lack of motivatio...

...n

The season is winding down. Conversations are fewer round the tables in the galley and more meals eaten silence. When conversations do take place, something previously unthinkable sometimes happens: they end. Earlier in the season it was habit to not ever conclude a conversation, but instead allow them to carry on, drifting lazily over weeks and months, out of simple nessecity. Better to not exhaust the supply of topics to talk about over dinner. Better to enjoy the same subjects for weeks. Now things wrap up a bit more. People are leaving, and most everyone has the far away look in their eye of places and people that are not here. And there is fatigue. As the long hours, cold dry air, and repetative work slowly wear away at a person, and the parties and late nights take their toll, exhaustion becomes the watch word. Rather than participate in the oodles of things always going on around station, more and more people hide in their rooms or lounges watching movies and sleeping. The parties are a good thing however, as they are the common means for keeping track of time in a place where the sun never sets, shifts operate 24 hours a day, lunch may be at noon or midnight with little differance observable, and the exact same time every day finds many of us doing the exact same thing as the day before in the exact same place. This de-a-vu Twilight Zone effect is only broken by major events and parties. Did that happen before Icestock or after? Was that between the Christmas party and Block Party?

I had written a blog entry the other day, before Blogger ate it and pooped it into the ether of the internet. It was about Sir Edmund Hillary and all the other V.D.'s (I mean D.V.'s, Distinguished Visitors) like the Prime Minister of New Zealand and the direcor of the National Science Foundation and various congressional and cabinet staff members who come down here and wander all over the place making life difficult for us. Actually Ed Hillary isn't so bad, we like him, since he was the first man with Tenzing Norgay to climb Everest and he worked down on the Ice for many seasons back in the olden days, leading the first motorized traverse of the polar plateau to the South Pole. So he's a badass, even at 80-something.

Been cleaning, still, and teaching salsa lessons. Led an overnight camping trip and climb of Castle Rock last weekend, may do the same this weekend. There us talk of being allowed to board the Polar Sea for a few hours as it works the channel; there are whales out there and a morale cruise ranks as one of the best boondoggles a person can get. Saw a penguin last night at Hut Point as I was leading a tour of the historic hut. And I have only 25 days left. That's right, I got my redeployment date: 20 Febuary. I asked for the 24th, the last flight off the ice before winter, ut lots of folks wanted that day, so I got my third choice. Still better than the folks who are leaving this week and next, and every week from here till the end. But there is one last hurah on the horizon. Supply vessel and tanker are on their way, and when they bring the suppleis for the station for the next year we will all work rotating shifts round the clock until the ships are unloaded. Then it is a rapid transition to winter and we are out.