A day off

We got some awesome news yesterday. The sedimentologists and myself are getting a much needed and much overdue day off on Saturday night. The coring has been stopped for the last couple of days because they were switching between the HQ and NQ drill strings at the 700m mark. Everyone else has had some time off, but because there was a backlog of core the sedimentologists haven't been able to rest. Fortunately there's an open house on Sunday for the McMurdo community to come in and see what we do, so there wasn't going to be time to sample during the day on Sunday. The day off comes at an opportune time, as well. There are three birthdays on Friday (two of which are people on the night shift) so that's a pretty decent birthday present for those folks.

We've already started planning what we're going to do with the free time. The plan at the moment is to meet at midrats and have dinner together. And then after dinner, we're going to walk the Castle Rock loop, which takes a couple hours. After that we're heading back to the lounge in the dorm to PARTY!!!!! Lots of yelling and playing pool so we make a lot of noise. We'll get our revenge on the daywalkers for waking us up during the day when we're trying to sleep. Just kidding, we're much too nice to do that. I don't know what we'll do when we get back, but I'm looking forward to skipping the morning meeting and going to bed early.

It's been a pretty busy week or two for me. I've been working hard on some new features for PSICAT that should make compiling the on-ice report easier. But between that and other things like homework, I haven't had much time to sleep. I've been really happy how the body has been holding up. So far I've dodged the flu and the crud, even with the long hours and little rest. It must be the strict regimen I've been sticking to--a multi-vitamin every day and 2-3 beers a couple times a week to sterilze the system.

Since there haven't been too many pictures recently, I thought I'd include a picture from when we were over at Scott Base last weekend for brunch. They have the original base building open for tours so I walked through it and snapped a photo or two:
I complained in the blog earlier about the food. And while I stand by my previous assessment, I see now that it could be much, much worse. :)