All you have to give up is everything

It's that time of year again. This Sunday I leave for my summer job in Antarctica. Most blogger types would use the experience as an excuse to post about ten thousand pictures of penguins and write about how seeing a seal roll over gave them a new perspective on life. Just because I'm going down there don't expect me to get all emo over snowflakes. If you want to read about the snowy adventure of a lifetime or any other hardcore outdoorsy Antarctic adventure crap, go somewhere else. This blog will continue to focus on truly important and fascinating stuff like toy robots I had in 1984.

My job isn't glamorous down on the ice but it sure is fun. Most importantly, it affords me the opportunity to score mad robots at various cities along the way. Last year on my way down I bought Alternators Meister in the Singapore airport. Then when I left, I found the Madman DVD release of TF:TM while I was in New Zealand. I hear Australia is getting a lot of Alt Nemesis Primes lately. Hopefully I'll score something on my way down. Plus there's the yearly tradition where I shave all my pubic hairs in Christchurch. I call it "giving myself a New Zealander".

I'm packing right now and deciding which robots will be coming with me. I can't take much but I will bring Alt Prime because he's a red Dodge Ram, which kind of looks like the trucks they drive at McMurdo. So for the next three months Prime and I will be hanging out down on the ice and missing out on times that are traditionally spent with family like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. If you're a traditional family that sucks, but after spending so much time in the military and being married to it, we've learned to be flexible and adopt alternative celebration traditions.

Then there are the holiday events I'll miss out on no matter what. There's black Friday sales, the Wii launch, the Playstation 3, Toys R Us reissue Soundwave, about three months worth of podcasts and other trivialities I'm sure would have pointlessly consumed my life. In the end I won't feel very bad about missing out on that stuff at all. I gladly give consumer culture up. They stopped making anything I liked 20 years ago anyways.