The stories I really want to tell are the ones I never seem to be able to put into words.

Last week I had one of the Top 10 most memorable experiences here in Antarctica. However, all I wrote about this trip was a couple of pictures a few words and a promise I'd get back to telling "The Rest of the Story."

This week the story has not been able to write itself, either in my head or on the computer about how this trip, the flagging trip out to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) site happened.

My plan to write about the flagging was to compare our 24 mile journey to some of the explorations from early Antarctic explorers like one of the men from Robert Scott's party named Apsley Cherry-Garrard or the Australian Douglas Mawson.

Mawson and his crew brought down what could be described as the first airplane to Antarctica. With every ounce of weight meaning life or death, the inability for their plane to work down here was devastating.

I was just reading about Mawson today in the book "Mawson's Will" by Lennard Bickel. At one point in the story, Mertz, one of Mawson's sledging partners, says through the haze of frostbite, dysentery and a steady diet of malnourished huskies, "Am I a man-or a dog?" Then Mertz bit off his little finger that was yellow from frostbite.

What if their plane had worked? Or, what if on our trip out to the CTBT, the Pisten Bully we were riding in broke down.

Is there really a comparison to traveling 24 miles in a heated vehicle to plant flags for a Nuclear War Test Ban Treaty to chewing off your own finger? I couldn't really find one, so I wrote about ghosts.

Cherry-Garrard wrote the book "The Worst Journey in the World." This story told the account of hiking in the dark in the middle of the Winter to Cape Crozier. His hike took him from my neck of the woods, McMurdo, across Windless Bight (where we were flagging) and then over to Cape Crozier where a colony of emperor penguins live. One of the many or the main goal of their journey was to collect penguin eggs.

Another reason I haven't put into words the story about my trip out to Windless Bight is because it's been a couple of years since I've read "The Worst Journey in the World," some of the details are a bit hazy as to what happened exactly to Cherry-Garrard or his reasons for needing to get to Cape Crozier in the middle of the Winter.

Even small details like: should the word "Winter" be capitalized? In my opinion, if you've lived through a Winter in Antarctica, then you should respect what a Winter here can do. If you don't think "Winter" is a proper noun down here, then you very well could get your ass properly kicked.

My memory says that Cherry-Garrard needed to see the emperor penguin colony in the middle of the Winter because the film March of Penguins had yet to be released. Or, maybe it was because nobody had collected an emperor penguin egg at this point in history and they felt these penguins' eggs could be the missing link in Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

Cherry-Garrard wore thick glasses and his glasses would freeze making it nearly impossible for him to see. His glasses were like staring through the bottom of a frozen Coke bottle. On his hike out to Cape Crozier he nearly fell into a crevasse because his glasses were full of ice and his daytime didn't have a sun.

I also wear glasses and I have been on hikes in the middle of Winter where my glasses froze and the only way to see was by removing my glasses, the world became blurry therefore-I couldn't see. Removing my glasses didn't cause me to almost die, but I hiked so slowly I almost missed dinner.

(McMurdo is approximately one-quarter of a square mile. Getting 12 miles out of town will be the farthest point that I will travel in the next seven months. Think about it: 12 miles. This story may or may not continue. Chances are I'll use this trip as a memory to get me through the darkest parts of Winter, when that happens, I suppose you'll get the rest of the story.)

Last year Sir Edmund Hillary came to McMurdo and in front of a packed crowd of Antarcticans in the Galley, Hillary told us stories about how it felt to be the first person to climb Mt. Everest in 1953. He spoke fondly of his climbing companion Tenzing and what it was like to be the only foreigner at Tenzing's funeral.

Sir Ed came to McMurdo station last November because it was the 25th anniversary of a plane crash at Mt. Erebus. A flight Sir Edmund Hillary was scheduled to be on.

On November 28, 1979 a sight seeing plane left Auckland Airport in New Zealand to fly over Antarctica. Hillary was supposed to be on that flight to give people a first hand account about life in Antarctica, by regaling stories about his Trans Antarctic expedition and reaching the South Pole in 1958.

Hillary was too busy to take this flight, so he turned the sight seeing duties over to his good friend Peter Mulgrew. Years after Peter's death, Hillary married Peter's wife. Unfortunately, the two had quite a bit in common, because Hillary's wife and daughter were killed in a plane crash in Nepal.

