Green House Update and Mural

  The green house is really getting to be a jungle.

  The cucumbers are doing very well and it looks like we should have a harvest of those pretty soon. I recently started some melon seeds to hopefully have some melons for the midwinter dinner.

 

I was asked to do a mural on one of the walls of the skua shack a few weeks ago. Skua is where people donate things when they leave that they no longer want and others take things that they need or forgot (it's also named after the bird skua, I'm not sure why). I got a pretty nice sweater from skua a few months ago. I finally got around to getting outside to paint the mural today. The mural is of Amundsen's men and tent, it's one of the first pictures ever taken at the south pole. The plan was to paint it as life size as possible so people could pose with Amundsen's crew and be a part of the iconic picture.

Painting a mural in almost -50F/-45C with wind chill was a pretty difficult task. I could see the paint drying on the wall; it looks as if it was steaming. The paint in the roller tray would freeze/dry very quickly if I didn’t mix it every minute or so and I also had to add a good amount of paint thinner fairly often to keep the paint liquid and paintable.  

 As the paint roller was drying the water leaving it formed ice crystals.  The whole mural took four and a half hours to complete including three warm up breaks, clean up and walking back to the station.