nostalgia for summer (or: i'm ready to go!)

[photos are from the last week of our brief summer in montana, taken with my thrifted vivitar]

We have WEEKS left.  Not months, but just mere weeks.  A little under four, which is perhaps, in some books, still a month, but I'm counting them as weeks because I am ready to get off this continent and COOK, SMELL LIVING THINGS, WALK BAREFOOT, LOOK AT STARS, PET A CAT, CHOOSE WHAT I WANT TO DOOO!  Yikes.  I'm ready to be done, can you tell?

But, before we leave, we have one really amazing, truly spectacular, once in a lifetime adventure coming up, and we get to do it together.  We leave tomorrow.  When I get back I will fill you in with pictures (I'm even busting out the cranky old Instax for this one) and hopefully a video.  Very, very exciting!  I will just say (and I should stop bc I'm already saying too much) that it's incredible that we have the opportunity to go to this place, period, let alone that it's the two of us.  Yep.  Stay tuned!

Also, just for funsies, here is a wildly embarrassing but just-too-silly-to-not-share video that I made for these dumb weekly safety meetings we have down here.  Usually the safety meetings involve somebody talking for far too long about stuff they don't really know about.  So I tried to keep mine short & sweet while invoking a few giggles.

Self Esteem with Doctor Apricot from Elizabeth Endicott on Vimeo.

play and sing good [or: happy new year, a week late]

Have you seen this?  It's Woody Guthrie's New Years Rulin's from 1943.  I love it so much.  Next year, my resolutions will look a lot more like this. 

Down here, the name of the game is safety.  There are safety presentations, safety lectures, safety committees, safety meetings.  At a recent safety meeting, (and don't ask me how these are related) we had to sit through a woman talking about her personal resolutions.  They were things like "be open" and "see more," which aren't bad ones, but she was essentially saying that she doesn't think people should make specific goals for themselves because those ones are black and white if you fail them.  So she recommended making these broad, nebulous goals.  Well, safety lady, I don't agree!
Here are my concrete goals for this year, and I plan to black and white accomplish them!

1. Publish a photograph or short piece of writing.  This can be in a newspaper, a magazine, some credible online format, etc.
2. Start making videos, a la this one.  I'm going to be roaming around in some pretty incredible scenery this year, so why not branch out creatively?
3. Fix up my resume so that it is really, really good.  Not crappy like it is now.
4. Hike to Everest base camp.  Our tickets are already purchased for Nepal, but I'm putting this here because it still feels like such an unattainable monolith of an adventure. 
5. Learn how to play a song on an instrument while singing it.  Eek!  Double whammy!  If I get confident, this will become a triple whammy, in that I have to perform it in front of someone(s).

There you have it, shmeeples.  It's official.

p.s. Check out our 2011 photo roundup over at Weird Birds.

Antarctic Date Night

It's a quiet week here in McMurdo.  We've been enjoying each other's company after the 10 day, 900 mile separation.  These are a couple of pictures of our date night, which involved Scrumpy, seals, and snuggles - as all good Antarctic date nights do.  Go check out Weird Birds for more pictures.

Mud Season

The changing of the seasons in McMurdo Station, Antarctica looks a lot different than I had grown used to in New England or Montana.  We're reaching the pinnacle of summer down here, which means one thing: mud.  All of the snow melts for about a month and reveals town as a mud pit.  Janitorial life involves a lot more floor maintenance.  Sweeping away from the sides of the hallways creates a red carpet of dirt for people to walk down.  In this brief period, the puddles still freeze at night, creating beautiful, intricate patterns of ice amid the brown grunge. 

5 Happy Things

 This glorious bed in a glorious room shared with a glorious man, looking out on glorious Antarctica.

 Making ouchies fun and cute.

 My (very picked over) table at the craft fair.  My friend Gabe was nice enough to provide moral support throughout the ordeal, which was in the middle of my night, since K was out at WAIS Divide.

 While spending our first anniversary 1,000 miles apart was certainly not ideal, finding a scavenger hunt of hand painted clues leading to this amazing note and highly coveted elephant earrings was very, very special.

Time spent with these dudes is always full of adventures and giggles.

I'm feeling pretty content with a big full heart lately.

South Pole!

How has it been over a month since I last posted anything?  It's been so busy here, with both of us doing a bit of traveling, getting new people situated on the crew, the big craft fair, and celebrating a year spent together.  All very exciting things, which I hope to post about in the coming days.
I got to visit the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station for five days in preparation for the centennial celebrations of Roald Amundsen's arrival at Pole.  I think it's as close as an earthling can get to being on a space station without actually leaving this planet.  K got to spend a week out at the WAIS Divide field camp at the same time.  Go read about these adventures at Weird Birds!

Apparently I like to sleep, etc.

 We've switched to night shift, which I wasn't very excited about, but it's proven to have a lot of unexpected pro's.  One of which is that the nights are filled with colors like this, as the sun has stopped setting, but rolls sleepily along the horizon every night, setting the sky ablaze.  Station is also quieter, and though we have far less opportunities to hang out with friends, we have more time to do the things that often got pushed by the wayside, like journaling and drawing and reading.  Go check out Weird Birds for a rather amusing post about transitioning to night shift, as we wrote it in the delirium of exhaustion.

Here's a picture of a Valentine's Day card I made while transitioning.  The janitors of Antarctica and zappos.com have struck up a rather hilarious relationship, involving shout-outs on customer service lines, signed books, and now we have sent them a large bundle of homemade cards.  Mail is surprisingly efficient considering we're at the bottom of the world, but just in case, we chose the closest non-religious holiday.  Yeah, that's an interactive card of hearts punching each other :)

Also, I had a revelation while perusing the gorgeous photographs of Lily Stockman's studio.  If I could have one thing beyond the things I already have in life, it would be one little room to make things in.  That's it.