Planeless

There are no more planes. None at all. Nothing scheduled until September 23rd.

It's wonderful.

Sure, we don't have any mail or freshies or neat toys that come down as cargo, but we get to sleep. Our off days are actually off days again. No more having to come in to sit at Pegasus waiting for a plane to drop off more beakers and slowly go crazy from boredom.

Also, the break gives us some time to put our fire trucks back into some state of functional usage. This winfly has been hard on them. We've had issues with four out of six crash trucks. Red 1 got plugged into a three phase outlet when it's built for two phase (toasted the heater package in the back), Red 2 doesn't have a working generator (which prevents us from keeping the package warm when on the move), Red 3 decided it didn't like having a transmission anymore, Red 4 thought it would be fun to not discharge foam when needed (more on this later), and Red 6 doesn't like keeping glycol in it's engine.

Also, one of the perks of not having flights means I don't have to unexpectedly take Red 2 out to Pegasus in the middle of the night when another truck blows its transmission.

Red 2 is a long, slow ride no matter how you look at it. Even with me racing out there last minute with an hour before the flight is due, I still didn't make it in time. I tried, at least, at all four miles per hour.

Driving the ice roads at night is pretty cool, though. There isn't much to see to start with, but at night there's even less. Aside from the tracks from other vehicles and the marker flags, there isn't anything else to look at. At one point, since I was the only one on the road, I turned off all of my lights for a moment to see what it would look like. I was a little surprised to see that when I turned the lights off, a green glow covered everything. I thought it was my eyes playing tricks on me, but in reality, it was the Aurora Australis. While I didn't get to enjoy them then, I did get to see them later in the evening, though less intense than before.

No more looking at C-17s through the fog emanating from a score of tailpipes. As cool as that is, it's still cold and boring. I did get some cool pictures, though. Just wait until I get them downloaded.


Oh, so we had a fire the other day. B shift had the pleasure of enjoying it this time. The fuelie's Ford stakebody truck caught fire out on the sea ice the other day, just shy of town. It's suspected that they burned up the transmission and just kept going until it caught fire, though this is officially unconfirmed.

B shift went out with Red 4 to go put it out. They made it out there without it being completely on fire, so they were off to a good start. The bad news came, however, when they went to charge the system and the foam refused to discharge. While the purple k dry chemical discharged just fine, it is not typically enough by itself to fully extinguish a fire.

The fire was however finally controlled when shovels were put into action and snow was discharged on the remnants of the fire. It's a harsh continent. Creative solutions work.

Unfortunately, this only went to further reinforce the poor image of our current Renegade fleet. It's a one of a kind system that's had more than it's share of teething problems. We thought we had all of the big bugs worked out of it last season, but it looks like we have more work to do.

Drifting onto another topic now, I would like to touch on nacreous clouds. They are an incredible and rare sight in the world. Only a few places down here in Antarctica really only get them. They resemble something of a beautiful, oily smear on the sky and show with every color imaginable. I have a few pictures of the sky looking like it's on fire. It's incredible. Words don't really do it justice in the least. I suggest all of you come down here and investigate it for yourself.

As for the winfly town life, it has been good. The town population is large for a winfly, with it pushing 600 people. A normal winfly would only add about another hundred people or so. We're running at more than double the normal population and that's created its own set of problems.

The housing situation has been interesting. Due to a last minute change by the NSF, 203 turned into a beaker only dorm. This forced the opening of other dorms that tend not to fare as well in the colder months as the others.

I happen to be in one of these chilly dorms. 211 is a great dorm for the most part, but parts of it are not that well insulated. We've had problems with our toilets freezing up and ice forming the bottoms of all the showers. My room gets a little chilly sometimes, too, though it's not bad when you consider it's often -30F outside.

If you're wondering about the weather, it's chilly. If the wind is blowing, it's miserable. We had wind chills exceeding -74F the other day. I'm glad that's fairly infrequent this time of year. South Pole has been hitting new records lately. Just prior to our arrival, they reached a new record low of -104F. Glad I'm not there right now.

If you think that's cold, I hate to disappoint you, but Vostock Station gets even colder...

As for here and now, we're probably around -25F with zero wind. Definitely sweatshirt weather today. I'm going to live it up.

That's all for now. Time for a safety nap.