dantarctica

Due to some extenuating circumstances, I spent about 3 months at McMurdo Station on Ross Island…ANTARCTICA. During that time I attempted to write my first blog to capture what I was experiencing, please enjoy those posts below.

quick aside: I am not being elusive about the “extenuating circumstances” it is just that I have outlined them in embarrassingly gruesome details on a post from the archived blog: antarctica:

I have changed sites and largely abandoned that blog, but I’ve pulled along the content ever since. In this most recent endeavor, I have even gone through to clean up the links to photos and attempted to use higher resolution photos that I had not posted previously. I, mainly, left everything untouched (even some blatant typos) but did update a few thing here and there so it is not exactly the same, but pretty darn close.

I took a picture of myself every day because one of the things I was doing was not cutting my hair or beard. I’ve probably had a dozen beards since then, but that was my first. It is chronicled here:

my Christmas (updated w/ pic)

Today is Christmas. It doesn’t seem like it at all. I went to the town Christmas party last night and that is the closest it has gotten to feeling like Christmas.

Merry Christmas...

I am almost 31 years old and this is what the first Christmas I’ve spent without my family looks like. I hope it’s the last… 12:01AM on 2009-12-25

tourists

This was hard for me to believe, but there were tourists at McMurdo today. It was very odd. They were all wearing matching bright yellow jackets with red deflated life vests.

monster truck

Today at work we had to take a few boxes to different buildings in town. Some of them were bulky and kind of heavy, probably too much to hand carry (plus it was COLD today).

snow

It snowed most of the day today. Hard at times (nothing like DC I’m sure). I know that no 2 snowflakes are alike, but they were VERY different throughout the day today.

decorations

Someone put Christmas themed decorations up on the light poles around town. It’s kind of funny. It doesn’t seem like Christmas at all and it really doesn’t look like Christmas, but now the decorations help.

laundry (part 2)

It snowed a little bit today. And I was only wearing my fleece, so that was bad planning on my part. I went back to the dorm a few times during the work day to do laundry and I never picked up a different coat though, so it wasn’t too bad.

Black Island

Helicopters are AWESOME! Today’s helicopter ride was a great experience. For those of you that have never ridden in a helicopter, you should. If you can do it in Antarctica, that’d be even better (I might be bragging a little there, sorry).

helicopter

Tomorrow I am scheduled to take a helicopter ride across the ice shelf to another island. I am going to Black Island. It houses our off-continent link to the rest of the world.

one month down

Well, I’ve officially been in Antarctica a month. Nothing special about today other than that so I don’t have a whole lot to say. I did drink a Diet Dr. Pepper today.