From left to right: Jim, Juliane, Barbara, and Brian celebrating the old year and welcoming the new year with snow cones.

Happy New Year to you all!! We hope you had a great celebration with friends and loved ones. We certainly did! Antarctica decided that we needed to take this last day of the year off and blew extra hard winds with lots of snow around. Our tent had another 2 feet of snow drifted in front of our entrance during the night. And even after shoveling ourselves out from the inside, again, snow kept drifting our entrance closed constantly during the day. The snow drifts around camp have become huge mountains in places over night. The snow is very granular, and behaves more like sand than snow. And that makes it super slippery when one tries to climb up -or go down- such a drift. Luckily we are well padded with our clothing so nothing major has been hurt besides our pride during our sledding accidents all over the camp. Even at our pee flag we were not safe from slipping on the granular snow which majorly sucks, luckily things freeze instantly here including pee so no harm done. Our re-supply mission didn’t come and we are now scheduled for Tuesday. Hopefully. So we spent the day today cuddled up inside our tents reading and napping. At 3pm we decided to start our New Years Eve celebration and met in the science tent to play Scrabble, Farkle, and Settlers of Catan with a lot of passion that might have been enhanced by the eggnog and powdered drink mixes. At 7pm we made the celebratory American-German style New Years Eve pizza topped with pepperoni, tuna, onion, and corn. As appetizer we had nachos with cheese and salsa. And as dessert we had real snow cones!! I had brought all the ingredients (cones, straws and syrup in the flavors of raspberry, lime, and cherry) all the way from home to Antarctica as a New Years Eve surprise. Because who doesn’t want to eat snow cones in a country where there is snow in plentiful, at -20C. We had so much fun with those. And interestingly the syrup has so much sugar in it that it didn’t freeze even at -20C!. It was so yummy. Now we are good for our sugar intake until the end of our season! And food coloring too probably, we all had blue and green tongues afterwards. At midnight we ventured out to greet the New Year in full and bright sunlight with blue blue skies. The wind has finally died down and we are more than hopeful for tomorrows (ok todays) prospect of meteorite recovering. Now we need to get into our sleeping bags and find some sleep soon because we have to work tomorrow (well today). 10am start, so we have to get up in 7 hours. Sleep well everybody, and Happy New Year from the icy continent where snow cones taste better than in Hawaii 🙂