GroundHog Day!

I'm getting close to the end of my deployment. It has truly been the experience of a lifetime. I'm lucky in that if all goes well, I'll be home in time for Christmas. I'm looking forward to that a lot.

In some ways, it's hard to convey what it's like. When I thought of this, it was mostly the cold and the daylight that struck me. I didn't mind the cold, and I still don't. This is my kind of weather. The daylight makes things really interesting. Perhaps one of the best metaphors is the movie Groundhog Day.

I think almost wherever you are, it's normal to fall into a routine. If nothing else, work brings its own rhythm. This is true at the Pole as well, but it's different. You are pretty much stuck within an area of a few square kilometers. As far as the eye can see is nothing but a white plateau. You wake up, you do your work. You find a way to relax, you sleep. You wake up, ...

Time begins to blur. Almost everyone I talk to works to remember what day it is, or when a particular event happened. You will spend every day with pretty much the same 250 people. You'll spend it in pretty much the same place as yesterday. There will be variations, but tomorrow you wake up in the same bed with the same day ahead of you. It's not bad, but it helps you realize how much your time sense is based on the normal diurnal cycle.

There are a ton of little things you never really think about. The only living things I've seen since November 9th are humans and a few plants in the small greenhouse here on station. If it moves, it's either blown by the wind or human. We get a load of laundry per week (cold water only), and two two-minute showers per week. It's extremely dry; effectively zero humidity. I've been lucky in that I haven't suffered the effects of no humidity as acutely as others. Many people get nasty bloody noses, have trouble sleeping, and get the all the fun associated with dry skin. Many people bring humidifiers to their rooms so they can sleep at "night." Cuts don't really heal at all. I have several cuts that were not even deep enough to bleed. Normally, these would have been gone in a day or two, but now happily linger for weeks or months.

I think about the most interesting thing to see here are some of the atmospheric effects. There have been some really spectacular SunDogs. You get those in the north, but not nearly so often. Surprisingly, it doesn't actually snow much here. Most of the snow build up is from snow that blows in from other places. We have had some flurries, but no real snow storms.

Those sorts of little things are really about all that vary. The rest is pretty much the same thing day after day.

It's Groundhog Day! I should really get an alarm clock that plays "I've got you babe".