Commercial Items Identified on my Commute

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I see a lot of interesting commercialitems on truck on I-75. When you make the commute many times you start to see the same items over and over again. Sometimes it is huge equipment tires, sometimes heavy equipment of different types. I see these huge blocks of aluminum going North. I think about what the mill must look like and where it is going. And how much aluminum foil a block like this will make. Using the Tesla Full Self-Driving (supervised) allows me to look for these things on the highway. The FSD also helps me through the crazy stop and goes. Easily over 70MPH and then sudden traffic at dead stops, frequently. I see accidents every trip. It is amazing there aren't more. A side note- aluminum foil has a shiny side and a dull side. The reason why is that the foil is folded as it goes through massive rollers. The shiny side is the side that faces the steel roller. The dull side faces itself - aluminum.
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It is Thursday night. It is American night over at Scott Base (the New Zealand base). It is a couple miles away. I didn't much feel like going so I didn't. My ankle is a lot better. Today a co-worker and installed a radio with a battery/solar charger in a fuel pump house. Of course that was just a small fraction of what was done today.

I received a satellite call from the folks out at Taylor Dome. They said I can slept in a heated module or with some of others who are camping outside. They said it was cold. That means (it takes a while to figure what cold means with all the unspoken context) it is between 25 and 50 below. I told them I will decide when I get there. I have to help them decide whether to dig up an antenna they see 5 feet of. The rest is buried in the snow. I am pretty sure it is a minimum of 35 feet tall which means 30 feet is under snow since 1996 (when it was supposedly installed).

It does not snow a lot here but it did today. The snow really gets moved around a lot. In McMurdo, snow and volcanic ash get blown around interchangablely and snow banks are a parfait of ash and ice. The ash isn't dirt. There is nothing growing in it. It is powdered rock. It gets in your eyes sometimes since the wind is almost always blowing.

Here is a picture I borrowed from the public domain drive on our intranet. This penguin was just below town last Saturday. Here they come. They will be coming right into town here pretty soon.

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