MTV Cribssss

Hey guys. I've promised for a while to get pictures of me new room up and I keep forgetting. So here ya go. I also made an MTV Cribs style video for ya.

This is what it looked like the day I got the keys...

 Before...

 After...

 This is what it looks like now...

 Hahahaha....

 A couple pics from outside the other night. It's weird to see it getting dark.  Pretty soon it'll be dark all the time...

 So I had to walk down the road a good little ways the other day to work on a computer.  It's up near the giant fuel tanks so it's one of the further buildings from "town", it wouldn't have been a bad walk but it was cold as shit and it was blowing in my face the whole time.  Here is the building with the computer. There was a guy over there, he said, "It's the door on the left, try not to knock snow in or you'll have to clean it out so the door closes properly."  Yipppeee...

 I didn't knock any snow in coming or going, wooohooo...

 A cool shot of the mountains...

 Thats where the ice pier is, freezing over...

 Most of the water out there is freezing over...

Tour of my room...

walk

Damn, I'm not being a very good blogger am I?!

I have more stuff to post later, I swear I'll do it. I just had to walk over from across the street. It's blowing pretty good right now so I thought I'd let you experience what it's like to walk around when it's nasty out. Of course you get to be warm while you experience it, damn you all! :)

When I took the video is was -10 with a 35mph wind for a -41 windchill.  The wind dropped a little since then but so did the temp. Right now its -20, with a 26mph wind, for a balmy -51 windchill

Video Tour

Hello my peepsicles!

I dont have anything particularly wonderful going on. I just thought I'd say hi.  I was bored at work so I made a little video tour of where I work for you guys. I'll do that same with my room another time.  Maybe around some other places.

The temp is 5 degrees + 21mph = -16 degrees.

wet

So I was sitting in my room this morning with my headphones on, totally oblivious to the world. Between songs I heard something and realized it was the fire alarm going off.  So I grab my stuff and evacuated. There was no fire though. They aren't 100% sure what happened because the person took off. They think someone was carrying something on their head and whacked one of the fire sprinklers good. It must have been like a river because quite a bit got flooded and the fire department was already here by the time I got outside and they would have found it and shut the water off pretty quick.  There are like a half dozen rooms affected upstairs and a couple downstairs and the lounge. Luckily it was a hallway over from my room so none of my stuff got wet.

On the bright side the sprinkler system is disabled until they can fix it. According to the email they sent out they aren't going to be back online for 4 days.  It didn't seem like a big deal until they said that since the water suppression system is down we should be extra careful to evacuate immediately if there is a fire alarm. Yikes!  Lets hope everyone is careful with their road flares and flame throwers while I'm sleeping, pretty please!


Oopsie...

Can't really see any water but the carpets are wet...

 Again you can't really tell but the carpet is still pretty wet. Someone said there was a good amount of standing water in here earlier today...

 Wish me luck on not bursting into flames before they fix the sprinklers.  Well, or after they fix em actually. :)

Last Flight

The last flight out was supposed to be Monday but the flight got about 30 minutes from here and then got boomerang'ed, for weather I assume.  Then it was delayed for 3 hours on Tuesday but it did finally get here.  Then the last people to leave piled on and took off, leaving us stranded here until August.

It's a tradition when the last flight leaves to have a "wheels up champagne toast" over at the "chalet". The chalet is the building where the big wigs sit in the summer. It's got ceremonial type stuff, statues, and flags from all the nations that are part of the Antarctic Treaty. So everyone gathers and toasts the upcoming season and watches the flyover. Every year when the last flight leaves they'll buzz the town and dip their wings to kind of give us a little wave goodbye.  Instead of a C-17 like normal, this year the last flight went out on a RNZAF 757. I know the 757's are much less robust than the C-17's, so I don't know if they just can't do something like that, or no one told them they were supposed to.  Instead of our flyby they just took off and went home.  So I was hoping to have a little video for you of them doing the flyover, but not so much. I did get a distance pic from the chalet of the plane taxiing before it took off.  So that'll have to be good enough.  