Seeing Hillary was like watching living history. First, we get to meet Sir Edmund Hillary. Second, he's here to commemorate a horrible accident in which 257 people died. Thirdly, one of those people should have been Sir Ed, instead, it's his friend who dies, and then Sir Ed finds love in this tragic turn of events.

All of these stories we get to hear first hand, and then someone in the audience asked, "Is it true you saw the ghost of Ernest Shackleton at Cape Royds?

"Yes," the Sir said, "it's true." Then he told us the story about going to Ernest Shackleton's hut about 15 miles from McMurdo. He said he was the first one through the door and he immediately felt like he was being watched. And that's when he saw the captain of the Endurance, staring at him from across the room.

I believe him. I've seen things. Things I would never mention. I've passed a psychological examination, so there must be an explanation.

I wonder if Sir Ed passed the same examination?

It's not because the isolation does wacky things to our brains. Or because the cold makes our breath look eerie. It's because we all have stories. The Library is haunted, I've heard. Items in the freezer move when no one is around. A janitor, this summer, got locked in a bathroom when she was alone and cleaning the Coffee House.

In the night--and soon all 24 hours of the day will be night--things go bump.

The crosses of the people who came and died before I showed up in Antarctica litter the landscape around here. There's the cross for Robert Scott and one for the driver of a D-8 Caterpillar that crashed through the Ice. There's Vince's Cross and there's Mt. Erebus.

Tonight I am working at the Library. Working can certainly be a misnomer, because in the two nights I've worked at the Library, there has never been a single patron. Zero. Zilch. Just me and the ghosts.

Too many horror movies are based off of the premise I am currently living to not be just a little bit jittery. The remote Antarctic Science Station, shut off from society, alone in a library--the scare factor nearly writes itself.

Sure tonight's apparition just might be the heater turning on or the wind howling outside the door, but what about tomorrow's ghost? Do you think for a moment, even though I'm facing the door, that I haven't looked over my shoulder at least 18 times looking for tomorrow's ghost?

If Shackleton is or was well read wouldn't a library be much more hospitable than a...ah shit.

There's someone or something at the door. I've got to go.

Yesterday 12 people from McMurdo were lucky enough to flag a route. This is kind of the construction or road crew version of the highway department for Antarctica.

Right now I don't have time to write about the 12 lucky people chosen to go out on this project, because directly after spending 10 hours working outside flagging a route there was a poker tournament at Southern Exposure.

Coincidentally, out of the 12 people lucky people who joined the poker tournament, I'm currently in first place. The worst I can do is come in second place in this double elimination tournament.

Then I slept for 7 hours and worked for 10 hours and after work the New Zealand base about one and a half miles from McMurdo sponsored a Trivia Night. My team came in first place.

Now it's time to go to bed, work 10 hours and look forward to a day off two days from now.

In the mean time, here are a couple of photos from our trip out to a place called Windless Bight (sp?). At Windless Bight there are a series or several or one big microphone that monitor large explosions, such as nuclear or earthquakes, but mainly nuclear, that might take place on planet earth.

We had just finished lunch and were putting on our coats when Shandra asked, "Phil, do you have any rope?"

I think she meant, "Do you have any rope in your room?" because she was really surprised when I said, "Yes" and then pulled 12 feet of nylon rope out of one of the seven pockets in my Carhart pants.

The rope-that's just in one pocket. I also carry two notebooks. One notebook is a Green Brain. The Green Brain is a green notebook issued to us when we arrive in Antarctica because we need a paper back up system for the times that our brains freeze. The Green Brain in my left front pocket is for writing down my day-to-day duties and things to remember about work. Since business and pleasure don't mix, I carry a Moleskin notebook in my right front pocket to keep track of observances , important events and the names of the people I know.

Honestly, it's necessary to write down such trivial items like names, because soon my brain will be like an overdue library book-"checked out." I also carry an assortment of pens, a mechanical pencil (I prefer to write in pen, but when the pen freezes I use the pencil) and a pager. Temporarily, the chances are good, that I'll also have a lollipop or few in my pocket as well.

Even though I've given up on eating Lemon Heads, my great weakness, in the world of hard candy, are lollipops. The company store just put out their new supply of candy, and Lolly Pops were heralded with much pomp and circumstance. Because of the lollipops, I also carry with me a canker ridden mouth and some very sore teeth.

