Nov 13th – Day 4 at Pole

Whew! Guess who “fixed” their laptop charger (by splicing it with another charger) — This guy!

It’s only been 4 days back at Pole but it’s felt much longer. Lots of remembering how to do things and trying to feel like a “supervisor” .

I had a beautiful flight through the Trans-Antarctic mountains and wonderful weather! In fact, the weather has been beautiful the whole time I’ve been here — even unseasonably cold and calm according to our lovely weather man Jeff:

“Step outside right now and you will feel record cold for the date. We are currently at -46.2°C / -51.2°F; the coldest we’ve been on this date since 2006. The UTC date doesn’t end until 13:00 local time on Sunday so there is still time for the documented record to get colder. If you are only staying for the summer, your next chance to feel temperatures this cold will be (realistically) early February; and that’s not guaranteed. If you are staying for winter, the currenI t temperature is warmer (a lot warmer) than the average daily temperature for every day starting March 26^th until October 29^th. So there is that . . .

Cold is not the only record we’ve broken this week. On UTC day 12 we broke the record for lowest average wind speed (see below). You won’t see the cold record “officially” listed until next week’s summary. Looking ahead, models indicate a warming trend starting Monday night into Tuesday.”

The great thing about the Basler flight is that you can actually fly THROUGH the mountains — like you look out the window and look up to see the peaks of some of them! My watch has a barometer and said we were flying between 10k and 11.5k ft; so only about 1000 to 2000 ft higher than Pole.

I felt great this year; haven’t had any trouble sleeping (which is very uncommon). So I’m happy!

I’ve done a couple runs outside; getting used to the cold and trying to figure out how to stay warm, but not too warm and to not burn out my eyeballs when I inevitably have to take my goggles off because they iced up 10 mins into a run. I also now have a watch with GPS tracking… which is, well, not very useful at Pole

I have also of course been working a lot with the current WOs to train up the new ones and get them ready to be self-sufficient at operation and trouble-shooting.

Work continues tomorrow with some EHT training in the morning – installing the mirrors and showing them the electronics.

Also I played volleyball on Friday night and it was awesome… I really gotta get into a beer league back in the real world. Dunno why I haven’t.

And of course I’ve been playing some roller hockey here and there, though with a larger summer population the gym is a little more busy so it’s hard to find good times.

That’s about it. Check in later.