It has been over eight months since my last letter and much has happened since then. First, I went to my ten year college reunion in Annapolis, Maryland. I drove there (two days drive each way), I couldn't leave my new car behind. Half of my company showed up (16 of 32). I discovered that one of them lives about a twenty minute drive from me, and works about five minutes from my work. And he has been here for three years! One of my old roommates (Robert) was there. Of the sixteen that showed up only two are still in the Navy/Marine Corps. We all went to the Homecoming football game, which our team won (barely). There was a huge tailgater afterwards. A bunch of us went out to a crabhouse for those famous Maryland crabs after that. At the football game I met up with a woman (Melody) I met over six years ago in Japan. I was in the Navy and my ship pulled into Fukuoka, Japan. We had a reception onboard the ship for the Mayor of the city and many other chosen persons. At the reception was a group of American women who were exchange students there in Fukuoka. Nearly two years later I received a letter from one of the women that was at the reception. We maintained a precarious correspondence over the years. She lives about fifteen mile from Annapolis, so we got together while I was in town. We had a good time in the short time we had to visit.
I got about 80% of the siding on my house replaced before the homeowner's association repainted it. I got the color scheme reversed (light gray with dark gray trim), which should be cooler in the summer.
Over Thanksgiving I took another trip out East. I flew this time, though. I took a couple of days off work, so I had six days there. I visited with Melody, and Robert was there also. We had a great time.
For Christmas I went to visit my parents. I flew on a tour charter flight which was a direct flight down to Los Cabos and was pretty cheap. I spent a week there. Mostly I just relaxed, but I did play tourist a little bit. It was pretty cold and windy, except for the day I left which was beautiful.
A few days after New Years I flew down to New Zealand again. It was a rather interesting flight this time, though. It was snowing at the airport in Denver. My flight got into LAX two hours late because of the snow and a few other fiascoes on the airline's part. I had to run to catch the flight to New Zealand. It was so close that they had already pulled the jetway away and closed the door on the plane. They reconnected the jetway and opened the door for me. I had to walk the entire length of the plane (747) with everyone staring at me as my seat was in the last row of the plane. Wow, is that a long plane. My bags could not run as fast as I could so they did not make the connection with me. I arrived in Christchurch on a Saturday around noon and flew down to McMurdo the next morning. There was a distinguished visitor (DV) on the flight. I think he was a congressman. Shortly after we took off the flight crew discovered a loose panel, so we turned around and landed. They fixed the problem, but then we had to refuel. The end result was that we wasted two hours, which meant that I missed dinner in McMurdo. The only food for the day was the airplane boxed lunch. My bags arrived in Christchurch while I was flying to McMurdo. There was not another flight to McMurdo for two days, so I was without my luggage for a total of about four days. Fortunately I had planned ahead and had my toiletries and a change of underwear, socks and a shirt in my carryon bag. It took me a total of 57 hours from when I left my house until I was in McMurdo. I think that might be a record. Of those 57 hours 24 were spent flying, 1.5 driving, 13.5 waiting in airports, and 18 for sleep and myself.
I spent a quick two weeks in McMurdo. While I was there I saw a play (Me Too, Then) put on by residents. There was a nine hole golf tournament out on the ice shelf (I did not partake in this fun). I went over to Scott Base, which is the New Zealand base a quick two mile shuttle ride away. There was a Russian ship in the harbor. I saw a guy who was on the same ship I was on in the Navy (USS Anchorage). He is still in the Navy and is doing his tour in McMurdo with the Naval Support Force Antarctica (NSFA). The pending government shutdown had McMurdo in quite a frenzy. With winter approaching there is no putting off station closing. There were plans for having a skeleton crew over the winter and pretty much shutting down the place if the budget was not signed or there was no continuing resolution. Fortunately that did not have to happen.
I then got on the research ship Nathaniel B. Palmer where I spent the next month. The ship went over to the eastern Ross Sea where we used sonar to map out the bottom of the ocean. We took a few core samples and did seismic mappings of the ocean bottom. The ship is just over 400 feet long and there were about 45 people on board. I had a good time on board but it was lots of work. I did twelve hour shifts, seven days a week. While on the ship I was getting a 38.5% bonus in pay, but I was doing 110% more hours of work. There are three groups of people on the ship, Edison Chouest Offshore (ECO), who runs the ship, ASA and the scientists. ECO is headquartered in Louisiana, so many of the people who work for them are Cajun. A couple of the guys spoke Cajun as a first language and English as a second. It results in a rather unusual accent.
