photos of the week

[12/22(Sa) the Moon]
This morning I had a mail from a family friend in Japan, saying that she now looks at the Moon more often after talking to me; that made me happy :) After ~5 days of overcast, today is finally a clear day, but the Moon has long set already here. It'll rise above the horizon again on the 30th when it'll be about half Moon and waning.
11:30 This week's Science Meeting had ~20 people, including Nils who reported that unfortunately Kevin had to leave the telescope project... That's kind of sad, but at least it looks like he can work on another project here at the Pole.
5:30PM This summer's Greenhouse leader Monique gave us a brief training on the growth chamber and hydroponics. This will be good to know as I'll like to grow greens in outer space and on the Moon.
Had dinner with the 10-meter telescope crew, plus the yoga instructor Michele =>
7PM Then went with Kevin and Michele to a reading of Dr. Seuss's "How the Grinch stole Christmas" -- it was very animated and fun, with everyone just like a kid.
[12/23(Su) Wine & Cheese after a working Sunday]
I'm still having difficulty falling asleep and waking up... It seems like my sleep cycle is becoming later and later even though i'm trying to make it gradually earlier in sync with the telescope operation schedule, which happens 4 minutes earlier each day (doesn't seem like much, but it's half an hour each week).
Today the station worked so that we can take tomorrow and the Christmas day off. With help of Martin and Brad, I re-leveled the telescope mount because the building on the snow is slowly tilting and we need to compensate for it. I made the telescope level to within ~1/500 of a degree. Maybe it's just an optical illusion, but our building and the telescope (the one with a silver dish) looked tilted... =>
7PM The meteorology department hosted the annual Wine & Cheese party -- I hadn't been in previous years for some reason, but it was very fun. I talked to Elke who is a teacher at the United Nations International School in New York -- made me want to visit the school.
8PM Went to the Science Lecture about the study of subglacial mountains on Antarctica to learn about the structures and history of Earth. The speaker was very good and interesting, but when I went back to the party I had difficulty conveying what was interesting about it...! Actually, what I thought was cool is that this project is part of an international collaboration involving many countries including countries like China, Russia, and Japan. As peaceful as this continent is, I had difficulty before finding much involved international collaborations, so it was nice to hear of this. The International Polar Year (2007-2009) seems to be helping.
The 10-meter telescope buddies invited me over to the Summer Camp, so I was gonna go, but on my way out a few people caught me so i talked to them and ended up not heading out to the Summer Camp. I heard later from the 10-meter people that over there was a fight between two drunks, ending up in a broken jaw and a few teeths...
[12/24(Mo) ultimate frisbee & Christmas dinner]
This morning, the International Trans Antarctic Expedition arrived from McMurdo with ~14 people traversing the continent. They were in the galley for brunch, and the Pole people were looking at them as if they were foreigners. I hope they feel welcome. Most of them had a sun-tanned/burned faces and had somewhat a different aura around them after traveling the continent for the past month or so. I wanted to talk to them, but they were kind of in their own group (which I can understand) and looking at us Pole people as if they had come to a new country. So I figured I'll talk to them later.
11AM Katie had a greenhouse training session on lettuce -- I was planning to go to just Kara's at noon because her cucumber/tomato/zucchini section is what I'm helping with, but I had a feeling that not many people will show up to Katie's since the brunch had just started at 10:30, so it was already 11:15 but I stopped by the greenhouse. No one was there; felt kind of sad but i guess she picked a bad time.
12:00 Went to Kara's training and this time fortunately 2 others showed up. Ended up making progress on our section with Alan and Kara for 2 hours!
2PM The trauma team leader Ryan and Adam organized an ultimate frisbee game, so I went outside to play.
At first there were about 5 others, and unlike me they were able to throw frisbees properly. I thought it'd be hard to throw especially with mittens, but my throws were not too different from usual -- I guess I'm not advanced enough to really use my fingers.
Anyways, more people showed up and we played 4-on-4 with people switching in and out once in a while to take breaks. The field was big, and sprinting was really painful. After a while I could barely walk at a normal pace and thought this is a bad sign for tomorrow's 3km race! Here, Nathan is trying to decide if it's worth passing the frisbee to me. Then, right before I make an awesome catch in the air (yeah right). 		I was impressed by Katy, who arrived at this altitude only couple weeks ago; she seemed less exhausted than I was... Here, I'm over-exerting myself trying to cover Katy... After half an hour or so, we went into a "Do Not Freeze" Cargo barn to warm up. It was painful but very fun and we decided to play again some other day.
3:30PM Back in my room I was exhausted and decided to take a nap, especially since I may not get enough sleep tonight between the Christmas party and the 10am race tomorrow. I set my alarm to wake up in time for dinner, but woke up after an hour, so I wrote a postcard.
