Ice, White & Blue

Redhead Amok in Antarctica

Just When You Thought It Was Safe

I overwhelm you with links past present and future to Ice blogs. From all different stations, no longer quite so US-centric.

There are HUNDREDS.

Have fun reading.

posted by: coldwish at 12:20 | link | comments (1) |
between 2007

Envy of The Other Genevieve

Heads up, all you who read Andre's blog. I am not the current Genevieve in his postings. That would be Dispatcher Genevieve, the second Genevieve on Ice. Luckily she has made it down for Winfly, but I follow at Mainbody in early October.

Andre could do with some kind of Genevieve code, since he's got a surfeit of Genevieve's in his life and populating his blog. =)

posted by: coldwish at 03:41 | link | comments (2) |
between 2007

Pardon My Mess

Doing some edits to the template, looking for better colours, the green was wearing on me.

posted by: coldwish at 06:39 | link | comments (4) |
between 2007

Cool, Way Cool

Right now, parked on our apron, we have the oldest operational B-25 Bomber, "Miss Hap"  (2nd plane on page, scroll down). 

I came into work in the dark and my headlights shone on this ancient beast through the fencing as I parked. Right next to it, an F/A-18. I walked right through the building and straight out to these two planes and wandered around underneath them with a huge goofy smile on my face. I liked seeing these two planes side by side, juxtaposed in the darkness and the warm summer night, runway lights blinking blue in the background.

I'm not really an airplane geek, but you gotta admit these things are kinda cool. Way cool, really.

Like the biplane that was here for the airshow, and the wingwalker. Yeah. That's cool too. Carol arrived on Monday night with her biplane in a trailer, and spent the week building her plane in our hangar. She's not just a pretty face.

Down in Antarctica we don't get that much aircraft variety to fuel. But we get to do it in Antarctica. Up here, none of the aircraft have skis and there's no live volcano puffing merrily away at my back as I fuel a Herc, so we have to make do with cool planes.

Then there's all the people inside the airplanes: presidential candidates (Romney), senators (Clinton, Obama, etc.) governors (Richardson), presidents (Putin, Sarkozy, Bush) bands (Deep Purple), performers (Travis Tritt), rich people. We get 'em all. Not half as cool as the planes.

I'd love to come back here next summer and work for them again.

posted by: coldwish at 18:55 | link | comments (3) |
between 2007

The Threat Of A Naked Lady

Today I went back to the pool. It has been awhile since I swam, and I need to return my body to Fuelie shape so I can keep up with the big boys. I have five weeks.

One drawback with the Dover Indoor Pool is the fact that Henry Law Park is right outside the door. Why is that an issue? It is an issue because the changing rooms, shower rooms, and locker areas, are where the toilets are. The public toilets for Henry Law Park. I don't have any issues with mothers bringing their children, male or female into the women's locker room when I am changing. I am fairly blase about nudity, at least for the US. (As any of you who read my Peeping Tom story can attest.) If they do not want their children to see breasts and pubic hair and other evidence of the adult female body (bulgy tummy, stretchmarks, scars, body hair, cellulite, etc.) then they can stay out. For the most part the kids are too young, or too stunned to stare much. I will not rush for cover on their invasion of my turf, nor feel less comfortable with them in it. If they stare, I let them. Often I stare back, to indicate I find it a bit rude.

However, I do object to the herd of just post-adolescent girls who sweep in giggling and clinging to each other as if we are the threat, and they the conquering youth, better by virtue of their taut young flesh and ignorance of age. They come to use the toilet, and to check their overly made up faces. I don't resent them for their youth, after all, I'm past mine, thankfully.  Been there had that. Wasted it. I resent them for their idiocy.

Today, as I was showering--in a private stall, performing my ablutions, not just rinsing--I use the public showers then--and half covered in suds, body mottled red with the exfoliating I'd been undertaking, I heard the click clacking of little heels and the high pitched shrieks of insecure girlhood. Then I watched as my towel was snatched off the hook outside my shower stall.

