Creation of Penguin

So today is one day later than I stayed last year.  People should be leaving by the hundreds, but our usual runway is a soggy puddle and we can only use smaller, slower Hercs to fly to New Zealand instead of Airbuses.  I'm not due to leave for another week anyway, but the backlog of people grows every day as weather and allowable weight keeps town full.  It's probably just chance, but the temperature dropped about 15 degrees (it's 1F, with -27F windchill) and you can tell summer is waning fast.  The first sunset will be Saturday night/Sunday morning, around 1am.  I plan to watch it dip down and hope for colorful clouds.

Penguins have been thin on the ground this season, but we did have two nice instances that nearly everyone was able to see.  One day a penguin walked all around town, pausing at the McMurdo sign and to stare at the Coffee House.  Another day, a little guy got it in his head to waddle uphill and take a nap about 100 feet above the beach.  Word spread that he was hanging out, so I approached -- cautiously, of course, not to disturb it -- and got within about ten feet.  He rested his eyes and occasionally squawked and preened.

The ice has cleared out a few more miles into the sound, and is seething with steam in the colder mornings, as well as today.  There's a section of beach, where the waves roll the rocks up and down and you can see a marked variance with the tides.  The waves have washed the remaining ice on shore into a slick slab.

There were a slew of last events, bands performing, goodbye parties, and even my terrible company paid for some decent beers for us to all bond over.  In gloopy food news, I made some sloppy Terrence, with textured vegetable protein instead of beef; also, we may have stumbled across the secret formula for Velveeta in our attempt to make nacho cheese from american slices and dehydrated milk.  Once it cools it becomes a perfect colloid, moldable yet yielding.  And unfortunately also gloopy, cases upon cases of red onions must have frozen and thawed and then molded before they got to us, which called for the removal of foul squishy layers to retrieve the still-edible nuggets within.

I may have mentioned this before, but there's a dining attendant friend who makes stunning illustrations for our bulletin board.  Every morning when I'm sandy-eyed and bilious, I perk up a little as I walk up to his daily creation.  This is just one of many fantastic pictures: