Ice Stock New Year's Celebration

See if you can find me in this picture. Last time I hula hooped here I was told I looked like I was riding a bucking bronco, so I didn't go near the hoops.

These characters came out when I had gone inside to warm up (these are pics from the shared drive).

Ice Stock is where amateur Antarctic bands play 20-minute sets throughout the afternoon – 6 hours in all. It is a chance for people to hula-hoop, dress in zany costumes, dance, mill about, play Frisbee, and drink. I preferred sitting or standing soberly in the stands and watching people, being very careful after my little incident last month. Besides, it can be pretty funny to observe human behavior.

An example…the Air National Guard air crews are usually a sober and serious bunch, but this day several of them were in shorts and flipflops, drinking. One flight engineer named Dan was sporting a red sweatshirt with bold letters across the front reading SEX MACHINE. Dan, aka Sex Machine, saunters to over to Colleen (a pretty 24-year-old in shuttles) and me and tries out the kind of line on Colleen heard all too often here: “How would you like to come over to my room later and try out my flight simulator?” I had to walk away I was laughing so hard. We have to read safety topics every week for work and my roommate and I were thinking about writing something about how to survive the Antarctic "wolves" including a list of some of the classic lines to watch out for that we hear about, especially from all the young women in the shuttles department.

 

That's my roommate, Helen, in the white skirt.

Sunday was the Scott hut 10k race, but the weather had turned bitter and cold. There were gale force winds which helped push us down the hills but made all the up-hills insufferable. Only 32 people out of a thousand on station came out to race. There was a mountaineer ahead of me most of the race who guides on Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina in the summers and happens to be dating a co-worker of mine, Miss Salsa-Zumba-Pretty-Pants (who apparently gets asked out at least five times during every lunch meal and who also likes to talk about popping her ear zits). I finally caught up with Mr. Mountaineer and overtook him on a downhill, but I assured him he would probably catch me on the next uphill. When I didn’t see or hear anyone behind me on the next hill, I honked out the biggest farmer blow over my right shoulder (a skill I learned only after I met Scott a few years back). Then I caught a glimpse of something shiny and I looked behind me. Mr. Mountaineer had been drafting off me the whole time up the hill, and the front of his down coat was covered with my now-frozen snot. I apologized profusely and tried to wipe it all off with my gloves, even as we kept racing. I couldn’t breathe because I was laughing so hard. I still beat him though.