As some of you may have just seen from Facebook, the South Pole’s contributions to the New Zealand Red Cross are now officially $10,000! For many Polies Christchurch is like a second home, and it was devastating watching another crippling earthquake hit the city two weeks ago. One of our crew here collected donations, found a donation-matching opportunity, and got our total contribution up higher than I would have ever imagined! $10,000 is small in the big scheme of things, but every little bit helps. It felt good to contribute something to the disaster, given our huge distance and inability to help with relief. We are also considering shipping a large quantity of lightly-used clothes to the Red Cross in the spring from our ‘Skua Shack’. That’s a long way off though…
Things have continued as usual at the South Pole. The biggest thing happening on station is the imminent sunset. Only about two weeks away, the sun is verrry low on the horizon and is very noticeably sinking each day. Its fun to sit at breakfast and have the outside look like a sunrise. The same is true at night – it looks like a normal sunset. The strange thing is having the sun setting mid-day. When I walk back to the station for lunch around 1200, I always think I’m walking in for dinner and wonder where the day went. It is an odd feeling. The fact that the sun is departing for six months is really starting to sink in. We will have several weeks of twilight before it actually gets dark, allowing us to adjust to walking around at ‘night’ and without the light to guide us. Just crazy.
Another big highlight (other than the setting sun) of last weekend was the crepe extravaganza. Two of our wonderful crew took all their practicing and made the crepes a reality on Sunday night. Wow. I have to get the recipes! They made both sweet and savory crepes to order. It was amazing. I had the vegetarian savory crepe to start with, which was a crepe filled with cooked spinach and portabello mushrooms sautéed and reduced in white wine. The crepe was then topped with a reduced red bell pepper sauce and pine nuts. (I think this was the filling and topping anyway – I may be getting some of the details wrong!) Simply heavenly. The dessert crepe was a crepe made with a yeast batter, giving it a slightly fermented flavor which complimented the Nutella and pureed banana filling. We are so spoiled down here!
For the most part, everything is running smoothly at ARO, giving me time to dedicate to other things such as planning fire team training and cleaning out the Skua Shack. When all of the summer Polies left and donated items to Skua, there was absolutely no organization. Literally, everything was piled up on the floor of the small wooden shack on skis. What a mess! This past weekend a few of us hauled out about 8 garbage bags worth of items. Most of them were worth keeping, but many items had to go. I’m going to be continuing this process for the next two weeks. At sunset, Skua gets dragged out to weather the winter months with the other small mobile buildings at the “End of the World”. All of these buildings get moved downwind of the station and stored in a row to minimize the amount of drifting we need to shovel out at the beginning of the season. Why make several large drifts when you can just make one really large drift?
We have made it to three weeks of our 2-a-day workouts and we’re still going strong! One additional person has joined our little group, making a support group of three encouraging eachother daily. Its great! Its amazing what 1-2 hours of exercise makes daily! I think next week we are going to try moving on to Level 3-4 of Power 90. It should be interesting. Also a good thing. We know all of Tony’s quirks on the first DVD and I’m not sure how much more we can make fun of the people demonstrating the workouts. Doing the workouts everyday, we can recite the dialogue along with the DVD. At least we have added our own music to our workouts. Freija and I have compiled our most trashy workout music possible – we have a lovely mix of 90’s club music, Dutch rap, and just plain terrible modern pop. Love it.
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