Nowhere To Go But Up

I'm giving up sweets & booze during April. The big fad this season at the south pole is to give up something for a month. It's a fad because lots of people seem to be doing it. It seems that the whole thing was started by our facilities engineer who decided to give up drinking for a month. Then another person decided to quit next month, then another, and another..... I had already made some early season commitments to eating differently, but I haven't been sticking to it. I decided to just give up desserts completely for a month. Since lots of people were not going to be drinking the same month, I decided to go ahead and throw in sobriety with my starvation. Since I eat about 3-5 desserts a day and I drink maybe once a week, the drinking seems like a token sacrifice in comparison. I'm qualifying desserts as anything from the dessert tray, candy of any sort, and pancakes during breakfast. To sort of see how all of this affects my body, I went to medical to get a minor checkup. Heidi was nice enough to take the follow readings for me.


Total Chol – 201 (181)

Triglyerides – 87 (97)

HDL – 44 (42)

LDL – 140 (120)

Chol:HDL ratio – 4.6 (4.3)

BP – 120/80 (125/80)

Weight – 182lbs (188)

O2 saturation – 91%

Pulse – 87 (60)

The first numbers were results from today, the number in parenthesis were my results from when I left the ice last November. My pulse was a bit high since I had just worked out in the gym, so I will proably get that remeasured. Total Cholesterol, triglycerides, and LDL (bad cholesterol) should be as low as possible, while HDL (good cholesterol) should be as high as possible. For me, the higher the weight the better, as long as it's muscle. Blood pressure and oxygen saturation seem fairly normal, though the O2 sat should be 100% but at this altitude apparently few people have that.

So, in a month I'll revisit most of those numbers to see how I'm doing. I'm working out nearly everyday, so I'm just going to try to continue that...maybe even kick it up a notch.

In unrelated new, but big news, our cooking superstar is at it again. Michael has again graced the airwaves on the Colbert Report. If you do nothing else today, click on that last link and enjoy the show.

Here's this season's carpenter crew. They just recieved recognition for being able to tear stuff up without tearing themselves up. They're also the best-dressed guys on station. From left to right it's Noah, looks like Brian next, then it could be Jamie, pretty sure that's Richard after that, and seated I'm guessing is Travis.

It seemed like a good idea to have a posting about Flarp earlier today, but now that the time has come, it just seems a bit lame. Compared to the other zero things I have to write about, Flarp comes in first. Basically, today I followed around Jason and helped him perform inventory of some of our office supplies. My way of helping was to carry around the cannister of Flarp and make disgusting farting noises while we searched for the various batteries, mechnical pencils, notebooks, GPS units, etc. Only at the south pole is a GPS part of the standard office supply list. Anyway, I was highly entertained by the Flarp and Jason was entertained by my simple-mindedness. It worked out all around. About the only drawback to so much Flarping is that my thumb stunk and was a bit dried out afterwards. It was also pointed out that it's not such a good way to make inroads with the ladies (or anybody really) by walking around accompanied by the sound of a wet juicy fart, especially on Mexican day in the galley.

And Teri had it on her site:

You scored as Miyamoto Musashi. You're considered a sword saint, whatever the fuck that is. You don't give two hoots what weapon or tact people come at you with, as your solution is a steady grip on a sharp blade and it tends to work. You're never going to be defeated in battle, but you are going to die of Cancer. Miyamoto Musashi 83% Jesus Christ 75% C.G. Jung 67% Friedrich Nietzsche 58% Dante Alighieri 42% O.J. Simpson 42% Sigmund Freud 33% Hugh Hefner 33% Stephen Hawking 25% Adolf Hitler 17% Mother Teresa 17% Elvis Presley 8% Steven Morrissey 0% Charles Manson 0% What Pseudo Historical Figure Best Suits You? created with QuizFarm.com

Here are some photos taken during the last week, before the sun went bye-bye.

The sun is almost completely gone now. Technically, we can still see the sun and will off and on for several days. We had our official send-off for the last few rays of direct sunlight that we'll see for several months. We had an excellent dinner consisting of scallops for an appetizer (I had 8 total), a choice of either beef & potatoes or salmon & green beans (I'm poor at decisions, so I had one of each) for an entree, and a mousse dessert (of which I had 3.5). There was pretty good wine to accompany each entree. I actually dressed up about as much as I can possibly dress up at the south pole with what I brought with me: button-up shirt that my mom gave me, black pants & a belt, and my non-USAP-issued socks. I even took a shower and ran a comb through my hair. I don't have dress shoes though, so my black basketball shoes had to do the trick.

