Bad Blogger

I just realized I haven’t written a blog entry in like 3 weeks, easy to do when time starts flying by. I’ve been immersed in a lot of projects as of late (a painting for my friend Ken that I’ve owed him since last year, pillows for me and Jean’s couch, making progress on my icestock project, etc.) I guess, in a lot of ways, it’s seemed like not much has happened but if I really think about it that isn’t exactly true…

I was at refresher course a couple weeks ago, which is basically a series of lectures and demos on all that Antarctic survival stuff we learn at Happy Camper and Sea Ice. It’s a requirement every year, which is good cause there is stuff I always forget…stuff you don’t want to forget in case your life depends on it…but it’s a long boring class and out of 20 or so of us with anywhere from 2 to 16 years on the ice only a couple had ever actually had to crack open the ol' survival bag. My instructor was really good (knew it was dry material so was as efficient as possible) and I did learn a couple new things but as we were all dozing off in a warm room re-learning a t-slot and trucker’s hitch or the different degrees of hypothermia I was thinking about how mundane it all is, how people think of how exciting Antarctic life is and here we all were, bored to tears. I sat there thinking how my life is really pretty commonplace…and then a week later I was standing in a puddle of other people’s pee in -20 windchill and I was like “I was so wrong, my life really is weird.”

One might be asking themselves why I was standing in a puddle of other people’s pee... Up at the waste barn, U-barrels (u as in urine) are one of the things we pack up into milvans and ship off the continent, most buildings do have indoor plumbing that goes to the waste water treatment plant but these barrels come from field camps and those departments that aren’t lucky enough to have said plumbing. As I was loading these into a milvan with a forklift one of the barrels was pretty old and ended up leaking which meant placing it into a bigger barrel and soaking up the leakage with absorbent pads…which would blow away in the freezing cold wind if left unattended, so guess who got to stand on them to weigh them down? The smell was so bad Deb (my partner in puddledom) was gagging…good times. So yeah, my life can be weird sometimes.

Also, I got called out on my first spill. Just my luck, it was after work on a Saturday (Sunday is the only day that we don’t work around here). I wasn’t actually on call but the spill team that was (as well as an additional one) were out at a site near Willy Field, where something had gone wrong with the chemical toilet creating some sort of corrosive material and chlorine gas (from what I understand, I didn’t pay all that much attention), cleaning up the mess in respirators and tyvek. So when the Firehouse decided to test the fire extinguisher mounted on their truck, at 5:30pm on my night off (we get off work at 5:30) and it didn’t turn off when it was supposed to, the two remaining teams in town got called up. It really wasn’t so bad, my first spill could have been way worse, but nobody wants to spend their time digging ankle deep in foam out in the cold when they could be eating dinner.

So that’s about it, I can’t really think of any other news that’s fit to print…except that my old roommates sent me a surprise care package containing lots of fun things including a tea-for-one set and zombie finger puppets (do they know me or what?) that made my day proving once again they are the spectacular (thanks Emily and Molly!).