7PM By the time I finished the postcard, the appetizers had finished and it was already time for seating.
I sat with the 10-meter telescope crew and also talked to Ethan who's trying to be an astronaut -- I found out he's only 29 years old for having done a lot. For dinner we were thankful to have big red lobster tails -- never had it like that before. It was very good, and I had a second one instead of more desert => Then, we had a dance party in the galley. I went back to my room to check on the telescope and stuff, and thought maybe I'll go to sleep to get enough rest for tomorrow's race, but after a while went to check up on the party. Carla pulled me in to the dance floor and it was fun. I managed to pull in Brad and Nils, and caught a great picture of them, with an appropriate expression on the girl's face. After volleyball one night, someone asked me if I breakdance. I said no, but I have tried it a while ago. Somehow a rumor has spread that I can breakdance when i really can't. I jokingly said that i'll do it for the New Year's party when there'll be more space, so now I need to find someone to teach me before the end of the year!
[12/25(Tu) Race!]
8AM Woke up and saw a mail from Chris in Sydney wishing me merry Christmas without an ankle injury like last year right before the race. The temperature was not too different from 2 years ago when I ran, a little below -35°C windchill. I put on 2 thin long pants and 2 thin long sleeve shirts and my blue Team BICEP t-shirt on top. Ate a mandarin, a white pear (and half of its label), and a cookie and headed out.
10AM The race was 3 laps on the snow, totaling 3 km. It's longer than the last time, and unlike the last time, I took it very easy the first 2 laps so that I don't exhaust myself too quickly. Maybe I should've picked up my pace a little earlier, but during the 2nd half of the final lap, I felt like my stomach was going to melt down. That was grueling enough that I think I won't regret pushing harder, although the pain was almost nothing compared to the last time. But this year, I needed to make sure I survive the race so that our telescope can continue running. It felt very pleasant afterwards. Here were the results. Last year's winner Kurtis won again and even beat Nils on skis (althouth Nils just arrived a week ago).
11AM Had brunch and had to go fill liquid nitrogen/helium into the telescope. Then I prepared a weekly report to my team members.
4PM Went back to station for the Christmas choir over the radio to other Antarctic stations. This is a tradition, but it was the first time I made it. When I got to the communications center, no one else was there except the 2 people who work there... This was bad especially since I was just planning to lip sing. The McMurdo Station, with what sounded like 100s of singers accompanied by the piano, went first, singing about 4 songs very nicely. Meanwhile, fortunately, 4 more people showed up, including Nils. We sang "We wish you a merry Christmas" and other traditional Christmas songs -- McMurdo people were nice enough to cheer enthusiastically after each of our unrehersed performances. Nils was a very good singer and tried a few advanced variations that often threw the rest of us off. I probably sounded pretty badly, but it fun really fun. Christina's choir practices back at the Lothlorien Co-op had probably helped me though :)
7PM After dinner and before volleyball I was going to send out my weekly report, but then my draft had disappeared and I could not find it anywhere! Similar things have happened since I've been here this year where a few of my emails that I sent were never delivered and went completely missing, not even in my "Sent" folder. It was very upsetting and I didn't want to rewrite the whole report at that time, so just went to volleyball hoping to relieve some of this stress. By the time I got to the gym, I had completely forgotten about this, so my game was no more aggressive :)
9PM I could not fall asleep again, so caught up on some emails. There was a flight this morning on Christmas day, which I thought was very strange, but turns out it was just to send out the 2 people involved in the fight off of the continent, making people here and at McMurdo work on this holiday and I heard costing almost $300,000.
[12/26(We) Sore]
5AM Woke up early for change, but fell asleep again after ~2 hours. Skied to the lab, hoping that my report draft is still on the computer screen.... Luckily it was mostly there when I backed up on the browser :) I noticed that my thigh muscles were sore from yeseterday's run -- I guess skiing doesn't train those muscles as much. Rather, skiing makes my triceps sore.
6PM Made it to the yoga class for the 2nd time. The small lounge was full with ~10 people. All the yoga mats were taken, but the instructor Michele offered me a towel to use instead -- found out later that it was her towel; that was very nice of her, especially since loundry is restricted here. The class was excellent, especially for my abs.
8PM I mailed back Denis's gift from Irina that arrived here too late. I wrote them a little note in Russian (they should be in Moscow now, and Denis is trying to learn Russian), thanking them for letting me have some of the dried fruits. I also sent out a postcard to Japan. Now my cash is down to ~$5, no problem.
[12/27(Th) Snow Stakes, finally!]
6am Woke up, skied to the lab, and called in for the teleconference. No one else called in for the first 5 minutes or so, and then Cynthia called in from her home in Illinois. I guess everyone else is trying to recover from their Christmas parties. So I just updated her on all the latest gossips at the pole. just kidding. She was looking forward to coming, arriving on the 18th (oh, i didn't realize at the time but that's my birthday:). She said she wouldn't even come to the pole if she was serious about graduating soon (to make analysis and thesis progress), maybe implying that I'm not at all serious about graduating :) Anyways, it was nice at least she called, and it was actually productive because I asked her some telescope geometry questions that helped me with my data analysis.
