “James Brown Bingo”, James Brown was the executive chef during the summer, and apparently he was known for his bingo nights every year. I thought sure why not I have nothing better to do. The first night was hilarious, and they just kept getting better every time. This was the second to last time he did the bingo, and this time he dressed up as William Wallace (braveheart) while Jane Foxx dressed up as his wench. He likes to get loud and scream behind people when the number 69 comes up, it scares the crap out of the poor soul he is behind…

We were offered ice that night as well, ice from one of the ice cores…have no idea how old it was 100yrs? 1000yrs? Old either way. Krissie wanted a shot of her using it with her Dr. Pepper, so I obliged :}
Brian (comms tech, a.k.a Churchman) is shown here playing with 10 cards, well there are ten cards there he’s only playing with 8 at this time.
He whipped all 10 out for the final bingo game which is always blackout and is always for the cash prize. You see you pay $1 for every board you get, that night the prize was $250 I think?
At the beginning of bingo night we were all told that there were surprises in store this night. Oh and surprises there were! You see the whole time we had bingo night going, the lovely little gingerbread house that Jon “The Baker” made for Christmas was sitting out on it’s own little table. I thought that odd, but whatever, it’s the South Pole. We do what we want ;}. Then all of a sudden after the final bout for the prize money was over (oh yeah there was a tie and they decided to arm wrestle for it, and epic moment let me tell you) anyway after this bout James Brown grabs this giant potato smasher he had sitting at the bingo table drops the mic and runs screaming towards the gingerbread house (which consequently Brian and I were standing right next to) and proceeds to smash the thing into smithereens, which also smacked Brian and I. Freaked us out let me tell you. Then Jon “The Baker” came out with a rolling pin and started smashing it up even more. Holy crap it was awesome. Thankfully Devon (Mr. Pike) had his little camera rolling the whole time and I have proof of this moment :}

Holy cow this thing is sooooo long…

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INTERMISSION #2

BEEP BOOP BOOP BEEP BEEP BOOP BOOP, BOOP BEEP BEEP BEEP BOOP BOOP BOO BOOP BOO BOOP
(Sad attempt at Mario via BEEPS and BOOPS)

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Really I know that no one is actually going to read this whole thing, but it makes me feel better knowing that I will be caught up and can move on…

Now where was I? Oh yes so I decided to winter here…I decided to take the job as work order scheduler down here during the summer. I originally wanted to be here for one year time, both summer and winter. I wanted so badly to see the night sky and the auroras. There was really only one job that I could apply for at the time and it was the W.O. scheduler. Not something I was exactly excited about, but it would get me here during the winter. After I went through the process of finally getting the position, IT wanted me to try and take the comms tech job over the winter, well Henry my boss at the time did anyway. I naturally said of course, I don’t have the experience but I can figure it out. That and be trained by Brian until he leaves. Long story short I was bouncing back and forth, higher ups said it would be unsafe, I didn’t get it (would have made and extra $10ishK over the winter if I had) and now am here as work order scheduler, which means I won’t be done here until November and I will have spent a year here at the pole by the time I am outta here. Well that is the hope anyway, I may get shipped out sooner, we will see.

Now since I was going to winterover, I was given a week off that I could have gone out to McMurdo and spent the time. I chose not to, I had no reason to go there, I knew no one and everything I wanted to do and see was closed off for the season. So I stayed here at the pole for a week and watched movies, read and slept. Man I slept a lot if was nice. So then they had us all do our blood work, sent down a shrink checked us out, took the test passed, but still had to do dental. The dentist came down, she was quarantined with the flu, medevac’d outta here and I was seemingly screwed. Took them a while to figure out what they were going to do. What they finally decided was that they would send me to McMurdo for one day to get the dental exam over with. So I flew out to Mcmurdo at 4pm I think, got there 8ish PM maybe and then had to go see the dentist the next morning at 8am, then fly back to the pole at 12pm…Not exactly something high on my to do list.

Erin and I both flew out to Mactown, she was going there for R&R as she just got hired on for winter season. So when we got there, we ate, ran into Michiel (Me-kel). He came up from Mactown for a week to replace Tripp as sys admin while Tripp was off on R&R/medical leave. Cool guy. Anywho, met him and he offered to give us a tour of where he worked. This is a shot outside of the entrance.
I then decided to go peruse the area.
While out walking I ran into something I hadn’t seen in a long time, running water outside! So weird to see again…
I decided to go and see Scott’s hut. So I made my little trek out there and ran into some very beautiful scenery.
Once I made it out there I realized that it was locked and that you had to go somewhere, dunno where to get a key or possibly a tour from someone. So lame…
Here’s the dead seal outside of the hut, better than nothing I suppose.
There was also this whale thinger made from iron and such which was kinda cool.
The first time I was in Mactown I was only there for 18ish hours so I didn’t get to do anything. I really wanted to go up ob hill and was worried that I may not get to ever do it since it was entirely possible that I could get a straight through flight when I go home which means I just plane hop. So I was very glad to have the chance to and climb up ob hill. This is ob hill; the cross on the top is barely visible.
I really didn’t know how to get up there, I was told that the direct route that you can see in the above photo was closed off, so I found a little map thing and went off walking. Right after I came back from Scott’s hut, had a mocha and filled my water bottle.

