Skua

A Skua is a type of seagull that lives here in Antarctica. They are not afraid of humans. In fact, they are notorious for flying behind FNG's (new people) and swooping in to knock wrapped dinner plates out of their hands onto the ground. I've seen a skua snatch a sandwich out of a person's hand. I don't blame them for being so aggressive because I have not seen anything whatsoever edible on this continent (outside of people food).
Anyway, there is a wonderful system here where anything usable that people don't want is deposited in this mill van. People can go in and take anything they like, whenever they want. The whole system is called SKUA, after the bird. Skua can be used as a noun or verb, as in, "I skuaed this nifty camouflage baseball cap!"
You can get all manner of kitchen items even though we have no access to any kitchens.
The clothes smell like a dirty clothes hamper, but I've found three great cotton jerseys that I haven't minded getting oily (checking engines in shuttles).

Very few of these shoes have laces for some reason. I made a random list of some things I saw in Skua recently (it changes often). This week you can find mucus relief pills, panic purple hair dye, used chapsticks (ew), cinnamon rush whitening expressions toothpaste (again used), monistat 7 vaginal anitfungal cream (yep, you guessed it - used. EW!), Degree deoderant, squeezable strawberry jelly, grey poupon mustard, a zip lock back full of teeny Tabasco sauces, a box of wool socks with no matches, hundreds of books (heavy on Dune, James Patterson, Dean Koontz), Riverdance and Karate Mania on video, and a trunk full of seasonal decorations. It's always fun to go in there. All towns should have Skua! It would cut down on trash, that's for sure.
This is just a picture of the galley decorated for Christmas.All the buildings are numbered only here. You never have any idea of what goes on inside until you've been here a few months. These little jobbies are all lined up to be put down at the dock for when the ships start coming in come January. I can't wait to see the ice breaker!

Tomorrow we have a big softball tournament. As captain of the shuttles team, I'm trying to get everyone pumped up, but we are playing the VMF (vehicle maintenance dudes) first and they have just one woman on their team. We've only practiced once, while the other teams have been out there all week. Zoiks. It will probably be a blow-out, but it will still be fun. We play up at the ballpark - a big parking lot where they park all the sad ancient vehicles from yesteryear. The ballpark was actually used as such way back in the 1950's though. How about the 60's, Dad?

I put a few more Soiree pics in the last blog entry.