First Day on Station

This morning we finally arrived at the station.  Luckily, the past few days aboard the LMG have been pretty smooth.  No sea sickness for me, but that could also be due to using some scopolamine patches throughout the trip.  Apparently the smoothness of the Drake's seas were unusual.  Today we've been doing back to back orientations and moving our things into our rooms.  Because the woman I'm rooming with is also staying over for the winter season, we get to have the lead scientist room.  It's significantly bigger than the other rooms around here, with the bottom bunk even being a double bed.  For the first month I'm sleeping in the double bed so that I don't have to hit my head on the ceiling every morning.  After majority of the station departs in mid-May, I'll try my best to get a single so that way we can both get bottom bunks.  If not, top bunk it is.

I was supposed to go on a 36 hour fishing expedition starting Monday morning, but Urjeet spoke up for us and reminded our PI that we have to study for our finals that we are taking at station.  New plan is to help set up our lab stations in the basement of my building (I'm birthing in the Bio building instead of the GWR building - GWR is the recreation building and Bio has labs and the galley) and study for my physics and ecology finals.  I tried my best to study while on the ship, but unfortunately the Internet was so limited that I wasn't able to access Blackboard and truly study.  I did learn to play some strategy board game called Catan, and I came close to winning once!  Can't say I'm exactly great at that game though when compared to everybody else who was playing.

Tonight we had people who are staying on the LMG ship come over to the main station for dinner.  Our chef made quite a few pizzas and bundt cakes for us all.  Clean up is the responsibility of all people at the dinner.  We each wash our own plates, and each week we have to sign up for "Gash."  Gash is our post-dinner cleaning session where we help the cook clean up the entire kitchen.  On top of Gash, every Saturday we draw from a bucket to see what we're cleaning.  We also do mid-week cleanups for the labs, bathrooms, and labs.

Now I'm going to go with my roommate over to the GWR building to hang out at the theatre/bar with everybody else on station.  Today's a pretty relaxed day since we all just got here.  Tomorrow things should pick up with some work to be done.  The real work won't happen until my PI and another group member comes back with some icefish and, hopefully, embryos.  If no embryos then we're going to have to try to coax them into breeding.