The most useful thing I carry is my Leatherman multi-purpose tool. Knife, screwdriver, pliers, bottle/can opener, file, scissors this thing has it all and not a day goes by that I'm not cutting up, putting together, screwing around or opening a bottle.

The most important thing I carry is a candy bar. Every jacket I own has a candy bar in the pocket, because the first time I was down here a candy bar saved my life at the South Pole. My friend Kevin gave me that lifesaving candy bar, and he said, "Only eat this in case of an emergency."

The first day I arrived in Antarctica this year, I met Kevin at the Coffee House, and he handed me another candy bar, "Put this in your coat," he said.

Even though I had only been in Antarctica for five hours I said, "I'll put that one in my jacket, because I already have a candy bar in my coat."

With all of these items, it can take me about an hour to get ready and leave my room.

Yesterday, at work, my job was to go outside to our milvans and take inventory. I had the help of two of our GAs (General Assistants). As we were getting ready to leave the office, my boss, MJ said, "Here Phil, take a radio."

I know my shoulders dropped, and my expression said, "But that's just one more thing to carry and it's unnecessary." MJ insisted that we take the radio in case of an emergency, so I moved my pager to my pocket and hooked the walkie-talkie to my belt.

Once we arrived at the milvans, I put the GAs (Troy and Rachel) to work counting Nalgene bottles. Nalgenes are very desirable plastic bottles for water and whatnots, so we keep this milvan locked just to keep the honest people honest with a simple bolt and Masterlock. Counting the Nalgenes was a better gig because the Nalgene milvan has windows and the door closes to keeping the wind out. You just have to be careful not to slam the door, otherwise the latch on the lock flips over the bolt and you'll lock yourself in.

I left the GAs with the radio and my water bottle, because I thought these would freeze where I was going to be working.

The milvan I inventoried houses all of our flammable and dangerous liquids like propane, chloroform and methanol. The wind was blowing so hard that the milvan door was like a giant metal sail, so I took the 12 feet of nylon rope out of my pocket and tied the door open.

For the next seven hours, I counted chemicals and the GAs counted bottles. I used my Leatherman to open boxes, my pager told me the time, the pens all froze and the pencil kept track of everything I was counting.

We took breaks, because even in the Nalgene room, our water froze, our hands froze, our toes froze and our penmanship became infantile as our motor skills slowly slipped down the thermometer.

At 4 o'clock, the GAs finished counting the Nalgenes, so they brought all of their supplies into my chemicals closet. The wind, the wind, the wind was really stressing my nylon rope and we wanted to finish up and get back into the warmth of the Crary lab because, once again, our water was frozen and so were we.

When we finished counting the chemicals, I looked at their Nalgene paperwork and had a question about bottle # D1827. They said they hadn't found any of this bottle, even though the paperwork said there should be 360.

"Quickly," I said, "Leave our stuff here, we'll pick it up on the way back."

We ran through the wind, and into the Nalgene room, and sure enough there were 360 D1827 bottles, the GAs had simply written this down in a different location. No big deal. We turned to leave and before we even tried the door, we knew that in our rush to get out of the wind, we'd slammed the door shut.

We were locked in.

Troy, the biggest of the three of us, shook and pulled and pried and tried to open the door to no avail.

"Damn."

This was going to be embarrassing, I was going to have to get on the radio and call for help.

There is one person in town, Susan, whose job it is to monitor the radio for 1000 different reasons, and this was going to be reason 1001.

"Susan, can you call the fire department, because I've locked myself and two others in Milvan number 816. We need to be rescued."

I hated to make this call, because the channel to call Susan is listened to by nearly everyone else in town. Soon this pathetic cry for help, would make me the laughing stock of McMurdo.

"Rachel," I said, "hand me the radio. I'll call for help."

"The radio," she said, "is in the chemical milvan. You said we'd pick it up on our way back."

"Damn. Damn. Shit. Damn." Repeat.

I took inventory of my pockets and had two lollipops, one candy bar, three frozen pens and a mechanical pencil. I looked at my pager. It was 4:15 p.m. If we were still locked in there at 4:30 p.m. I was going to declare a candy bar emergency. MJ might notice we were missing at 5:30 p.m. when we didn't come back to work. Then again, maybe she wouldn't.

I also had my Leatherman.

The knife came out, the pliers came out, the screwdriver was summonsed. This door was coming down.

Rachel and Troy got a lollipop and I got busy.

