Yet another sunny day

Today is another sunny day. I think we're working on a record. It is pretty windy, but other than that, the days have been absolutely gorgeous.

There are rules down here about how long you can stay. The max amount of time you can spend down here in one shot is 14 months. After that, you have to leave for at least 2 months before you can come back. I think that other countries have different rules, like Britain I believe has their people sign up for 3 years at a time. But the US regulates how long you can stay. I guess too much time and they're afraid you'll go nutty.

Yesterday I was at Station 2. I was supposed to be at Station 1 yesterday, but due to a change in K-day schedules, I got shifted to Station 2. Tomorrow I'm down there as well, and then I have my K day on Friday. We had a medical call right after dinner, and had to transport the patient to the Scott Base transition to meet up with the ambo from town. They transferred the patient over, and then the ambo from town broke down, so the ambo from Station 2 had to turn around. This is a big deal, since the transition from the ice/snow road to the land is really gotten bad since the weather has been so warm. So we aren't allowed to take light vehicles (vans, trucks, ambo, etc) over it except in dire emergency. The ambo did make it over, but now Station 2 is without an ambo. Hopefully this will force The Powers That Be to realize just how crappy our equipment is, and that we need new stuff.

At any rate, with the transition closed to light vehicles, those of us going to Station 2 now have to pick up the 8am shuttle from Derelict Junction. The shuttle is either a Delta or Ivan the Terra Bus. Neither is horribly fast, so it takes a good deal of time to get out there. Basically, it adds a total of 2 hours onto each shift...one hour each way. Kind of a pain. AND we can get bumped if there are more important people who need to go down, like passengers. Which is what happened today. There were a lot of passengers for one of the flights, so the A-shift crew for Station 2 got bumped to the later shuttle, which meant that we didn't get back to town till about 10am. Kinda screwed up my workout schedule, but oh well. I'll go this afternoon.

The other exciting thing that happened yesterday was that one of the LC-130's had some mechanical issues with flaps, and had to land at Pegasus field (it's a longer field and they can use the entire length of the runway to stop). This meant that we had to send a crew of 3 out to Pegasus to stay until it left (which won't actually be till after 4pm today). There is not an actual station at Pegasus, so anyone who has to stay out there for a while has to stay either in the passenger terminal or in the Fleet Ops hut, which evidently has snacks and a microwave and stuff.

So yeah, exciting night last night. I stayed up way later than I wanted to, so it'll be and early night for me tonight.