It is a bit of a strange feeling knowing that no matter how bad I want to go home, I cant.  Up until Tuesday afternoon I could have just quit at anytime and they would have stuck me on the next flight out and I would have been on my way home. Now, I don't have a choice, I'm just here.

So everyone is in their own rooms now and it's like a whole different world when you have your own room you can go to and not have to deal with roommates. Also once they last flight takes off they turn on the wireless internet for everyone.  So I spent all day yesterday setting up peoples wifi on a shit ton of various laptops, tablets, kindles, nooks, and cell phones. I may have done more work yesterday than I did since I got here. Hahaha.  So I'm sitting on my own couch, in my own room, using the wireless to post this for you all. YAY!


Closet view we'll get of the last flight just before it took off. Unless maybe someone working at the airfield posts something on the network. If they do I'll post it...

I've been taking my dear sweet time setting up my room. So as soon as I'm done I'll get some pics up of all that. 

Darkness

So I ordered a bunch of stuff from GNC for my winter weight loss extravaganza.  I tucked it away until I got my winter room. Now I'm in my room, so I started breaking things out.  I happen to notice that everything was shipped from a GNC warehouse in Phoenix, and as you can see the box was manufactured in Tolleson. Normally that wouldn't exactly be a big deal, but when you're 8,000 miles from home, hanging off the bottom of the world it's really cool to see something from your home town. :)  YAY!

Also, I'm not sure if I mentioned it before but the one "official" sunset for the year happened about 2 weeks ago.  So each day after will become darker and darker by 30 minutes each day until the sun is just gone for the season. I just went downstairs to make some soup and realized it was pretty dark outside, so I thought I'd take a pic for ya.  I'm normally in bed by this time of night so I havent seen this until just now. Its weird to see lights on, on buildings after having experienced nothing but 24/7 light here since the moment I stepped foot on this continent!  I saw darkness a few weeks ago when I was back in New Zealand, but before that the last time I saw nighttime was back in October when I was still in the US. This is going to get seriously interesting soon.

tourist boat

 Well it's been quite a while since I posted an update. I've been kinda busy lately. All of my co-workers have all gone so I'm all alone in my building now. There are a bunch of buildings that don't get used in the winter. So they shut off the heat and let the buildings go cold to save energy. So I've been busy running around to all those buildings and pulling out the PC's, monitors, and printers before they freeze up.

We had a tourist ship make a little stop here a week or so ago. I saw a few of them in the store buying "Antarctica" trinkets. I didn't talk to any of them but someone was telling me that it can cost $20 GRAND to come here as a tourist!  Yes, thats a "2" followed by 4 zeros! Not only did they pay for me to come here, but they're paying me well to be here. So I think one of us got the shaft on their trip to the ice, and I don't think it was me.

The resupply ship is gone and almost everyone is out of here now. There are only about 200 people left now.  The last 45ish people or so are leaving on the last flight on Monday, then we're stuck.

The water is all open now after the ice breaker tore it all up and the wind blew most of the ice out of here. It actually really seems like the ocean now, it doesnt seem like it when it's all frozen over.

Everyone in the Tiki lounge had been pouring out over the last couple weeks. It's weird to see each of the rooms suddenly empty and all these people I've been living with since October just going away.  I finally got my winter room so I'm out of the Tiki Lounge myself now.  I'm getting my room all setup the way I want it. I'll post some pics of the new room when I'm all done.











Oh, I used to get requests for the temp all the time when I first got here and it was cold. I didn't really think about it when it warmed up but it's getting cold again so I'll try to remember to post it again.  Right now the ambient temp is -2, with 28mph wind making the windchill -28.

The tourist ship, "The Spirit of Enderby"...

 Coming ashore to play...

 Look its the ocean...

 So, one of the buildings I had to go take equipment out of was the helo hanger.  I have no idea how you can wedge 5 helicopters in this one building but as you can see they managed to do it.  That's a hell of a parking job if you ask me...

 This is the the narrowest staircase I've ever used, just for the record...

One of the empty rooms in the lounge...

 Another one that's empty now, kinda creepy in a way...

 My room with all my roommates gone. Last man standing...