*footnote/gloss/fine print
1) I will be a Fuels Operator, performing such duties as transferring diesel from storage tanks to buildings around town, driving a big ol' truck to deliver fuel, dispensing jet fuel to airplanes, laying out and checking hoses, and helping offload the annual resupply tanker ship.
2) This is an opportunity for me to advance my, uuhhh, nascent mechanical skills. I mean, I did take shop class (one trimester) in 7th grade, and I did (eventually) figure out (and subsequently forgot) how to dismantle and reassemble a commercial deli slicer in my (wait for it...) salad days (haha).*
3) Next season will be somewhat/rather/wildly complicated by the coronavirus. The details are being hashed out, but it's likely the program will scale back projects and personnel.
4) No one really knows when New Zealand is going to allow anyone to enter the country again. Having only recently escaped, I can verify that they have zero interest in a bunch of germy people transiting through their stringently protected island oasis.
*footnote to the footnote
So I actually learned how to take apart and clean and put back together a deli slicer working at a deli when I was 17. Among other things, I made salads at this deli. And then my first season at McMurdo I used Shreddie Vedder, the industrial salad shooter slicer in the so-called Salad Room, which necessitated me drawing (I am terrible at drawing) the five or so components that you screwed it to make the blades work, and describing for myself in my notebook at length what I thought they looked like and how they fit together because just looking at the metal parts in my hands each time it was like I had never seen them before. Normally I hate terrible puns, but those were ACTUAL salad days. :p
Last October, I was fixated on photographing a certain image that never quite worked out. Out at the airfield, maybe six or seven of these sled-trailers with fuel tanks were parked in a line about fifty feet apart. They had circular holes in the metal braces (which you can barely make out on the lower left of the tank); you could look through one and see the next tank, and then through its hole to see the next tank. I'm not sure if any camera or depth of field would show more than one, given their distance apart. But trust me, it looked cool.
It will be an interesting season, no doubt. I'll be closing valves! Analyzing samples! Turning giant wrenches! Legit working outside, south of the Antarctic Circle! And the isolation will take on a new tone. I'm guardedly optimistic for next October -- a rare commodity at present. And I'm duly optimistic about spending a long chunk of time this summer with a certain guy of noted quality. That's right, no updates from Alaska this year, but yes reports of hiking and cooking and fun.
