Carbon Monoxide!?

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Weird. The smoke alarm went off, not incredibly odd when I am using the fireplace, but it wasn't the smoke detector. It was the CO alarm. I was totally surprised. It had never gone off as long as I have had one, over many many years. Yep, after resetting it a few times. It was getting a reading over 200 ppm CO. When I took it downstairs I got a reading near 300 ppm. I started getting light headed at this point. After thinking maybe the furnace heat exchanger failed and puzzling around a bit I figured out what happened. As part of the huge winter storm that recently covered almost half of the US, we lost our electricity. So, being well prepared, I rolled out the generator and started doing what I normally do. The generator (although it was completely outside) was creating CO to get in the house. Using the fireplace draft (and possibly other leaks) the whole house created a vacuum around the seal of the basement garage door. After the CO got into the house the forced air heat...
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Its Tuesday Morning here. I was up top of Crater Hill a couple of times yesterday. Crater Hill is part of T-site (kind of). It is the larget peak adjacent to McMurdo. It is a restricted area for most because of all the transmitters and what not. It is actually quite nice. There is a crater on top as shown is the first picture. There is a nice little pond that is frozen solid. I suspect it is deeper than 10 feet. The ground is difficult to walk on. it is very irregular. Some of it gives and some of it doesn't.

The second picture shows what is left behind from the Ice Runway. Early in the Season the Ice Runway (which is on sea ice very close to town) handles all the air traffic. Once the sea ice starts getting a little soft they move primary flights operations to Williams Airfied (willy) some miles from town on the ice shelf. There is also another ice runway on more solid sea ice called Pegasus which gets the C-17 flights from Christchurch.

Mt. Erebus is the active volcano near McMurdo. Some days there is a little steam and some days there is a considerably more. It burps out bombs and ash fairly regularly.

The last shot was taken with a level camera out the window of the Pisten Bully. The hill up Crater hill so so steep you cannot get up it with a wheeled vehicle or a matt track. Only a pisten buly or a dozer can make it. The lines in the photo are the defroster lines in the side window of the Pisten Bully. The hill is so steep if feels that teh Pisten Bully may flip over backwards on the way up.

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