Happy New Years!

So we had new years and I guess its 2007 now. It was acutally a fun day. It was yesterday for us and on new years eve day, we had what is known as Icestock. It was an all day event where they set up a big stage and had bands playing all day. There was also a chili cook off that was pretty cool. Out behind my doorm which is the main building here, they set up a stage and about 12 shipping containers and each department set up there booth for the chili in a container...ex. Heavy shops had one, janitors had one and so on. We had three guys from our firehouse play in the concert and they were actually one of the better bands. They did a few cover songs from
the goo goo dolls, dispatch and three doors down. All in all the day was fun. About dinner time we were all ready for bed but we took a quick nap and then headed over to the other side of the island to the kiwi base for the new years celebration.

It was a good time, they had a good turnout over there. After that about 4 of us caught a van back to mcmurdo and went over the the air guards doorm and hung out in their "bar". It was a really good time seeing that the pilots are some of the only people on station that like us haha. We had a good discussion over a few drinks about our rules for the landing scores. I dont know if ive talked about it but when the hercs land we have a binder with 1 through 10 on paper and we grade them based on a strict criteria. Grades are based on many things. If they land quick and taxi off quick they get higher scores and if they do "sight seeing" and fly over mcmurdo a bunch of times and make us wait they lose points. For the flgihts that get in after midnight the highest score they can get is a seven because that means we have to wake up for it. They can up their score buy holding the nose up for a long time on landing, landing with the cargo doors already open, whiting out the runways and taxiways by reving the throttles when taxing in, and landing with only 3 or 2 props, if they have engine failures. They get an automatic 10 if they land with an engine on fire though. Its actually a fun game and funny to watch them get mad in the cockpit if we give them a bad score. All in all it turned out alright. A huge storm blew in after midnight and it was a condition 1 storm today (which is the worst classification) when we went to work. That means everything is shut down. We had to come out to the airfield though to replace A shift so we were the only vehicles aloud out. Now I am here and hopefully we dont get stranded out here tommorow. someone left the window cracked in our big tank looking fire truck out here at the runway so we had to clean some snow out of the cab when we got out here. In storms like this if there is the slightest crack the craziest thing happens and it snows inside.