This morning I was up at 5 am, partly to get some mood photos, and partly to get my laundry underway. As it turned out, neither exercise was entirely successful. Clothes washing is confined to the non-working hours (if such a concept applies at Dome C) in order to help reduce the peak load on the power generator. To add to the laundry challenge, the washing machines are of the European type which take at least 90 minutes to wash a pair of socks, and the driers are equally slow. So, the three alternatives are: get up early, stay up half the night, or smell.

Breakfast was good and the mood photos stunning. However, the clothes drier refused to start, leaving me with an entire basket of wet clothes and the clock ticking towards a power blackout for the laundry. Fortunately I was rescued by Fantomas (he of fruit sticker fame, as readers of the 03 - 04 diaries will be aware), who negotiated a few extra kilowatt hours and a spare drier for me.

We took lid off the SUMMIT instrument and were dismayed to find ice inside. We need to improve the sealing, and also perhaps add a fan and heater to encourage the water vapour to move to where it will fall into the clutches of the calcium hydride.

While Jon and Suze struggled with the usual mind-numbing computer problems (this time trying to get "telnet" to work), I made the embarrassing discovery that in two years at Dome C we've never quite gotten around to connecting the AASTINO ground to Station ground. I shall recite 100 "Horowitz and Hills" tonight as penance. There's no such thing as a true electrical "ground" at Dome C because we're over 3 km (vertically) away from anything you'd call the earth. Snow is a
fabulous insulator (both electrical and thermal). Normally it doesn't matter that the entire AASTINO (and the folk inside it) is floating at some totally random voltage with respect to the Station. However when the two "grounds" are joined together (for example by using an oscilloscope), it's best to do this through a nice heavy piece of wire that doesn't scare easily, rather than through the computer's Dallas bus as I foolishly did today. Whether any lasting damage has been done remains to be seen.

Closing the stable door involved first "borrowing" a couple of metres of nice thick cable from the Concordia construction team. This was 5-core cable so to extract the single wire I wanted (a very attractive green and yellow striped one) I had to strip off the outer covering. In Antarctica, electrical wires are usually insulated with silicone rubber rather than the PVC that we use in Australia. Silicone has the not inconsiderable advantage that it doesn't become as stiff as a board and brittle when the temperature drops. Against this, it is remarkably easy
to tear once it has a small cut in it. So, extracting my precious green and yellow wire from the cable involved a process very similar to skinning a snake, but more ecologically sound.

Suze continued work on the roof feedthrough for Nigel's optical fibres. We decided to crush part of the copper tube that holds the optical fibres so that we can bolt a couple of resistors onto it and keep everything warm. As it turns out, the AASTINO has only one known vice, so we used it to crush the tubing. This involved Jon turning the handle using a large spanner for extra leverage, while Suze stood on the vice to stop it escaping, which it desperately wanted to do. I took a photo of this bizarre scene which looked like a game of "Twister" gone wrong,
but for reasons to be revealed later the photo will never be shown in public.

The three of us ride back and forth to the AASTINO by skidoo, when one is available (they're a bit thin on the ground this year). Halfway to Concordia from the present station we picked up a hitchhiker, making four on our skidoo. I think the Station record is six, but I'll have to check.

Today I took a large number of truly outstanding photos - each brilliantly framed, perfectly lit, aesthetically pleasing and telling a story by itself. I then accidentally erased the lot of them before transferring them to my computer. I guess I'm not the first, nor the last person to do this but, right at the moment, I am the person feeling most annoyed about it.
- John