Found these on the way up there, not sure if they were done in Mactown or if they were done before they got there.
I ended up going off on this little trail that I was unsure where it went. I decided to just follow it and see where it would take me. This was the closest I got to the Kiwi’s base while on foot (we drove sorta through it everytime we came in from the plane)
While on the trail I came a cross a few really odd looking rocks that seemed completely out of place.
Ooh purdy
I was quite glad I took this trail that was leading me to who knows where. I actually got to see some wildlife, as boring as they were I still can say I saw them :} I wasn’t sure if this guy was sunning himself or if he was dying or what was going on exactly. While on the trail I kept seeing these little dark splotches out on the ice all over and I couldn’t figure out what they were. My camera’s zoom wasn’t adequate enough to get me close enough in to see what the stuff was. Then I came across this fellow. And I knew they were seals.
He didn’t move much but I stayed and watched him for a while, and then all of a sudden another little guy popped his head up out of the water in front of me. He eventually climbed up out of the water to join the other deal in sunbathing/death I don’t know which.
I stayed watching the two of them and a skua that eventually showed up for a good 45 minutes, this is what I was sitting and watching, I could have stayed there longer but I wanted to get up the hill as it was getting late. This was around 1am I think.
Here’s the little skua who hung out as well.
This was the first time I had ever seen any bit of ice under the sea, and it was so incredibly beautiful. The picture does it no justice. It was the most amazing blue I had ever seen. This has made me want to go scuba diving near some icebergs; I know they do that somewhere on this little planet I just need to find out where.
Ahh a friendly site, I was circling around ob hill apparently, here was the trail and Mactown getting closer.
I just really like this photo as it looks like some alien thinger out in the distance shooting up a light beam.
Getting closer to where I freaking started…
There was a cool seemingly abandoned building that I ran across.
Just another cool pic looking back on where I came. I contemplated walking back to the seals to see if they were still there or not. I finally decided screw it I’m getting tired and I still have the trek up the hill so I turned back around and continued on.
The trek up the ill really sucked while wearing Big Red. It was the only coat I brought so I guess I really had no choice. Also my worn tennis shoes were not the ideal choice for footwear but whatevs. It wasn’t a bad little climb at all; I was quite impressed that I was breathing so well doing it. Living at 11k for 3 months is sure helpful when you go back down to sea level and do this type of exercise. I was getting closer and closer the little cross teasing me onward.
I really wanted to go climb the hill across from me, it looked purdy
You’ll notice there are no folks out and about in the pic of the town here; that’s because it was around 2am at this point.
Finally made it, the view is breathtaking and totally indescribable.
I decided to walk along the coast once I got back down, it too was indescribable. While I was walking along it a seal popped its head up out of the water for a breath of air. He was no more than 20 ft from me, quite cool. I waited for a bit but he never came back.
Here’s a map of the area and the treks to various spots. The Ob Hill loop was closed I learned after I came back…
And here is the route I took overlaid in white. I was pretty dang tired when I got back.

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FINAL INTERMISSION

DUM DUH DUM DUM, DUUMMMM

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So made it back to the pole all in one piece thankfully. The dental appointment was interesting to say the least, they didn’t have my records, had to get them guardmailed over, her equipment was broke, the repair dude was there while she was fiddling with my teeth, eventually got it working, then got out of there…