I'm sure they were thinking this was a fine joke. Nudity, nakedness, is something, at their age, to be vulnerable about. A glimpse of ones flesh is like a theft, when so young and faux confident. They perhaps thought they would trap me trembling in my shower stall, wrapped in the curtain and pleading for help, towel-less?

I saw the towel snatched away and without a thought of hesitation or fear, I whipped aside that shower curtain and marched right out there among the fully clothed skinny herd of them, and demanded, "Who took my towel?!" I was more disbelieving than angry, but apparently the extra yards of skin, and my willingness to wield it without embarrassment, stunned them. Silence fell on the 6 of them, they turned and stared, shocked and scared. I caught eyes darting from crotch to breasts to face and away. I know when I am nude I am often more naked and exposed than many other women, I am a redhead, and I am lightly furred. My labia show from the front. Other women, those who do not shave (and that is the majority at the pool) have dark forests to cover them. In a public gathering of naked women, it can seem more polite than I can manage.

So I was really naked.

I repeated myself, "Who took my towel?" and like a strong breath of wind on dandelion seeds, they scattered, flying out of there without a word. They skittered around the corner and shot out of the locker room like the depths of hell had just opened on them. I think I've seen those kinds of expressions on Buffy the Vampire Slayer before.

On the floor behind their instantly vacated spot I found my towel. I retrieved it, hung it back up, returned to my shower and flnished my cleansing ritual.

That's right. Didn't expect that, did you?

Run from my naked body. Think about it tonight, and think on your future. For this too shall be yours one day.

posted by: coldwish at 15:49 | link | comments (4) |
between 2007

A Short Sharp Reminder

The sky is infected with lightning tonight. I do not use the word infected lightly, either. I have never seen such displays of lights and dark.

It is warm and humid out, and the night sky feels clear and dark blue. Emerging from Planet Fitness after my workout into the light polluted parking lot, I did not think to check the sky. Dark blue, dark. Until, 10 paces closer to my car, I and 2 other oblivious women were stopped dead in our tracks as the sky above our heads was ripped open by two simultaneous hands of boney lightning reaching down from clouds on high to lower clouds. Clear as light in the dark can be, as shocking and exclamation of power and threat as I've ever seen. These twin roots, fingers, snarled from one cloud to another and disappeared from all but our retinas.

The cloud cover is high, very high, and I imagine, in the outlines of the lightning strikes slaloming across the sky that the thunderheads are tall and gorgeous. We have no wind. We have no rain. Everything is calm, it pends, it pauses, it expects.

There is little to no thunder accompanying these strikes, just the light show and thin distant rumbles. I imagine the cracking kapow!s of those directly under this storm, and I tremble. We stand paralysed in the middle of the lot, tempting fate, to see more of this. Realizing this I stop pointing with my car keys. Not clever.  But there is no fear without the sound and fury of wind, rain and thunder.

I drive home. I lean forward over my steering wheel, seeking more sky. At home I head out into the backyard and stand head back, mouth agog as the lightning shoots sideways, dodging behind clouds and striking others like weaving in the sky with silver. Sometimes it's a dozen or more tiny strikes in all directions like little worms seething. Others I get pictures of spider veins, the sky is having a stroke and all the veins are pulsing with light flow. I recall high school pictures of blood flowing into the lungs with each heart beat, disappearing into capillaries tiny and fine into invisible. The sky pulses with these odd beats or life and death and disease and threat.

I can taste the lightning, the hair on my face stands on end, my nose singes inside with a metallic crisp inhalation. I can feel my heart race and sing, the soundtrack to this event.

I hope never to be the person standing in the middle of a field during one of these events. Just as I hope to be that same person with an unobstructed view, as on the prairies or the ocean, from horizon to horizon. I want to centre myself in a sky dark bowl of sharp shocks and heathen angles. I would risk my life for that glimpse.

There is no lightening on the Ice.

Sometimes the world has to remind me that the Ice is not all that is beautiful.

I could not live happily in a world without these reminders.

posted by: coldwish at 15:09 | link | comments (2) |
between 2007

Mainbody Deployment

I'm going back.

Now I can stop holding my breath and start looking for a roommate.

*phew*

posted by: coldwish at 10:26 | link | comments (3) |
between 2007