By 4:17 p.m. I broke us free from our Icy Entombment. Thank God I didn't have the radio. I knew that was unnecessary to carry.

Today the weather changed, again, for the worse.

I work in the science building on station, Crary (named after the first man to set foot on both the North and South Pole), and this is possibly the best built structure on McMurdo Station. The doors are heavily insulated, large and metal. Imagine the kind of door that locked refrigerators closed on all 50s style Frigidaires right up until kids dressed in 50s styles jeans and 50s style Daniel Boone caps started locking themselves into the fridge and then suffocated to death because the door locked. Those are the kind of doors I open to go to work every day.

Often when I come into work, I think about the kids who died suffocated and isolated in a dark frozen refrigerator. Soon, when the sun becomes a memory and I'll be living in the dark, I imagine I'll think of those kids every day.

Anyways. Like I was saying.

Today the weather changed, again, for the worse and our science tech, Bec, in the Crary Lab needed to travel slightly out of town to a place called Arrival Heights to check some instrumentations. Partially because the weather was changing and she didn't want to be alone and also because she had to get on top of a roof to check this equipment, she needed a partner--for Safety.

Her husband also works in Crary, but he was busy, so she chose me (don't think of this as winning the lottery, there are only five people in my building all Winter).

Because of the sensitive nature of some of the equipment up there, the road to Arrival Heights is off limits to nearly everyone except Bec. The road was barely visible through the blowing wind, and by the time we arrived at Arrival Heights, the wind was gusting around 40 knots (oh, hey--it's not like I'm trying to get all scientific with "knots" versus "miles per hour" but the instruments at Arrival Heights are all Scientific and shit and they were the ones doing the measuring--not me. It's my understanding that 40 knots is somewhere between 40 and 50 miles per hour) and we had to go up on the roof to dismantle a box to uncover a laser that stares up at the atmosphere and measures, as near as I could understand--Science.

Arrival Heights is higher than McMurdo and 40 knots of wind is the kind of breeze you rest on. I mean, literally. I put my back to the wind and leaned backwards on my heels without falling over in this dreamlike-blowing and floating state, until Bec said, "Are you keen to help me out?" Bec is from New Zealand, she says things like keen. On the drive up she said, "I'm glad you were keen on getting out." And I asked her if she'd ever heard of the phrase "Peachy Keen." She hadn't. Doesn't this seem weird? That's kind of like saying you're a fan of Quentin Tarantino without seeing Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction.

Anyways. Like I was saying.

After Bec made me keenly aware of how cold it was outside and that we had some work to do, we climbed on the roof and got the box down. Back in the building with all of the science equipment, she gave me a tour of her job and all of the science projects she over sees throughout the Winter.

One machine allowed us to listen to a lightening storm in the tropics and another monitored the ozone layer and UV rays. Another computer kept track of the only thing I could understand, and that was the wind. The graphs charted in this photo show the vast fluctuations of wind and temperature here in Antarctica. Each line represents either wind speed, direction, temperature or something else.

Oh, and that's Bec. Isn't she keen?

There is a saying in Antarctica about the weather. The saying says, "If you don't like the weather, just wait an hour and it will change."

I've heard this said about a lot of places, but down here, the change is always for the worse and I seem to remember this--never.

On Sunday I came into work to catch up on some email, the weather was pleasant (8 degrees Fahrenheit) so I only wore a sweatshirt and for only the third time in my Antarctic career, I didn't even need to wear capilene beneath my Carhart pants. Generally, I never know what my day is going to entail, so I figure it's better to over dress and sweat at work, than to under dress and get stuck working outside on a project. That's why I always wear long johns or capilene.

However, this was my day off so I knew exactly what I would be doing. Next to nothing, just writing and drinking coffee. The only need for an extra layer of clothing would be in case I spilled hot coffee on my pants. Capilene could keep coffee off my crotch, other than this, what good would come of it?

At work, about an hour into writing, my friend Tad stopped by.

"Hey Phil," he said. "The women on station are having a party at Hut 10. In two hours a group of guys are going to meet on the back porch of Hut 10 and drink beer. Do you want to show up?"

Drinking beer on a porch with women in the background? How could this not be a good idea.

First off about Hut 10.

