I fell asleep in the physics stationery cupboard this afternoon. It was lucky Peter found me a few hours later and woke me up otherwise I would have missed out on dinner. He said they'd originally thought I might be up in the mezzanine level under the observatory domes but when they found me in the cupboard they were relieved because the domes are leaking at the moment and they were worried I might have got wet with snow melt.

The explanation is a long story. I choose to start this story now.

Chapter 1: In which four intrepid boffins fly 150 km onto the Antarctic ice shelf, dig a big hole, take a team photo in the hole, and come back home.

The operation was to retrieve a magnetometer that had been left on the plateau for two years, and which we suspected would be buried a few metres in snow. We codenamed it "Operation Dig To China I" although the alternative title was (after Lloyd suggested we ought to pipe Indiana Jones music through the heli headsets upon takeoff to set the right mood) The Expedition of Magnetic Pulsations and Lidar Engineers for Outer Field Digging, Observations and Other Madnesses (which shortens to TEMPLE OF DOOM). We left base with both helicopters, a chainsaw, two pilots, four passengers, survival packs, several shovels, a few ice axes, a packet of TimTams and some hot tea. We dug and chainsawed through the ice for six and a half hours. One pilot sat in his chopper and read an entire book. The other pilot stood in a freezer suit and sledding cap and watched us bemusedly. We got to about 1.8 metres depth and had to abort the mission because the weather was about to turn foul, we were physically exhausted, the ice was getting solid and unworkable, we were already cutting into the following day's helicopter operations, the chainsaw was clogging up, and Rick the pilot had finished his book. We flew home through a stunning twilight.

The site we left behind looked like a place of strange pagan worship. As we'd chainsawed blocks out of the pit, we'd hauled them to the surface with ice axes and then dragged them away from the pit lip to make more room, so at the end there was a six-foot rectangular grave surrounded by a circle of blocks like Stonehenge. Even though Lloyd was in charge of all the chainsawing we all posed for photos with the chainsaw before we had to pile into the chopper, in a kind of "look at me, I get chainsaw action in deep Antarctica, I'm heaps cool, man" kind of (sad, ridiculous) way. Damon, however, got some ace shots of him looking like Mr December of a Chainsaw Men In Antarctica calendar. Nice work.

So: despite a day of solid digging in sub-freezing temperatures in the middle of the Antarctic desert, we didn't get out the sensor. We asked Leigh if in his 27 years of flying in Antarctica he'd ever seen boffins do anything so seemingly stupid. His answer: "No comment."

Trying to find the buried sensor head. Yeah, good luck.

Watching Lloyd chainsaw to China

Snowhenge and Ritual Gravesite

We didn't get the sensor, but we did get a team photo in the hole. So that makes it all worthwhile.

Work it Damon.

Flying home.

Chapter 2: In which girl keeps kitchen running all morning, hangs up tea-towel over lunch to fly 200 km and retrieve valuable scientific instrument from remote location in the noble pursuit of science, and gets back in time to mop the floors and wash the pots and pans.

Okay okay, I wasn't running the kitchen but I feel the need to talk myself up a bit because retrieving the equipment at our second magnetometer site turned out to be so damn easy.

On Tuesday I was on slushy duty for the second time - that's where you help out all day in the kitchen, mixing up the orange juice, making the milk from powdered stuff, refilling the fridges, putting out the brekky and lunch stuff, killing carrots, peeling spuds, washing up, mopping the floor, washing the teatowels, taking out the garbage etc. I was cruising on very little sleep after having 3 a.m. toasted cheese sandwiches with the LIDAR guys the previous night, which is how I came to find out about Andrew C.'s secret past as a jumping castle operator. (Actually it was what he worked as for the entire previous year. It's a strange progression in career and rather Clarke-Kentish: one moment he's operating bouncing castles, the next he's shooting giant space lasers in Antarctica.)

Just before lunch Lloyd came in with a strange smile on his face and his eyebrows all crooked which indicated he was going to say something strange. He said: what would you say if I told you we might be flying to the plateau at 2? Hmm, option (a), wash pots and pans and scrape mould off potatoes; option (b), fly in helicopter to sublime and exotic location with a bag full of tim tams. So I got Andrew K to fill in for me in the kitchen and went and grabbed our stuff.

We had good reason to think that this second site would be even more difficult than the first. So we left prepared: TWO chainsaws, FIVE people to dig, and TWO packets of tim tams. The codename was Operation Dig To China II: This Time It's Personal.

Lloyd, Damon and I left first in one chopper. Flying across the plateau was amazing and beautiful. Looking out to a perfect clear sky, the landscape was an abstract painting: one blue rectangle over one white rectangle, framed in the chopper window. We used the handheld GPS to track the target. We eyeballed it as a tiny black rectangle from the air - the solar panels. As we circled low to land we saw, amazingly, the top half of the vault sticking out of the ice, and the cable lying on top of the surface. The thing was sitting right there, pretty much ready to be picked up and loaded into the chopper. No chainsawing, no digging, just a bit of delicate scraping away of ice and then we were off again. We couldn't believe it.

The weather was coming in fairly rapidly while we were there, so it was lucky we scrammed when we did. The white stretch of ice reaching off to the horizon dissolved into these great white prominences of mushroomy-cloud. I never thought I would see anything that was so exactly the alien sea of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, with its wide plains sending up inexplicable towers and feelers into the sky.

So: we got back to base at 5:30, unloaded the stuff, and then Damon grinned and said "You know this means you've got to go back to slushy duty!" Argh. So I went back to the kitchen all hyped up with the first magnetometer retrival success story, and washed up all the dinner stuff and then co-slushy Theo and I mopped all the floors dancing to the Beatles on the radio (the slushys have the privilege of programming the radio playlist for that day). And then we had Space Group drinks to celebrate (Brown Brothers port and cheese & bikkies, oh yeah).

At the magnetometer site

Choppin' it up back to base.

Chapter 3: In which we learn that the heroine has no-one to blame but herself for falling asleep in the cupboard.

The point of all these stories is that I did a lot of digging and duties and stuff and had very very little sleep. It continues in the same manner: after going to bed at 3 a.m., the next morning I had to be up in time to start Baywatch duty at SEVEN.

Baywatch duty is not about parading about on the beach in red swimmers although that joke seems STILL to be in vogue around the station despite the fact it should have been laid to rest LONG ago. It involves being rostered on to clean up the bar and lounge area, restock the homebrew fridges, clean out the empties, mop the foyer floor, vacuum and so on. Lloyd is the only person who has been able to explain the origin of the strange name. It seems its etymology starts with "Night Watch", a traditional duty of Antarctic expeditioners of yore, which involved stoking the fire, baking the bread and so forth. At Aussie bases it tended to be rostered to be done in the mornings instead of at night, so it became "Day Watch". From there it had a permutation at Casey which was "Day Care", but the facetiousness grated so it was changed back, from where it mutated again into "Baywatch" which has unfortunately stuck. So now you know.

When I finished up I came to the space building, wrote an email back to Newcastle about getting out the magnetometer, put together some material for a press release the uni was doing (it's just been put up on the net and it's all: local girl makes good, goes to antarctica, "gruelling work conditions and freezing temperatures" - yeah, right, it's sunny and we're having drinks on the balcony in t-shirts) and then went to look for some stationery. The stationery cupboard was quiet and dark. I sat down on the desk in the corner of it. I shut my eyes just for a bit. I lay down. I woke up with my head on a Brother label maker and shuffled down for dinner. You know, just another typical day in Antarctica.