Not long after I returned the folks over at SPT (South Pole telescope) had a get together. There I witnessed my first outdoor toilet fully equipped with foam seat. The sign there on the wall was pretty darn funny.
When we were going to leave there was a small hiccup. Someone jacked the van… Here is a shot of Billy standing where the van should have been. It eventually made its way back; someone just took some folks back while we were inside. We even had the person in comms do a station wide all call, “If you happen to be the one who stole the van could you please bring it back” something like that, too long ago for me to remember, it was funny though.
At some point we had these trucks pull in to the pole, they were the support team for some race that was going on. We were all a little PO’d when they planted all their flags and such over by the pole…We also had some beakers come in with this cool giant balloon. They were doing something with air samples and would raise and lower it whenever we had flights coming.
We also had ice sculptures that were pretty cool. Some were better than others; here is Calvin and Hobbes done by Patrick Cullis (Cully). Many of us were ticked about which sculpture won the contest. Let’s just say it helps to be a cute girl down at the pole…
An exit sign pointing down with a hole (you could sorta get into it) won, while clever and funny there were a couple that I thought were better. The Egyptian? coffin (I don’t have a pic) was incredibly detailed. Meh whatev
Ben and Tripp decorated the office with a Mexican pueblo theme. It was pretty awesome :}
We had another movie night and this time we had Nitro Ice Cream. It’s ice cream made with liquid nitrogen, pretty dang cool.
After oh 3ish months I finally went out to see Krissie launch a balloon. I went out there with Churchman. Here she is looking cute as usual in the BIF (Balloon Inflation Facility). During the summer Meteorology launched 2 balloon’s a day, one at 10am and one at 10pm.
There are ginormous freezer doors on the BIF so that they can inflate the balloons and walk them outside. Brian is seen here in the pic for a size reference.
On the way back I noticed this old tractor getting ready to be shipped out of the pole. How I missed it coming in is beyond me.
I eventually received my humidifier from home and naturally had to decorate it. His name is Frank. Frank the tank, though while he was wearing his sombrero he liked to be called Francisco.
Sometime before the last bingo night the cargo folks found a box of packaged diced bacon. It was I think 28 years old. There were a few folks who tried it; I was not one of them however. They did say it tasted fine.
Towards the end of the season Sara and Andrew threw an Ice cream jamboree I believe they called it. They made some more Nitro Ice cream and had all kinds a fixins’ This was around 1am mind you as they were swing shift workers.
There were only a couple of days left before Brian and Claude left us, so I had everyone go out for a group photo. This was S.P.I.T. (South Pole IT); Krissie was an honorary member as she was in our office almost as much as we were. Starting in the back row we have Benjamin Burke, Devon Pike, Henry Malmgren, Me, Tripp Whalen. Then on the bottom row we have Krissie Shiroma, Claude Clegg, and Brian Churchman. You also note they are a bunch of puny things in full gear. I wore my hoody as it was a bit chilly out ;}
They left two days after the photo, and then Ben was to leave not long after that. Here we are walking out with him. The three in the middle are Tripp, Ben and Laurie. There were a bunch of our friends that left on this flight.
Here’s Ben and Laurie surrounded by all the other folks waiting to leave.
Every time I see this picture I picture Ben saying “Hey kid, I’m a computer”. He didn’t actually say that, but there are a few folks who know what I mean.
Then the last of our friends to leave was Devon. Though this was not the last flight yet.
Finally the last flight arrived, bought dang time! For the two weeks leading up to this flight I would yell out “Get Off My Continent” every time a plane took off with more folks leaving the ice.
The last group of folks waiting to leave are actually not in the photo I don’t think. There was a group of us waiting to send off the last of the summer folks as you can see. It was funny because when they were ready to load the plane the dude kept waving us all on, he eventually just gave up when we all ignored him. We were not the ones leaving jerk! The last folks to leave were the firefighters and fuelies, and cargoey folks.
Last stand at the fuel shack
The last of the firefighters heading into the plane
All boarded and ready to get the heck off my continent! They did a standard flyover, many of us were not expecting it to be so darn cold, or to be out there so darn long and were getting very very cold. Stupid plane was taking forever to do the flyover. I ran my but back inside immediately after the shot to warm up.
And this is what I found when I got inside, beautiful isn’t it? Nobody in the halls, man it was weird the first couple of weeks without all the people in the halls. You would never see the halls so empty during the summer.
Once summer was officially over, we needed to get paths flagged to the various remote work areas. Kinda cool.
While taking the earlier photo of the flagged path to DSL I noticed this little thing on the deck. I guess it was fairly new. It was completely wrong apparently no one cared to set the time on it correctly. Mainly this photo was placed in the blog to show you how I normally go outside to the deck and look around, in a hoody, pants of some sort (these were workout pants, quite flimsy) and my crocs. You can’t tell here, but I have no socks on. Gets a little chilly standing out there like that ;}
I have a surveyors measuring stick thinger that I use to measure from the top of the snow to the top of the flag.
My eyelids were freezing up and freezing to my hat/gaiter again, it was fun. My eyes were so frozen however that I could not see out of them very well and would use the clipboard as a marker for the measuring.
Taking a little break to modify the printout I made for jotting down the measurements
Back to work.
And finally this is what I looked like after being outside for 2 hours doing this. It was an incredibly warm day with little to no wind. A toasty -48F

Hmm

2009-02-25T02:08:00.000-08:00

Haven't updated this thing in over a month...wow

Have a two day weekend coming up, hopefully I can spare and hour or two to get this up to date. Little fun side note, today I had my eyelashes, gaiter, and hat freeze together. That was fun, didn't realize it until i tried to pull my gaiter down which just pulled my eyelids down in a painful manner...By the time I got back inside I had a 5/16" ice ball dangling from my left eyelashes. While outside it was annoying me constantly being in my vision so I grabbed it assuming it was just something stuck to my hat, bad idea...

