I found my first grey hair today! There it was, looking at me in the mirror. It is on the very top of my head, and is white for about the first ½ inch and the rest of the strand is brown. It kind of looks like Rosalind’s hairs. I am very proud of it. I feel like I crossed another bridge on the road of life….
Strangely enough, the past few days have been incredibly stressful. I’ve been busy beyond compare for the greater part of the season, but now it’s finally getting to me. It seems like for every one mediocre thing I resolve, 3 really important things suddenly appear that I have to deal with. I am really looking forward to the upcoming 2 day weekend. I hope I am able to relax and enjoy it and I don’t end up working too much. Happy Thanksgiving to All!

Another fabulous week on the ice! It started out with even more residents doing foul things we janitors had to clean up. Then we tried to use our brand new, super industrial walk-behind floor sweeper and the first time we plugged in the battery to recharge it, it exploded! I’ve been inundated with paperwork ever since, and to top it off, the whole event is under review! Then a worker got injured; more strife and paperwork. Just when I finished my week of medication, my body fought back with a sore throat and even more fatigue! The infection seems to be mostly gone, but now I am on a variety of medications, 6 different ones, to be exact, all a different color! That comes to a total of 15 different pills I take a day! What am I, 98 and in traction? Aw, well. How I sacrifice myself for the better of my employer!
I watched an Antarctic movie by NOVA at the coffee house. The title was misleading. “The secrets of Antarctica.” Sounds like fun, right? Well, it turns out the whole movie was about global climate change over time and the whole idea of cyclical ice ages. That’s such old news. Oh well, you can’t win them all. Someone called for me on the phone in the middle of the movie and the bartender had to call my name to get my attention. This wouldn’t be so exciting, except as I left the couch I had spread myself out on, I discovered a sea of people behind me, standing and sitting on the floor. And I had a whole couch to myself. This seems to be a recurring theme. Again, oh well!
I worked out almost every day. I decided to skip the early morning awakening after working past midnight the night of the explosion, and just didn’t feel the need to work out when my throat woke up before me, trying to convince me that I’m sick.
Friday night I went to the monthly housing party. Rebecca decided to make it a cookie baking party, and I was quite pleased to have the opportunity to bake 6 dozen chocolate chip cookies. It was a thrill. The highlight of the event was that we had real milk and real eggs for the affair. These things are like gold in McMurdo. I had a blast. When I realized it was 11:30 PM and I still had several dozen cookies left, I packaged them up to deliver to folks the next day. After I dropped off my last batch of cookies to friends, I returned to my office to realize I had baked and distributed all these cookies without ever actually trying one for myself! I hope they were good!
Erik called me from Christchurch after he returned from his trip to Fiji. I am convinced I am going to Fiji now after my contract here is done. It sounds just as fun (if not more) and far more affordable than Sydney or Honolulu.
Saturday night I watched Tami and Fred play chess between watching Holly, Jeff and his crew playing Settlers of Catan (and eat their cheese; Cheese that hadn’t been frozen-another rarity!) Then we meandered over to the galley to see “March of the Penguins.” Rec never managed to successfully pop popcorn for us, but I managed to last the whole movie without eating any Frosty Boy (Frozen treat that is supposed to resemble ice cream). As per my goal, I haven’t eaten any Frosty Boy yet this season, and I don’t intend to break my streak. Oh, how I came close tonight, though! “March” was cute. I am surprised a “nature” film did so well in the theatres. It looked so glossed over and perfect, like the movie was filmed at a zoo. Who knows, maybe I would have enjoyed the movie better had it been on a real screen and not obscured by a big white pillar (you have to be there). Well, that’s my week. I am tired and sleepy and I intend to sleep late into the day tomorrow, my one lonely day where I don’t have to wake up at a certain time.

Yeah, I am having some trouble lately with my website. I got a comment on some of the links not working. Over the past week, I tried several things to try to get the pictures loaded before I wrote about them in the blog, but with limited success. I don’t know what the problem is. Either there is something wrong with my FTP, or something that goes wrong during the upload. I doubt there is anything wrong with my FTP process, seeing as I never had any problems before. We do not have a lot of bandwidth here. What he have travels to the states via satellite and it is currently undergoing a huge upgrade. Soon we should see a lot more bandwidth, but it is still measured in KB and this is for voice and date for 1,300 people (including scientists with a lot of data to share). As far as I know one has seen any slowing with uplinks, though. The problems are with the downlinks. There could be problem with my host. I don’t know what that might be. I am running out of disk space. I only have 100 megs left to use, but for now what I want to load is only 50 megs.
A separate thing I need to figure out is whether or not I want to upgrade my service with my host. One thing I could do is change my blog host to one that is maintained on the blog’s server instead of mine. Or I could buy more space. That looks like it would be about $10 a month. That seems like a lot of money for something that is just a hobby (I currently pay nothing for this website except for $5 a year to register the amandaeve.com domain). That may take a while to do since I don’t have enough hard drive space to back up my website if I did decide to upgrade (yeah, I know I need a new computer [I have about 30 gigs of stuff that isn’t backed up between my IPod and my website]) I’m still thinking about that. To make a long story short, yes, there are a lot of broken links on my site now. It will probably be at least a week before I get them fixed as I don’t have a whole lot of time during the week to troubleshoot.
Advice on what to do about my limited space issue is joyfully welcome!!!!!