Hut 10 is the Ritz Carlton of McMurdo. It would be the Super 8 or Motel 6 in the States with an ensuite kitchen, but down here Hut 10 is the place for private parties. Hut 10 is also where Congressmen and Senators are entertained. Hut 10 is a romantic get away. A private alcove for couples who want to copulate. In case of any wrong doings, Hut 10 is also the Jail, but that's another story.

For some of these reasons, Hut 10 is where the first Women's Only Party (WOP) commenced.

By the time I finished with emails, it was 4 o'clock. I looked out the window and saw the wind had picked up. What I didn't realize was the proverbial one hour had passed and Antarctica had turned down the thermostat. It was now close to minus five with a wind chill of negative 56.

I met up with my seven guy friends and thought the weather would deter us, but they had worked themselves into a beer and testosterone frenzy and were committed to crashing the party, by not really crashing the party.

While I was typing away, these guys were busy thinking and they had come up with "the perfect plan" to disrupt the girls.

Dan said, "Okay, we're going to go to the back porch of Hut 10, drink beer from this cooler and ignore the women."

Seeing that Dan had a large beer cooler in Antarctica, made me think there is a salesman somewhere in this world with an award on his wall that says, "#1 Salesman." Previously, this award went to the guy who sold air conditioners to Eskimos.

We carried the cooler (with ice inside) to the back porch of Hut 10, and then did as planned. We drank beer, drew a picture of a naked lady in the snow and talked about guy things.

I was so poorly dressed that I didn't want to sit down because I thought the synovial fluid contained within the bursae of my knee might freeze, locking my leg in a 90 degree angle Worse yet, not that we really even cared, but the women had the curtains closed so they didn't even know we were outside.

Eventually, after we threw a few beer cans at the window, the ladies party went from dull to slightly less dull when they threw the curtains opened and cat-called at the idiots freezing on back porch.

We ignored them in quite the manly way. I poured my beer into the snow and spelled my name. With our carefully numbered supply of beer cans (littering in Antarctica can cost you about $20,000) we tossed our cans around like we'd become the newest inductees into the white trash hall of fame.

Even though the wind was blowing as much as 29 knots, our cans didn't blow away, because the bottom third was ice. The beer froze before we could finish drinking it. Our lips froze to the can while we were drinking it and even though we all wanted to be warm, no one dared or cared to be the first man to say, "Guys. I'm cold."

It wasn't until we drank/licked all 24 of the popsicle beers, that we slowly beat the blood back into our legs, collected our cans and then walked away from a very long lineage of a "Guy's Only Party" in Antarctica.

Random bits and pieces.

Bit #1. Today Martha and Dave get married. I would have been at their wedding, but I'm in Antarctica--talk about cold feet. Ba dump bump. Thank you very much.

I met Martha and Dave the first time I Wintered down here in 2003. Martha was my dorky friend and Dave was her dorky boyfriend. For eight months Martha and I washed dishes together. By the end of that dishwashing ordeal it was Martha who kept me from going completely insane.

Then in 2004, while Dave was going to school in Nebraska, Martha and I were roommates in McMurdo. If you want to know someone really well, you should do two things. First off, spend 60 hours a week, elbow deep in dish soap and suds, and then, although I'm sure she could have hit me over the head with a four inch hotel pan during our eight months as dishwasher and it would have been justified homicide, she then asked me to live with her for five months.

Needless to say, today is a day that I wish I could transport myself out of Antarctica and to Nebraska to see two of my friends get married.

Bit #2. I cut myself off from Lemon Heads. After eating four boxes in less than seven minutes, I walked into the company store and said to Zoe, the clerk, "I'm all hopped up on sugar, my cheeks have canker sores and my teeth ache from crunching little yellow lemons like my mouth is trying to be the stations only lemonade factory. The first thing about being an addict is that I recognize that I am an addict, so you've got to cut me off from Lemon Heads. This is easy, right now, but tomorrow, after lunch, I'm going to want my four box allowance and you have to be my pillar of strength and say, 'No.'"

Then, I bought a 10 cent piece of gum, because I love that Bazooka Joe humor, and walked away feeling confident in my new "No Lemon Head resolution."

The next day, after lunch, I craved my citrussy candy and cursed the day (yesterday) that I told Zoe to cut me off. The store is located across the hall from where we hang up our coats before entering the Galley, and I noticed that Lady Luck was shining on me like a large Lemony Head. Zoe wasn't working the afternoon shift, Kim was the girl behind the counter. Kim knows I love hard candy, but she didn't know about the Antarctic Lemon Head Treatise. With $2 in one hand and four Lemon Head boxes in the other, I approached the counter at the exact second Zoe came walking out of the back store room. Curses. Busted. No Lemon Heads for me. Now all store employees (both of them) know.

