Condition One?

Hello again. Time for another quick update from the Ice.

As of right now, we're being threatened with Condition One weather. On the three tiered scale used to determine weather and travel limitations, one is the worst, requiring that everyone stay inside whatever building they are in and cannot travel even across the street. They have been calling for bad weather the last day and a half, but it hasn't really gotten as bad as they initially feared. Several sites (mainly the airfields and places off "The Rock") are at condition two and limited to only essential travel. I'd like to actually experience a condition one myself, just to see what it's all about. It has been described to me as being able to know what the inside of a ping pong ball looks like.

In town, the winds are gusting past 40 knots but the visibility remains fairly good at this point. It's a warm 14 degrees. It's odd that the human body can adapt so quickly to extremes of weather, because I really do mean that 14 degrees feels warm, especially compared to the negative 20 that isn't uncommon here. I'm almost overdressed for the current conditions.

The last few days have been fairly uneventful, which is odd considering that everything here is amazing in some way. We've been working a town schedule (0730-1700) which has been less than exciting. Our days are filled with death by powerpoint and walkthroughs of buildings. The walkthroughs have been fairly interesting. We went through the "Water Distillation Plant" the other day so we could see where our water for everything (including hydrants) comes from.

The name of the building is a little deceiving, as we don't actually use a distillation process and instead rely on reverse osmosis to essentially scrub seawater into drinking water. A simple way to describe this process is to say that seawater is essentially forced through finer and finer filters under pressure until it becomes drinkable.

Anyway, while the process to make drinking water from seawater is expensive, it is actually cheaper by a factor of 25 than to just boil the impurities out of it as has been done in the past.

We were also given tours of building 206 (An Air National Guard dorm) so we could look at the fire suppression systems and also of building 176, a cold storage warehouse so we could practice doing inspections.

It was good to see that we have ample stores of all food items that we critically need and don't need. Pedro, the guy working in the warehouse, stated that there was about a 12-15 month supply of food available, including the precious Frosty Boy that keeps everyone happy.

That pretty much summed up our work week. Since we are on the town schedule, we have Saturday night and Sunday off before we go back to work. Last night (Saturday) we went down to Gallagher's, one of the bars in town. It's not the absolute dump that you might expect, but rather, it's a pretty nice set up with pool table, dart board, and table shuffleboard in addition to a spacious bar.

Due to Octoberfest and the fact that Southern Exposure, the other bar next door, hasn't opened yet made it a little crowded. I had a few beers and played some pool before returning to the dorm for some video games in the lounge.

Since today has been threatening bad weather, I'm not able to get out on some of the trails that I've wanted to explore. I'm waiting for a better day to go down the trail to Scott's hut and take some pictures. There are also many other trails that are open, but they are even less desireable to travel on in inclement weather.

As a result, I've been taking care of a few things. Namely laundry and updating this blog. In fact, I need to get back to retrieve my laundry from the dryer about now. That should be all for today.