Midwinter and midwinter storms!

Well, believe it or not, there's been a LOT going on here! We celebrated our midwinter here and the 50th winter over!

It was quite a lovely evening with a formal, or as formal as you can get, dinner followed by dancing and then live music at our Coffee House. Heather was looking SMASHING!

And I wasn't looking too bad...

That's me and some of my homies. From left, Ben, me, Jason, Ron and Andrew.
But of course, there's always a picture of Heather and me...

That was a great evening and one of those points you mark your memories of this place with.
Another marking point is the storms we have here! Our friend Christine held a pool to see who could predict as close to the date our first "Condition 1" storm! These are the worst of the worst and are times when the station pretty much closes down and you stay home and ride it out. Last year the winds hit 160+ MPH in our worst storm and a few days ago we peaked at 120 MPH! Last night into this morning we had long sustained winds and woke up to a "stay home" message on our pagers. Well, that didn't last but an hour or so and we got the message that the winds had died and it was time to return to work. We all wandered back to our workcenters to shovel out. Here are a few photos of what I had to look forward to outside of my building...




We're still waiting on word about the Port Hueneme jobs and worry a bit that the company may take the good idea they had and tweak it into something... ackward (and I'm being nice when I use that word!). So, holding pattern here for the IRS case, our New Zealand residency application and the Port Hueneme project! I'll keep you posted!
So that's us... halfway through winter now and it's all downhill to sunshine! First flight of winfly is scheduled for August 20th!

Mid June...

Ah, mid June... Cold... Dark... and halfway to Mainbody!

Celebrated our annual "BLACK OPS" party on the 11th, coincidentally Heathers Birthday (here's a picture of Heather when she was only 3)

Heather and I celebrated in usual form...


Yes, the woman in red is Heather... I went for the more subdued/refined look of the mad scientist.

Anyhow, the Black Ops party came about as a result of all the UFO talk about Antarctica, made famous by both the X-files movie and Art Bell radio show about Antarctica. There are also any number of Antarctica UFO connections online...
Nazi UFO's
and more UFO's...
And even MORE UFO's!
Crazy/funny stuff!

So this coming weekend we have an unprecedented extra day off! Yep, another REAL 2 day weekend!! WHOO HOO! To mark the occasion we're having our mid-winter dinner on Saturday the 18th. Great food, great friends, great fun! I'm sure to have some pictures of that to post.

Still waiting on a final verdict for the IRS case although that could come any day. Our lawyer told one of our claimants over the phone that he recently ran into the IRS lawyer for our case and that the IRS lawyer, "congratulated" him for his work on the case! We're hoping that's a good sign of a positive verdict to come!

Heather and I have also put in to work in California for the USAP Program. This is a new project that has yet to be fully approved but if it happened and we were selected we'd be working in Port Hueneme...

Port Hueneme is just north of Los Angeles in the Oxnard area near Santa Barbara.

We'd be helping to receive the incoming cargo that goes on our resupply vessel down here. This would be from mid-October to mid-December and give us free accomodations, rental car and company gas card, per deim for food as well as our current rate of pay, plus overtime for anything above 8 hours a day! Not a bad deal and could be the downpayment we need on our first house in New Zealand!
While we're not too excited about working extra on our time off Ice, this would likely be a one time deal for us and a backup plan should we lose the tax case. If you gotta do it, it's not a bad way to go!