I won't really be doing regular blog entries until I am back on the ice but, considering the pageantry that is this whole process has already long since started, I figured I should make an entry here and there.
So here we go again, almost time for a third season down South. During my PQ process this year I really began to wonder whether I wanted to do this again. I love McMurdo and my life there but I had a bit of a quarter life crisis (that might be an understatement) in the off season and realized that I need to start constructing a life in the real world. Not just any life but a stable one, a life that involves 9-5 work days, 2 day weekends, a lease, pets, food that hasn’t been sitting in a freezer for the last decade, a life outside the snow globe. I need to do something with my life in the off season so I’m not just waiting to go back, ‘cause lemme tell ya, that kinda limbo doesn’t make for a mentally healthy lifestyle. I can’t help feeling like there isn’t much for me here, and that it’s my own fault for living like a migrant worker for the past couple years. And if all that hadn’t given me pause then going through the whole bloodletting, pee in this cup, pee in that cup, get injected with TB antigen, and everything else that is the Raytheon PQ process made me wonder why I work so hard every year just for the opportunity to work so hard. But then July comes and my little internal clock says *ding* “time to go!” and I get the urge to start packing and journey South.
You know how the old saying goes. This is year three. Does that mean I’ve become the cliché of going back because I don’t belong anywhere else? Maybe. Probably. At least partly. And yet I feel like I’m going more for the money this season then my first two. Unfortunately my seasonal migration patterns are set to Winfly, which traditionally starts in August (though this year some version of it starts in September) and I’m not contracted to start until Mainbody. So that means I’m going to be here for Fall for the first time in two years. It’s an odd feeling.
At least I get a little ice preview. Since I have left the somewhat cozy confines of the housing department (the department in which I spent my fledgling Antarctic seasons) for a position in waste (yay!) I have to attend oil spill response training in
There's this odd smell to McMurdo, a crisp cold smell, devoid of plant life or humidity, with a touch of exhaust and galley food. By the end of the season I can't stand that smell...I know it's time to go back when I actually start to miss it.
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