Turf in Antarctica?: A fun week in Antarctica!

So one week has passed since I shaved my head. I will say I regretted my choice a little bit when I first saw the results and on Monday when it was cold and windy at the airfield. I needed to wear my beanie and neck gator for the first time since early November. Now that one week has passed everyone is recognizing me again and all my hair is starting to grow back, surprising most people down here. I hope you like the week after picture and are not as scared by it. I have decided to grow the beard in again, but I think this time I won't let it get as long and keep it shorter.

First day, results

Week one hair. Thoughts?

So on to this week, I was at the airfield all week long. As the season as progressed the road to the airfield as gotten better so the commute is a whole lot better than back in December. I timed the ride out to and back into town driving one of our Deltas and it 46 minutes out to and 44 minutes back into town. So with the Ipod in one ear driving by yourself isn't that bad. I guess the many years of driving at South Suburban got me use to driving all day by myself. Thank goodness for good music. I was also asked if I wanted to work the early shift, starting at 5:00 am and getting off work at 5:00 pm. I realized jut how much nicer this shift is compared to the late shift. I wish I has volunteered to work the early shift earlier than this past week. The airfield operations picked up this week with good weather for both the LC-130's and C-17's, this helps us out by making the day go a whole lot faster. On Thursday we has a C-17 come in with 2 milvans (containers) that needed to go back into town. One weighed just over 10,000 lbs and the second was over 24,000 lbs. Our loaders at the strip can lift the 10,000 lb milvan onto a Delta but we chose to be safe and barrow a different loader to make the lift. The second milvan at 24,000 lbs was a different story, at the airfield we do not have anything that can lift that much weight, so we needed to use 3 loaders, our 2 Cat 950G's and a Cat 966 to make the lift. I was asked to operate one of our 950's to make the lift. Once we got the milvan into the air, we back a Delta under and lower the milvan into place. I hope to get the pictures of this onto a future blog for everyone to see. I am glad to say we were able to safely complete the task and get the milvan back into town without any problems. Though this situation from the sounds of it will become more common and we may have to change operations up a bit with the possibility of more milvans coming in on future C-17's due to the vessel problems. So we will see how things go from here.

I also volunteered to stay here longer than my original contract. So I may be here till March 9th to finish helping with all the cargo movements. I have also volunteered to be a "Line Handler" for both the fuel vessel and the resupply vessel. Which means I help tie the ships up our warf, it should be fun and interesting work. I have been given a pager so that I can be notified when I need to report to work for it. I hope to get some good pictures out of it and even a tour of the boat.

Our cargo team challenged the other 2 teams on our shift to a disc golf challenge this week. So far we are the only ones to have played but Beer and Burgers are on the line for this one so I hope our score holds up and we win.

I hope all is well with everyone, till next time.

Tim