The end of the winter is in sight. We saw the sun for the first time in a few months and, as is tradition, marked the occasion with the of the flag ceremony. The youngest member of the winter crew, Frazer Prescott, had this honour. Rothera is too far north to have the perpetual night that more Southerly regions have. The winter here has meant our days have been short, with about 3 hours of day light during the solstice period. Now however, the days are getting very noticeable longer -- the sun is rising at about the time I go for breakfast.
Although we could see the sun during the ceremony, it was only just visible through the layers of cloud. It was a while later before the sky was clear enough to see the full disk of the sun. My shadow is back!!
The work is steady going. By job is mainly pro-active maintenance checks on hardware and data. I have been pretty lucky in that I have not had many problems with the kit, and most of those problems I have had, have been simple to remedy. One issue I keep coming across are problems with switch mode power supplies. We have had several fail and diagnosing a fault becomes a bit of an issue, especially when the entire module is seen as one component to be replaced. As a result, there are rarely schematics available to trace the problem. I have, then, come up with a rather elegant solution to this:
One of the distinct advantages of working down here is the amount of skills that we all cover, and the ability to learn from one another. I have been learning how to recondition and rebuilt an engine from a Ski-Doo recently, with the generous coaching of Curly, the vehicle mechanic.
One of the big things that has kept a few of us busy over a number of weekends is the Antarctic film competitions. They are run by some people at McMurdo, the large US base, and are open to any wintering Antarctic base. We entered films into both categories of the competition -- the Open category is for a 5 minute film based on something Antarctic related, and the 48hour category is for a 5 minute film which has to be made over 48hours, and contain 5 particular elements. This winter, those elements were the character Popeye, the sound a dripping tap, a t-shirt with a chocolate bar on it, a saw, and the line of dialogue "which I imbibed rapaciously".and our Open Category entry, the Lost Diary:
This version of the Lost Diary is the long, "directors cut". We severely cut it down for entry into the competition. For interest, the shorter version is available at http://youtu.be/dGqqPjiI5kY
