Not too bad a day following the mystery hours between years.*

I woke up late to a phone call from old friends spending time working in Greenland,** made a couple more phone calls, had a lazy breakfast, and then split the eve between two regularly scheduled movie bouts (horror and space, Ghost Ship and October Sky, respectively) and a lecture put on by Keith, one of our two Ten Meter Telescope scientists. Keith has been putting on a series of lectures about the more bizarre areas of science from quantum mechanics to the theories of specific and general relativity. He’s basically taking a large number of lay-folk through an English translation of where science no longer equates to the empirical reality we see everyday, to where the explanation of a theory resembles science fiction and dream as much as it does fact.

Afterward, I wandered off for a late-night sauna and close to my day, only to find another couple of Polies present. Good people, both, but I’m apparently becoming an introvert as I grow older and the winter life here is only emphasizing that. I hung back until they left, ready for silence in the dark.

I’m realizing that there is a great deal more satisfaction for me to be found in the company of a good friend, a book, or writing. Maybe this is an outgrowth of the comfort of a few good friends conversing around a wood stove or a campfire. I’m a far different man now, however, than the one who used to refuse his girlfriend calling him to bed in the middle of a party during college. I’ve (thankfully) learned that lesson - I no longer need to hang on to see the end of every social function, no longer feel that I might be missing something. I’m far more content to spend time with those close and with self than in my past.

On a different note, the rumor mill has been good for laughs lately. It seems that life at the other stations on continent must be rather boring (or at least at McMurdo) as all manner of interesting tales about the South Pole station have found their way back to us, none of them true. I’m also intrigued by what fact I know about friends at other stations when it comes to the stories that find their way here. Scuttlebutt, it seems, travels faster than anything else in Antarctica.

*The mystery hours were a term put forth by a friend some time ago - the space between one year and the next, the idea that you go to sleep at twenty-eight, to wake up twenty-nine, with a great unknown in dream spanning the distance between the two ages.

**Catch that - a phone call from a remote field camp in Greenland to a winterover at the South Pole. We really do live in interesting times.