Anywho, this weekend me thinks.

Let's See

2009-01-16T04:30:00.000-08:00

If i can't just get this blog thinger completely updated in one massive super crazy blog update!! Not gonna happen but i will get a good chunk of the way caught up!

Where did i leave off, hmm oh this place is awesome right. Well it is the holidays are quite interesting/fun down here as well. They serve really god food and there are always parties/dancing afterwards. So i mentioned way back when about the crazy thanksgiving night, so let's go with that. They decked out the dining room quite fancifully and server delicious food, or so i was told. The week prior to thanksgiving dinner they had volunteer parties for pie making and potato peeling and the like. Everyone had a good time there or so i was told :) Here is a pic of the dinner setup
And here is the hallway that was lined with tasty treats
I don't know how the food was as i didn't go to dinner, i forgot to sign up for the dinner so was just stuck in a random seating. I would have been sitting with a bunch of strangers people I've never talked to nobody that i knew. Just not my bag. No biggie, i just hung out waiting for the dinners to get over with. Then it was off to the party. The party was supposed to be out in summer camp lounge but it started early in one of the game lounges. The DA's made us Sangria, here is the flyer for the party that i made for them.

And here is the scoop we used for it :)
Brian Churchman our Comms Tech showing proper scooping technique:
Once we moved it out to summer camp things got a little crazy...
There were so many people in the little lounge thing that it got so hot while you were there dancing. A group of us all went outside and were generally blinded, atleast i was by the bright light coming out of the dark lounge, that and it was like a steam bath we were all steaming which made the pictures kinda cool :)

And in this shot you can see the inside of the summer camp lounge, yes that is a stripper pole in the middle of the lounge ;} You can see my back in this shot with the black shirt and brownish hat.The party was awesome, drinking dancing and awesomeness. There were jello shots (a tray of jello rather than individual cups) that were disgusting though some people whose names will remain anonymous were just dumping the trays in their mouth all night. The dancing was fun, they had an alright selection of music. This is where the fun came in, I was dancing with one of the girls in the outside shots when we were yelled at because the guy who provided the music didn't like the way we were dancing he yelled "IT"S NOT EVEN ABOUT THAT", we ignored him and kept dancing and he yelled again so we stopped and she left. We still joke about that night and the "it's not even about that" line gets used often. But i still say, how exactly are you supposed to dance to Juveniles "Back that azz up"?? After that I stayed with the other lovely lady i was dancing with and chitty chatted with a bunch of folks in the "coat room" area, she was sort of my date for the evening though i don't think it was ever clearly labeled that. Point is i went with her, stayed with her afterwards and chitty chatted. It was a really fun night. Oh and apparently my "it's not even about that" dance partner found out we made a scene, not sure if that was good thing or a bad thing she though it was a good thing, and i was apparently "The Man". The girls i was dancing with are quite the cuties that many on station have crushes with :) So yah that was thankgsiving... 2 months late i know shush!

So as it runs out not too long after the thanksgiving night that cute little lady i went to the party with and stayed up chitty chatting with became my girlfriend. Remember that girl i mentioned earlier i helped with the luggage, same one :}. Name's Krissie oh she's just so terribly cute and short! and i <3 short chicks :}. She works in meteorology here, and was working in meteorolgy as a weather girl before she came out here. Now never call her a weather girl, she gets very angry ;} She is a meteorologist according to her, bah i say! Weather girl!! anywho whatever you want to call it she was on tv in multiple cities. yah dating a tv star ;} Here is just about the cutest picture i have ever seen of her.

Now i'm not sure of the date exactly this happened but one of the planes had to be parked here for a good week and a half because someone backed up some fire equipment wrong and smashed a bunch of stuff inside. Here is a rare pic of two planes on our runway.

And here is an excellent pic showing a sign the siding carps put in front of it after it sat here for a week.

