Monday December 22, 2003
Tom writes from McMurdo:

Today we esentially had a day off. Nobody works on Sundays, and we pretty much have everything sorted (except the coring gear that isn't here). So we braved some driving snow to do a little shopping over at Scott Base a mile and a half down the road. Tomorrow Katie and Erica will go off to snow school, and will go through two days of Antarctic survival training. I have scheduled them on a flight out to Lake Vanda on Tuesday afternoon so they'll have to miss the last part of the training. Alex and I will also have a busy day tomorrow. We need to get all of our gear down to the helo pad including our core boxes and half pipes that are currently being manufactured and were promised to be ready by 10am tomorrow. We also need to test our radios, collect the water testing gear from the Crary Lab, and find out what happened to our coring equipment! Fingers crossed it is here and has everything we need!!!So, if we get to go tomorrow, we'll be away from any computers until we leave the field in early February. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from us all!

Tom