Chilli chocolate, jumbo oats

The postman came yesterday! Two more bags of mail from Stanley, and it was like Christmas all over again. We had an afternoon off, a wild and windy day, cosied ourselves up in the bunk room and lit the fire. I had two little packages, chocolate! extra-special chilli chocolate from Rachel (even more special because my roomies don't like chilli so I get to eat it all myself!). And a big heavy squashy parcel from Phil containing ..... jumbo oats!. Ever practical. I had been bemoaning the fact that we had very few here - they do make the best home-made muesli - and he took it upon himself to do something about it. Fantastic, down to the last packet but this should see me through. Only 6 weeks and 5 days to go til we leave, not that we are counting but Rachel and I did work it out the other day .... just curious you understand ..
The days continue much the same, with the odd spectacular highlight here and there. We had an emperor penguin visit, over on Jougla Point across the water. Of course we can't get there being boatless, but the ship that was visiting at the time gave us a zodiac trip over to view it. Beautiful big bird, amazingly huge, made the gentoos all look like babies. And even better, there were a few spare kayaks that evening, and Rachel and I borrowed a double and went out for a circuit of Goudier Is. What a treat, I had been so jealous of kayakers we had seen in the area. It was magic seeing the ice cliffs and bergs from sea level, and having penguins popping up next to us to take a look.
And having said the days are much the same, that's not quite true - they are different also! It seems that almost every day one of us has a connection to a passenger, or a visitor has some link to the early inhabitants of the base. A couple of days ago Rachel sold a stamp to a friendly couple, and they put it on a card with an Ayr address - when I had a look I was sure the address rang a bell - White Gables? It dawned on me that Judith, one of my best friends at school had lived there! They were astonished when I told them I had been in their house! admittedly not for near on thirty years - they said it had changed a bit. And took a photo of me to show Judith who they still knew. How funny, they went around the museum telling everybody of this odd coincidence.
Well, it's a wild and windy day today, the baby penguins are in a right bedraggled state and I'll be surprised if we don't have casualties poor things. But from what I have heard the weather has been grim back home, and I imagine we are still in a better position to have long sunny days than the UK. No more painting for a while, but we haven't really got time now anyway, big ships in everyday for the next week or so.