Here are some pictures of what the store in McMurdo sells. If you would like me to buy you something, just send me an email with the picture number, what you want from the picture, and what size. I’d say the stuff here runs a little small, plus it is all cotton. We can arrange payment then, too. Then, I’ll mail it to you and you, too, can have your very own authentic Antarctican garb! Whew!

This is just something I find a little bit funny. I do enjoy good fashion, and I like to try to look good. But I wouldn’t consider myself particularly trendy, or as a typical mall-hoarding female. My roommate, however, is very east coast. She loves to shop, and loves to admit it! She loves fine shoes. She loves to be covered in pounds and pounds of fashion magazines. She knows the brands, and knows what’s in.
But look at our closets. One closet is jam-packed with clothes, and one is practically bare. Who closet is jam-packed? Mine. It baffles the both of us how I managed to fly down here with so many clothes!

I love EasiYo. This is free advertising for the company, I know, but I can’t help myself. I ordered this dry probiotic yogurt from New Zealand to be shipped to me in McMurdo. It took a while to get to me, 2 months to be exact! And when it did finally arrive, part of the yogurt maker was missing! It’s not the cheapest of yogurts, but it truly is delicious. It has that thick and rich taste all New Zealand dairy products have. It is high in protein and very low in fat. What blows me away though, is the taste. This is plain, unsweetened yogurt that I ordered. It is not tart at all. It has a little bit of sugar in it, but not much, and certainly not enough to merit its good taste. I am so glad to have found this stuff. I am defiantly hooked on it!

Well, I am obviously less busy than I have been being that it is I have time to write!
This has been a pretty okay week. Last night I joined Josh and his painters for bowling. I had a lot of fun. Josh is a really good guy and it was great to let loose and have some fun. A few bands played last night at Gallagher’s, too. I went there after bowling but didn’t find it interesting enough to stay. That and the bar smelled really gross. I moved on to the Coffee House, but I found that bar full of people who I’ve never seen before and had no urge to meet. It was an early night. I think there is a lot of pressure here to have a mind-blowing time on Saturday nights because it is our only night where we don’t have to work the next day. I feel like Saturdays end up having the “New Year’s Eve” feel to them; you know where you feel obligated to have a great time.
I felt like I started to get sick this week. Actually, I feel like I’ve been fighting something off for a long time now, and whatever it is has just been colleting in my sinuses. For fear of actually getting full-on sick, I went to medical. The physician prescribed me an array of decongestants and gave me some saline mist. Since I was there, I have my liver enzymes checked again. They were high when I PQ’d in July, so a re-check was due. Luckily, all my readings were much lower than they were in July. They weren’t perfect, but they were low enough to dispel and alarm.
The biggest thing that stands out about this past week is the overwhelming feelings of fatique I battled. I was so tired every day! I had a lot to do at work, and I worked hard without taking any naps, but by the time I got home after dinner in the evening, I had absolutely nothing left in me. Not even anything left to watch TV! I just fell asleep. When I look at why I was so tired, I see a few potential reasons. I did feel like I was fighting a cold all week, and that may have worn me out. I also started working out this week as well, and that may have made me extra tired. There is also the possibility of my working so much getting to me too, or maybe I am bored and that’s why I felt so tired. At any rate, I hope I was tired because of feeling sick, because it seems like that would be the easiest thing to fix. After I started taking the decongestants, I did start draining, so I hope this bug is on its way out. I spent a lot of money on vitamins and things to boost my immune system and I will be sad to find out they don’t work!
My left arm started hurting, too. I’ve been at my desk so much, on the computer, that I am certain the pain is from my chair. The arms of my chair are not adjustable, so they bump into my keyboard and I have to sit and type in an awkward position. I tried to get a different chair last year when this happened. So, now I am trying to do the same thing this year.
No one has recovered my keys. I never expected to get them back, and I really don’t now. I still have my signs up, though. I am not sure when I will take them down. Maybe I’ll just leave them up all season to be obnoxious…. You can view the sign I posted if you have Microsoft Word.
On a better note, I am very happy with my workouts! I worked out 3 hours this week. I stayed exactly where I planned to be, at 65% of my VO2 Max. It’s hard to do. I have more fun when I feel more aerobic, it’s more exciting. I am trying to counter the monotony of moving so slow by moving slower and adding power to my movements. It’s helping. Also, there is no way I could be doing these workouts with out my IPod. This thing is a godsend! I don’t know how I managed to work out at all last year! So, tomorrow starts week two. I do hope that week two goes just as well as week one. I also thing staying at a low heart rate is a good idea since I am also fighting off a bug. I didn’t work out on the tow days I felt the sickest this week. But I worked out double today to make up for it! I am very happy about this new activity, and I hope to continue it!