Then not too long after this we had a very special airdrop. A c-17 was doing an airdrop one of only 3 ever by a c-17 ( so they said, i did not bother looking it up). It was not as cool as I thought it was going to be. Just a plane droppin stuff. Here are a few pics from that day though, sorta cool i guess. First shot is from my camera and the other two are from my coworker Devon's camera. His is fancy, you can freaking see the guys in the cockpit taking photos of us from his pics...

My air drop:

Devon's

After the drop they did a few passes of the station, a couple "high" and one low pass which was awesome, my pics do not do it justice.

The Bicep group over in the Dark Sector Lab(DSL) had a open house because they were shutting down the Bicep project, and they were going to have the stuff out on display for folks to take photos and chit chat about the project. I just wanted to go and take some photos :}We took a shuttle over to the lab, and on the way came a cross flint walking who decided to try and run along side the shuttle the whole way. Though it may not sound funny it was hilarious at the time especially since he was in full ecw gear trying to race our shuttle van. At first we thought he wanted a ride in the van so the driver slowed down to stop for him but he kept waving us on, he just wanted to race. He ran quite a long ways kudos to him :} The lab was pretty cool, i had been in there before on my tour with the old networking guy, but only briefly. This time we got to peruse a bit and see all the cool stuff. This is the building that the South Pole Telescope (SPT) is at. Supposedly it is the tallest point on station. It is massive, a 10M telescope that has to be cooled by liquid nitrogen which is approximately 6 kelvin...that's really really really cold. Here's the scope

And this is the view from the lab of the station

There was a bunch of nifty little doodads in the lab, i wish i had free range to go and fiddle with stuff. They had a big bottle of liquid nitrogen (maybe it was helium dun remember) labeled "The Dude" sitting on a scale which i was taking photos of. While i was doing that this old dude i can't remember his name came over and said you want a cool shot? I said sure, (i just assumed he meant he would stand in the photo making it cool) no he then proceeds to walk over and open the bottle up allowing it to spray out all over the table it was next to which had very expensive equipment on it. I was in shock and was not taking any photos of it, i couldn't believe what this guy was doing, then he stops and says did you get it. Umm no, so he proceeds to do it again, this time i got some shots... Crazy drunk old scientists are awesome!

Here are a couple of the thingers they had out on display, they explained a bunch of it to anyone who asked, i did not as there were too many people crowding them and asking questions. The parts were very cool none the less. And i think the versions of use for each piece that i came up with is far better than anything they could have told me. basically though the little parts and tubes went together to sit inside the blue rotatermajigger:
golden thingermabob

telescope housing thinger

telescope part (Krissie and Mark)

I then moved on to the roof to see what all the hubub was about. Apparently you could see into the blue telescope housing thinger from above. Photo-op!

This is the housing on top of the roof that protected the blue thinger

And this is what it looked like in there

From here you could take pics inside to the party, nifty.
Here are some of the pics I took.

Here is Ben and Krissie

I love the facial expressions these two had in this shot, Oh crap what did we just do!

And Krissie and myself, aint she a cutey?

Ben and myself

This pic is of Ben and I trying to figure out how to make IT gangsta signs, didn't work out too well...

Since i've been here we've had the traverse arrive both the US and the Norwegian folks, here is a pic of the US folks and some of their tractors encircling the Pole. It was kinda cool , to watch them all train in and then eventually swarm the Pole. The pic is terrible because i shot it from indoors while at lunch.

They stayed around for a while, had an open house and then went back on their merry way.

Maybe the next day? not sure on dates anymore, they moved over our christmas "tree" by the pole.

This is what my office looked like that week. You may notice it looks a bit different from the first shot I have of the office in the last post, slightly more messy ;}

This is the before shot

And here is the best shot I will ever get of Ben, he didn't have his iPhone out at the time i was taking the photos but it was in his pocket :} Tripp and I give him crap about Apple on a nearly daily basis

This was a really good day because i remembered right after i took that photo about the balloons i had found in skua the night before! Man what a find, what a find. So we proceeded to make a bunch of noise both in laughing our butts off and blowing up and popping the balloons.

Ben

Me

tripp

Then came christmas, meh nothing special just another day. We did get an extra day off so that was cool. And the dinner on christmas eve was pretty dang awesome. Oh wait I take back the meh...THEY HAD EGG NOG WOOT!!!!. It came in the day before and I asked/begged/pleaded one of the DA's to hide me some, she hid me away 3 cans of it muahahaha! Their story comes in the next blog, this thing is long enough as it is ;} Anywho here are the pics from the evening, the eggnog was spiked with rum, mmm mmm good.

Outside hallway with snacks and eggnog

Table seating

Christmas lobster

Beef wellington

Christmas dinner not bad for the South Pole ;}

Phew, tomorrow i should have this thing completely caught up, woot!

