Frozen Turkey Trot

The starting line at the Turkey Trot

Yesterday was our Thanksgiving celebration here in MacTown. The celebration is delayed until Saturday so we can get a two day weekend. For many of us it has been the first two day weekend in three months. After having yesterday off I woke up several times last night realizing I didn't need to go to work today and happily rolled over to go back to sleep.

One of McMurdo's annual Thanksgiving traditions is a 5K race called the Turkey Trot. The race starts at the chapel, goes up the main station road, then down a hill, out to the ice runway and back. About 250 people signed up to run and many more came to watch.

I had been running 3.2 miles on the treadmill in just over 30 minutes so I was hoping with the cold and the hills I would be abe to finish in under 35 minutes. My time was 27:29 so I made that goal comfortably coming in 85th overall.

Me at the finish line. Outside temperature was 25F
so half of the race was on mud the other half on ice.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing and having an awesome meal with linen tablecloths in the galley. Thanksgiving is as close to a formal event as we get here, quite a few of the men (including me) were wearing ties for the first time in months. There are three seatings for Thanksgiving dinner and I was at the latest. I hadn't eaten since 9 am before the race so I was pretty hungry when 7 pm rolled around.

Today I'm enjoying a second day off and will be going to a lecture in a few minutes that one of the documentary filmmakers on station is giving. It will be nice to hear what this guy with a camera is trying to capture.

Happy belated thanksgiving to everyone back home!

Donut of Misery

Today I'm roughly half way through my time on the ice. If I'm an intentured servant I just paid off my passage here and now I'm working to pay off my ride home.

I came in before the main crew during "WINFLY season" so for the first six weeks I was here I spent most of my time around people who had wintered-over. The winter-overs were getting pretty "toasty" after having spent 6 months in total darkenss so in my first week here while I was all excited to be in Antarctica they showed me one of the tools they used to keep sane.

It's an Excel spreadsheet that calculates the amount of time you've been here and the amount of time left until you leave the Ice. There's a nice donut of a pie-chart showing percentage of time done vs. left. Most people call it their "Donut of Misery" but I wanted to put a positive spin on it so I renamed mine.

A picture of mine follows.

Dude, It's like snowing and crap

Today it's snowing for the first time in almost two months.

Things have been hectic down here. I've been putting in a lot of time as a volunteer tour guide: I've led 3 4-6 hour trips this week in my time off.

For the week before and after the election I was spending my free computer time obsessively reading the news to see what was going to, and what did, happen.

I've also been taking some time to get cross trained on the power plant operation so I can fill in for an operator if one goes down sick or gets called out to one of the other stations.

My room mate just got back from three weeks out at one of the field camps. He got to live in a 8-foot plywood cube where the temperature was 30-40 degrees colder than it is here. He's a 19 year old competitive XC skiier who is always outside. We call him "Mittens" because he got second degree frost bite on his hands earlier in the season. Luckily he managed to make it through his time at the field camp without any lost digits.

The arrival of the snow means the weather is gettin warm. It's reliably been above 0 for a couple of weeks now and we're pushing +20 today. I've stopped wearing gloves when walking to work. My hands have blue spots on them but that's from the painting I'm doing and not from the cold.