The Whole Wide World

The hectic weekend flew by, as does time in general down here. On Sunday morning, before brunch, I joined a dozen or so friends for the midwinter mile. The route was around town with a couple little hills and lots of cold. I power walked it, and was beat by everyone who was running and chugging a beer every quarter mile. It took me twenty minutes which isn’t terrible considering the conditions. I don’t know how they (the majority of participants) managed to slam four beers in the freezing cold after going hard the night before, but they did. I suspect maybe there were lots of nappers on Sunday after brunch.

After getting warmed back up and enjoying brunch, the rest of the day was spent in the store. I am still tying up the loose ends of all the beverage sales from the weekend. The special event makes extra work for me, but it’s easy work relatively speaking. Everything just takes time since I have to go back and forth with my supervisors in Denver and they are a day behind us. I’ll be going through the process all over again for this weekend’s Fourth of July cookout, but to a slightly smaller degree. Midwinter is definitely the biggest event of the year down here.

I have it super cushy in the warmth of store lady life. My friend Piper who works in fuels, recently reeled in miles and miles…and miles of fuels hose that runs to the ice runways, only to find out about the medevac flight and have to relay all the hose. Then a day or two later when the flight was cancelled completely she had to reel it all in again. She is a tough cookie and I am so impressed by her.

We were all kinda excited about the flight because it meant that our sauna parts would probably get delivered. There are saunas on station that we have never been able to use because they need new parts to bring them up to fire code. We have a community board in the main hallway, right next to the store, which is really just a massive meme board. McMurdans love their memes. As soon as the flight was cancelled a new one appeared with a picture of a gravestone that read, ‘RIP freshies, sauna parts and our mail’. There have been some real treasures on that board. It is definitely a source of entertainment.