Didn't go too well did it?

Well

Just found this and though I would write a quick entry to appoligse for being totally crap at writing a blog.

But I survived the winter at pole - Went back again for about three weeks in January and I'm not ready to start work in Chicago.

BTW - keep an eye out for a new blog I'm going to set up on Curries

Crap Again

So it's been a little while since the last update. We managed to sort out the ski-way. The picture shows the two LMCs which are great fun to drive. It was great to get out away from the station and get a sense of how isolated it is here.

It's now getting very close to the sun setting - It's only just over a degree from the horizon and will dip below on Saturday. Most of the preparations here are done ready for the winter.

We've had a couple of storms the last two weeks. Complete white outs - It's really quite amazing standing outside and having no real sense where anything is, especially the horizon. Thank goodness for all the flags we put in ready for the night.

Booze Lugging

So we managed to lug all the booze upstairs today - wasn't too much of a bad job at all. Biggest issue is that whilst there is a large quantity of Gin (especially Bombay Sapphire) there is a distinct shortage of Tonic water. I think we need to find a way to make it here with compressed CO2 and some Malaria tablets secretly stolen from medical (Not that I'm counting on them having a large supply of Malaria drugs here). Apart from that we've almost got the worst of the winterisation of the station complete. Tomorrow we have to pull all the flags up from the ski-way and then that's pretty much it.

Most people this weekend have 2 days off which is great - We'll be working as usual but it does mean that Friday and Saturday nights are a bit more relaxed and fun with people around.

Today I got the full run down on the power plant (See picture) . It appears that they are going to let me loose running it for a few hours during these long 2 day weekends. Nothing fancy - just taking readings and making sure it isn't on fire or about to blow up because if the power plant goes we really are properly screwed.....

Apart from that, got the PS3 setup in the Science lab - Obviously for it's cell processor used in our cutting edge research, not for playing GTA on......

At Last

Ok, so, this took me quite a while to get set up but eventually I now have a blog down here at the south pole. All the summer crew left about two weeks ago on a C-130 and 43 of us are now here at the pole until the first flights arrive in October.

We are currently busy making the station all set up ready for the winter. Just last week we had to roll up about a kilometer of fuel hose which is used to supply the planes when they land. In a normal world they would have an electric system which wound the fuel line in. At the south-pole they need to keep us busy to stop us going mad, so instead we did it all by hand. It was good hard work but after three days outside, the novelty really wore off and the frostbite kicked in. Still I have to say I've not slept so well after those three days for a long time.

Today's job was a little bit more straight forward. We had to lay flags about 3 feet apart that guide us to where the telescope is about a kilometer from station. In the middle of winter with no moon that's about as far as we can see in a storm - In fact we don't actually see them, we hear them. Highlight of the day was getting a sled ride back towed behind a ski-do.

This evening I also did a first which was Yoga - It's odd: relaxing and bloody painful at the same time. I'm not convinced, however, I'm going to get the full benefit as I played Fussball afterwords and any resemblance of a calm, relaxed Ross, soon disappeared into a world of expletives and petty violence against inanimate objects.

So, some of the things I've learned here so far are that

• I'm crap at Fussball
  
• -48 C is not that cold....
• -48 C with a 25 knot wind is bloody cold
• Ski-do's are a lot of fun to drive
  
• LMC (Big red thing with tank tracks) are even more fun to drive (I'll try and get a photo)

I'll fill in more details about things that happened before I got the blog started as time goes on. Tomorrow we're bringing all the drinks inside for the winter so lots of fun moving stuff - But that is another day.....