Pock eggs & dinner cheese
- The Pock Egg -
One of my friends does this thing he calls a “pock choc” where he just sticks a chocolate in his pocket to find and enjoy sometime later. Here on the ship, the thing to do is stash a “pock egg”. There are always hardboiled eggs at breakfast and they make a nice little snack later, when you’ve been in -22 temperatures and up and down the stairs and in and out of steel-toe boots and heavy back deck gear. I watched Holly delightfully discover her pock egg a few mornings ago and have a great midmorning snack. Then yesterday we met a crew member who does pock egg, and today at lunch heard from another crew that The Pock Egg has a long and respected history on this ship. You just have to be careful not to run into a wall when the ship rocks.
- Dinner Cheese -
We have 4 meals a day offered to us now: breakfast at 07:30, lunch at 11:30, dinner at 17:30, and mid rats at 23:30. The noon-to-midnight-ers (“day shift”, though I think they’ve been getting less hours of daylight this whole time with all our time zone shifts) typically each lunch to mid rats, and the midnight-to-noon-ers (“night shift”) have mid rats to lunch. Most meals have some overlap with each other, in case somebody’s waking up and wants a breakfast item. But there’s this thing that we’ve all only ever seen at dinner. We call it dinner cheese. Dinner cheese makes everything better- it's creamy like cream cheese and tangy like goat’s cheese but it’s a mystery, none of us recognize it. You can put it on roast vegetables to make them a meal or plop it on beans with some seeds and crackers to make a nice soup-ish thing. I’ve put it on pulled pork and eggs benedict. I realized a few days ago that the night shift didn’t have it, so I made them a little container and hid it in the fridge for them to try. The dinner cheese revolution has since spread through the night shift. And today at dinner I found out: it’s whipped feta. Whipped feta!! The news has spread like wildfire- it ruined the magic for one person, inspired hope in another that they could find it at home, and someone else doesn’t believe it’s true.
Reading this back I’m thinking I should conclude with something like: food is a very normal thing for us in a very un-normal world and we all have very strong opinions about it don’t judge us you would do the same thing. But what I really mean is: we are just ordinary people who, for a few months, are united around an extraordinary job. It bothers me when people talk about scientists like we’re cold or uncaring, because I see us being very human in our floating workplace.
🥚🧀 Virginia
We saw a lot of Adélie penguin business meetings yesterday. They stand or lay pretty still in a cluster on a piece of ice until the boat gets close, having their little conference. Then at some point one of them panics that we’ll scoop their business idea and the whole group starts running away at the same time with their flippers out. I was outside and close once and heard a penguin yelling “HAW!!! HAW!!!!” as it ran. They eventually bloop into the water in a crack between ice pieces or the ship passes them enough that they shed their panic and go back to their Very Serious Discussion.