A light dusting of snow outside the surgery
It seems that I have now been living on South Georgia for over a month which has come as a bit of a surprise. I’m rather hoping that time will start to pass a little more slowly or the year will be over before I’ve had time to do any of the things I have planned. It’s also very likely that I’ve planned to do way too many things. Compared to life on the ship, life on a base is much, much busier. Not with medical things obviously – best not to get carried away with that kind of silliness. However, I have been spending a lot of time out on the boats as people appear to have noticed that the doctor doesn’t have a particularly taxing medical workload here and is therefore usually available to crew. Probably not something I’m going to complain about as it means I get to go pottering around to different parts of the island dropping off people to kill the reindeer or pick up people from visiting ships on beautiful sunny evenings with turquoise water beneath and incredible lenticular cloud formations above us. I also get to drive both the RIBs and jetboats when conditions allow and this is not an entirely unpleasant way to pass the time. I would say I’m not a natural jetboat pilot and my first attempt at coming alongside left something to be desired. Mostly this was due to a poorly timed blonde moment which resulted in me forgetting which part of the jetty I was aiming for. It all started off so well and the boat came alongside fairly gently exactly where I had planned. I felt terribly proud of myself for about 5 seconds until I realised this was not where all the mooring lines were. Unfortunately, the effort of reversing back to where I was actually meant to be was way too much for me to cope with and went something along the lines of “oh sh*t which way do I turn the wheel again? Yes, yes I now realise that was the wrong way. Sorry. Oh dammit, what’s the boat doing now? Yes, I think it would be best if you take over from here. No, no I don’t want another go today. No really, now I mainly just want to get off this sodding boat and have a cup of tea....and maybe some chocolate. Or a biscuit. Or maybe chocolate and a biscuit.” Apparently it will get easier......
Boating in the snow
Spaceship clouds
I have also been doing a lot of food sorting and I have found some real delights at the back of a few shelves. Surprisingly people here seem very keen to eat massively out of date stuff and get a little twitchy when I want to throw out salad cream and frozen fish that expired in 2005. I am neither keen to eat the food myself nor deal with the potentially unpleasant consequences of other people eating it and have started to slowly and surreptitiously confiscate it. I am a little concerned by the fact that I am starting to enjoy organising the food a bit too much and suspect that the slight OCD tendencies I had before I came out here may well get totally out of hand during the course of the year. Incidentally, the pineapple arrived and it was awesome! The food bill also arrived and I have decided it may be best if I don’t order pineapples from the Falklands every month. However, budgeting never was a strong point of mine and I do like pineapple a lot!
I have so many pictures of this guy
The dark ones are not entirely un-cute either
Hmmm, what else? I have now cooked twice and no one has died which is good. I have learnt that when attempting to make fish fie it is better to drain off all the water from the defrosted fish before you pour on the sauce and cover it in potato. Disaster was narrowly averted with some help from Ella who kindly attempted to hold onto all the potato as I poured off the water. I haven’t yet learnt to enjoy cooking and strongly suspect I never will, but I will hopefully be able to avoid poisoning people and I will hopefully learn how to cook pies. I do love pies. I have also been out running a lot and I think my mental health has now returned to normal after the confines of the ship life sent me a bit loopy. I have also been spending A LOT of time hanging out with the seal pups, especially the blonde one who I have totally fallen in love with. The penguins have started to have babies, which currently look a bit like some kind of reptilian creature, but will soon turn into wonderful balls of brown fluff. The adults have nearly all finished moulting and are looking very proud of themselves. I think I preferred them when they were losing feathers and looked totally fed up and embarrassed about the whole thing. However, they do look more shiny and colourful now.
Not massively cute at this age it has to be said
“More food, more food!”
Moulting penguins do look fairly ridiculous
All moulted and looking very happy with himself
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