One of my tasks on the ship was to stand watch on the Multibeam Contour Mapping Sonar. It uses sonar to map out the bottom of the ocean in a quite detailed manner. It uses some pretty powerful computers to manipulate all of the data it acquires in a real time basis. We printed out colored maps from the data that we gathered. We also gathered gravity, magnetic and seismic data at the same time. We created maps of those sets of data also. One area we mapped out with the Multibeam was at Cape Roberts. Over the Winter they will do core samples there after the ice shelf forms. It was a very beautiful place which this picture sort of shows.
We ran ship drills once a week. We had to grab our immersion suits and muster at the abandon ship location. We normally had some instruction in ship safety then. The water on the ship was a light brown color due to the quantity of rust in the system. I am told that the high quantity of rust due to all of the electronics on board. The electrical currents running through the ship accelerates the formation of rust.
The scientists on the cruise were mostly from two different universities, the University of Alabama and the University of California at Santa Barbara. They were mostly students and the cruise was part of a class they were taking on geophysics. There happened to be a number of them that were not American. There were persons from Austria, Spain, Netherlands, Norway and two from Canada. Among the ships crew there were persons from the Philippines, Chile and Russia.
The food on the ship was pretty good. They serve chicken so much that instead of saying that it is dinner time or lunch time they say that it is chicken time. Just before we returned to McMurdo we parked the ship in the ice and got to run around on the ice around the ship, they call it ``Ice Liberty''. It was really fun. Here is a photo of the ship as it was parked in the ice.
I flew out of McMurdo the next day, February 28th, which was the day the station closed. It was the latest I have been there by more than two weeks. The sun was beginning to set, well sort of. It was very low in the sky, and as it rotated around the horizon it would go behind mountains and would look just like a sunset. The only thing is that it would ``rise'' a few minutes later.
I took a week of vacation in New Zealand. A friend and I went to the northeast portion of the South Island to an area called the Marlborough Sound. We spent a few days in the town of Picton. The fifth oldest ship in the world is there, called the Edwin Fox. It is not much to look at though, as it is in awful shape. I got quite sun burned laying out on the quay in the harbor. We then went to a hostel called ``The Lazy Fish.'' It is out in the Sound so we had to take a water taxi to get to it. It was three glorious days of doing nothing. There was a good group of people to socialize with and good food to eat. Here is what it looked like from the front porch of the ``fish''.
One of my old roommates (Stephan) from the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) visited me for two weeks in May. Well, actually he was going through 737 pilot certification training in Denver, so he stayed with me while he was in town. He got out of the Navy (he was a P-3 Orion pilot) and is having a hard time finding a job in the airline field (since the military is kicking out so many pilots right now) so he decided to make himself a little more marketable with this training.
A month after I returned from the Ice I decided that I could no longer work at my current job. I also decided that I did not want to live in Colorado any more. So, I started a job search on both of the coasts (in the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles area, San Diego area and the Washington D.C. area). I ended up finding a job in Herndon, Virginia as a Unix Administrator. It is a good sized pay raise doing something I want to do. So, I gave my notice at the middle of May and was working in Virginia two weeks later. I have been here almost a month now and have found an apartment. I am planning to buy a house in a few months. For now my address is:
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Herndon, VA
Since I have been here I have been very busy. That old roommate Stephan is out here visiting his brother in Manassas while waiting for job interviews, and for a family reunion over the Fourth of July. Last weekend Robert was in town again for a visit. It was the first time the three of us have been together since our graduation eleven years ago. We have had a good time getting caught up. Robert lives in Toronto right now and is trying to move down to this area, so we might have more of these good times in the near future. I roomed with Robert for all four years and Stephan for three years at USNA. I bought season tickets to the Navy football games for this coming Fall. There will be four home games. I also bought tickets to the Army/Navy game, which will be in Philadelphia on December 7th. I can't believe that I am now happily paying money to go to football games that I was unhappily forced to go to a few years ago. I don't have to march to the game now, though.
I sold my old house in Denver pretty quickly. I had to replace the heater, water heater and repair the roof before I could sell it, though. I made a fair amount of money from it despite those costs. While the movers were packing my household goods and I was talking with a financial consultant about converting my old 401k from work into an IRA I noticed that the water heater had burst. I was mopping up water for the rest of the day. I guess I was lucky it happened while I was still there to stop it from flooding the entire house. I am in the process of buying a new house here. It is a new townhouse that should be finished being built in the middle of October. My address there will be:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAs you can see I have bought myself a color printer. I am having fun playing with it. Well, that is about all for this edition. I hope you are doing well and I hope to hear from you soon.
Centreville, VA
