Daniel Leussler:

Who knew that you could be so ready to go back to work?

I’m less than a month away from leaving for my third season at South Pole Station, something I probably wouldn’t have anticipated 3 years ago. It will be as hard to leave Minnesota and go abroad as it’s ever been, but I think it will be worth it still; strange to think that being on station in the middle of nowhere has started to feel normal.

My preliminary date is October 5th this year, which is the earliest I’ve left yet; I’ll be doing 3 days of extra training in Denver, and then hopping on plane after plane until I get to Pole on the 17th. That’s the very first flight that will land at Pole after 8 months of isolation, so I anticipate that the people currently on station will be excited to see me (and excited to leave). Some of them will have been away from the real world for 12 months by then.

I know I don’t update this blog all that often; it’s not that I don’t want to, I just tend to forget about it. However, the plan for this year is for the blog that Kiell and I share, http://kiellanddaniel.wordpress.com, to get frequent updates during the season so the folks at home can follow along. We’re expecting this season to be especially interesting as the station celebrates the 100th anniversary of Amundsen’s party reaching the geographic south pole for the first time. It’s hard to say what that means for everyday station life, but the assumption is that the tourist population will skyrocket with expeditions and dignitaries from all over the world. I think it’s fascinating that 100 years ago a trip to the south pole was most likely to result in death, and now it takes me about 8 hours to make the same trip so I can ensure that the people working there are happily running their computers at their desks. This might very well be the most drastic change in human accessibility ever in history.

In unrelated news, I’ve spent the summer working on some self-produced music! I’ve finally updated the Music page on this blog, and you can listen to the first track either there or at my SoundCloud page, http://soundcloud.com/mradyfist. I’ve got some more tracks in the works, and hopefully I’ll get them posted before I leave.

It’s been almost a year since I last posted something here, but I’ve been a little busy.

Right now I’m at McMurdo Station, on a lovely little island just off the coast of mainland Antarctica. I’m sharing a bunk room with 29 other transients bumming around here until we leave for our destinations, some to the pole, some to field camps. My flight is supposed to be the second one out tomorrow, so I had the pleasure of “bag dragging” my luggage to be checked in; unlike a commercial flight, my luggage stays checked until I go. If I’m as unlucky as some of the people who made it to the Ice earlier I could be living out of my carry-on bag for weeks, a prospect which I’m not looking forward to.

Tomorrow I’ll get up early in the morning in the hope that the weather is good and the planes are in working order, and hopefully I’ll be at the pole by lunchtime. If not, I’ll be showing up for work at McMurdo.

It turns out that there’s always plenty to do at the South Pole.

Work has slowed down considerably since the flood of incoming new people has become a trickle. I always have things to do, but it’s become more of a make-your-own-project kind of thing, mixed with cleaning up the clutter that’s left over from the rush of turnover. My focus has been on revamping the inventory system, which is currently a surprisingly low-tech Excel spreadsheet that’s in poor shape. Since I’ve done some scripting on OS X but none on Windows, I’ve taken this as an excuse to learn Powershell, Microsoft’s relatively new scripting/programming language. My pet project is Spo-Inventory, a script which queries all the workstations in our Active Directory OU and writes info about them to a persistent XML file for internal storage, and a prettied-up HTML file on the webserver for retrieving information about a device. I’ve labeled it as version 1.0 right now since I can actually use it to inventory machines, but every time I finish adding a feature I think of a new one I want.

I haven’t mentioned it much in this blog, but one of the best things about Pole is that we have a fairly well-kept music room, with many guitars, an upright electric bass, a drumkit, a keyboard, and an assortment of accessories. I’ve been heading down to play almost every evening since I’ve been here, unless otherwise occupied; it’s pretty common to run into someone else, but they’re usually looking for someone to play with anyway. The musicians here range from absolute novices to old pros, and generally multiple bands will form to play for events. I’ve been playing with a bluegrass/folk group that Mark (a longtime Icegoer) usually runs, and I’ve been working on forming a Violent Femmes cover band tentatively called “Violet Phlegm” starring myself on bass, Eli on vocals (and occasionally mandolin), Orin on drums, and our choice of one or two Johns on the guitar.

I’ve also been playing soccer once a week in the gym, which is unbelievably exhausting at this altitude. We play 4 on 4 in a tiny gym, with 1-3 subs ready on the sidelines. The first game I played I probably spent more time out than in, wheezing and chugging water. Playing soccer indoors is faster than on a field, since the ball never goes out and you can use the walls to bounce around people.

The satellite will be going down soon, so I’m going to finish this post and leave plenty to talk about in the future. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!