Odds and Ends

Today is Thanksgiving.  I’m thankful for a lot of things.  Some of them are the little absurdities in life, a few of which I’m including in this post.  They are going to have a feast on Saturday.  Normally I should not be there for that feast.  But it is looking increasingly like I will be.

 

I learned the definition of a Waf-fail.  This is when you fail to spray the waffle iron with the greasy stuff and it ends up sticking to the iron.  It then takes a team of galley staff to get all the crap out of the iron.  So they take this seriously.  Which is why they put a sign next to it.  Which Dana and I accidentally ignored.  Now we know what a waf-fail is.

 

Tien spent 2.5y hours yesterday watching a seal that was trying to give birth with his gigantic camera.  That was the first session.  He went back for another three hours.  It made a lot of funny noises.  I think he was hoping to catch shots of the placenta.  Nothing came out.

 

I met the Ambassador of the United States to New Zealand the other day.  He was on a Distinguished Visitor tour of the station.  Turns out he was also my Senator when I lived in Massachusetts.  His name is Scott Brown.

 

I was out on a hike and I saw this just out there collecting dust…

 

A Fata Morgana illusion is a thermal inversion band where different densities of air refract the light as a mirror and bounce the light back and forth before it meets your eye.  I caught a band of it in the picture below.

Longfellow wrote a poem about it.  Which I found at the bottom of the wikipedia link above.

FATA MORGANA
published in 1873 by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

O sweet illusions of song
That tempt me everywhere,
In the lonely fields, and the throng
Of the crowded thoroughfare!

I approach and ye vanish away,
I grasp you, and ye are gone;
But ever by night and by day,
The melody soundeth on.

As the weary traveler sees
In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees

That a pleasant shadow cast;

Fair towns with turrets high,
And shining roofs of gold,
That vanish as he draws nigh,
Like mists together rolled —

So I wander and wander along,
And forever before me gleams
The shining city of song,
In the beautiful land of dreams.

But when I would enter the gate
Of that golden atmosphere,
It is gone, and I wonder and wait
For the vision to reappear.

 

 

There were supposed to be around 30 C-130 flights to the south pole.  So far about 6-7 have made it.  The weather is to blame.  There is an increasingly high likelihood that I will be delayed coming home.  This is partly due to a weather system moving into McMurdo.  I am also being deprioritized below people trying to go home from pole after wintering over.  The NSF has been paying them the last two weeks to do nothing.  Oh, I’m also being deprioritized below the people being fired and sent home.

 

There is an active volcano nearby.  I think in an earlier post I said it was like 70 miles away.  I was wrong, it’s about 12 miles away. That’s steam coming out of the top.  I’m going to call it Mt. Doom.

 

I haven’t seen a cockroach the entire time I’ve been here.  Or any bugs for that matter.