A Week in Review

Howdy everyone!

Wow what a week! So last time I wrote we had just arrived and had begun to settle in a bit, or as much as I could at least. Last Saturday Oct. 10 was the first day at work, mainly carpenter shop orienation and some training. There are around 70 people working in the Carp shop. Around 20 females and 50 males. Everybody is great, has varying levels of talents and seem to work well with others. Especially the small Texan who does not have much carp shop experience. But I am being taken under the wings of many and have been learning a lot! The first real day of work on Monday I did work orders, i.e. fixing broken door latches, installing toilet paper dispensers etc. Eric better watch out! He's going to be getting competition back in Austin! I also worked all day outside on putting together 10 boxes of Jamesways tents, which have ben used as shelters since the Korean War. This leads me to Tuesday at 5:30 PM.

I get off work and immediately head to bed. I have a 101.5 fever, chills, then hot sweats, a runny noise, sneezing fits, watery eyes, achy body... a whole lot of not very fun times. So I stayed in bed all the next day, having already called into work letting them know I wouldn't be there. During the whole time before, I was drinking plenty of fluids, or at least what I thought was plenty, washing my hands all the time and trying to stay generally healthy. But the bug found me. Eric sweetly brought me soup and crackers for dinner and put on Enya for me to listen to. What a nice boyfriend. So all day Wednesday I was in bed trying to get better. But I am much better now! I knew eventually I'd get sick down here, but didn't think it would be this soon.

On Thursday I helped do "Food Pulls" for WAIS Divide which is where I will be going for 6 to 8 weeks this season. It stands for West Antarctic Ice Sheet and is 800 miles west of McMurdo. They are drilling a 10,000 foot ice core there to study the earth's climate from 100,000 years back. Very intersting! Eric has been there twice and will be the carpenter foreman again this season. So I helped to get lots of the food that will be flown out there, packaged it up and got it ready to be mailed off. Made sure we had lots of chocolate! Although it was a lot of heavy lefting, it was a good, warm time inside which helped me to keep getting better.

Now that brings me to Friday and Saturday! So there is this camp called "Happy Camper" that all first year workers have to go to. Mine was this weekend. There were 20 of us that went out to the Ross Ice Shelf and went through a training course on how to survive out in the elements. We were very lucky as we had failry decent weather. Not much wind to speak of. Granted we slept outside in -27 temeratures but I managed to stay pretty warm inside my sleeping bag. We had to build shelters (one of them being a Quincy hut), use emergency kitchen gear, build ice walls, have buckets on our heads and try and find our instuctor (all of this to simulate a white out) and just in general survive. The key was to keep busy in order to stay warm and you would be fine. We certainly stayed busy. All in all it was a pretty good time. Not as bad as others made it out to be. But I was definitley happy to be done with it and to not have to do it again. I'll have some of the pictures labled from it so you can see what I am talking about.

So here are a few things that I've learned so far:

1. Static electricty runs rampant here. It seems that anything I touch shocks me. Sometimes even when you're not in the dark, the spark is so big that you can see it!

2. I've already gone through almost a bottle of lotion. My skin just soaks the stuff up. Again a testament to how dry it is here. I should have brought more lotion!

3. It's okay to want to go to bed at 8PM even when you don't have to wake up until 6AM. I am working my behind off here!


A few Facts about Antarctica:

1. It holds 70% of Earth's frehwater.
2. 98% of it is coverd in ice and snow.
3. It holds 90% of the world's ice.
4. The ice sheet is over 2 miles deep.


So that is my week in review! It feels like I have been here for 10 weeks. But it is really going very well. I'm meeting more and more great people, learning a lot and soaking up all that is the Antarctica experience. Until next time!


Love,
Erika