The Tragedy
I put a lot of time and love into these posts. Sure, the layout is godawful, and I would accept that the design leaves a lot to be desired. Even the glorious photo's I include only take a moment to capture and upload if I'm not being too picky. But the words. Every single word I write is a promise to the reader, to be the best, most evocative word it can be. I agonize over every sentence. Read and re-read again and again to tell my story in the most entertaining manner possible.
Which is why I was particularly saddened this fine Saturday morning to discover that my latest endeavor; a thousand words of nail-biting, seat-edging, beauteous prose dedicated to my recent blizzard-bound mission for frozen potato ovals (the "hash brown incident"); has disappeared from the face of the Internet.
It appalls and offends me that I have fallen into this situation - I am of the generation and professional-ilk that "Ctrl+S" is less of a habit and more of a compulsive tic. Spend enough time programming or documenting and you will wake up with your left hand twitching to the beat of the damnable save shortcut. Alas, each little convenience that the modern Internets adds takes away from your own control and responsibility. And given that I am writing these articles in a web browser, straight to a remote server, and that our satellite connection would be classed as "bloody slow" at the best of times, I really should have checked that me hitting save was sending my precious words.... somewhere. Anywhere. Instead, somewhere out in the nether, the damned hash brown incident got lost. So you will never hear about the time I braved the elements (and fell over (a lot)) just so the station could have crunchy-carb-cakes with breakfast...
... I guess it's not all bad.
Back on topic - Sometimes it is Windy
The base cause of my being on this magnificent continent is to look at the weather. The weather is not why I personally wanted to come, it isn't even what I do with the majority of my time, but it is the reason why the government gave me the opportunity to be here, and it is why they pay me. So I figure it's high time we spend a moment discussing the weather, particularly as pertains to Dear Mawson.
As a general rule, it's windy and it's cold.
Variety is the spice of life though, and Mother Nature ensures that we here get our fair share of spice too, so sometimes it is very cold, which is manageable. and sometimes it is very windy, which is not.
The following video was taken on my walk home from work one night. It was the first night that I had to 100% rely on the blizz-lines, and, as you will see, I got it wrong.
When watching that you have to understand that the camera see's much better in the snow than I do - it doesn't have to worry about warm breath freezing on the inside of the case. It was like being in fire training all over again, they take away your sight and see how you manage with whats left. I didn't slip over this time though, which was nice.
As we are the Weather Measure-ers we have a set of criteria for declaring a windy, shitty day to be a true blizzard:
I put a lot of time and love into these posts. Sure, the layout is godawful, and I would accept that the design leaves a lot to be desired. Even the glorious photo's I include only take a moment to capture and upload if I'm not being too picky. But the words. Every single word I write is a promise to the reader, to be the best, most evocative word it can be. I agonize over every sentence. Read and re-read again and again to tell my story in the most entertaining manner possible.
Which is why I was particularly saddened this fine Saturday morning to discover that my latest endeavor; a thousand words of nail-biting, seat-edging, beauteous prose dedicated to my recent blizzard-bound mission for frozen potato ovals (the "hash brown incident"); has disappeared from the face of the Internet.
It appalls and offends me that I have fallen into this situation - I am of the generation and professional-ilk that "Ctrl+S" is less of a habit and more of a compulsive tic. Spend enough time programming or documenting and you will wake up with your left hand twitching to the beat of the damnable save shortcut. Alas, each little convenience that the modern Internets adds takes away from your own control and responsibility. And given that I am writing these articles in a web browser, straight to a remote server, and that our satellite connection would be classed as "bloody slow" at the best of times, I really should have checked that me hitting save was sending my precious words.... somewhere. Anywhere. Instead, somewhere out in the nether, the damned hash brown incident got lost. So you will never hear about the time I braved the elements (and fell over (a lot)) just so the station could have crunchy-carb-cakes with breakfast...
... I guess it's not all bad.
Back on topic - Sometimes it is Windy
The base cause of my being on this magnificent continent is to look at the weather. The weather is not why I personally wanted to come, it isn't even what I do with the majority of my time, but it is the reason why the government gave me the opportunity to be here, and it is why they pay me. So I figure it's high time we spend a moment discussing the weather, particularly as pertains to Dear Mawson.
As a general rule, it's windy and it's cold.
Variety is the spice of life though, and Mother Nature ensures that we here get our fair share of spice too, so sometimes it is very cold, which is manageable. and sometimes it is very windy, which is not.
The following video was taken on my walk home from work one night. It was the first night that I had to 100% rely on the blizz-lines, and, as you will see, I got it wrong.
When watching that you have to understand that the camera see's much better in the snow than I do - it doesn't have to worry about warm breath freezing on the inside of the case. It was like being in fire training all over again, they take away your sight and see how you manage with whats left. I didn't slip over this time though, which was nice.
As we are the Weather Measure-ers we have a set of criteria for declaring a windy, shitty day to be a true blizzard:
- gale force winds for the last hour or more
- temperatures less than -10°C
- visibility less than 100m
Steps 1 & 2 are daily occurrences for Mawson - the average daily maximum temperature through April was -12ºC (and its getting colder every day) and we had "gale force" phenomena for 17 of the 30 days. Visibility down to 100m is a whole different kettle of fish - it requires abundant falling snow (uncommon here) or a huge amount of snow to blow off the plateau and through station.
We had four blizzard days in April - three one weekend and one the weekend after. Most of the tradesmen and such on station take blizz days as off days; the risk involved in simply going outside is greatly increased. We in the Met however brave all comers - the worst I've personally experienced so far is wind gusting up to 160km/hr with heavy blowing snow in the dark on my walk to work. And of course, there is the daily weather balloon to contend with.... which gets complicated.
We had four blizzard days in April - three one weekend and one the weekend after. Most of the tradesmen and such on station take blizz days as off days; the risk involved in simply going outside is greatly increased. We in the Met however brave all comers - the worst I've personally experienced so far is wind gusting up to 160km/hr with heavy blowing snow in the dark on my walk to work. And of course, there is the daily weather balloon to contend with.... which gets complicated.
