Upper Peninsula Michigan and Auction Win Outcomes

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I was up in Wisconsin and the UP (upper peninsula) in Michigan. It was a lot of driving after launching/landing in Appleton WI. I got an item off the bucket list by driving across the "Mighty Mac". Altough it was built in the late '50s. It is still the longest suspension span in the Northern hemisphere. It is a crazy long bridge with a crazy long suspension span. It was good to see the bridge in context of the seemingly endless forests of Northern Wisconsin and Michigan. The culture in the two haves of Michigan are noticibly different as you might expect. Great time meeting with folks both in WI and MI. The tractor I won in auction, seems to have paid off. This time I beat the odds. It was a really good deal. I have the "no-key, non-running, may have hydraulic problems, unknown hours" -auction win, running well with minimal cost and time. I have some more tweaks, maintenance and minor fixes but the major risks are gone.
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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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