Oh yes...We're down to about 3 weeks (weather permitting) until it's time to stow your tray table and put your seatback in it's upright and locked position. The Basler is now making it's way from Canada (where it lives) through Central and South America and should stop here for fuel on Tuesday next week.
Our local post office has re-opened so that we can ship out some of our stuff so that we don't have to schlep it half way around the world. I brought a bunch of stuff that I really didn't need. Of course, if I knew I wasn't going to have any social life, I wouldn't have brought so many non-cold weather clothes. By the same token, I brought some quilted flannel shirts and long underwear which I never used either. So, in the Antarctic, we have a concept called "skua" which I may have explained in an earlier post. If you missed it: The skua is a bird found mostly around the coast which will eat almost anything and can be quite persistent about it. It is a scavenger. We Antarcticans have adopted this behavior and have created places like the "Skua Shack" were items we no longer want may be taken by anyone who wants them. Skua can be a noun as in "I found these pants in skua". Or, a verb: "I'm going to skua these pants". Today, I took several pounds of new or lightly used clothes to the skua box just outside the station. What a great thing to get rid of so much unused stuff. Some of it was skua'd (vt) to me by an outbound friend at the end of the summer. Skua: The gift that keeps on giving.
So with the clothes (and stuff) I'm keeping all neatly crammed into two U-Haul boxes and with my unused clothes out to skua, my room is beginning to regain it's bare-walled, utilitarian, government-furnished charm. The actual logistics of my departure in conjunction with the gig I am playing the night before I leave (weather permitting) means that the clothes I wear for the gig will probably go strait to skua and I'll be wearing my USAP-issued cold weather gear until I get to McMurdo for a likely day or two.
The milestone? I put on my sunglasses for the first time since March! It's clear and bright at the South Pole today.
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