Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Cinco de Mayo

Temperature: - 56.7C
Wind Chill : - 76.2C
Wind Speed: 10.1 kts

Yeah, I know, I'm a little past the 5th of May, but when I wanted to post this last week, I took the liberty of saving two pictures and deleting the text, so I'm playing a little catch up here.

Cinco de Mayo down here just proved to me that it doesn't matter where you are...if people want to celebrate something, they will find a way to do it! The galley was adorned with both good food and festive decorations! We were surrounded by tortillas,




big hats,



and cutouts of figures that looked frighteningly similar to David Hasselhoff!!



To finalize our tribute to the day, there was a jalapeno eating contest...



and there were two brave souls...Eric and Ross.



...Cully didn't enter the contest...he just really likes jalapenos!!



...and they were off! Ross put up a considerable effort during the contest, and it looked like he might have pulled it off,



but in the end, it was Erik that won the day, with the final numbers being Ross: 13 Erik: 20



Later on in the week, one of our temperature sensors on the tower decided to give us incorrect data, so Cully took it down one afternoon, and brought it inside to take a look at it. It turned out that the instrument was working just fine, but the fan inside the casing had stopped running. Cully switched out fans, and he and I wandered out to the tower to put the casing back over the instrument.

It wound up being a one-person job, but I tagged along anyway, so I could practice freezing fingers, and working on camera settings.



Within a couple minutes, Cully had the housing back on,



and we stumbled back inside to make a couple observations of the moon, and collect a couple air samples.

That took us to the weekend, and a 5K race through the inside of the station, but as I was "running" in the race, I don't have any pictures. As soon as some of them get shared, though, I will post them and tell you how the race went!

In the meantime, stay warm!

Capt. Splash

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