MCI drill

So today was our Mass Casualty Incident(MCI) "drill".  The scenario was a fire in an aircraft before it landed. There were several injured including an injured pregnant woman and a couple dead. It was pretty wild!  My job if we have a real MCI is dispatch communications, I have to sit with the firehouse dispatch and relay information about incoming casualties to the lead physician. They have the firehouse setup as like a casualty triage type area so there were lots of people walking around with stretchers and doc's and nurses pretending to treat people. The crazy part is that we had a "real world" emergency during the drill. One of the inbound LC-130's radioed in saying they were having trouble with their landing gear. So I think everyone was waiting for the drill to be aborted and replaced by the real thing. Luckily the plane landed safely so it was all just for pretend today.  Sorry no pics from the drill, I figured I should keep my ear glued to the radio rather than taking pics. There was some guy taking pics though so maybe I can find those and send em. 

The pics are pretty much just random stuff. I just thought I'd post em now.

I also got my E-Vehicle training today so I can check out one of the electric cars if I need to.

Ridin dirty...

 Thumbs up to the tiny little car...

 I also found another crazy recycle bin, for all your dreams this time...

I also found this note up on a lost and found board. I hope you can read it, it made me pee a tiny bit...

Turkey

Well today has been out Thanksgiving festivities. There were 3 guys in the halls dressed in very elaborate turkey costumes just walking around going "gobble, gobble, gobble....gobble, gobble, gobble". This place is seriously messed up sometimes, haha! We DID get some turkey so apparently whoever I was listening to was full o' shit.  I got some delicious turkey & ham with the mandatory mashed taters.  I'm pretty full at the moment, so much for being "good", but this is a special 2 day weekend so fuck it.  I'll just make up for it tomorrow in sweat.:)  Most everyone dressed up in nice clothes for dinner, but the nicest thing I have is a long sleeve black t-shirt. So I pretty much rocked that bitch till the wheels came off! The galley is normally just open between certain hours and you go eat when you're hungry. For Thanksgiving they had sign up sheets so you could goto dinner at 3, 5, or 7 and you were only supposed to go to your time. They had the doors all closed up and you had to wait in line.

Here is a pic of the line. It's all the way back to that Exit sign in the background, and around the corner behind me. Crazy!  So we just sat in our room for 15 minutes or so until the line died down...

 Everyone claiming their share of the yummy...

 A couple of the peeps at my table, that's Nate on the left, he's one of my roomies...

 This has nothing to do with Thanksgiving but you don't often see Mary Kay 2-in-1 Body Wash in the men's room, so it was picture worthy...

Happy Thanksgiving bitches

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you're all stuffed to the gills and feeling sick because you ate so much. :)  Actually it's almost 11 o clock there so you're probably all passed out from triptifan overdose.   Instead of Thursday we're having the big turkey day festivities tomorrow.  Weather hasn't been the best so they have to keep cancelling the C-17. Soooo we aren't going to have any "freshies"(fresh fruits and vegetables) tomorrow. I also heard that the turkeys were on that plane too, hahaha. So we may not have turkey on turkey day.  Then again I just kind of heard that, it isn't official as far as I know so we could be each getting our own goose for all I know.  I do know that I just started my TWO FUCKING DAY WEEKEND a couple hours ago!  I'm pretty excited in case you couldn't tell. 


I found this chillin in the lounge the other night.  Anyone want a genuine used pee bottle from Antarctica? Haha

 This is a Skua. They're just starting to show up for the season.  They're kinda like seagulls, or rats from the sky maybe?  The trays in the galley are all blue and I haven't seen it yet but apparently if you take a tray outside they'll dive bomb your happy little ass until you drop your tray so they can get a tasty treat.  Someone said they'll mess with you if you're just wearing a bunch of blue too.

 Don't mess with me pigeon, I've committed bird murder before and I have no qualms getting another tear drop inked on if you mess with me. 

2 days off

I havent posted in a while so I thought I'd say hi.  I have a couple pics but they're in my room on my laptop so I'll have to post those later, they're nothing special anyway. This weekend we get Saturday and Sunday off. I'm sooooo excited to have 2 days off in a row, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself.  Well that's not entirely true, I signed up to take a trip out to the "Pegasus" runway on Sunday.  The ice runway is only about 10 minutes away but Pegasus is about an hour. It's located out on the permanent ice shelf. So once the ice melts then all the air operations are moved out to Pegasus.  It's named after a C-121 Lockheed Constellation that crashed there in October 1970, but everyone onboard survived.  They just shoved the plane off to the side of the runway so you can go and check it out still.  So I should have some good pics of that for you guys. 

We're expecting a storm to roll in here soon.  It's dropped from 22 to -8 in the last 3 or 4 hours. It's still snowing and a bunch of places other than McMurdo have been downgraded to Condition 2, so we're probably headed that way soon.  So much for it warming up I guess.

fire

So there was a fire in my dorm last night. I live in the dorm that is in the same building as the galley, the big laundry, and some other stuff. I went to go pee about 10 o clock and heard what sounded like an alarm in the distance so I followed it. It was going off downstairs in the galley. There were some people gathered around and someone came up and shut the fire doors. I still had to pee bad so I went while I was downstairs and when I came out I saw a couple firefighters pull the general fire alarm to evacuate the building, so I figured it was time to get out. So I ran upstairs put on my shoes, grabbed my coat and headed out.  It smelled like paper burning so I knew something was up.  Everyone went either to other dorm lounges, or the gym. I was in the gym with a bunch of other people. It turns out it was a fire in one of the big industrial dryers in the laundry. So the fire dept put it out and cleared the rest of the building and let us back in an hour and a half later.  I was totally late for bed so I'm tired today but I didn't burn to death in my sleep so I guess that's the trade off. 

Everything is A-otay captain.

A bunch of people in their jammies and jackets leaving the building...

 

 Waiting outside...

 Waiting inside the gym, boringgg....

These pics aren't fire releated, I had taken them before.

I thought this was pretty funny, someone has a pop-up book of phobias. Nothing cures a phobia like having it pop out of a book at ya. Hahaha...

 Snakes...

 Public Speaking...

 Clowns...

 The dentist... <--- I made sure to get this one for you Court...

These are Yaktrax, they help keep you vertical on the ice...

Fashionable, yes...

Other peoples pics

I didn't take any of these pics. There is a public drive on the network people can put the pics and videos they take to share with others. So I copied the hell out of someone elses pics. Some of them are really cool so I thought you guys might want to see.

 Adelie Penguins

 Emperor Penguins

 Baby penguin taking a peek out of the vag before presenting himself to the world

 Unloading a C-17

It looks like they're cruising down the runway and shoving stuff out the back to me.

 LC-130. The "LC" has the ski's on the wheels. All the other planes like this without the ski's are just C-130's. Apparently there are only a few of the LC's in the world.

 This dude has a golden grille. Bling bling and shit yo!

 Aurora australis

 The boss took a bunch of us around on the first day and showed us all the IT infrastructure around station. That's me huffin and puffin at the back of the pack trying to keep up. It's amazing what a month of trudging through the snow and walk up and down a million hills will do for your stamina.  I can't remember everything that was in the building. I do remember that there is a nuke detonation sensor out on the ice shelf as part of the CTBT Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The radio receiver for the sensor is on that tower and he showed us the associated equipment inside the building. That's pretty cool.

 Hahaha

 JATO - Jet Assisted Take Off

Coldddd

The weather was behaving and getting warmer, until today.  It's snowing pretty good and and it's pretty windy, it's way cold out today. It's allegedly only -3 but it feels like those -20 days.

 my face was colllldddd