Midwinter days
 Shortly before Midwinters Day Denis broke his leg while playing basketball in the gym. The rest of us had to take over some or all of the cooking for awhile until things started to heal. Here we are visiting him in Biomed shortly after Dr. Fritz put the cast on. He obviously is suffering very much from the effects of his pain medicine! That's me in the brown/yellow shirt at far left next to Gary.  Midwinters day we had an international dinner featuring some Russian cuisine. Here we are with borscht and caviar....Alex's birthday may also have been involved with this celebration. 
At left is a view from the head end of the table. Yes, that is me in the right foreground. Someone must have just told a REALLY good one!  Alex and Al drink a toast to international friendship and cooperation, while Jerry has a bit more caviar... Alex brought some of the menu items with him from Russia. The vodka was the same Stolichnaya "import" that we had on the bar, but the Russian bottles had a pull-off top that was not reusable. The assumption was that if you opened a bottle of vodka it would be finished in the same sitting, so there was no need to put the top back on...such a marketing deal!
The midwinter celebration at Antarctic stations is a tradition that started with Scott's, Shackleton's, and Amundsen's expeditions at the beginning of the 20th century. By the 1970's most of the stations were sending out midwinter greeting messages...a tradition that continues today. In 1977 some of the greeting messages consisted of rather elaborate ASCII teletype art; nowadays in the internet era the emails include photos and "invitations" to midwinter dinners. Here's a June 2004 Antarctic Sun article which describes the tradition, depicts glimpses of our teletype messages depicted above, and includes the 2004 Pole midwinter greeting photo. 
After dinner, the fun and games moved upstairs...to the costume party. Here we are clowning around. Denis (left) and Alex. 
We all wore costumes of some sort...I opted for a diaper. Behind me, Dave Thelander is sitting in front of our photo board. 
Behind me in this photo is SSL Tadashi Yogi in his costume(!). I must confess that I wore a bit more than this when I walked from the annex to the bar. 
A bit later we got raided by the KGB. 
Mrs. Gastil (Jerry) takes a break from the action. 
A couple of weeks later we celebrated Independence
Day. Somehow the evening turned into the Dome Wars... 
What would the Fourth of July be without some pyrotechnics...well, smoke bombs, firecrackers, flare guns and a fire extinguisher or two... [Thanks to Billy-Ace Baker for the midwinter greeting message!] |
