Friday, January 16, 2009

If i can't just get this blog thinger completely updated in one massive super crazy blog update!! Not gonna happen but i will get a good chunk of the way caught up!

Where did i leave off, hmm oh this place is awesome right. Well it is the holidays are quite interesting/fun down here as well. They serve really god food and there are always parties/dancing afterwards. So i mentioned way back when about the crazy thanksgiving night, so let's go with that. They decked out the dining room quite fancifully and server delicious food, or so i was told. The week prior to thanksgiving dinner they had volunteer parties for pie making and potato peeling and the like. Everyone had a good time there or so i was told :) Here is a pic of the dinner setupAnd here is the hallway that was lined with tasty treatsI don't know how the food was as i didn't go to dinner, i forgot to sign up for the dinner so was just stuck in a random seating. I would have been sitting with a bunch of strangers people I've never talked to nobody that i knew. Just not my bag. No biggie, i just hung out waiting for the dinners to get over with. Then it was off to the party. The party was supposed to be out in summer camp lounge but it started early in one of the game lounges. The DA's made us Sangria, here is the flyer for the party that i made for them.And here is the scoop we used for it :)Brian Churchman our Comms Tech showing proper scooping technique:Once we moved it out to summer camp things got a little crazy...There were so many people in the little lounge thing that it got so hot while you were there dancing. A group of us all went outside and were generally blinded, atleast i was by the bright light coming out of the dark lounge, that and it was like a steam bath we were all steaming which made the pictures kinda cool :)And in this shot you can see the inside of the summer camp lounge, yes that is a stripper pole in the middle of the lounge ;} You can see my back in this shot with the black shirt and brownish hat.The party was awesome, drinking dancing and awesomeness. There were jello shots (a tray of jello rather than individual cups) that were disgusting though some people whose names will remain anonymous were just dumping the trays in their mouth all night. The dancing was fun, they had an alright selection of music. This is where the fun came in, I was dancing with one of the girls in the outside shots when we were yelled at because the guy who provided the music didn't like the way we were dancing he yelled "IT"S NOT EVEN ABOUT THAT", we ignored him and kept dancing and he yelled again so we stopped and she left. We still joke about that night and the "it's not even about that" line gets used often. But i still say, how exactly are you supposed to dance to Juveniles "Back that azz up"?? After that I stayed with the other lovely lady i was dancing with and chitty chatted with a bunch of folks in the "coat room" area, she was sort of my date for the evening though i don't think it was ever clearly labeled that. Point is i went with her, stayed with her afterwards and chitty chatted. It was a really fun night. Oh and apparently my "it's not even about that" dance partner found out we made a scene, not sure if that was good thing or a bad thing she though it was a good thing, and i was apparently "The Man". The girls i was dancing with are quite the cuties that many on station have crushes with :) So yah that was thankgsiving... 2 months late i know shush!

So as it runs out not too long after the thanksgiving night that cute little lady i went to the party with and stayed up chitty chatting with became my girlfriend. Remember that girl i mentioned earlier i helped with the luggage, same one :}. Name's Krissie oh she's just so terribly cute and short! and i <3 short chicks :}. She works in meteorology here, and was working in meteorolgy as a weather girl before she came out here. Now never call her a weather girl, she gets very angry ;} She is a meteorologist according to her, bah i say! Weather girl!! anywho whatever you want to call it she was on tv in multiple cities. yah dating a tv star ;} Here is just about the cutest picture i have ever seen of her.Now i'm not sure of the date exactly this happened but one of the planes had to be parked here for a good week and a half because someone backed up some fire equipment wrong and smashed a bunch of stuff inside. Here is a rare pic of two planes on our runway.And here is an excellent pic showing a sign the siding carps put in front of it after it sat here for a week. Then not too long after this we had a very special airdrop. A c-17 was doing an airdrop one of only 3 ever by a c-17 ( so they said, i did not bother looking it up). It was not as cool as I thought it was going to be. Just a plane droppin stuff. Here are a few pics from that day though, sorta cool i guess. First shot is from my camera and the other two are from my coworker Devon's camera. His is fancy, you can freaking see the guys in the cockpit taking photos of us from his pics...

My air drop:Devon'sAfter the drop they did a few passes of the station, a couple "high" and one low pass which was awesome, my pics do not do it justice.

