Donut of Misery

Things are rolling along here at McMurdo. The warmer temperatures are starting to turn the roads into muddy streams and the temperatures are approaching the 30s F (just below 0 degrees C). It feels warm and pleasant when the wind isn't blowing and we're trying to spend more time outside.

The station celebrated Thanksgiving this past Saturday with a two-day weekend and a giant, fancy meal in the Dining Hall. We celebrated with some friends, including Antz and Christine. Christine introduced me to the Antarctic Program in 1999 and encouraged me to apply (so I can alternately blame and thank her :) They mostly do winters these days so we don't get to see them very often, but they are here this summer on an Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation.

Antz is known for his incredible time-lapse films of Antarctic landscapes, wildlife and people. You can see several of his videos on Youtube if you search for Antzarctica. His wife, Christine, is also incredibly creative and very amusing in the video about Condition 1. Their goal is to gather enough time-lapse footage during their 6-week stay to put together a full length film. Their website is: www.frozensouth.com

Prior to the eating-fest, we ran in the 5K Turkey Trot race. It was pretty windy so I needed to supplement my gear with handwarmers, but we both finished and Michiel did well enough to win a great t-shirt. The top 50 runners were rewarded with a shirt. You'd think that it would be easy enough to place in the top 50, but the running crowd is exceptionally competitive and the turn-out was excellent (maybe 100 runners???). I just missed being in the top 50, but I scored a shirt from a guy who couldn't wear a Medium. (It's good to be small!)

Now that the Thanksgiving weekend is behind us, the holiday season will fly by, but still...at this time of the season, people start to think about the travels after the ice and the free time and travel opportunities that are the main reasons why people keep coming back to the ice year after year.

In order to keep track of how much time we have left, someone created the Donut of Misery. The donut is a famous (around here, anyway) Excel spreadsheet that calculates the time you have remaining on station based on your contract start and end dates. Here's a screen shot.

The donut is particularly popular with people who are doing a year-long contract. They might lament that they are only at 28% when the rest of the summer population is at 48%.

I recently received a copy of an updated, slicker version of the donut, called the Penguin Timer. Here's a screen shot:

A Month Already

Views from the plane were good this year.

Welcome to McMurdo. I still find it incredible that such a big plane can land on ice.

We’ve been in McMurdo for almost a month now. The time goes incredibly fast here and before we know it, it will be time to make plans for after the ice. For now, though, we are working 6 days a week, 10.5 to 11 hours per day. I am playing drums in two bands, one original reggae music, the other a funk cover band in which my stage name is Peaches Delite. Both bands will surely play on the New Year’s Day outdoor music festival, IceStock. I am also volunteering as a medical recorder for any Mass Casualty Incidents. We’ll have a drill some time soon and my job is to stay with one patient and write down vital signs, symptoms, treatments, etc. Michiel is volunteering as a stretcher bearer.

Sheri, quarantined in her room, watching tv.

When he isn’t working, Michiel is again training for the marathon and is working a small side job as a pin-setter for our manual bowling alley. More on that in another post. This past week, he had the very unenviable job of bringing me my meals in the room as I have been quarantined with the flu. This year, there is a near epidemic of both kinds of flu despite the massive effort put into getting all of us vaccinated. It is very tricky to figure out how to appropriately vaccinate all of us since the flus and flu seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres are different and almost all of us travel through both hemispheres to get here.

Clipped Wings

The next day, after a beautiful run in the Botanic Gardens, we reported to the US Antarctic Centre for clothing distribution and learned that our plane was broken. We would be notified at our respective hostels if the flights would be going the following day. We spent the afternoon doing a little shopping, enjoying the gorgeous blossoms and greenery of spring in Christchurch, walking around the city and eating ethnic food, though we were incredibly saddened by the fact that our inexpensive Asian Food Court was be remodeled for another use.

That evening, we learned that our plane would not be repaired in time to fly the next day so we made plans to go to a little ski town with Hot Springs. Though Hanmer Springs is a very commercialized establishment, it was wonderful to leave the city, not think about the Program (sounds like a cult, doesn’t it?) and soak in some very warm water….especially since the weather had turned nasty. The pools were wonderful in the downpour. The pattern of the raindrops on the steamy surface was mesmerizing and the low cloud cover swirling around the mountains made the whole scene kind of dreamy.

We spent several hours getting pruny and then the skies cleared and we walked around town under bright blue skies. We drove back to Christchurch in a lazy daze, much to the sadness of our shuttle driver, who wanted to make jokes with “Kittens” and his harem of 2. The company’s dispatcher had told the driver that he had a party of three under the name Gitzels, but to the driver, all he could figure out was Kittens. So Michiel, our friend Jeri and I became the Kittens party.

Upon return to the hostel, we saw that our flight was on for the next day but we had a nice, late check in time. We enjoyed a fun evening out at one of the US Antarctic Programs’ favorite hangouts, Dux Delux and poured ourselves into bed.

Deploying Together

Deploying together for the first time….it seems like a small thing but considering that we have to move out of our cabin in Hope, get ourselves to Anchorage (1.5 hours away) and then get ourselves on an early morning flight to Seattle, it is so much easier to only have to make arrangements to do it once. It was also nice to be able to share without abandon our disgust at the lousy set-up of the security check point in LAX airport and to be able to share the events that ensued. (Michiel doesn’t stop muttering: “amateurs!!”)

The Qantas flight from LA to Auckland is always long and uncomfortable but ours was quite a bit longer than expected. Amongst our deployment group was a new South Pole doctor. She had heard about the program from the book written by another South Pole doc who had done her own breast biopsy one winter. This new doc was inspired by the tales of camaraderie and the bravery of all the people at the Pole who worked together to help the sick doctor be evacuated during a time of total darkness when no planes fly to Antarctica.

This new doc, Pat, didn’t have to wait long to have an opportunity to prove herself. Not more than 3 hours into the flight, one of the flight crew requested medical assistance from any certified medical professionals. We didn’t know at the time that Pat and one of the McMurdo firefighters had volunteered their expertise but several hours later, when the pilot made an announcement that we were, regretfully, making an emergency landing in Tahiti, we learned that the two of them had spent the night awake with the patient who had taken a turn for the worse. An ambulance was waiting at the airport in Tahiti to get the sick patient to better medical facilities.

We landed in the dark and descended down the steps onto the tarmac, greeted by a humid tropical breeze and tall women in floral dresses and fresh flowers in their hair. We spent the next hour and a half in the small airport, watching the sun rise and talking amongst ourselves about how great it would be to have to stay for a day or two. Pat told us how the patient might have experienced a heart attack and the medical experts in Phoenix (or wherever they are) advised the pilot to get to the closest country with a hospital. Though Tahiti was 3 hours out of the way, when you’re in the middle of the South Pacific, there aren’t many countries to choose from.


We did eventually arrive in Auckland and all of us had already missed our connecting flights to Christchurch. Qantas frantically struggled to get us on Air New Zealand flights. You can imagine the chaos….a whole 757 plane load of people, many of whom were flying elsewhere in New Zealand or onto Australia, who needed to be rebooked.

We survived the lines, the security, the wait and the last flight for an uneventful trip to Christchurch where we met our shuttle drivers (who had practically taken over the Meet and Greet on which the company economized), drove into town, checked into our hostels and went out for Greek food.