Fire Extinguisher Fun

Today it really does feel like the sun is setting!  There are clouds on the horizon, obscuring most of the direct sunlight.  No real sunset colors yet, but you can feel that those are just around the corner.  The wind has also returned, thank goodness – for the past few days it has been too light for me to complete my scheduled air sampling.  It is very frustrating waiting for conditions to change!  Every morning at breakfast for the past few days I look at the weather displayed on the scroll, sigh, and wish for wind.  This is counter-intuitive for most people.  Wind equals cold, so why would you want wind?  Sometimes I feel a little bit backwards.

By the time I'm at ARO I'm a little frosty.  And I'm only outside for 10 minutes!

It has been a fairly uneventful week, as far as life in the station goes.  Everyone has played it pretty low key.  Yesterday the fire team had equipment training – we went over how to operate the O2 sensor (used to see if we have an atmosphere that can support breathing during drills and events) and fire extinguishers.  Before this training, I completed a good deal of research on fire extinguishers and learned some interesting things.  Did you know that the first patent on a fire extinguisher was filed in 1723 by an English chemist?  I bet you didn’t.  This first fire extinguisher contained gunpowder and a fire-extinguishing fluid.  To work the extinguisher you had to light a fuse – the gunpowder explosion scattered the liquid out of the extinguisher and onto the fire.  Its just my opinion, but I think it’s a little counter-productive putting gunpowder near open flames.  I wonder how many additional fires this started compared with the amount that it actually extinguished.  But I guess if you already have one fire, what’s one more?

Tonight we are having a double-feature at the ‘drive-in theater’, aka gym.  The matinee is ‘Tron’ and the real feature (at least in my mind) is ‘Black Sheep’, the New Zealand zombie sheep movie classic.  ‘Black Sheep’ was a hit at ARO this summer, with a record amount of viewers flooding the lab.  We even had to pull out a mattress to put on the floor.  And people sat on our wicked hard wooden bench.  That’s dedication right there. 

There’s some weather moving in, so no real opportunities to take photos for a few days.  Hopefully when it clears I will get a few good shots of where the sun is so you have a better idea of what I’m actually talking about!  Stay classy, non-Polies!