Flight Ready!

Thursday we declared "flight ready," meaning that if an opportunity to launch was available for tomorrow we could do it.  In practice, this means that we can still fool around with the detector, letting it run on the ground, tuning various components.  And all that fooling around, plus various adventures, has led to my negligence regarding this blog.  I apologize, Dear Readers, and offer this meager replacement for the missing daily posts.

At work, I have been working with Stephane diligently doing final tuning of the veto system. I am happy to say that it is finely tuned! I have every expectation that the system will veto anything and everything charged trying to get through our detector.  Documentation is posted, plots are made, and fingers are crossed.

Yet another shot of the CREST gang, in UM maize and blue

The weather here has been gray and snowy. As a result, there has not been much fun going on. I continue to be sleep deprived since my roommate goes to bed late and gets up early... but wait! There's more to this story:  Gray and snowy means that flights on and off continent are delayed and/or cancelled. Or both.  Remember last post I said two colleagues were leaving Thursday?  One was my roommate.  He is still here (Saturday night)!  The other one got out just today.  My roommate has been on the manifest of four flights so far, and even showed up this morning (after getting me up at 5:30) for transport to the airfield only to be told he was bumped for some med evac cases.  His flight for tomorrow is cancelled, so his original departure of last Thursday is now scheduled to be same as mine: Monday morning. Will we make it?  Weather is still supposed to be marginal, so who knows?  This blog may get more entries than I intend.  I "bag drag" (deliver my baggage) for my Monday morning flight Sunday (tomorrow) afternoon at 4pm. I will have then (our term:) "bug drug."  That doesn't mean I will get out. My roomie has been living out of his carry on for the last few days. He is "bag draggled."

There have been a few fun things going on. We took part of last Thursday to have the last song of the Long Drops, our group band at the hanger.  There was some very creative percussion going on.  We took another group photo, this time with the University of Michigan-supplied fleeces (CREST logo, maize and blue) in front of the McMurdo sign. You can see the weather is poor.  Also, I toured the pressure ridges (a blog post about it soon) and last night I played guitar for the first McMurdo Area Country Hoedown and Square Dance.  What great fun!  We had about 20 extremely enthusiastic dancers, and I and Collin the fiddler (remember him?) played til our fingers hurt, over two hours.  I don't have any pictures myself, but I am hoping to get some from others soon.