Short Sunday update

Hello!
I have a lot of things to write about and not enough time to sit down and write it all up.
I went to snow school for two days (January 2-3), where we learned the basic survival skills and I am not allowed to actually go to stations and do field work, Yay! I am also preparing to go West Antarctica on January 9th, so Lee and I processed some cargo shipments for that.

The weather has been continuously warm, so we are still having troubles with the runway. Planes are taking off and landing now (mainly because we can not afford so many people being backed up), but it is a pain to get to the runway as the road is in the really bad condition. As a result we are also canceled even more often then "usually" for our day trips to visit the AWS stations - it takes us so long to get to the runway and back that unless we start first thing in the morning we can not return on time for the pilots to have their rest.

Yesterday (Saturday, January 5) was one of those days, when we were supposed to fly, got all ready and did not have a "go".  We were scheduled to go to one of the most magnificent AWS sites - the Alexander Tall Tower!, but a combination of bad weather on site in the morning and a long drive out to Pegasus runway resulted in us being stuck in McMurdo.
 
This is my photo-response to the situation:

(I just wanna fly already. I am proud to say that I took this picture myself - on a timer. 

Granted it took be about  twenty tries to get the jump somewhat right ;) Well, my flight was canceled, so I had some time ;)

I am really hoping not to get canceled again tomorrow, but if I am - I promise to write another post.
Thanks for reading!
Masha

PS Zozo says hi. He's happy to report he saw some penguins today (Sunday, January, 6). I will have to sort through pictures and hopefully post some of them here!