3PM The combination of the weather and everyone's schedule finally allowed for the snow stakes trip that was originally planned for 2 weeks ago.
It was 4 of us, including the cryogenics technician Chris (left), cargo Greg (right), and Dwight (middle) whose voice is familiar from station announcements but I had never met yet. We got a GPS receiver, a tiltmeter, a tape measure, an Iridium phone, hand/toe warmers, and 2 big bags of emergency gear (tents and everything). We took 2 snow mobiles. People said that pisten bullies are nicer because you're warm inside, but the station wants to make sure that the pisten bullies are not malfunctioned for distiguished visitors. I'm actually glad because snow mobiles are much nicer way of experiencing the outdoors. I rode behind Chris, pulling a sled of equipment. We passed our telescope and at first the snow was extremely bumpy and I could barely hold myself on the snow mobile, so I thought this is gonna be a rough ride, but then we entered a nice well-traveled path, so we buzzed on. It felt pretty warm (-27°C or so), but i thought the wind chill must be very low now that we're moving at 30~50 km/h. There was a path because there's a Sun observation camp about 10 km away currently undergoing reactivation. That saved us some time. We stopped to locate the flags indicating where the stakes are. Past this camp, we had to drive on the bumpy sastrugi -- at every major bump I looked back to make sure our sled was fine. Then I noticed the sled had been disconnected and Greg and Dwight was waving at us behind. Turns out that the connection was a weak design. Greg used a rope to tie the sled and we moved on. We drove along the stakes toward the end to make measurements on our way back. An hour had passed, so we stopped and called the station on the Iridium phone to inform them that we're fine. I had only seen flatness around the station, but out here we could see the landscape was somewhat wavey over large distances, and now we couldn't see the station because we were near the bottom of a basin. It's neat to see something other than flatness.
4:50PM We finally found the 40th (the last) stake, 20 miles from the station. We turned off our snow mobiles and it was so quiet and calm with absolutely no wind. The altitude was back up, so we could see back to the station again. Greg measured the length of the stake above the ground, Dwight measured the angle of the stake, and I recorded everything including the GPS coordinates and the altitude. (I think Greg in this photo is just either photographing some features on the snow or zipping up his coat.) Then we would move on to the next stake 1/2 mile closer to the station. The sky was beautiful with strips of clouds running across the entire view. About midway through, we noticed that Greg's snow mobile's fuel gauge was almost empty, even though we saw that the gauge indicated full at the beginning. We found out that the gauge had been falsely indicating full and the tank was never full at the beginning. To save as much fuel as possible, we moved the emergency bag to the other snow mobile and Dwight and I took turns riding on the sled. I was secretly hoping that we get stranded in the middle of nowhere and have to test our survival skills, but looks like we'll be okay... I drove the final ~10 km, being careful with the bumps so that the ride is comfortable for the person on the sled. It was fun. After ~5.5 hours we finally reached the station. As the record keeper, I was the busiest and didn't have much time to stand back and enjoy the scenery, but it was still nice to venture away from the station.
[12/28(Fr) Trauma practice]
5AM Woke up and the telescope was not responding. I thought the control computer must have crashed again, but surprisingly the computer was fine. I was afraid something worse might have happened, but when I checked the log, it turns out that the ephemeris related to the Earth's rotation had just expired and as a result the control system shut down. Fortunately, the satellites were up so i could find the current ephemeris on the internet and resume the telescope operation.
Got a little new year's greeting from Alina that I've been out of touch with for a while. It was very nice to hear from her.
6PM After cleaning the toilets, had an early dinner and headed to the Trauma Team training, where today we people pretending to be patients and we practiced patient assessment and reporting the patient status to the medical department over radio concisely. By the 3rd patient, I felt pretty comfortable about what to do and what to report if I find a patient. This is good to have practice for.
8PM Left volleyball after an hour and went skiing with Jeri and Mike. Jeri had mentioned stopping by the ARO (atmospheric Research Observatory) building, which is only about 500 m from the station, so i thought we'd go skiing for a while and then stop by on the way back, but turned out that ARO was our destination... I hadn't been to this building yet this year, so I thought I'd check what's happening in there. I made a smoothie with the clean snow from the Clean Air Sector -- it was very good. It was a movie party and they were watching a mystery movie "Take Lives". I'm not really into watching movies, but they were a good crowd and i thought i'd just stay and maybe take a nap if I don't like the movie. It turned out to be pretty fun watching it with them, although the story was not too good.

[12/29(Sa) Liquid helium]