South Pole is Just Awesome...

2008-12-25T06:08:00.000-08:00

Need to get this dang thing caught up so i can talk about all the cool stuff I do here ;} And since I'm up again and staying up all night I can get mostly caught up. I was up all night Christmas eve getting decorations made and ready to decorate a Piston Bully for "The Race Around the World" I'll talk about it when i get the photos and such up, awesome time, man awesome time. So yes i was up all night last night and since my girl*** right haven't gotten to that part yet in the bloggin', a friend of mine had to work over night Christmas i decided to stay up with her.

Moving on from the previous post...

I was absolutely miserable for the first 12ish hours or so I was here. When we all arrived we had an informal little meeting thing, so i was feeling like crap sitting in a tiny room full of other folks that were also feeling like crap. Generally speaking your first day or two here is set aside for acclimation. Henry (my boss) told me to just go find my room and rest. So i did.

I found J12 right away as it is basically the first Jamesway you come across when walking towards "summer camp". Summer camp is just the name for the collection of jamesways that are only used in the summer, hence the name. They are quite clever up here aren't they ;}.

I'm not going to lie, though i was feeling terrible, getting to my jamesway made me feel a whole lot better. It was just so cool lookin'. Here I was sitting at the bottom of the world and I'm about to enter my "room" made of canvas and plywood...AWESOME!!

But wait, then i entered the jamesway and found it to be completely dark, suck. I couldn't find my way around there for the first five or so minutes, then a stroke of brilliance! I took off my sunglasses...don't want to hear it shush. It was still very dark, there was only one red light in the jamesway so it was still quite difficult finding my way around. This is a bit of an exaggeration as my room number 2 is actually right beside the door you come in at. I did however have MAJOR problems getting into my room. The rooms in the jamesway have either wooden doors or canvas "curtains" that slide over, or my door...All the other rooms were opened up, my room was dark and closed. I was beginning to think i was in the wrong jamesway, so i walked outside (with my sunglasses off) opened the first door to the outside closed it behind me then opened the other door and BAM nearly fell on my butt i lurched back so fast. Holy crap it is SOOO bright down here! i have never before felt such pain in my eyes from the bright lights as i did when i stepped out of the dark jamesway into the South Pole sun. I quickly fumbled for my sunglasses and regained my composure. Turns out i was in the right jamesway so hmmm. I go back in and see if i can hear anyone in the room, nope. So i find the endge of the room and try and peek in, i was able to move a bit of canvas enough to peek in. There was blankets and such on the bed like the other empty rooms but there was also a bunch of other things in there: personal items. I could see mardi gras beads, a christmas tree and what looked like a penguin; so i thought well damn someone's in my room! Or they just left all their stuff, i decided to just go in and check it out. Well this turned out to be quite difficult. I couldn't get in. It didn't just slide open like the other ones. So i tried pulling from the side i peaked in at, all that did was rip a portion of my canvas "door" off the wall... hmm i found no seams, what the heck. I eventually just picked the canvas up from the bottom and sorta crawled under and into my room. from inside it was clear how the "door" worked. It was just two pieces of canvas one small and one very large that spanned the distance of the room. you sorta just slip in between the two. (as it turns out this sucks quite a bit when trying to move things in and out of the room quietly, especially while wearing big red). Now that i knew how to get in and out of my room it was time to go find my luggage.

They stored it a litte shack thinger very close to my jamesway so that was a bonus. I lugged everything over to my room and found one bag missing. Nothing major just the bag that had all of my actual clothing... went back to the room and couldn't find it there, i met up with Genevieve in the room and she said i should call over to the station and ask Beth Watson ( she sorta runs stuff, not sure what her actual title is). I called her and she said well the bag could have been brought over to the station on accident and that I should walk over and take a look...friggin lame.

I did also bump into another girl with a bunch of very large luggage, all of which was about 3 times her size, so I offered to help her take the stuff to her jamesway. I lugged that stuff over for her, not too big of a deal they have "banana" sleds that i loaded up her stuff with and just drug it over. Then I was off to the station. It's a 1/4 mile walk back and forth from the station and my room. Here is what it looks like from the area i leave everyday to start my trek:

I was exhausted from the elevation and lack of sleep/food/water, from moving that girls stuff (who interestingly enough returns later in the my story at the pole...) and now i had to walk back to the station to grab the largest of my 3 bags and potentially have to lug it back to my room, suck, major suck. Guess what the bag was there, lame. I drug it back unpacked and passed out on top of my bedding. Here is what it looked like the first few weeks:

Pip had no problem making himself right at home. He has a wonderful view of the station and the dome.

