Chazd's (Charles Dowdell's) News Burps

Its Sunday again. I played cards with a group of about 9 people last night. It feels as though I know (by sight) about 500 people here, 250 from where they work, 80 by first name and about 30 by first and last name. There are approximately 1080 people on station right now. People talk about isolation. There is no isolation with that many people on station. It is far less isolated than I am back home. Out in the field isolation is a totally different story and it doesn't take long geographically to get out in the field. My job gets me out in the field quite a bit. My pager went off last night. A repeater seems to to gone down suddenly on top of Mt. Aztec. The science camp has HF radio and an irridium phone as backups so we may not get out there until later this week rather than immediately because it is not a dangereous condition. The first picture is me on top of Mt 1882 talking to a science camp via my VHF hand held radio to determine if we were succesful in getting the Teleph

Here is an account of some guy that comes down for a week writing about Mac town and Antarctica. What a whiner! He shows up last night and he starts complaining about the experience. The consensus is that if you don't like it GO HOME! He has had far less hassles than anyone else who has been here. He is being treated as a Distinguished Vistor (DV). You may have to search a little bit due to a poor indexing system at MSNBC. "http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15834019/page/2/

Today is Saturday (I had to check my watch). I am giving a tour to 14 people off a cruise ship this morning. The price of their cruise was $30 thousand dollars a seat. They are very interested in Antarctica and they are supposedly interested in meeting someone like me and they will have many questions. I have many questions for myself too. I am having some good reflection of why I am doing this. It is definately not in the path of least resistance to have embarked on the adventure. I am reading and reflecting. I climbed crater hill yesterday to get to some flaky equipment. It was a work out for my ankle but today it feels like it made it stronger. The first picture is a dive hut out on the sea ice. It gives a good scale for me of how large the outside shots are. The second picture I mistook as a mumified seal in the dry valleys. The mumified seals are in the area here. They are quite a mystery of how they got to where they are. They don't rot because of the cold, dry and lack

My Earthlink email is working again for the time being. The yahoo address is good for backup if I don't respond.

It has been a pretty exciting day. The photos speak for themselves. Well, almost. I was out in the dry valleys fixing a repeater and was along for the ride measuring the ice edge. We saw whales, seals, and penguins. I went up to the hamshack and I talked with Alex from the Russian Vostok Station. That is good DX for Antartica ham radio. Vostok Station holds the record for the coldest temerature ever recorded on earth. It was -129 degrees below zero F in 1983. That is cold. It does get colder than -100 at the pole but -129 is really something. It is exciting here, but I do miss home and Bonnie. I have having serious problems with my earthlink email again (The problems is entirely at Earthlink's end). If you need to get a hold of me use chazd13736@yahoo.com

Deltas do get stuck. These pics I pulled off the public domain drive here on station. I volunteered to be a tour guide for the three or so cruise ships that will come into McMurdo this year. That will be interesting.

Today was kind of slow. I fixed a bunch of stuff and got soem stuff done but overall it was pretty slow. There is an ice cream machine in the galley named "Frosty Boy". It is a self serve soft ice cream machine that dispenses vanilla ice cream. When Frosty Boy is broken or out of premix the Antarcticans become restless and irritable. It is important to ensure Frosty Boy is functioning. Here is a picture of me on the ham tower the other day. It is only 30 feet. The other picture is of the bowling alley machine. The lanes are really warped and the pins are set by hand. It truely is a museum piece. I heard Brunswick wanted to buy it back.

Isn't ice amazing. Today was a good day off. It even felt like a day off. My activities for today started with a fantastic breakfast as an encore from an awesome Thankgiving feast last night. I had my favorite food in the whole world as shown in the photo, smoked salmon with red onions and capers, two custom fried eggs, a salt bagel, a fresh biscuit, cranberry juice, coffee, a slice of melon and some assorted cheeses. I had Mike take this photo of my breakfast. Antarctica is very harsh, just not this morning. Note the two "green brains", one in my pocket and one on the table. After that we went up to the ham shack as a encore of my most-excellent contacts last night from Japan, Patriot Hills Antarctica and Pacific marine mobiles. I got my climbing harness on and climbed the tower to rotate the tri-band antenna more towards North America. The 20 meter amateur radio band is tricky down here. We have to follow the dark line. We are still experimenting with some very