My one week anniversary at the South Pole! Today was another good day work-wise. In the morning, Doug and I installed the camera controller and phobos (one of our cranky computers) into the EES. I was very appreciative of the tent at this stage since it involved kneeling on the edge of a quite high, quite narrow tower and besides blocking the wind it had an additional blinkering effect. Our next job was to install the router and the KVM switch up there, and Doug decided the cables were too long. Ever the handyman, Colin quickly whipped out his toolkit (whereby quickly I mean he had to trudge back to his Jamesway and bring it back), cut the cables, re-soldered them and shrunk them. Well he shrunk the heat-shrink he had placed around them. In all he reduced the cables by about 2m. And they still worked! Magic. So then Doug and Colin went back up the tower and installed the last two devices and voila! We could talk to phobos, and could tell it what to do with the KVM switch. Hurrah!

Since that was the last thing that we could possibly need the tent for the boys set to work dismantling it. Is there any task a male will go to with more enthusiasm than pulling something apart? As evidence I give you Colin and the cables, and Colin, Fred and Doug with the tent. They took up two sets of allen keys with them to unscrew the supports and I still managed to get called out of the AASTO with requests like "Can you bring me my balaclava?" and "Can you find an 11/64th of an inch allen key?". Well we had a 10/64th and a 12/64th and when I suggested they take the 12/64th out into the cold for awhile to see if thermal expansion would help them out at all (well this is the coldest place on earth, right?) I was met with little enthusiasm. In the end they used the 12/64th (otherwise labelled a 3/16th) and the tent came down. So now the Gtower looks more like a telescope assembly and less like a space satellite (see pictures)!

My other adventure today was at the medical centre just after breakfast. The day before I left Sydney I managed to acquire a splinter of rock in my toe (rock pool in Coogee) and it was too deep to get out. I decided to wait until it had worked its way out a bit, and this morning I had a shower (warm! bliss!) and noticed that it now looked approachable. I didn't have any tweezers though, hence the visit to the medical centre. I wandered in, merely hoping to be able to borrow some tweezers and bring them back later, to be confronted with two very bored doctors who immediately wanted to have a look at it. At first they just had me sit down and took turns with the tweezers. In the end they had me lying on the surgery table and were opening scalpel packets and discussing whether or not the toe needed to be anaesthesised. For a splinter! Admittedly it was still quite deep and it took both their combined efforts to get it out ("Oh no, it's fragmenting" is not what you want to hear when two doctors are standing there with scalpels). Then they washed the toe for me and put alcohol on it and put a bandaid on it and gave me extra bandaids and described all the possible things that could go wrong and that I should come back "any time" if I wanted them to check it. Then they asked for a tour of the AASTO (to distract me while they were poking around in my toe with scalpels they were asking about what I was doing) and I told them they were welcome any time. Then they finally let me leave. I know it's important to have good medical help available for emergencies but these must have been two of the most bored doctors on the planet. I would wager that I was the only patient they saw all day. Which says something for the safety regulations of the pole and the common sense of most of the people who come here. Yes I said 'most' deliberately!




- Jessie