20 December, 2002

Food Pull

(Note to my language arts students: Quotation marks come out in my journals as funny squiggles for some reason, so I am going to write quotations with a comma and a capital to show where it begins. When I use them for emphasis, I will just capitalize the letters. Can you recognize the need for them and edit them correctly? There are three examples in the first paragraph below.)

At the end of yesterday, Jen, Pete and I looked at each other and said, Have we only been here one day? The answer of course was, Yes! But what a day it has been. One of the most interesting things that we did was help Karen and John do a Food Pull. The warehouse has floor to ceiling wooden shelves stocked with food from soups, to chips, to tomato sauce, to CANDY! We filled out an order form and then each took a page of it to pull the food from the shelves. We were getting food for six people for two weeks. Can you guess how much that all weighed? Every item had to be boxed and then weighed, because a helicopter will haul it to our camp for us. (Even WE will be weighed before we are allowed on the helo!) The most fun I had was picking out 100 candy bars-yum! But I'd better not eat them before getting on that scale.

Thanks to Robbie at the tech center, I finally got online and was able to post my journals and pictures. He spent several hours getting me up and running.

Later, the whole Stream Team learned how to use the Total Station. Jen and I will be responsible for surveying and remapping the stream beds that were originally mapped in the 1997 Alger, McKnight, et al study. My grandfather was a surveyor in Florida early in the 20th century. I think he would be amazed at the equipment we have today. The Total Station is an instrument that measures elevation to make topographic maps using the Pythagorean Theorem. (OK math students: what is the Pythagorean Theorem?)

1. John is into honey!

2. Karen and John pack it up! We have to be sure to pack carefully so that foods that can't be frozen are together. Since there are no animals or insects to worry about, we can store some food outside the station hut. Our only worries will be wind blowing it away.

3. Pete listens to directions on how to do the food pull. Have you ever seen a grocery store like this one?

4. Jen and Pete arrive with the 144 pounds of frozen food we will take to the Dry Valleys. We will eat well--steaks, chicken, hamburger and halibut, frozen fruit and vegetables! I shipped some of Terry's (that's my husband) famous bar-b-q sauce down here, so we should eat well.