...And the Winter is Just Beginning

Current Conditions
Temperature: -6F
Wind Chill: -25F

Before I get to the meat of this post, I just wanted to drop in a few photos I like that never found a home here. First is the Palmer again:

It's just not everyday that you see a ship drop out it's gang plank onto a sheet of ice.

This next one is of the cargo vessel, with Mt. Discovery in the background:

You can see the turning basin that was carved out for this ship pretty well here.

Lastly, a cool shot of part of the Royal Society Range one day last week when the sun decided to peek through momentarily:

It's too bad I couldn't capture the whole panorama. It was completely overcast everywhere but for a perfect strip that lit up the entire mountain range. The distant glaciers were glowing in orange sunlight, sandwiched perfectly between a uniform steel gray sky above and 30 miles of shaded blue ice below.


I'm going to shift gears now. I'm going to tell a story. I hesitated to include this story because like all good stories it contains bad taste, sexual references, hilarity, contraband, foul language, and weapons of mass destruction. Well, not all of those things, but the first few, at least. I hope many of you are drooling with anticipation, and I hope this story will measure up to this lead-in. The purpose of this lead-in, though, is not to make some of you drool, but to warn those of you who may not want to know. (go ahead, it's still safe to read on)

That said, I decided to include this story because it is a decent sample of the culture and the open-minded anything-goes attitude here. It's not that this wouldn't happen anywhere else; the point I'm trying to make is that stories like this one are commonplace here, so much so that bystanders consider them normal occurrences. Honestly, it's not that bad and I'm sure most of you can handle it. And by now, there's no way it can equal the hype anyway.

Once upon a time... (by that I mean "stop reading now")

Thursday, actually. Lunchtime.
A good friend, Katie, had rented "Another Gay Movie" and brought it to lunch. It's supposed to be another of those funny teenster stereotype satires, I think; I didn't actually watch it, it looked awful. But I did read the description, and next to it was a picture of an appallingly large butt plug, which I laughed at and commented on, but no one else at the table knew what it was. So, I immediately became the butt (pun intended) of a bunch of plug jokes. On a side note, and for my own sanity; so far, everybody not at that table knows what a butt plug looks like.

Katie works in the galley. She chops, dices, tosses, mixes, spices, etc. She disappeared into the kitchen area and returned to present me with a large plastic kitchen tool that was once used to feed some kind of food into some kind of processor, I don't know. The point is that it has a handle and a shaft and no one uses it anymore, but everyone refers to it fondly as, of course, the butt plug. So I had the joy of being asked repeatedly on my way out of the galley, "What is that?"

Saturday. Dinnertime.
Being that turn around is fair play, I thought it would be fun to cover this thing with melted chocolate and return it to Katie, being sure to thank her for letting me borrow it. It was absolutely disgusting: dark chocolate dripping down the shaft in gloopy chunks that honestly resembled their intended substance much more than chocolate. Gross. In hindsight, I should have added peanuts or corn. Anyway, it was good for a laugh, and I thought, naïvely, that the damn thing was now out of my hands for good and back in the possession of the galley, where it belongs.

Saturday. Evening.
Let me set the scene here. We're at the bar. It's packed for open-mic night (imagine that! any live music is good music here). Katie is sitting front and center. Unsuspecting, I'm on stage singing none other than "Lola" (oh, the irony). I look up from my own world of concentration to see a chocolate-covered butt plug waving through the air like a lighter at a concert. It immediately starts flying up and down into the air. I found out later that it was Katie's sole intention to try to get me to stop playing.

I lost it, totally. I had to stop playing in the middle of the song and keel over with laughter for what seemed like a long time before being able to completely recompose myself. The whole room laughed with me, though few of them knew what was going on, aside from someone tossing a bizarrely lewd and disgustingly dirty looking implement into the air. I wonder if ever before in the history of open-mics everywhere, anyone has ever muttered the phrase "nice flying chocolate-covered butt plug" into the microphone?

...and the winter is just beginning . . . . . .

I just found out I can post video, so here's a short snippet of the end of "Lola." Someone must've been into it, because he started in on another chorus when I was finished.

Cheers!