I got a lot of soothing reassurances after that last post (thanks!) and yes, today was much better. Got to meet a lot of the rest of the Pole team today during orientation. Megan and Meghan and Ralph, Kiell, Shawn, and a couple dozen others whose names spilled into and out of my head like water. Each has their own amazing story of why they’re here and what they’ve done before. We sat through the slide decks together. We played Stump-the-Benefits Rep together, shared pizza, trepidation and reassurance over the Sunday comics.

Most of us are going to Pole*, and we’re doing it together. And we’re doing it tomorrow**.

*(Man, I love the richness of Antarctic dialect. I keep pestering people to explain to me the little linguistic things, like when you refer to “the Pole” (the general geographic area) vs. just “Pole” (the station itself, as distinguished from McMurdo, Palmer or WAIS)

**(Okay, we’re not actually going to Pole – or the Pole – tomorrow; it takes about 7 days to get from here to there, including a couple of days of staging in CHCH (pronounced “Cheech”). But we’re starting tomorrow. Oh boy.)

***(Yeah, I know there’s no three-asterisk citation above, but I wanted to mention that I do promise to start taking and posting more pictures once we hit the road again. I’ve got a few from my day kicking around the  mountains up at http://picasaweb.google.com/david.cohn/20101019Colorado.)

****(Oh, and, while we’re at it, I wanted to remind you that you can get postings emailed directly to you as soon as they’re posted, before I have the chance to go back and correct all those typos and lapses of judgment, by emailing roadtrip-blog+subscribe@googlegroups.com)

*****(It seems like there ought to be some sort of Roman numeral collapsing of asterisks once you get more than a couple of them, shouldn’t there? Something like using a “%” for “5” and prepositioning the “*” to mean “one less than”?)

$*#$%^!(But then, if you have too many footnotes, people may think you’re suffering from some textual analog of Tourettes, so maybe that’s not a good idea…)

[I think I’d better stop now.]