More ships in town

The tanker ship has docked, and is filling the fuel tanks on station with more fuel for the year. It should take a few days to do. The ship is pretty big, and the Palmer is docked up next to it, while the Oden continues to break up ice in the channel so that the tanker can get back out (the Palmer has a reinforced hull, so it doesn't have as much of a problem in the ice). The freighter comes in next week sometime.

My friend Rose leaves today for home. She's the one who lives not far from my mom, so when I get up there to visit when I get home, I'll be calling her for a visit.

I will be calling my phone company later today, since they have decided to charge me $100, even though my phone has been shut off since October 5th, and I was supposed to have been charged $15 in October and $15 in January. Someone has some explaining to do, and it's not me.

We had an unplanned power outage this morning at around 6:30. I got to go home last night, so I was in bed and was woken up by the fire alarm panel's trouble alarm. After determining that there was no issue, I went back to sleep. The fire tech set the alarm off when he was resetting the panel after the power came back on, which woke me up again, but other than that, I slept till 10:30 when it was time for me to get up so I could say goodbye to Rose.

I need to go to Scott Base tonight to hit the store and get a Polar Plunge patch. They won't be open on Thursday since some of their government big-wigs will be there (they don't want a bunch of rowdy Americans running around I guess), so I want to go over today to get it. I also need a new lanyard, since mine broke this weekend.

I did line-handling for the Palmer on Sunday. They made a big deal out of nothing, really. The crew on board throws the leader line, which is attached to the actual mooring line, and you pull it to pull in the mooring line (which is really heavy). The mooring line goes over the bollard, and they pull it tight from on board ship. Nothing to it. I honestly thought it would be much more organized from the way they were going on about it at the 'training meeting.' Later on Sunday, I went down there with Rose and took a tour of the ship. They didn't have a whole lot of nifty lab stuff, since evidently this is a fairly light cruise for them, science-wise. Evidently they base out of Chili, and do cruises of anywhere from 3 weeks to 2 or 3 months. But it was neat to see the bridge, and I saw some whales out in the open water (through the binoculars though). There is a lot more open water now that the Palmer and the Oden have broken more ice up. And today is an absolutely gorgeous day, finally, so the sun should melt a good bit of the ice as well.

Tomorrow is a Station 2 day, and then I have my Kelly day, though on Thursday and Friday I have class from 9am till 11am. The head dispatcher is giving us an EMD (Emergency Medical Dispatching) familiarization class. It'll look good on my resume. Next week we are getting a CPR class, which I need, since mine is expired. The cards will be sent to our houses, so it'll be there by the time I get home.

Counting the days...