You know how when you're going to break up with someone and you want to be civil about it and you just say, "Look, it's time for us to move on?" And she's all, "Is there anything I can do to change this? You like booty, don't you? You can have booty." Well that's where I am with Antarctica. I'm in my last few weeks down here and I've come to terms with the fact that this will be the final time I will be down to the ice. I've accepted that I will never be back and this is the last time I'll get to see this place. But Antarctica doesn't seem to want to let go of me and this last week she was trying real hard to make me happy with her snowflake booty.
Overall I was a bit dissapointed with the lack of weather I got compared to last season. I came down with dreams of capturing all sorts of snowflakes during the austral summer. But as it turned out this season was a lot more mild than summer '05-'06. I didn't capture anywhere near the amount of snowflakes I intended to. In fact my first few tries were total failures because I didn't have the technique down good but I was figuring I'd have a lot more opportunities to fine tune the process. Unfortunately it hasn't snowed nearly as often as it did last summer. So I'm all, "Well Antarctica if you aren't gonna put out then I don't really feel like I got what I wanted out of this relationship. So I'm out of here and I don't feel bad." Then as if to make up for the lack of weather action, this week was the Antractic equivalent of smoking crack with penguins. Sexy penguins.
I already wrote about what happened Sunday, then Wednesday I got a tour of both Discovery Hut and the Nathaniel B. Palmer Science Vessel plus icebreaker. Then Thursday when I was working at Pegasus it snowed and I got a lot of good snowflakes. Plus a C-130 landed there which is an extremely rare occurance. One of this week's C-17s arrived late so I got to see it come and go all during my Friday shift. Then the ice cleared out of the sound and people started seeing whales from Hut Point. So I have like five billion pictures from just this week and even if I upload only the ones where I like how my hair looks that's still like 20 zillion. We'll see what I put up at Flickr Macrocrania.
Did I mention I got some good flakes? My plan now is to take the slides to Crary Lab sometime this week and see if I can borrow one of their microscopes to take nice big closeup pictures of the snowflakes I got. It also looks like it may snow again tomorrow, which would be really cool. So I will be out at Williams Field on my day off, hoping I can score some more snowflake action. Next update to PSMR should have some pretty decent Antarctic snowflake pictures if my Crary Lab invasion proves successful. Hopefully all of you valued loyal citizens of Macrocrania will be rewarded with something worth reading for once!
Yeah, breaking up is tough to do especially since I've had some really good times down here. I will miss McMurdo Space Station and weather observering. I think the Antractic snowflakes will miss me too. But I've got a hot nasty slut in the South Dakota winter and she puts out flakes all the time. So from the perspective of a snowflake hunter I gotta go be hitting that South Dakota snowflake booty instead. It's just natural for Antarctica to be jealous. At this rate Antarctica will be doing all sorts of snowing for me and talking nasty and stuff. It'll be a lot of fun sharing my final few weeks of Antarctic breakup sex with all of you.
UPDATE!!!!
Pages 11 and 12 over at the Antarctic Summer '06-'07 album are new and they've got pics from the Discovery Hut and Nathaniel Palmer ship tour.
1 comment:
So just out of curiosity, what is the deal with the weather watching down there? How did you get involved with that? I never thought about working in Antartica and I was just curious how that worked.
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