The next few days I got to check out my workplace

Met my coworkers and met the winterovers we were replacing and ended up going on a tour of the science stations. Being IT we get to go to pretty much every place here at the pole, and as such we got to go on this little tour of places most people will never see because we needed to show the new networking guy where everything was. I had no reason to be there, non of us computer helpery folks did, but since we are also IT we got to go along, sweet!

I've never seen so much fiber in one place...

wires, wires everywhere:

The winterover folks, Nate Bahls (Dr. Bahls as he was called) and Mike Rouss-otherletterstoo-o were awesome, they seemed like a fun bunch of people that i would have loved to work with. And the other two guys i would be working with everyday were pretty cool as well, Ben and Tripp. Tripp's his real name too, pretty cool. The whole time we were getting shown around the station we kept seeing signs with ping pong balls about no ball washing showing ping pong balls in the water fountains, and also ping pong balls themselves, little odd. We asked nate about it and he said they just ended up with a ton of ping pong balls and were getting bored and started putting them all over the station that and attacking each other with them. And as he was saying this a couple of balls came flying over our wall and hit him in the face.

The office we work in is just a sectioned off piece of the lab, we have walls and a door, but there is no ceiling it is all open, everything you say and do can be heard by everyone in the office, and as sch one of the other winterover dudes heard us talking about it and decided to show us what the balls were for :}. This started a mini war where Nate threw the ball back there more balls came over then Nate grabbed some a box of some sort and chucked it over the wall. All while we were laughing and then gasping at the large heavy box he just chucked...Man i thought to myself, wintering has to be AWESOME, I must winter here!

Aside from that there wasn't much excitement while we received our "turnover" and learned all the stuff we needed to know for the transition of folks. It was fun, Nate was awesome a really good guy. Then he left and it was now all up to us. I was pretty intimidated at first knowing that there really wasn't anywhere for folks to go if i/we couldn't fix it. You can't just send someone off to another IT group. You are responsible for everything. So far the job has not been demanding at all, it's ben fairly constant with the normal slow days, but it's been really fun up to this point. I'm learning a lot, doing things i never had a chance to do before with IT jobs in the past. Basically we are given the keys to the city and told here ya go, enjoy. I have full admin to most everything here it's awesome, AD work, exchange management, admin access to all the servers, it's just amazing the freedom i have here to work. I no longer have to call some retarded middle man and ask for permission to do something trivial, or worse setup a case to have someone else do something trivial...*cough* ITS *cough*

I am definitely glad i made the decision to come out here. Aside from work being awesome the "social life is great too. Us IT folks are quite spoiled. We have a comms shop as it is called where the comms tech works and where the NOC is. We have what is called the "comms theatre" setup in there. We have a HD projector, a PS3, a Wii, a computer with 4ish TB of movies and TV shows, and music, and INSANE sound system, with two giant subwoofers with independent 800w amplifiers that shake the room if put at half volume. It is amazing to play games and watch movies down there, oh yes we also have a couch and ottoman that slide under one of the work benches, i need to get a pic of the setup now that I'm thinking about it. There's a quiet reading room, a nice little library collection, a bunch of board games, The green house has a nice little seating area where you can "bask" in the light ( wonderful to have during winter i suppose)

Then there's a nice little weight room, hmm needs pics of this stuff too, and nice gym. I play volleyball every thursday, we play wiffleball on fridays? I think it is, and we also do dodgeball (i've since stopped playing dodgeball)Volleyball is awesome it is my favorite activity down here i look forward to it every week. It's also one of the worst things down here for me because i can't stay away from it.

Le Volleyball

Dodgeball

I hurt my shoulder playing dodgeball one night, then two nights later i was playing volleyball and hurt my elbow while compensating for the hurt shoulder. Then 3 nights later i played volleyball again and was to the point that i could no longer rotate my arm, not a big deal right who needs to do that. So i stayed away for 5ish days when i could rotate my arm without pain. Played again and was doing fine until i started spiking the ball and serving hard again which caused the shoulder to freak out again. And i of course would not stop spiking the ball or serving it hard until i had to quit the game cause i couldn't rotate my arm again... Stupid i know, but for those of you who know me it's quite normal fo me to continually do stupid things that cause me pain. Such as my weird craving of incredibly hot food when my stomach is upset... So though my arms still hurts i continue playing, i do try and warm up a bit before i go crazy with the spikin' and such but i still leave with a numb throbbing shoulder every thursday. It's also played on sundays but i tend to sleep through it, or i've been hungover. But that shouldn't be a problem as i've vowed not to drink to that level anymore after the Big Lebowski night (more on that later ;} ) We've setup the gym as a movie theatre to play The Big Lebowski, we are going to set it up again this coming saturday to watch The Dark Knight and Wall-E both on Blue-Ray (very excited about that). We have pub trivia every wednesday, I cohosted last week. So ya, it's pretty much just awesome out here. I've also learned to drive the LMC's and the Piston Bullies for when i need to go out to the far away stations and do stuff such as our RF building. They are awesome.

