Safe nights and wild days.

Work was not particularly exciting yesterday, so we went to SAussie's to hang out in the evening. SAussie, Finn, Sydney, and Canuk were tired from having given blood (yay, community service!) by the time I got there, so we just lounged. I had to work later than they did. Pity, as I was hoping to see what blood donation was like in Switzerland. We hiked home somewhat early, and I caught up with Brazil for a night in the bomb shelter. All new buildings in CH had to be equipped with a bomb shelter until quite recently, and ours is supposedly good for eighteen people for eighteen days and nights, at which point there's an escape hatch ready for a quick exit to the road.

These days, the shelter is full of archives and office supplies. Brazil and I brought two sleeping pads and a duvet each, plus sleeping bags and pillows. The floor was still noticeably concrete, but it was a pretty good night anyway. I brought also some cheesecake for a late night snack, and a flashlight/torch to scare away the spiders, since I was sleeping under the hatch. The light was instead used for reading until the wee small hours. It's quite dark in the bomb shelter with the overhead light out. I'm glad I didn't check on the spiders till the morning--when I did open the hatch for a peek, they were at least the size of Oreos, their bodies narrowed nickels in the middle. We padded off to breakfast in our pajamas, as required. We're working our way through the Staff Challenge, and you have to be able to prove to senior staff that you did the challenge items. The lone guest, a remarkable woman who was here earlier this month with her sister and nieces, also heard us in the night, so we should have an earwitness to call on if needed.

I spent this morning with six young women from England. I instructed them in the fine art of igloo building, then ended up putting much of it together. They didn't realize that it would take four hours to build one large enough for them all to fit inside, and they quickly tired of chopping wedge-shaped blocks. The snow wasn't of the proper sort either, or at least the top layer wasn't. We've been getting enough sun lately that there was a two-centimeter crust of crumbly ice on top of the snow, which was still a good 30 cm thick in places. I eventually gave up on their feeble blocks and just patched the thing together. It was never as nice as this igloo/bar/fondue restaurant, but it did hold all of them. It would have slept three, as well, had the afternoon sun not caved in the roof.


Nevertheless, we did finish the thing. The blocks disappear about halfway up, but we tried to just smooth out the rest of the construction. Toward the end, we had to go from three to two inside the igloo, then just hands poking out the shrinking hole in the roof. Those on the outside kept dumping more snow on our heads as we tried to close up the gap. Our hurried efforts toward the end left the roof a bit flatter than it should have been, but we did reinforce the inside with some extra snow. We also had to pat another layer onto the side facing the sun, as it looked to be thinning out a bit. The Brits held a tea-time discussion inside the igloo after we'd finished, then emerged triumphantly and headed out on a sleigh ride. I hung around to soak up a bit more glory. It's not every day you can build an igloo at the end of March.