December 7, 1975: Sunday

Woke up about ten. Spent the next six hours in the dark room. Lots of really good shots. A few clinkers.

I’ve decided to write to Mom and have her get me some scrap books to put all my pictures in.

One entitled “Back When My Hair Was Short,” for High School.

And, of course, “That’s the Way It Is, In Antarctica.”

Did pictures for Kathy from the Dirty Ice. Gave her the negatives, so I made five by seven prints for me.

Helped Kathy put some stuff for her expedition to Taylor Glacier into the Fish Hut. Gee, is that place clean.

Howard tells us all sorts of stories at dinner, like the marsupial mouse, which burrows straight down and jumps three feet out when he leaves, so he doesn’t leave tracks.

Why?

So the wombats don’t get him.

Then there’s the fruit that looks like a cucumber but tastes like an orange at one end and a banana at the other.

Then there’s the marsupial watermelon. But that’s only a joke. He’s trying to teach us cricket.

I work on the x-ray samples, doing all the determinations by looking up d-spacings in the tables and cross-referencing them with a catalog and mineral descriptions. Calvin’s red and green Christmas rocks from Hogback Hill are garnet and pyroxene.

The Taylor Valley lapilli tuff is calcite and phillipsite, the same zeolite we found at the volcano on Gneiss Point.

I’m pleased (and surprised) that I did the job right and didn’t come out with some impossible combinations.

Polyminerallic charts are very difficult to work with. It takes a lot of searching.

Had a noisy noodle feast and retired.

Oh, I keep forgetting to mention that we’re going to Shapeless Mountain and Carapace Nunatack on Wednesday. That’s about as far as you can go on a helo. What a name, Shapeless Mountain. I like it.

The snow around here is really melting and today was like spring, except there are no chirping birds or leaves and seeds of trees rushing down the muddy, rivuletted hillside.

The sun shines warmly and glitters across the moist road, fed by thawing ground and snow.