Piston Bully, aint she purdy?

Tripp and I heading out to RF, I'm in the passengers seat:

Our RF building:

South Pole Death Star nearly complete...

It still amazes me that i am getting paid to be down here :}

Ugg

2008-12-21T05:32:00.000-08:00

Stayed up again all night. Sort of realized there's not much left here to catch up on prior to my getting to the Pole. Oh and pictures are not working like they are supposed to again, and I am too tired to fiddle with the stuff. A good portion of my photos are up on flickr so feel free to peruse there for images i may add the images later, who knows, anway. After Christchurch I made it into McMurdo. Interesting little tidbit about my stay there, i only stayed maybe 22 hours at McMurdo while others were waiting weeks there to go to the pole. I lucked out. I also lucked out in that i was supposed to be at "man camp" but i managed to get out of that as well. Man camp is what everyone calls one of the living areas that is basically a barracks, there are 24ish beds in each room, very little room anywhere. By the time i got all of my crap lugged over to man camp there were no more open beds, or so it seemed. Every bed either had someone in it or had clothes around it or had peoples bags on them, I went ahead and assumed that they were all taken and went and spoke with housing and got moved inside the main building 155? maybe. Not sure of the number, it's where everyone goes to eat. This was far nicer, there were only 4 other folks in that room. The folks in that room were pretty cool too. I left to do some exploring with my camera and try and find the bars i heard about. I found the coffee shop wine bar thing where i had a delicious mocha with bailys, oh so good. I decided to head back to the room and unpack not too long after that i was pretty tired.

By the time I got everything unpacked and settled in, one of my new roommates told me I was supposed to be at bag drag. I had no idea what he was talking about. I some how got put on the list of folks flying out the next day so I had to hustle my butt off and get all my bags ready and hauled up to the cargoish area. By then i was pretty damn tired, all I wanted to do was get to my room and go to sleep. When i eventually got back to sleep I was awoken by the sound of someone vomiting. One of the roommates was a bit too excited about also leavin in the morning and as such drank way too much wine. He threw up large amounts of purple stuff all over himself and then bed. Wonderful... After he got himself cleaned up and his sheets changed, i finally started back to sleep after the other roommates and i contemplated contacting someone as we were worried about the guy. We ultimately decided to let him sleep as he would of probably been denied his plane ride. I was then awoken again by the sound of him vomiting...he did this 3 or so times, i got no sleep, it sucked a lot.

The night eventually ended and I was off to the plane that would send me to Le Pole.

I still really wasn't all that excited, McMurdo really didn't seem like Antartica. It felt like an old mining town in the rockies. Yes it was pretty white all around, but it just didn't seem isolated in anyway, I just wasn't impressed. But then, oh then i finally landed at the Pole...While sitting in the plane it was only mildly cold and i thought to myself, pshh this isn't so bad, I've been far colder than this. Then I walked outside...

I had never been so cold in my life. It was super windy naturally and the planes engines were not helping in that matter either. It was a very long cold walk from the plne to the station, I hurried as fast as I could go. The 22ish hours i spent in McMurdo with almost all of them inside did not prepare me for the cold I felt then. I was still basically used to the 75ish degree weather of Christchurch. So I went from beautiful wonderful climate to a freezing blistering cold -45 degrees F, with roaring winds with windchill of -75 degrees F. That is freaking cold!!!

Sort of funny side not to this, prior to arriving to the Pole I really wanted to live in the Jamesways, I really felt like it would be the best way to experience the pole since I would be inside for most of my job. After I made it in from the cold I was hoping and wishing that I would get a room in the station and would never have to go outside again. I could not stand the thought of walking everyday back and forth to my room. Man was I disappointed when I got my room number, J12-2. I could not find it on the station map anywhere, then the little wheels started spinning again in the ol head and I realized I was to be outside... Not only did I have this terrible realization I was also experience some elevation sickness. I was getting really hot and dizzy and felt like vomiting all while having trouble breathing. It was a great first day :}

Photo Update

2008-12-14T13:19:00.000-08:00

If you haven't checked my flickr account lately, my panoramas have been uploaded.

You can find them here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22826465@N04/sets/

I will be getting this thing updated in a couple of days to bring everything current to the South Pole, keep an eye out.