Team OZ  - The adventures of Sarah Zawistowski and Jim Ott

Update on the Last 20 Months

Yeah, I know. It has been a very very long time since my last post. I pretty much gave up on the blog a long time ago. At least I am here now and once again posting. We'll see if it lasts this time.

I thought it best to give an update on some of the things I've done in the past 20 months. Since the last post I've deployed twice more to the ice and have worked in Montana at Glacier National Park last summer. So I'll start off were I pretty much left off from my last post. I am probably going to have to do multiple different blogs to catch up. It may take a little time since I am leaving for another amazing trip in just a few days. I'm headed to Southern Africa for a month!! I am so very fortunate in the opportunities I've had over the last 3 plus years. For this trip I'll be traveling with Kris, my girlfriend over the last year. We are going to take some tours with intrepid travel and some of the highlights will be Cape Town, the Eastern coast of Africa, Lesotho, Durban, Johannesburg, the Okavango Delta, and Victoria Falls. It's going to be a busy month! Ok, back to where I last left off.

So, my third season on the ice I once again was a Shuttle Driver at McMurdo. It was another good season with some familiar faces and some from my original season that moved on to different things. I lucked out and roomed with my good friend Audrey for the season in a nice room in one of the upper case dorms. That got me out of 155 and a 4 person room and into a good sized two person room. It was a great experience living with a good friend. Sometimes it was a little interesting especially when she got a steady boyfriend.

At the end of season 3 I got to go on one of the best morale trips ever. I got to go to Cape Royds to the Adelie penguin ranch with a science team for a day. The main reason I was given the opportunity is because I volunteered to be a hut guide that year for trips out to Cape Evans and the historic hut built in the early 1900's during the great exploration trips. Out at Cape Royds there is another historic hut and the science team was hoping for a trained hut guide to let them in. That narrowed down the eligible people and because of my good performance as a Shuttle driver I was given the trip. Out at Cape Royds there are over 4,000 Adelie penguins and the area is a protected place listed on the Antarctic treaty. Typically only scientists get to go up and get close to the penguins. However, I lucked out again and the science team added me to they're permit allowing me to help them out. The project for the day was to tag the new baby penguins born that particular season. In order to do this the scientists would corral the penguins using some fencing, remove the adult penguins from the corral, and then begin to tag the young ones. My job in all of this was to help with the corralling and once the scientists tagged a baby penguin they would hand it over the fence and I'd take the penguin from them and put it down somewhere safe a little way away from the corral.

Yes, that's right - I got to touch and to hold baby penguins! That is unheard of for anyone who is not a scientist. There are rules that require a certain distance from any wildlife down in Antarctica and I got added to a very rare permit to actually touch the Adelies. It was Amazing!! Smeelly and Dirty! And Amazing!

Here are a couple pictures from the day.

All of that brown area is penguin poo! I did say it was smelly! It was also super noisy. Penguins like to squawk a whole lot.Can't beat that view

The corral used to get the penguins.
One of the adult Adelie penguinsOne of the baby Adelie penguins tagged
Me at the penguin colony

I also took some videos but they couldn't be uploaded. I let it run all night long and nothing happened.

That's all for this post. Will be working on some more in the coming months. It will be a slow process.

Another Brithday - now 32

The last two years have really flown by. It seems like I just had my 30th and now I'm on to 32. It was a good birthday spent with my family in Ohio. My sisters went out of there way to make me a great meal with some of my favorites - apple pie and tator tots . It was especially nice since I had been feeling in a funk leading up to my birthday. I'm still in the funk but slowly finding my way out of it. I think part of has to do with me being 32 and being where I am at in life. I have had a good two years since I decided to go travel but all of that two years has not been perfect. The hard times are when I'm back in the states and not working. I feel really unproductive. I also feel at times I have little control over what I do each day. Part of that is not having a car so that I can take off when I want to. In a way though I should be able to find enough things to keep me busy. And so the only one to blame is really me. Hopefully finding more things to exercise my mind as well as my body will help me get out of this funk.

Another thing about the hear and now and being 32 is I realize I'm not totally fulfilled yet with my life. Maybe I never will be totally fulfilled. All I know is that there is still some things missing. I love being able to travel and go to the ice and will continue to do so while figuring out those few things missing.

As an update, I've been back in the states now for two months and am in Ohio hanging out with family. I was in Denver visiting with my sis for the first 4 weeks. I've got two more months before deploying again to the ice. I am really looking forward to deploying and being busy again. I'll leave for St. Louis in a couple of days to visit friends out there and do my best to make it around the midwest once more to visit as many people as I can.

Someday I will get around to posting some pictures of Asia on the net. There are over 3,000 pictures to go through and I just haven't been motivated to look through them all and pick the best 100 or so to post. Most likely they will all go up on Facebook first.