Night shift

We'll be logging core tonight. It's amazing how quickly the situation can change. We had been hearing that we'd be getting core on Saturday night so we'd officially start logging core Sunday night, but Ross came and found me a couple hours ago and told me that they'd made quite a bit of progress at the drill site and to plan on starting a couple days early.

On one hand, it's kind of a bummer to be starting the night shift tonight because ANDRILL is hosting a little "Thank You" shindig in our dorm to thank all of the wonderful support people that have been working so hard to make sure we have what we need to be successful. So I'll probably sleep through the beginning of it and be heading out to work as it gets into full swing. And tomorrow they have the big station-wide Halloween party, though hopefully we'll be able to sneak away and check out the costumes The other bummer about starting early is that it gives us only about a day to completely flip flop our awake and sleep schedules. I opted to just stay up last night, so I'm just passing the 24 hours awake mark on 5 hours of sleep the previous night.

On the other hand, I'm really excited to actually have core to log and to finally put PSICAT through its paces. And overall, it's just good to be finally settling into a routine; I know everyone around here has been anticipating the first core. We'll see if they're just as excited when we're 800m into the hole :)

I also had a delightful dinner over at Scott Base (the Kiwi base over the hill). They invite 12 ANDRILL folks over every Thursday to have dinner and do a tour. Their food is much better than here because they are cooking for fewer people. I think they generally run about 1/10th as many people as are at McMurdo. I'd heard good things about the food and I wasn't disappointed. And the best part--they served it with a Speights. After dinner I played a few games of pool with Julian in the bar and had a beer or two before heading back to begin my long night of staying awake.

Staying awake was easier than I expected it to be. The Galley opens up at midnight for the night shift folks to come in and have some lunch. The food perked me up and got me through the toughest part of the night. Around 3AM, everyone else had left so I cranked up some tunes and did some coding on PSICAT. Around 6, John showed up and we went for some breakfast. I still need to figure out when I'm going to fit the gym into my schedule. I'm thinking I'll get up around 7PM and hit the gym before my shift starts. But we'll see how well that works out.

I promised a picture of the computers, so here goes. Hopefully I'll get some good pictures of the sedimentologists in action using PSICAT and Corelyzer with the core laid out on the tables.