I just faxed some medical forms to the Antarctic Division in preparation for them organising my pre-trip check-up. They are the coolest medical forms I've ever had to fill out in my life: listen to this:

Persons participating in the AAP may engage in physical activity at altitudes up to 2000 metres, may experience temperatures as low as -40 degrees C, and may make flights in unpressurised aircraft to 3000 metres. All must be sufficiently agile and physically fit to enable them to climb ladders and nets on the sides of ships and climb into and out of ship's boats and inflatable craft which move considerably in heavy swells.

It kind of sounds like a James Bond novel. All you'd need to add would be a wristwatch that did some fancy tricks and a girl wearing a leather catsuit and of course the small boat would advance towards the churning ship's propeller at an alarming rate while you were pinning down the Nazi henchman with one hand and reaching up to the helecopter ladder with the other, dagger clenched between your teeth to fight off the ravenous Antarctic shark that would be following you because it was trained to kill you by the evil oil baron... Wow, this is going to be a way cool trip.

Interestingly, the form says that "those applicants whose continued good health is dependent on any medication are generally not acceptable." This includes asthma, which could possibly rule out quite a lot of otherwise healthy people. One thing you don't have to do, however, is get your appendix out before you go. The doctor at the base should be able to take care of a busted appendix. According to Nikki Gemmel in Shiver (which kind of reads like a diary of the author's trip with the names changed and a melodramatic romance sewn in, so I'm inclined to believe the factoids she mentions in the narrative) the doctors are the only ones who are required to have their appendix removed, after an incident where "a Russian doctor got appendicities in the early sixties and had to operate on himself. He used a local anaesthetic, a scalpel and a mirror."

Anyway. Having a medical is just one of the things I have to do before I leave on the ship in two months and three days. Also on the list are: write five lab reports on electromagnetism then do one assignment on Maxwell's equations also write a tutorial paper on concepts of freedom in modern society as well as a philosophy essay on Camus' existentialism then do two exams and don't forget to go camera shopping and also make sure my laptop is set up properly all while becoming the expert on the Antarctic magnetometers in addition to my job which is solving the problems with the clock timing on the satellite FedSat and training the guy who will do the work while I'm in Antarctica but not forgetting to take care of the first-year physics laboratory sessions I demonstrate and also the students I tutor privately and still finding time to hang out with actual people particularly Marty in Sydney and play in the squash competition and also be able to practise harp now and then. And sleep.

Stuff I should no way be doing because it's wasting important time: reading the big stack of Antarctica books teetering on my desk, writing slop in Slush, and especially not sitting up in bed late at night with a Chemical Engineering textbook calculating the thermodynamic properties of spit in Antarctica in order to determine that it will take over a minute to freeze assuming a mass of half a gram, a convective heat transfer coefficient of 40 Watts per square meter at minus twenty degrees, neglecting evaporation and making the reasonable assumption that the temperature profile within the mass is roughly uniform. (Don't ask, just read here comes the science).