Nov 6th – Day 32 of “The Commute”

This past week has had some great weather both here in McMurdo and at Pole, allowing 3 of the 5 opening flights to take pax in and out. This includes the 2 replacement winterovers for SPT, which is good because even if I get delayed from my nominal Monday flight date, they can start the training with this past year’s WOs.

I’ve done my “bag drag”, where I submit my checked bag to the cargo folks in prep for the flight, so now I just wait for Monday and hope for clear weather!

In the meantime I’ve been reading lots of papers and including the just-released Astro2020 decadal review which is a big collection of the US’s plans for astronomy in the upcoming decade. One notable encouragement from the review is the interest in time-domain astrophysics, including lots of multi-wavelength stuff – which is what I’m currently doing with SPT data. There was also lots of talk about CMB-S4 (the next generation CMB experiment) and how there should be a strong push to publicize data, including near-realtime alerts – which is also what I’ve been working on with SPT. So that’s encouraging that I might be headed in the right direction for post-graduate work 🙂

Aside from work, there is a Halloween party tonight. I have a feeling McMurdo will put on a well-decorated ; so I’m excited to see how it turns out… though I must admit I’m not much of a Halloween person. I don’t like coming up with costume ideas, nor dressing up

Then there is open volleyball on Sunday afternoon.

And meals in between. What more could I want?

I’ve also been getting really good at my Antarctic stare; especially right after stuffing my face at a meal I like to just sit in the galley for a while in my food coma and stare. Exciting stuff.