Holiday Spirit

We decided to get into the holiday spirit by setting our Christmas trees up. We had been holding off until all of the December birthdays were out of the way. It was our little stand against the Christmas decorations going up earlier and earlier back home. So anyhow, when I came in to work yesterday, Ellen was decorating our Christmas trees. We had gone over to Skua Central back in late October because someone told us there would be little Christmas trees there. Skua is the place where you can leave stuff you don't want to take home and anyone can come in and get stuff. We were fortunate to get the last tree (sans any decorations), which has been sitting on the shelf since then. Fortunately for us, my mom and grandma mailed me another tree with plenty of decorations. So we had two trees and enough ornaments and such for both. We kept the nicer tree for us back in the lab and sent the Skua tree out to the drill site:


In other news, it looks like my departure announcement in the last blog entry was a bit premature. They needed someone to help finish the on-ice report and getting stuff packed up to ship home, so I volunteered to take one for the team and stay a bit longer. Most other folks have kids and/or teaching to get back to, so sticking around seemed like the right thing to do. The main ANDRILL contingent leaves on January 4th, and then a handful of us catch the next available flight out of McMurdo on the 9th. So with any luck I should be back in the States on the 10th instead of the 5th.

And finally, I grabbed the Java Posse podcast for this week and listened to it. Great as per usual and they gave me a nice shout out at the end, which was awesome! It's always good to hear from folks back home. When I get home, I'm definitely going to take them up on their offer to chat.