The Whole Wide World

Weather update. It’s -22F with a wind chill of -48F. Honestly, it feels nice out when the wind isn’t blowing. I’m to the point that I can run a bag of trash out the front door in just a fleece rather than my big red jacket. It does not cease to amaze me at how we as humans adapt. The sky is supposed to be nice and clear this weekend, making for some excellent Milky Way gazing and hopefully, some sweet auroras. Our station manager emailed this morning advising that we will be running an Operation Dark Sky tonight and all day and night tomorrow. That means that most of the street lights and exterior lighting will be turned off until Monday morning. Bring on the twinkles!

So we have a radio room down here. It’s a proper broadcasting room. If you want to, you can get with the broadcast engineer to be trained on how to use the equipment and learn the rules of what is allowed and what is not allowed to be said when on air…and then set yourself up with a little Antarctic radio show. It broadcasts here at McMurdo over the Armed Forces Network and many McMurdan’s choose to do this for a little funsies. My friend Jess has a show on Friday evening’s called 80s Power Hour with Jess.

Sometimes we have radio listening parties here in the store. Often, Jess interviews someone during the show and last night she interviewed our station manager, Erin Heard. It was a relatively big deal for him to agree to it. She gave me a shout out and asked him about Dave Matthews, because it is a known fact that Erin texts with Dave on the regular. I asked him about it and they met at an REI in Seattle, WA years ago and he dropped the Antarctica card and that was that. Just a little fun fact about life and extracurricular activities down here.

After the show ended at 8PM, a few of us ladies got together for a girls night. I find the connections I’ve made down have been getting deeper and stronger over the past few weeks and I am grateful for that. We are a resilient bunch, in a weird environment and I am proud of all of us. It is crazy how quickly the winter is blowing by. Only four more weeks until WinFly, which will take about forty people back North and bring almost two-hundred new faces down here to the ice.