Below is a picture of Richard photographing Andy photographing me and everyone else at the table. You can always tell when I'm clean because my hair is unruly.


For some more pictures, check out Robert's site.

We had a St. Patrick's Day celebration. This is what a half dozen Irish Car Bombs will do to you:


For what it's worth, I was only pretending to be drunk in that photo. Really.

As it turns out, the ICB is different from the Boilermaker, which until Saturday night I had assumed were pretty much the same thing. Car Bombs are a subset/variant of the Boilermaker that seems to be made with St. Paddy's Day in mind. We used Bushmills rather than Jameson, for no other reason than personal (on just about everyone's part) preference.

In a not obviously related topic, a fellow polie and I are trying to devise a way of ranking one's expertise/adeptness/overall skill in a particular area by assigning a naming convention consisting weird animated pop culture of our particular taste. So far we have only come up with the following series:

Beyond all others, what you can do defies natural laws --- Jedi
Better than most, you know the mystic arts in a certain field --- Ninja
Good, but only because nobody else has tested you --- Super Mario
Never tried, or done so and failed miserably --- Smurf

For example, if you are very good at chess, you might be assigned the moniker of chess ninja. The same person might be terrible (and likely is so) at pugilism. They would then receive the title of boxing smurf. There are some gaps there. There needs to be something between a Smurf and Super Mario. Probably something along the lines of a Gummi Bear. Also, it seems like a pretty big leap from SM to ninja. Maybe GI Joe, though that just doesn't flow well....I'm a Linux GI Joe.

The sun is still up, be we have gotten to the time of long shadows. I walk out to the Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO) each day for part of my job. Currently I get to enjoy the benefits of sunlight and seeing a few sites along the way. In a couple of months I'll have the moon and aurora to keep me company, but I won't have very many veiws of the landscape anymore. I thought I would take you on a walk with me via pictures & words from the station to ARO. I go a little out of my way to get some close-ups, but for the most part this is what I see each day.

When I first step out of the beer can, I can see the pole marker directly in front of me. It's up over a small embankment that will eventually grow into a huge wall of snow as the winter progresses. The pole is only about 30 meters away from the beer can.

Just in case you forgot or are just joining in, here's what the beer can looks like. It's a big tin stairwell. I come out from the door with the dead pig's head above it.


If I turn to the left as I come out, I see the front of the station. It's still mostly covered in plywood, but they did make a little progress over the summer to install some more of the black panels. The panels look better than the plywood, but it's hard to tell if they will ever keep any heat in.

Walking a few steps forward and looking to the right you can see the old dome. At 4 o'clock in the afternoon the sun was directly behind the dome. The construction crew is busy performing demolition on the arch to the right of the dome there (buried in the snow so it's hard to make out). The dome itself is not expected to be brought down this winter.


There's not much interesting for a bit after the dome. The dark sector is to my left, but it's too far away to get a good picture of with my camera. To my right is the quiet sector, which is home to the seismology equipment in the SPRESO vault. It's a hole in the ground four miles away, so my camera really can't get a good picture of that from here. About halfway through my walk I pass by one of the many experiments buried along the way to ARO. The V-8 vault is actually a small room under about 6 feet (almost 2 meters) of snow that houses an experiment looking at the magnetosphere. To the left of that is another seismology experiment. In the background of the picture you can see ARO on the left and a small box in the center.


That small box is an experiment testing to see how long batteries can last down here without any power from the station. There is just a solar panel on the outside and a battery inside a flask. In the background you can get a better view of ARO, my final destination. ARO is home to NOAA, who smells the air and tastes the snow to see how the consentrations of various gasses is behaving. ARO also is where many of the aurora-sensing equipment resides, which is why I go there.

Here's some pix from my time in Christchurch that for some reason never made it on my blog the first time around.

Here's a preview of the 2.0 bar, coming soon to a south pole near you! Details to follow.



In other news, I blew out my knee in basketball tonight. I'm the third of three science techs to have an injury to require limited mobility. Hopefully I will recover soon. With a week of basketball, yoga, volleyball, badminton, and cards coming up, I'm hoping that I'll have more than a game of cards to look forward to for awhile. If I do play cards, it will be in that little box pictured above....

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