August 31 – Day 242 on Ice

Weather: Cold, windy, blowing snow and low vis. We got down to -70C a few days ago, and it has averaging around -63C for the past few days (that’s like -85 to -90F). Winds have been pretty high, so the windchill has been brutal.

We took our window covers on the station down today… you can see that in the live-feed cam (if the weather isn’t too bad). We could do this because the sensitive aurora cam on the roof has been turned off… unfortunately it’s still so dark out (and the windows are so tinted) that the windows effectively act as mirrors:

Last weekend was my birthday, and we didn’t do anything special particularly for me, but the station did host an Iron Chef event. It was really fun to watch the 4 teams participate and cook. I was actually pretty surprised at the quality of food which they each made (I didn’t participate… no one would have wanted that!). The 5 ingredients to include were: corn, miso, cocoa powder, bacon and beets. I don’t actually know how Iron Chef works, but it was my understanding that they had to incorporate all of the ingredients into their dishes.

We now have 3 weeks until sunrise. Hard to believe summer is almost here! My work ethic has plummeted, but hopefully with the increasing sunlight, some life will be brought back into the station. I think it’s a pretty common thing, the lack of interest, depression, lethargy, caused by being down here. Being in the darkness and cold, cooped up in a building with these other people. We seemed to have moved from working and sports in the evenings, to watching tv shows and movies. Vegging out seems much more attractive than working on projects.

I find myself staring at my computer screen, trying to understand the code I’ve written and trying to figure out why something isn’t working. For example, today I spent about 3 hours trying to understand why my script wasn’t reading in data properly… it turns out I was telling it to look in the wrong directory. Things like that eat at me daily. Stupid mistakes, easy math that isn’t so easy anymore, tiredness all the time. Do I just slug down more coffee and get more irritable? or just remain tired and get more irritable? It’s a harsh continent 🙂