Miscelleny

I take random pictures, every week, and then don't do anything with them so I'll just post them here.
Why not?

This is not just this past week as I have a backlog, but here you go:

Sometimes we find perfectly good cake in the foodwaste bins.  

That's Rob, posing next to our truck that we can't move because that stupid Skua bird is in the way.   We walked out to get in our truck that morning and a bird had parked itself right in our way.  Because of the Antarctic Treaty, we aren't allowed to just shoo it away.  The general policy of wildlife is that you can't do anything to alter their behavior (let's not talk about having an entire base).    You can't walk so close it looks at you, you can't make loud noise to disturb them and you certainly can't shoo them out of the way.   We moved our morning meeting into the galley and waiting another 20 minutes for that Skua bird to fly off. 

I got to play with the metal bailer the other day.  I put all these drums in here and then I got to crush them! 

All down into one tiny cube! 

It was so fun I decided to give you another photo. These are all the tin cans from the galley. 

Look at that pretty cube!!

This fun looking vehicle didn't want to work in the cold morning so the VMF had to send out the Emergency Recovery Vehicle (a pick-up truck with all sorts of gadgets attached to make vehicles go) to warm it up.  You notice the hose and engine? That's a huge heater to warm the engine up. On cold mornings the VMF is very very busy.   There were no less than two times we had to call them ourselves.  

Penguins!  These emperor penguins had been hanging around for a couple of days and they walked right into our bay!  What a great afternoon.  The Waste department took our van down (no Skua impediments this time) to look at the penguins.   For people without transport, we had a van driving people down from work centers all afternoon.  

We won a night out at this little hut on the ice (random drawing).   It was cloudy when we arrived and stayed that way all night so we didn't get any stargazing.  I'm not to upset though. The weather had called for aggressive wind with temperatures at -72 (with windchill) so I was fine with it being overcast and still. The next day, however, was beautiful!

Here's that same hut the next morning. That mountain in the background is Mt Erebus-the cloud above it is steam-it's a living volcano. 

Clearly we chose the right group of people to go with-outfits, wigs, food and fun photos shoots. Such a great night out.  All these photos are compliments of our friend Debbie-far right.