Typical Day with House Mouse

Last night I did not sleep much. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, so since the satellite comes up in the middle of the night, I did work on my analysis. There’s something seriously wrong with that, I think! It must be because I didn’t do anything yesterday except hang around the station. Nice as it was, I should probably avoid that in the future!

I think I’d say that today was a pretty typical day. We had the morning meeting at 8 and I tried to take a nap after that since I didn’t sleep in the night. At one we went out to do the DOM Dance where, like I said before, we remove the old DOMs and hook up all the new ones. I managed to get all the photos I was missing from the previous DOM Dance, so I’ll be posting those soon.

By 4PM I was back inside because I had to take care of my House Mouse duties. What’s House Mouse? Well, once a week, each person is supposed to help clean the bathrooms in their wing. We are grouped by 4 or 5 rooms, so theoretically you’re never supposed to have to do it on your own. I was paired with two other people and I was in charge of the ladies’ room, which of course is much cleaner than the men’s. Normally cleaning would never make it into a blog, but cleaning here is a little bit interesting, actually, because we aren’t allowed to use water to do anything except mop the floors. This makes cleaning much more difficult and much more chemical-dependent—imagine for a minute cleaning a shower without any water. It’s really annoying to get all the long hair out! Plus, it’s a small space and you have to spray all these harsh chemicals all over and then stick your head in there, so I was coughing for the rest of the day. But it took less than an hour and in the end our bathroom was much cleaner so I felt satisfied.

I spent the evening running tests on my DOMs and going to the gym (I decided I wanted to be sure I was really tired tonight!) The gym was packed because everyone is training for the race around the world in Christmas day. Yep, that’s right, a race, all the way around the world! Ha ha! How cool is that? Well, we’ll find out on race day! But as for today, it’s just about the same as Chicago—only -10 F with a windchill of -30. I actually got too warm outside during the DOM Dance!