I've been reminded that I've been slacking on my posts. It's because things have been busy around here what with all of these fishing trips I've been conducting on zodiacs, running the entire aquarium/lab facility for our group while those with doctorates are off fishing, video-conferencing with the NSF for take your child to work day, and managing fish that are getting sick and becoming reproductively mature. Today Nathalie and I attempted to sex the fish in our tanks. We removed two large female C. aceratus fish to inspect them (weight, length, physical attributes) and check their bellies by gently rubbing/squeezing the belly. They were clearly full of eggs, but unfortunately they were not ready to actually spawn. Nathalie, Thomas, and Dr. Detrich will be going on another fishing trip tomorrow to the Banana Trench down south, so I suppose it's a good thing that we didn't get the fish to spawn.
Right now I just finished "House Mouse" and am sitting in my room. House Mouse is when we all get together as a station to clean everything. We draw from a bucket to see what duty we'll be assigned, and on our sheets of paper have bulleted lists of tasks that need to be completed. Last week I pulled Bar & Lounge. This week I got Bio Top Floor Hallway. Both are really simple house mouse duties. The bar and lounge just needs to be tidied up here and there, and the Bio (my building) top floor hallway really only needs to be vacuumed. Since we have a station meeting at 3:30 today, I was able to find some time to write. Normally when I have free time I'm elsewhere on station or reading up on something that I need to know for my work this Antarctic winter.
Tonight in the bar we'll be having swing dancing lessons apparently. Yesterday was a science lecture from one of the researchers on station, Bouvard Hosticka. Bo is a research scientist from University of Virginia, and he's here to run tests on the atmosphere to see if anybody in the world is setting off (testing) nuclear weapons. Pretty cool stuff. There's a lot of physics behind it that he's explained to me a number of times, but I won't get into the details of germanium crystals and electron excitations. He also gets to observe a matter-antimatter reaction. I actually got to see the data results of said reaction. Essentially, with a matter-antimatter reaction you go from a photon of light (a photon is to light as cell is to life) to mass (although energy and mass are essentially the same) to finally kinetic energy. Neat. The data isn't as cool though as it's just a spectrum with a peak in it.
Tomorrow since the ship is leaving, I'm probably going to do what's called the Polar Plunge. When the ship departs from our little pier, I'll be jumping off of the pier with a number of other people on station. I convinced a few newbies to do it with me since this will be my first time. My thought is that if I go around telling people that I'm doing it, I won't chicken out and will actually follow through with it. I want to do it now if I'm going to do it at all since the water is near 32˚F (0˚C...really at 0.4˚C though). On mid-winter's day, the water will be near 27˚F. Too chilly for my taste. I guess now I have to find the bathing suit that I reluctantly packed. Maybe I'll throw on some water-repellant shorts in the hopes that it could manage to wick even a little bit of water away from my body.
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