Land of Milk and Honey

If you're not an early explorer that suffered frostbite and unimaginable deprivation, Antarctica is a sort of promised land, a land of endless sensual delights.  Ok, I tend focus a lot on the food-related ones, but also: alternating snowflakes and warm sunshine on your face; the smell of fresh cedar in the sauna; color-spectrum-expanding electric blue ice; hypnotically soothing wave action washing over the stony coast.

It's getting to be that time of year all the good free stuff shows up in Skua.

Anyway, back to food (and drink).  We have been enjoying apples and broccoli every day now.  Other people get really into the return of salad; give me three apples a day.  I brought some wine and a variety of candy to share at dinner one night, but the real key to spreading joy and increasing your popularity is doling out a giant box of ice cream.  Despite Frosty Boy, our beloved non-dairy frozen dessert, there is no actual ice cream.  There is some at the South Pole, though sources tell me it is stored in close proximity to gasoline and you have to dig out the center to minimize the off-taste. A lucky few folks out in the field get a half-gallon to, say, celebrate an otherwise culinarily lackluster holiday in a tent in the middle of nowhere.  Scott Base down the hill, however, knows what they're doing, and built an entire room just for ice cream.  That is where the invaluable giant box came from, ten sacred pounds of Hokey Pokey, delicate vanilla studded with golden nuggets of toffee.

Just to be clear, the contents of this shipping container will

defoliate trees and suck fish out of the water upside-down.

And brunch is back.  The resupply boat finally pulled out of harbor in the early morning hours, unfreezing alcohol sales, bringing a reprieve from gangbusters work scheduling, and making way for the enormous platters of cheese and donuts that assuage the tumult of another week.  I am quite a happy lady with creamy and sharp wedges, maybe a gherkin or two.

In fact, the only way improve upon brunch might be a select second seating, with a picnic blanket, on top of a hill, the better to watch for whales in the open waters before you.