Expedition Planning #7 : The final countdown

D-Day (or departure day) as given by our marching orders is December 26th. While most of you will be sleeping off Christmas and settling in to a relaxing Boxing Day, JY and I will be making our way to Strasbourg airport at the crack of dawn to start our journey to Concordia.

What will we be doing in our last three weeks before departure? It's a classic case of "so much to do, so little time"... We have pared down the remaining tasks to the bare essentials. For me these are:

• finish configuring the remaining equipment that we will take down there;
• get an article I am writing with colleagues in the US to a point at which they can move it forward during my absence;
• brief my colleague JJL (who is also PI on the CASE-IPY project that is taking me to Antarctica) on the current state of a masters project we are co-supervising;
• get home for an early family Christmas (this also means finding time for early Christmas shopping);
• buy essentials for the journey and pack my bags.

I would like to say I am calm, collected and efficient right now, and that all this will be done with no stress or panic. The reality is somewhat different. I seem to be going through phases of being entirely with it, calm and efficient, followed by phases in which I feel like I am going in circles and am incapable of doing anything right.

My advice to myself in these cases: breathe! And remember that a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step...

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