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 oout 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 (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 heating eff...
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I am in LA. I missed my connection. I did manage to get the red-eye out tonight. So it looks like I get to spend another night on a plane. I slept last night. I probably got 4 or 5 hours of sleep. I caught up with a fellow ice person last night for the flight. We were recounting the experience. Our experiences and impressions were very similar. He was saying that he can't describe a lot of it. He went on to say that even looking at his photos, they didn't tell what he was experiencing. We agreed about how strange it was meeting the winter-overs we were taking over for when we got there in October. "They had that weird stare and they talked ok and everything but there was no emotional content to what they were saying". There is a zombie like quality to some people who spend a lot of time on the ice.

After a couple of weeks at pole he was medivaced to McMurdo for altitude sickness (there were quite a few this year). It got better and went back to pole. This guy is a body builder and you wouldn't expect anything to bring that guy down.

This is a picture I took day-before-yesterday of some fata-morgana. Fata-morgana is Antarctican for mirage. This is looking across about 40 miles of sea-ice. The temperature inversion causes this really cool elongations and inversions. I have seen small mountains upside down. It is pretty freaky when you are walking into work and you see these things.

I have taken and saved about 35 GB of photos and videos. I have not sorted through many of them myself. It will take quite a while.

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Carbon Monoxide!?

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Image
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 oout 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 (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 heating eff...
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