Another week+ at the Pole: January 16-23, 2015

So I haven't updated the Blog in over week, but that's mostly because
basically nothing has happened (until yesterday!). Every day, we wake
up and meet the Basler crew for breakfast at 6:30am. That's when we
hear the bad news: the weather is unsuitable somewhere, either at Pole
in the morning (this we can normally tell by looking around during our
walk into the main station from the Hypertat), weather at SuperTIGER,
or the forecast for when we'd be getting back to Pole. Then we go on
"Weather Delay" until the 10am forecast comes in, when we officially
get cancelled for the day. Every day for the last week. The Basler did
get a flight out to cache fuel at another fuel camp one day that the
weather at SuperTIGER was bad, but otherwise we've been hanging out
with the Basler crew and killing time waiting for the weather to be
right.

We've found ways of entertaining ourselves—we basically rotate through
napping, watching TV shows on DVD, watching movies, playing board
games, and playing sports in the gym. In the gym, we've done
badminton, ping pong, tennis, volleyball, and wiffle ball. We've also
probably played 10 different board games. It gets a bit frustrating
just waiting around for the weather to be right.

Sunday night I gave the weekly Sunday Night Science Lecture in the
Galley. I talked about SuperTIGER and gave basically a brief overview
of the experiment, how it works, and what we've found, with a bunch of
recovery photos at the end. I was hoping for more photos (and some
actual pieces of the instrument!), but we didn't make it out in time.

Over the weekend, the Traverse arrived from McMurdo. They covered the
distance from McMurdo in a record 17 days, and brought tons of fuel
for the station to use over the winter.

So that's what happened at Pole for the first 8 days or so that the
Basler was here. We finally got the weather we were waiting for on
Saturday, so I'll have a longer entry about the recovery tomorrow.