Signs of a South Pole Winter Over

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!!

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

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

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...

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...

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 ;}

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.