Mmm... two minute showers...

You know you've been at the south pole too long when the highlight of your week is a two minute shower. At least the water was warm.

Tuesday, I finished filming the movie for SPIFF and I edited it on wednesday. I showed it to the guys who made it and a few random others and everyone really liked it. I know it's too early to start talking awards, but...

After dinner on wednesday, I had a quick band practice, followed by pub trivia. It was our week to host pub trivia so I wrote 12 questions about horror/monster movies. It was a lot of fun. Justus' category was still shots from movies where someone edited out the person's skin so all you had was the background and their clothing to guess the movie. It was kind of an easy round, but totally a lot of fun. The first round was done by Phil and every question was about military history. The scores were very low. Another round was done by Don, registered Canadian, and it was all about people on money from around the world. Aside from it being canadian biased, it was just plain hard. People seemed to enjoy it, though. How could they not? The prizes are beer!

After pub trivia, a few of us watched the movie Primer. I think I decided that I didn't like it. It's hard to tell since you have no idea the entire time what the hell is going on. It's essentially about a group of silicon valley nerds inventing a time-travel machine in their garage, but it totally throws causality to the wind. It was totally some pretentious sciencey-nerd's idea of a way to look cool to people who don't know more than him. It's like if I made a movie...

After a disappointing movie and weak beer, I went to sleep.

Yesterday, after turning in the movie, I actually finished some data analysis that had been giving me trouble for over a week. That took pretty much all day, but after dinner I was able to sneak in a half hour band practice and then played volleyball until almost midnight. The band is really starting to come together.

Concert and film festival are tomorrow night. It's going to be a crazy night. Parties like this are few and far between and the station really comes together and has a blast.

There are some very interesting people down here. Yesterday, I had a long conversation with my friend Mark. Mark has to be in his 50's by now if not older and has come down here every year for the past decade. He's also the guy I jammed with a lot last year, and the one responsible for getting me plugged into music down here. He was telling me about seeing Pink Floyd in germany in 1972 (before Dark Side of the Moon even came out). He also saw the Grateful Dead in 1970... just incredible. Mark works here for 4 months out of the year, then travels for months, then resumes a job back home for about 6 months. There are a lot of people who do that. They work here for a few months and save up enough money to travel for the rest of the year. It's pretty incredible.

Our winter-over should be getting in today, weather permitting, so there will be another hand to help with the telescope.