After ten beautiful hours of sleep I woke up feeling clear-headed and awake to my first full day at the pole. Unfortunately the feeling didn't last all day but it was a great start!

When it's cloudy here, the ground is white and the sky is white. It's actually reasonably disorienting because there's just so much white! And if the cloud lowers a bit, objects in the distance get whiter as well. Lucky our parkas are red is all I can say (picture).

Our list of things to do for the day was fairly light - we had decided to take it easy on the first day. By the time I got out to the AASTO it was just after 10am (I had no alarm clock at that stage and in a pitch-dark room it's awfully hard to tell the time), and Doug, Colin and Fred had already finished everything on the list! So we started on days 2 and 6. As a summary - everything in the AASTO seemed ok, parts for the upcoming procedures were located or requested, we all took a turn climbing up the tower and peeking at the telescope (picture attached), and we installed a fancy new KVM (keyboard, video and mouse - we think) switch, which lets us control one of the computers remotely (kinda like VNC only more flexible). Unfortunately Kevin had changed the user password for the switch and hadn't told anyone, so after much head-scratching and guessing (another picture) we had to call it a day and wait for the satellite to come up. By this time we were starting to feel the altitude again though so it wasn't a bad time to wrap up.

Colin and I did manage to get our hero pictures taken at the pole today as well (more pictures). Also, Doug and Colin are officially better than me at pool (another picture). Which is probably true of 90% of the people at the station! I blame the lack of rotational velocity. Doug blames the Coriolis forces being different in the southern hemisphere.

If we can stay this far ahead of schedule we'll be finished in a week!

- Jessie