Dirty Hair and a Fish Cloud

Well, only 4 showers are allowed per week, but I'm finding it hard to even shower once a week with this schedule. Weird thing is that somehow bodies don't seem to get that dirty around here. Even though I'm still running and hiking, I don't stink and my hair is not greasy after five days of not showering - check out the pic. And my hair is very straight down here. Bizarre.
This road goes out 13 miles on the ice to Pegasus field. I've driven it several times, and the view back toward the mountains is amazing. Last night I drove a small group of Air National Guard troops to the ice runway, and I met an acquaintance from when I lived in Bristol, Vermont. He gave me news of an old, dear best friend (Michelle Butler) whom I haven't had any contact with in over a decade. I told him to tell her son Dean, who goes to school with his son, to tell his mother that I said hi from Antarctica! This place is like that. You can always find some sort of weird uncanny connection with people.
The guys were down here for only a week blowing up defective thruster canisters out on the ice. I didn't hear the explosions but I saw the big smoke clouds after the fact.
Look closely at the cloud - it looks like a tropical fish exhaling some smoke. We zoomed up Ob Hill at lunch yesterday.
Scott is getting some incredible shots as usual. I'm trying to get him to write a blog entry with some of his pics (in his spare time!)
It is so much fun to be here with Scott, even though we only see each other for only a few minutes each day.
We are still ramping up for regular schedules, so sometimes we have extra time on our hands in the office. Everyone knits!

The executive producer of Blue Planet and Planet Earth is here with his film crews and I went to a spell-binding presentation by them the other night. They showed some extremely graphic footage of killer whales eating seals and an elusive snow leopard chasing a little goat. Terrifying! I had my eyes covered the whole time while everyone else was oohing and ahhing. Nice folks though.

A few days ago, Scott and I got to watch (from afar) scientists take a camera off a seal and herd it back into a hole they had drilled out on the ice. The seal moved along like a big slug and it looked very carefully down the hole before plopping through. Very cool!

Today was not fantastic because we all didn't have a lot of work to do, so we were all sitting around knitting and the big boss blew through and got irritated. "Unless you are knitting a sweater for me, get to work!" Of course we had already cleaned bathrooms twice, swept the floors and the vehicles, and there was really nothing else to do, so one of the veteran drivers had us all pile into the back of an old Delta and he drove up over some big bumps so we could see what it was like to be in the back cab box. It was a total waste of an hour, but kind of fun. We won't be on a regular schedule for another week, so there are always 18 drivers milling about. It's weird because sometimes we are all driving all day long. It's either all or nothing. I'm halfway done knitting a fair isle scarf though :)