Big day

This morning I went to sleep at around 9:30AM and woke up at 11:30AM. Since I seemed to be awake, I got up, rushed through the morning ritual of pulling on some jeans and a shirt, lacing up my hiking boots, pulling on a light coat, and then walking the 40 yards to the summer camp bathroom to brush my teeth, etc. Once that was done, went back to my little sleeping cubicle and pulled on my ECW gear then walked the 100 yards or so to the station.

I went through all that rather than lying in bed because the Prince of Monaco had skied in from a camp ~10 km away and was giving a brief talk in the galley. He doesn't look like Grace Kelley at ALL!

After he finished speaking, I got lunch. Today was Burger Day and the hamburgers were surprisingly good for cafeteria-style food ... the Prince even lauded his as the best burger he'd ever had in Antarctica! Someone at my table noted that he could also have safely said you couldn't find a better burger within 2000 miles of here.

After lunch I walked back to summer camp and got another 3 hours of sleep. 5 hours of sleep is actually pretty common down here. I've made it halfway through my work shift already and still don't feel too bad.

As a driller, I technically have the day off, but there are problems with the data acquisition software (which is the system I work on most of the time back home) so I'm taking the opportunity to fix those.

I did go out to the drill camp at the start of my shift to look at the drill computers with one of the drillers who had mentioned that it sounded like one of the computer fans was dying. We pulled apart the computer and eventually determined that the noise he'd heard was coming from a generator fan located immediately behind the computer! This was good news because we don't seem to have any spare fans.

While looking for computer fans, someone needed to check the storeroom in the IceCube Lab building. The driller gave me a quick lesson and I got to drive a snowmobile to the ICL! That was pretty fun and MUCH better than walking!