I suppose this is a good thing, because over the Winter we have a doctor and a physician's assistant (PA), but we do not have a dentist. Dentistry falls in the capable hands of our PA, Joe. I think he's only had a few hours of dental training and compared to the few years of school my sister needed to become a dentist, I'm kind of weary. Joe was in the hallway when the commotion known as "Zoe taking my candy away" occurred. Joe said he'd buy me Lemon Heads, he also said he would be excited to try some of his recently learned dental skills on me. He said this in the kind of way that implied: Pain.

Bit #3. Even though, aside from Martha, I hated it when it happened, I worked for 14 months as a dishwasher in Antarctica. From August 2002 to October 2003 I gained skills usually reserved for the mentally challenged or recently paroled from prison. This 14 month period of dishwashing has been referred to down here as "Unofficially the longest time any one person has continually washed dishes in Antarctica."

This week I sent Dave Bresnahan an email and asked him if I could take the "Unofficial" out of my claim. I'm not certain how long it's been that Dave has been coming to Antarctica, but if I found out he originally sailed here with Robert Scott, I wouldn't be surprised. Now, Dave is the Systems Manager of Operations and Logistics at the Office of Polar Programs for the National Science Foundation. To break it down, if Antarctica was a shop that sold hair pieces, then Dave would be the biggest wig.

He said, "If you want to declare yourself as the record holder as the longest serving dishwasher at McMurdo I would be hard pressed to challenge your claim. And who else would do it?"

There you have it, I have officially spent the longest time continually washing dishes on this continent according to the National Science Foundation. One day, I bet, there will be a place here called "Phil's Fork in the Road." Or maybe they'll name the bowl in a mountain after me. Dishwasher's Bluff. That has a good ring to it.

Bit #4. Last night it could almost have been described as "dark." I saw my first star and possibly made a wish on a planet. I hadn't seen a star since January 17th, so I made a really good wish. Knowing how it's been proven that people lose 10-15% of their short term memory over the Winter in Antarctica and also knowing that I lost my short term memory and parts of my mind my last Winter, my wish upon my first star/planet was that Kim or Zoe will forget I cut myself off from Lemon Heads.

From reading my stories, sometimes I feel like I'm on Top of the World--instead of freezing at the bottom. I can write about being a cribbage champ--twice (night shift and Day Time Doubles), the beauty of driving an ugly beast of a vehicle, and cloud cover that looks like the Second Coming is nigh and/or Aliens are watching.

Life isn't always grand. This place, believe it or not, is not Shangri-La.

Last night there was a poker tournament in town. The cost of admission was $40 and 12 people showed up to play. Much like Cribbage or any form of cards, I felt like eleven people were going to go home a loser and I'd walk away with $480. I dressed up, possibly the first time a tie has ever been worn at the degenerate smoking bar called Southern Exposure, because I wanted to look good when the Winner's Photo was taken.

Within two hands I was dealt a pocket pair of queens (virtually unbeatable), and just like that, 12 people arrived for a poker game and eleven people were still playing when I walked out--a loser. Apparently the guy with two 10's in his hand really wasn't bluffing when he called my raises. Sure enough, there was a 10 on the flop. If that's too much poker talk for you, then you really need to spend more time watching Celebrity Poker. Hell, with the craze of Poker, you just need to spend more time watching TV.

Then I went home. Leaving the bar, I didn't feel the need to put on my cap because my dorm is just a short jaunt away. When I got to my room, I felt like I'd swallowed a Slurpee in one big gulp. My frontal lobe was frozen.

The wind. The wind. The wind.

Before I came to Antarctica, I logged onto McMurdo's newspaper called the Antarctic Sun and there was a poetry writing contest in the first issue I read. Every single poem was poorly written and always about the wind. Certainly, I thought there was more to inspire a poet than the wind.

Last night I wrote:

Must you always blow?
Wind.
My hair is messy.
Wind.
Ouch, my corneas just froze.
Wind.
Why is all this dirt in my room?
Wind.
Who left the window open?
Me.
Who took advantage of this opportunity?
Wind.
Hey there
Wind.
Go to Hell and let the Devil have a snowball fight.

