Winter is approaching. Days are getting noticeably shorter and temperatures now remain around -10C and below. We even have some snow now after a couple of days of heavy snowfall last weekend. Davis in general doesn't get prodigious amounts of snow due to its location at the root of the Vestfold Hills, which greatly resemble a miniature version of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Whenever the sky is clear at night the aurorae appear in a myriad of shapes and forms. There is a sense of slowing down which, of course, is just a sensory perception of a phenomenon that has nothing to do with anything actually slowing down. With the possible exception of one's mind perhaps.

It is now a month since the ship departed but it feels like that was just last week. People at the station have now settled down, each into their own working routine. During the week work usually starts at 8am and finishes around 5pm with dinner at 6pm. On Saturdays everyone is busy with their allocated Saturday duty which normally begins around 11am and finishes at lunctime at 1pm. After that it is officially the weekend with a special dinner prepared for Saturday evening from 7pm onwards. We all dress up a bit, bring out a nice bottle of wine, put on some nice music and light up the candles - this is the only time and place we can have candles anywhere on the station (fire hazard is all too real in the extremely dry atmosphere). Most expeditioners have taken upon themselves to keep up their fitness and due to some people working on shifts and others during fixed hours, there is pretty much always someone sweating away at the gym. I keep an eye on the wind and the consistency of snow for outdoors running - loping around in anything beyond 15 knots without special snow running shows will lead to random sliding and slipping and to a greatly reduced mileage.

One thing that is impossible to describe is the profound beauty of Antarctica. No words, images or sounds can ever do this place any justice and I can only hope to convey some of the awe I feel when I step outside and look around. I have never seen such clarity of colour or purity of shape, it is as if the true profound beauty of Antarctica is only just starting to emerge and to reveal itself to those who dare to stay behind for winter. Every sunset, with icebergs bathing in a brilliant spectrum of perfect pastel colours, the snow sparkling like an infinite field of tiny diamonds with a pink and orange hue cast upon it all, and the eye-watering bluer than the bluest sky, is nothing short of a sensory overload.

My project is progressing well and I am slightly surprised by how easy it has been to get back into programming. I have always liked coding - there are many ways to do one thing, it is up to you how to do it and it all brings kind of instantaneous gratification (or miseration!). When working in the IT industry I always found it very rewarding to design and implement things from the scratch to see them (eventually) working - all the more so when the system is used for a scientific purpose. The "system" I have been building for my thesis is a truly modular beast and currently consists of a pile of UNIX shell scripts, numerous IDL routines, two Fortran programmes and one web-based program. Putting it all together certainly brings an invaluable insight into what one is actually dealing with and there is always room for improvement!

The VLF project has been stalled a little but the circuit shouldn't take too long to build and I have a computer ready to be configured for data collection and processing. The hardest part is to get the mount done - last time I touched carpentery was in year 4 but it's never too late to learn it again!