McMurdo Dispatch
Weather: 22F, Winds 5, Scattered, Unrestricted
Greetings All,
I hope this DSP finds everyone happy, stuffed and enjoying a long holiday weekend. Our current weather looks more like a Colorado fall day rather than an Antarctic summer day. As you can see I am still sending email, which means I am still stuck at McMurdo Station; not my favorite place to be stuck, if you know what I mean. We have had a great deal of headaches getting out of town and getting our camp put in. I will do my best to summerize whats been going on down here.
As I had mentioned before, some critical equipment has not shown up here to enable us to head out, including all of my medical gear. We have several basecamp structures, heaters, generators and such still enroute from God knows where. So, for the past two weeks we have been sitting in conference call meetings with the NSF guys in Washington trying to put together a reasonable plan to make this a successful science season, which is what we are here to do. However, its getting a bit out of control. I have never sat in more than two meetings in my career down here upon arrival; we take care of all that before arriving, so this has been, to say the least, a bit of a nightmare. Our latest plan (there have been 6 as of Friday) is to head South to the Pole to acclimatize and then move to our 13,000 foot camp and build it out for science. This presents a bunch of new logistical issues as we had not planned to go on a camping trip to the South Pole on this outing.
Now, due to the Thanksgiving holiday and the time/day differences from here and D.C. our crew has been anxiousely awaiting this next Tuesday's meeting to see what has changed since Friday's meeting. Its all part of the job, but lets get it done already.
We enjoyed Thansgiving yesterday and it was a hoot. You can not imagine the food that was prepared for the folks down here...really great. So it was a good relaxing weekend with a little work thrown in to remind us where we are and what we are doing here.
As mentioned, I hope everyone had a great holiday. I will keep in touch and fill you all in when we have a plan.
Take care and be safe up there!
Cheers,
Tayloe
