14 December, 1997

Hi Everyone,

My luck has held out so far. Remember that I told you that Sunday was always a No Fly day for the helo's. I learned that there are sometimes when they do fly. It seems that there was a two person group repairing a radio tower on Mt. Cook, about 40 miles up the valley on the ice plateu. They had been there two days working and did not want to spend any more time there just sitting. They got the helo to come out on Sunday and since it was a big helo to carry all their equipment off and they were flying right over us, they stopped and picked me up and took me to McMurdo. There was a real storm all right. Got out of the Helo and snow was over my boot tops. They had had a record amount of 14 inches. Still white and fluffy now but wait a few days, what a mess. I imeadiatly cleaned up and put my clothes in the laundry and went to the lab to catch up my

e-mail. Nothing exciting until the middle of the night. Since I came in on a Sunday there was no one working at housing. They had put an evvelope with my name and room number on it on the coark board. It said The Inn room 212. I

went there, the room was empty, great no roommate and started to unpack. For some reason I tried the key and it did not fit. Looking at the key it said room 211. I tried 211 and it was empty also so I just moved over there and did un pack and went to bed. Fine until about two o-clock in the morning. The weather had improved and three planes had landed and two ladies had walked into my room and were suprised to see me there and me a male. Worse yet, they spoke very little english. I jumped up and went next door to 212 and an Italian man was coming in. He just moved in with me and the ladies took the room accross the hall and we just went to sleep. Housing will settle it out in the morning. Missed my big opportunity to share a room with two Italian ladies. We will laugh about it tomorrow. I'm fine people, doing OK.