Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...

Another busy day. I am all set to go out to Taylor Dome on Saturday. Hopefully I will be getting back to McMurdo on Monday. I am scheduled to go out on a Twin Otter. I am pretty excited about being on the Twin Otter. I am not sure why. Hopefully I can get a ride back on a Basler which is a turbine powered DC-3. Last night's science lecture was about Antarctica past and future. A scientist who has been coming down since 1962 led the discussion with a lot of his personal photos. His photos included the first fossils found in Antarctica, petrified logs and all sorts of interesting geological content.

My ankle is much better. I went up to T-site today to check on a connection for the NASA folks. The picture out the truck window is on the road up to T-site. It is hard to judge heights from photos. It is at least 1000 feet down to the Ross Ice shelf. The other picture shows some of the hellium tanks for the Long Distance Balloon (LDB) project. The LDBs are launched in Antarctica sort of as a "poor man's" spacecraft. The winds go around Antarctica with sufficient reliability to launch very large balloons that can carry payloads of 6 tons and keep them at the edge of space for weeks. On top of that they can terminate the mission at their discretion and jettison the payload for recovery. They are launching a neutrino detector this year. I am not sure what else.

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Expidite the expidited

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