Dumb poem, sure, but for some reason I felt inspired. Wind.

Do you remember the cartoon drawing of old man winter, this image of an old man in the clouds blowing winter breezes through his puffy red cheeks. Well last night he was blowing and huffing all of that energy into my room, it was like he thought he could get high if only he blew and toked enough on my bedroom window. He may not have gotten high, but I got cold.

When I got to work, my eyes were puffy and my coffee had only begun to reverse the frozen lobotomy going on in my brain, my friend Alia said, "Your eyes look so sleepy."

"It's not just my eyes. It's my body."

Wind.

Even though the last plane has left Antarctica, there is still one plane in McMurdo that will always be here, this plane is called Pegasus.

About 30 years ago Pegasus, with 80 passengers, crash landed at the ice runway when trying to land in a white out condition. All 80 people survived, but the visibility was so low it took over an hour for the rescue vehicles to find this plane.

Now, we find the plane real easy and once or twice a year groups go out and visit the plane. Nothing like an airplane wreck to bring the community together. The ice runway, where a lot of the planes land and take off, is now called Pegasus, in honor of this plane that we're standing on.

The thing I love about this photo is that I couldn't pick myself out of the sea of red in the photo. Any guesses?

Once you figure out who I am, I think it's obvious by my body language that this photo was taken right after the point in which I had reached the moment when I was ready to go.

"If our eyes were closed the lashes would froze until sometimes you couldn't see."
--------------Robert Service "The Cremation of Sam McGee"

Here is a quick rundown of this last weeks activities.

First off, it's really, really cold. The last plane of the season must have packed up the final remnants of summertime in its cargo bay. Since Winter officially began, it has been officially cold.

Today I am learning to drive a different vehicle called a Pisten Bully (more on this little gem later). In order to get to the building where the training was to take place, I had to walk the proverbial "It was uphill both ways and the wind blew in my face no matter which direction I turned" path.

By the time I got to the VMF, building 143, my eyes were watering and the tear drops were icicles falling off my face. Cold.

And, that's just today's briefing.

You might remember it is my goal to be the best cribbage player on this continent. When I took my psychological examination, the psychiatrist asked what goals I had for the season, and I shared this goal with her. That must have been a correct answer, because here I am (Certifiably Sane) and this week, we had the first Cribbage Championship of the Winter season.

Having already become the Continental Cribbage Champion of the Summer Night Shift workers, I printed up business cards that said, "Phil Jacobsen McMurdo Cribbage Champ (night shift) Call for Lessons" and passed these out to all entrants at the start of the cribbage tournament.

This tournament had a $5 entry fee and we were randomly assigned a double's partner. Fourteen people showed up to play, twelve went home a loser. Put another notch in my cribbage bedpost, because my partner and I won this competition and $35 a piece. If cribbage becomes an Olympic event, maybe they will add a seventh ring to the Olympic flag and let me represent Antarctica. Maybe, just maybe.

Also, I'm all hopped up on sugar. The company store is slowly putting out the new candy we received on the ship that came to shore last month. This week's featured candy is Lemonheads. This is one of the things I really like about Antarctica, not Lemonheads, but the excitement that Lemonheads cause. When I saw we had these in the store, I tried to buy the entire case-All 48 boxes of Lemonheads.

I would never even dream of buying 48 boxes of Lemonheads back in the states, but seeing something new and shiny and yellow and full of sugar creates the highlight of my week.

It's not just me. There is a limit to the amount of Lemonheads you can buy in a day. The limit is 4. In the last three days, I have purchased 16 boxes. Even though the most I should have is 12, I have friends who purchase the candy for me. In return I buy them cigarettes. Cigarette smokers are limited to only two packs a day. We're also limited to one 12 pack of beer a day or two bottles of wine or one bottle of alcohol.

Cigarettes, alcohol and Lemonheads-there are restrictions on all the good stuff.

Hey, we all have our vices.

Finally, I just got back from a meeting and the official count is there are 203 people who I'll get to know quite well over the course of the next six months. There are 69 women and 134 men. My first year down there was a more equal man/woman ratio. Today, It was really obvious in our first all hands meeting how seemingly few women there are this year. They didn't give the average on station, but I bet sitting at 38 I'm smack dab in the middle of averaged age. That must mean I'm old, because McMurdo looks older this year, too.