Barbara with her progress of her cross-stitch-to-be at the point when we decided to cut our losses. 

Juliane reading the thriller book both crying and laughing about it at the same time.

Antarctica is clearly trying to give us a vacation, or trying to screw up my guess of the total meteorite count at the end of the season which I totally intended to win. In either cases we are not pleased. We don’t need a vacation and we certainly do need more meteorites!! But clearly Antarctica has other plans for us. We woke up to beautiful blue skies and sunshine but the katabatic winds (katabatic = Greek for flowing downhill – thanks to our in-house Greek expert Ioannis on Team B) are howling over the ice with almost 30 knots and produce a windchill of -30 F. So instead of our usual search and recovery operation day, Barb and I decided to tackle a different kind of operation (equally unknown to at least me) during our enforced tent day today: cross stitching (kits that the curation folks at JSC sent as presents – thank you!). After trying to sort string that is colored in different colors such as light yellow, very light drab brown, light gold, and medium drab brown, all of which look EXACTLY the same inside our color-blinding tent, we finally and proudly started to cross stitch. My cross stitches looked really blobby and the further I got along the more concerned I got. I was reassured though since Barb’s stitches also looked blobby. I lost patience for cross stitching after about the 3rd row, with my eyes playing tricks on me and changing the color of the black string to purple back and forth. After the 4th row I started musing about cross stitching famous meteorites instead, you would only need like 3 different kinds of colo rs, blobby-ness would be welcomed, and you would be done a lot quicker. 5th row in and my butt fell asleep in the tent camp chairs and I started wondering how this activity is anything but aggravating. After row 7 I gained the most utterly respect for people who do this for fun! And after row 9 decided to read the instructions because the blobby-ness of the cross stitches started to bother the heck out of me. You couldn’t even see that the stitches were supposed to be crosses. Turns out reading instructions before you start doing something is a good idea, especially when it comes to cross stitching. We were supposed to separate the “six-strand” cotton floss into individual strands and then only use 2 strands at a time for stitching. We were happily stitching away with all six strands, producing fat blobby crosses. At that point we decided to cut our losses (sorry, Cecilia!) and read books instead. We might still stitch famous meteorites that we find in the field sometime later, at another tent day. We might also present this exercise to Jim and Brian tonight instead so they too can practice being patient. We also decided that today is a good day to increase our fat intake so that we can produce enough body heat for the next coming days of meteorite recovery which has especially for me been a struggle. Our meals however have been almost strictly plant based to ensure good health: so far we have had expired frying-pan bread with cranberries (fruit) and lots of butter (the best thing about tent days is that we don’t eat freakin oatmeal for breakfast!), lots of chocolate (technically a fruit), maple-sirup (totally plant based) candies, Pringles (potatoes are veggies), lots of tea (self-explanatory), hot chocolate (see above), and fruit juice (also self-explanatory). For dinner we will have tater tots (potatoes this technically veggies) and cheese (we totally need some non-plant based protein to keep body heat production up). We decided against other frozen veggies like green beans since you don’t get much body heat out of those. The rest of the day we spent reading, in my case a thriller (Deception Point by Dan Brown) that includes scientifically ridiculously wrong facts, so gut wrenchingly wrong that I wasn’t sure if I should cry, hysterically laugh, or burn the book instead on our stove to help heat the tent. I opted for throwing it around and complaining to Barb about it who found all of that very entertaining since she has read the book before me and knew my pain and what more is in store for me. Luckily today is our last tent day so I might never have to finish the book! We hope Antarctica got that memo too. We have some records in meteorite recovery to break after all.