Media

Well for a short time the media invaded McMurdo. Okay so not exactly but Good Morning America was here a couple weeks ago (totally misrepresenting our location and current temp in their live broadcast) and there were 2 reporters from MSNBC here as well as some people from PBS...but in a population of 1200 that feels like a lot. Why were they here? Antarctcia is where all the cool kids hang out. Actually they are mostly here because of ANDRILL. I guess that begs the question, what is ANDRILL? ANDRILL is ANtarctic DRILLing; a group of scientists from a handful of different countries are here drilling deep into the sea ice and taking a look at the core samples to find out what the environment was like millions of years ago. It's a pretty cool project. So the first reporter from MSNBC, was a bit of a crybaby. He wrote his first entry about how much things suck around here...thinking somehow that everyone in Mactown wouldn't have read it 5 minutes after he finished it. As if we don't know how to Google people down here? Everyone was pretty annoyed by his comments; even if things aren't ideal down here, it's kind of one big family down here, and you can say stuff about your own family and have it be venting but if someone else insults your family...well, it's not cool. So I doubt his stay here was socially pleasant. The second MSNBC guy, the photo journalist, I met they day they left. I was getting ready to mop the laundry room in the dorm I clean and there was a confused guy wandering the halls with a camera, finally he saw me walk by with a bucket and was like "Are you Erin?" which weirded me out because I had no idea who he was or why he knew my name; so he told me he had been staying in Dorm 209 (next door) and that he was interested in the whole janitor in McMurdo thing and how most of us have college degrees and that he had been sent over to talk to me and would I be interested. I think I made an awful face for about 2 minutes before I finally said okay. For an introvert like me, my time to clean the dorm is my antisocial time, my time to have my head phones on and hardly see anyone and do my work, so having someone follow you around kinda sucks. But he turned out to be a really nice guy. He's from Redmond, WA so he knew where Bainbridge is and gave me a bit of an update on the Seattle area and unlike his colleague he loves it here, so we had a nice chat while I mopped the bathroom and wiped down the stairwells. Anyway, that's how I ended up on MSNBC...not my most flattering photograph but not bad either, and as a DA pointed out to me, my gloves look badass...I am not sure how that is possible but I am inclined to agree. It made for kind of a weird day, people kept saying "you're famous!" but I guess it is yet another cool way to mark my stay at the bottom of the Earth. You can check out the whiny guy's articles or if you check out "More from Antarctica" within the picture stories you can check out more about ANDRILL, see a picture of my friend Kevin (of the VMF) pinsetting, my friend Brent in the greenhouse (he's the greenhouse tech), and pics of life in general here. So the MSNBC are gone, but the PBS people may still be lurking about. They chatted up Adam at the greenhouse the other day and filmed him and his fellow DAs tending to stuff. So that will be cool to check out once it PBS puts that out because Adam just may be on it. We have also had another visitor here at McMurdo, Sam Feola, head of RPSC. He spoke at our town meeting and answered a few (a LOT) of questions. Basically due to fuel prices going up there are budget cutbacks this year and so the the whole schedule of how things work around here is getting all kinds of crazy. They are cutting the winter-over population almost in half, which is something we have pretty much known about all seaosn but what is really only becoming evident now is that they are going to have some people stay longer than usual to prep for the winter season. This could mean late February, or mid March...or for some people early April. I am not sure how I feel about this. As tempting as a reverse Winfly would be I kind of want to leave when my six months are up, if for no other reason than I have been planning on it for the last 4 months. But if it comes down to staying a few weeks longer there is really very little I can do about it. There is only going to be 2 janitors this winter instead of the usual 5 + a housing coordinator, so there is a lot to do to get ready for winter. They are also talking about starting next Winfly earlier, which actually sounds pretty cool, but all that is really up in the air. Anyway, deployment meetings start in about a month so I will know more then.