I sure do love this city.
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Like this very long winter…
“Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.”
-Pema Chödrön
morning poetry
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together.
-Richard Blanco, from “One Today”
3, 2, 1….
The sun is setting on 2012. Thanks for sharing it with me, for reading the blog and stumbling along with me through this tough and rather unpredictable year. Here are some words I’ve been thinking a lot about:
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” -Pema Chödrön
Happy new year. I hope you have a lovely evening, and be safe.
I understand everything now.
About 6 months ago, I was looking at my blog’s stats and I noticed that one of the hits I’d gotten was from a google search for “rainbow Obama riding a unicorn” or something completely ridiculous like that. I’m not sure why that linked to a little blog about Antarctica, but whatever, I take what I can get. And then, this showed up in my RSS feed this morning:
It all makes so much sense!
A little link or two for Antarctica jobs in 2012
You might have already seen it, but the Lockheed Martin Antarctic Service Contract facebook page has quite a few job listings across subcontractors– for contract positions/seasonal stuff.
PAE is the company that’s going to be responsible for a lot of what fell under Operations and FEMC (Facilities, Engineering, Maintenance and Construction), as well as most of Logistics (Cargo and Materials). I don’t have the link handy since it was in my on-ice email account which was deleted after I left, but I’ll post it when I get it.
Gana-A ‘Yoo Service Corporation aka GSC is the new NANA–food, housing and jano services fall under this. I heard that the grub lugger job will be with the Materials department now, but that’s not confirmed.
GHG is the company that will be hiring for IT/Comms, but not Information Security. I don’t remember what the other company was.
I think there are eight total subcontracting companies–Waste, InfoSec, and a couple of others are going to be separate. I honestly can’t even remember what they all are or what they do. It’s going to be really interesting to see how the dynamics will play out on station; everyone will be reporting to separate HR divisions in theory, and I think continuity/fair and equal treatment will be a huge challenge for them.
A lot of jobs aren’t posted yet, it looks like, and I know that the company’s focus when we were still there was on getting winterovers contracted and ready to go. Hopefully we’ll hear more soonish, but for now the facebook page is probably your best bet.
And the winner is…
For our 10,000-reader hit giveaway, the winner is (drumroll…)
Kurt from Connecticut! (sorry about the crappy pictures, and that I haven’t showered for five days–it’s a harsh continent!) Kurt, send us your address at kiellanddaniel@gmail.com, and we’ll get your box in the mail. It may take a while; we’ve passed the airmail deadline by just a hot minute so I think it will go by sea vessel.
Congratulations, Kurt, and THANK YOU so much to everyone who reads this blog, it’s fun to share this experience with you all.
~
In other news, Daniel is the South Pole Scrabble Champion! He won a very, very close game against Mikey of http://mikeygoingdown.tumblr.com/ (this is an awesome blog–check it out). And, improving my 4th place score in the South Pole Spelling Bee from last year, I made second place in an equally close Bee this year. Hooray!
Stay tuned for the Barn Dance… a friend and I are planning a live music-ing, line-dancing, polka-ing extravaganza this Friday night (keep in mind, this is a work night for us, but all the Saturdays were claimed by other events that we couldn’t compete with)! We will teach and call line dances, polkas and waltzes, and it’s going to be awesome.
South Pole Stuff Giveaway in Honor of a Momentous Occasion!
I’ve been noticing in the last few months a lot more readers who I’ve never met, from all over the world, in addition to our wonderful friends and family. And just yesterday morning the blog made it to 10,000 reader hits since its birth in 2010! Now, that’s not huge in the world of blogging, but it is to me, and I want to thank you with a gift for reading, commenting, and following us.
Here’s the prize:
A sweet South Pole Station pint glass and an Amundsen-Scott centennial patch to make any article of clothing infinitely cooler.
Close ups:
There are two parts to entering the contest.
First, you can either
a) subscribe to kiellanddaniel by email or RSS (you can see a link for that in the sidebar to your right)
b) share a link to your favorite post or our homepage, https://brownpaperblue.wordpress.com, on your facebook profile, twitter, your own blog, whatever
c) send us a postcard at
Kiell K. or Daniel L., RPSC
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400
APO AP 96598
Second, comment on this post telling us what entry you did, your name, and where you’re from. You can enter whether we know you or not, and if you enter multiple ways let us know and we’ll put your name in again… And then you could win a package postmarked from the South Pole, Antarctica!
Deadline is four days from this post (Sunday morning Auckland time)…see you soon!
Do Not Freeze
Today I got to do my first real jobs in machines! First, I moved 900 pounds of resealable plastic bags. Glamorous, I know. Especially in a tracked loader named Sparkles.
After lunch, I moved compressed gas cylinders!
After moving the cage of empty cylinders with Voltron the forklift to the rollers outside of the Logistics Arch, I placed the cage on an airforce pallet, and we pushed the pallet out to the doorway. Elissa picked the cages and set them aside for me.
I used Sundog the loader to pick up the cages one at a time and, after moving the empties to the cargo line to be shipped away, I put the new cages full of shiny green oxygen cylinders into storage on the berm.
While I was on the berms, I found this:
Do Not Freeze. Ha.
Have a nice day!
brown paper blue ink 