6 December, 1996

Dec. 6

McMurdo

Awaken at 7AM and RUSH to get to galley for breakfast which closes at 7:30. Not much of a selection, but I still have food.

It is cloudy this morning and we are glad we went ourt in the field yesterday.

We go to lab and finish a few things before going to a meeting with the National Science Foundation personnel visiting Antarctica this week. We return to lab to work until lunch. Jennifer is methodically copying all 70 of the diskettes so we each have a copy of the snow ripple data. Dr. Braaten will keep a set on a zipdrive as an archive. Copying 70 disks takes a LOT of time.

I also try to work on some personal papers which need to be FAXed back to Tampa.

The weather has gotten fantastic, sunny and pleasant. It seems as if summer is finallly here.

Dr. Braaten and Suruj return from their overnight trip to "marilyn" site, 200?miles South from McMurdo. They had flown out to the site, worked all night putting up the equipment for next year's experiment. It took two helicopters to transport all the equipment, plus 8 hours work for two men to set up this experiment. Inagine the total amount of man hours expended. We hope everything works. He had assembled the electronics back here at McMurdo and had tested them at -45C to verify that it would work through the winter. Since Dr. Braaten and Suruj have neither eaten nor slept for more than 24 hours, they go take 3 hour naps before coming back to the lab to do more lab work.

Jennifer checks her e-mail and discovers that the mother of her best friend has died of cancer. This is a sad day for us.

Jennifer and I have been invited to a reception for the NSF distinguished visitors. We plan to leave after a short time, but got involved talking with the large array of fascinating people and stay more than 2 hours. The NSF personnell who came down to McMurdo in this group are really interesting. Back to the lab again. I will need to run samples until most are done. I have been doing lab work until about midnight and then doing my daily journal later. Since it took until 2AM this morning to finish yesterday's, you may not hear from me for a while as I try to keep up the pace.