Storms and brou, ha ha!

Thursday, April 15: High: 18F Low: 8F Length of Day: 18h 58m
Friday, April 16: High: 19F Low: 17F Length of Day: 19h 19m
Saturday, April 17: High: 23F Low: 15F Length of Day: 19h 41m

Thursday morning, at 7:30am, the staff come through the hotel banging on all the doors, making sure we are all in our rooms. A storm has popped up, and we have advanced to a storm level of charlie. This means that we are all stuck in our quarters and cannot leave the building. It's snowing, but the real problem is the wind. At times, the gusts get to 75 MPH which creates blizzard conditions.

The hotel has MREs to eat and beer to keep us entertained. The MREs are disgusting as far as I can tell, but I don't have to eat them because I have food in my fridge. The odd hours I'm keeping means that I'm eating at hours when the mess hall isn't open, so I've got a fully stocked fridge. I had also been gearing up to make a chicken stir fry, which took me about a week to find all the ingredients on base. Of course, how I'm gonna make food in front of a bunch of starving men without them rushing me is beyond me. But Friday night, I make up as much stir fry as I can. I feed 4 other people with my leftovers and left a bunch of chopped up vegetables on the counter for people to munch on. Next morning, I made eggs with spinach, bell peppers, and onions. I then make up the rest of my eggs and leave them on the stove. It's all really appreciated because those MREs are really nasty. I'm also really happy that the women have their own restroom because over the next couple of days, the rest of the bathrooms in the place get really nasty too.

During those two days, lots of games were played. I learn to play Ukrainian checkers which involves treating kinged checkers like bishops in chess. You can move them diagonally as far as you like in order to jump the other players pieces. It's an interesting variant. Mike, who's from Ohio, and I teach people how to play Euchre and we spend many hours playing that game. Teaching people to play it reminds me what a great game it is. At one point, an arm wrestling match pops up between the United States and the Ukraine. I don't know who won, but there was lots of yelling involved.

Saturday morning at 2am, the storm alert is raised to bravo which means we can leave as long as we don't leave alone. By 7am, the storm alert is raised to alpha which only requires us to be aware of the weather, and we are back to normal conditions by noon.

I'm happy for the lockdown in a way because I have to make an extra copy of all of CRESIS' data. With all the disk problems we've had, it's decided that another copy will ensure the integrity of the data, so I put these free days to good use copying data. Hopefully one of the three copies will make it back to the states intact.

The storms have also delayed the rotator, which arrives Saturday morning. It brings a couple of dog sled teams from a project called Go North! This project goes on adventures around the world and lets classrooms track them and interact with them along the way. It's a K thru 12th grade teaching project, and the people are very nice. This team is taking dog sleds up to the ice summit in Greenland. Someone tells me that the trip will take several weeks. I make plans to go out and meet their dogs on Sunday. They aren't sure exactly when they are leaving, but are hoping to do so Monday morning. I'm looking forward to checking out their project more, and I send emails to my kids' teachers to see if they will also join in on the project.