This week has been great!

26/03/09 - My snowboard arrived, it looks pretty and is nice and shiny. I cant wait to take it out. Unfortunately the weather is too bad to do it today.

27/03/09 - Dayle and I have successfully rebuilt Malibu's engine again! And once again is alive!
Unfortunately on its maiden voyage the weather was so bad. There were huge drifts of snow which meant you couldn't see more than 2 meters in front of you. At one point Dayle suddenly stopped, I didn't so much and I bumped into the back of Dayle's scooter shattering the hood. DAMN!!!!
After 3 more hours of frantically gluing and tension strips we reconstructed the hood, all cosmetic, no structural damage, it just looks like Malibu has a broken nose now, Dayle isn't happy with me.

28/03/09 - Tested out m snowboard. It works fine, I just realised my boots are huge and only just fit in the bindings, I need to adjust them to fit into them properly. There is so much snow the board just digs in about 40cm and when you fall over snow goes everywhere, but its fun.

30/03-02/04/09 - We are doing experiments at the massive EISCAT radar facility this week. We have complete control of both the 32m and 42m dishes. We can control the directions and spin the 32m disk wherever we want. We can choose the pulse codes, duration, power output, everything. The facility and computer systems to control them are colossal, you can see where all our scientific funding goes here, and it's all in our hands, mew ha ha ha! The facility used up to 35% of the whole power output of the island!
It is extremely interesting you can see detailed structures of the ionosphere. After running our first experiment for 5 hours we have to go out to the static 42 dish and spend an hour shoveling snow from it, yes there was a lot and yes it really can effect the sensitivity of the experiments.

AVALANCHE, there was a big avalanche right between town and our barracks! Scary. Jenifer was at the bottom on the road when it happened and had to run screaming out of the way. Luckily no one was caught in it. It completely covered the road. The next day the police chief blow up the remaining cornises on the top of the peaks to stop more, but with little success. Now is probibly not the time to metion that a local died last week in an avalanche across the fjord on a scotter trip, the town was in mourning for a good few days.

We went on a small scooter trip to warm Malibu back into action across the bay. There is a small settlement jokingly called "Advent City". The view of the sun was beautiful and we found an old sail boat half burried in the ice.

Michie and I went on a snowboard session today. It was pretty much his first time. We went to where the school kids learn to ski. It was such good fun. I managed a whole run switching from side to side without falling over! Michie and I felt very happy with ourselves afterward a good session.
So we went out and had the most awesome Pizza in the world.