Winter here has started and it’s finally actually gotten cold. It’s 1°F today with -14 °F windchill, which has been par the past few days. It’s snowing very lightly but sideways. This is also normal.
It doesn’t feel super cold though. I dress a lot more warmly than home (long johns, all the time), but I’m not wearing a jacket when I go out of buildings. We don’t spend a whole lot of time outside. Some shops spend nearly all of their time outside (like Fleet Ops or the construction workers doing projects outside), and some don’t go outside at all (like the galley or white collar/paperwork jobs). If you live in 155* and you work in 155 too, since the galley is in 155 you could potentially never go outside at all.
We all have single rooms now and mine is really nice. I have a coffee pot and everything. I share a bathroom with a suitemate, but don’t have to use an all-floor one anymore.
The shared bathroom in 211 wasn’t bad at all – one of the most fun parts of summer was “girl time” in the ladies’ room, when people were getting ready to go out in the evening or coming back from a night out and we’d chat for a few minutes. The base is overwhelmingly male sometimes – it was roughly 40/60 female-to-male during the summer, but I’m pretty sure the proportion is even more skewed now, and depending on your shop there may be no men at all. A few shops are exceptions, such as the BFC, Berg Field Center, which is majority women. I don’t know why — there’s probably an obvious reason, but I haven’t hung out there enough to learn it yet. I probably should, because knowing that it’s there/exists as a majority-women-space is one of those little things that brings me joy.
Anyway — it’s nice to have privacy and to be able to decorate the bathroom and make it a nice space, but I do also miss those interactions.
Winter is big on privacy, between having single rooms and having a much smaller population. In the summertime, even between meals it can be tricky to grab a galley table to have a quiet bowl of cereal or cup of coffee to yourself, but in winter even at super-busy-meal-time (usually about half an hour into a meal) it’s entirely possible to grab a table to yourself and read a book.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think this is my big question of the winter, since I had such a fantastic time with my summer friends, and now I’ve returned to a level of solitude comparable to my life in the States. While I really enjoy having my own place and lots of quiet, there is so much richness in life from spending time with others.
Well, time for a quiet cup of coffee and to work on my quilt.
*The big blue building.
**Colloquially nicknamed Building Full of Chicks, which I embraced with more enthusiasm than I might have otherwise as it was the thing that finally made the BFC stick in my head for area familiarization. The BFC houses/maintains/issues equipment/supplies for field camps, among other things. It’s kind of a wonderland.
Book and Ladder 
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