mcmurdo monotony

I can't say that life ever truly becomes monotonous here, but as our "mainbody" of summer employees settle in we begin to develop patterns and schedules.

But, things do change under our noses. Sometimes, I feel like the dining staff phase out the fresh fruits so that we don't notice until the bright colors are right under our noses that we were missing them.

There has been a lot of snow melt over the past week. Temperatures are near, or at, 20 degrees and pretty sunny! Melting snow around here means a mess, though! Here's a nice photo of the mud that matriculates into icicles on our vans. The snow and ice roads melt and slow our vehicles down, the streets in town are muddy, and the island to ice shelf transition is beginning to crack more.

Common things down here are extraordinary elsewhere. Here's a picture of a propeller just hanging out on the Ice Runway. A tremendous amount of plane maintenance happens here; particularly to the LC-130's that fly our South Pole and other on-continent Missions. They have already swapped out an entire engine on one of these planes in one day!

Another flying apparatus of the feathered variety is the Skua. This scavenger has poked its' head around McMurdo for the last week now. The bird looks like a humongous seagull and proves to be extremely aggressive. Tonight, one of my passengers had been walking around with a cookie in his hand and, out-of-nowhere, was dive bombed by the bird. The birds are smart. They wait by the doors of the galley, they know what a blue tray is used for, and they most-definitely know what food looks like. There is an Antarctic Conservation Act that requires us not to disturb nature. Our running joke is that a person will get attacked by a skua and just have to endure the pecking so that we can save the Skua down here.

Our office had a Hut 10 party a couple nights ago. Hut 10 is the only "house" I've seen on station that various people and groups can reserve monthly for personal use. It's complete with kitchen, bedroom, 2 bathrooms, living room, laundry and all! Marty, pictured below, organized the food. He made handmade pizza with homemade sauce by requesting the items from the galley. The pizza was unbelievably good! We definitely enjoyed spending some time feasting on his pizza recipes!

Lastly, I finally have a good picture of fatamorgana. This term refers to an optical illusion, of sorts, that "creates" cliffs in the distance. It is a mirage that is reflected by the sun and ice. I am told that when we open our two other airfields, Williams Field & Pegasus, and begin doing our shuttles out there, we will see much more dramatic views of fatamorgana, but in the meantime, this picture will have to do! We typically see this effect daily on some part of the horizon.