The Bicep group over in the Dark Sector Lab(DSL) had a open house because they were shutting down the Bicep project, and they were going to have the stuff out on display for folks to take photos and chit chat about the project. I just wanted to go and take some photos :}We took a shuttle over to the lab, and on the way came a cross flint walking who decided to try and run along side the shuttle the whole way. Though it may not sound funny it was hilarious at the time especially since he was in full ecw gear trying to race our shuttle van. At first we thought he wanted a ride in the van so the driver slowed down to stop for him but he kept waving us on, he just wanted to race. He ran quite a long ways kudos to him :} The lab was pretty cool, i had been in there before on my tour with the old networking guy, but only briefly. This time we got to peruse a bit and see all the cool stuff. This is the building that the South Pole Telescope (SPT) is at. Supposedly it is the tallest point on station. It is massive, a 10M telescope that has to be cooled by liquid nitrogen which is approximately 6 kelvin...that's really really really cold. Here's the scopeAnd this is the view from the lab of the stationThere was a bunch of nifty little doodads in the lab, i wish i had free range to go and fiddle with stuff. They had a big bottle of liquid nitrogen (maybe it was helium dun remember) labeled "The Dude" sitting on a scale which i was taking photos of. While i was doing that this old dude i can't remember his name came over and said you want a cool shot? I said sure, (i just assumed he meant he would stand in the photo making it cool) no he then proceeds to walk over and open the bottle up allowing it to spray out all over the table it was next to which had very expensive equipment on it. I was in shock and was not taking any photos of it, i couldn't believe what this guy was doing, then he stops and says did you get it. Umm no, so he proceeds to do it again, this time i got some shots... Crazy drunk old scientists are awesome!Here are a couple of the thingers they had out on display, they explained a bunch of it to anyone who asked, i did not as there were too many people crowding them and asking questions. The parts were very cool none the less. And i think the versions of use for each piece that i came up with is far better than anything they could have told me. basically though the little parts and tubes went together to sit inside the blue rotatermajigger:golden thingermabobtelescope housing thingertelescope part (Krissie and Mark)I then moved on to the roof to see what all the hubub was about. Apparently you could see into the blue telescope housing thinger from above. Photo-op!

This is the housing on top of the roof that protected the blue thingerAnd this is what it looked like in thereFrom here you could take pics inside to the party, nifty.Here are some of the pics I took.

Here is Ben and KrissieI love the facial expressions these two had in this shot, Oh crap what did we just do!And Krissie and myself, aint she a cutey?Ben and myselfThis pic is of Ben and I trying to figure out how to make IT gangsta signs, didn't work out too well...Since i've been here we've had the traverse arrive both the US and the Norwegian folks, here is a pic of the US folks and some of their tractors encircling the Pole. It was kinda cool , to watch them all train in and then eventually swarm the Pole. The pic is terrible because i shot it from indoors while at lunch. They stayed around for a while, had an open house and then went back on their merry way.

Maybe the next day? not sure on dates anymore, they moved over our christmas "tree" by the pole. This is what my office looked like that week. You may notice it looks a bit different from the first shot I have of the office in the last post, slightly more messy ;}This is the before shotAnd here is the best shot I will ever get of Ben, he didn't have his iPhone out at the time i was taking the photos but it was in his pocket :} Tripp and I give him crap about Apple on a nearly daily basisThis was a really good day because i remembered right after i took that photo about the balloons i had found in skua the night before! Man what a find, what a find. So we proceeded to make a bunch of noise both in laughing our butts off and blowing up and popping the balloons.

BenMetripp

Then came christmas, meh nothing special just another day. We did get an extra day off so that was cool. And the dinner on christmas eve was pretty dang awesome. Oh wait I take back the meh...THEY HAD EGG NOG WOOT!!!!. It came in the day before and I asked/begged/pleaded one of the DA's to hide me some, she hid me away 3 cans of it muahahaha! Their story comes in the next blog, this thing is long enough as it is ;} Anywho here are the pics from the evening, the eggnog was spiked with rum, mmm mmm good.

Outside hallway with snacks and eggnogTable seatingChristmas lobsterBeef wellingtonChristmas dinner not bad for the South Pole ;}