Saving the Princess

China can you hear me!!!!

Preparations
    
25 April 2005

Preparations

So today?s dispatch is going to have to pull double duty since we slacked off and didn?t send one yesterday. There just really hasn?t been that much going on at Base Camp, especially in the afternoons when the temperatures plummet on a daily basis and send all of us running for our tents. It?s pretty funny that everyone arrives at Everest and all of a sudden becomes a completely fair weather climber. We?re here for so long and there isn?t the rush to bag a peak in a weekend, so we pretty much wait for perfect weather before doing anything. The excuse that we need more time to acclimate never gets old either. That being said, we?re planning on going back up the mountain in the next couple of days? weather dependent, of course!

But in order to keep busy around camp, we?ve each found our own hobbies to keep us busy. Spice has spent the last three days playing with his first 8 and now 18 foot antenna. We secretly think that he?s getting a payoff on the side to spy on the Chinese from up here with the telecom center that he?s setting up with the Sherpas. Our favorite piece of the puzzle: re-using parts from a helicopter that crashed several years ago to loft the antenna to even greater heights.

Trixie took a hike yesterday to get a view of Everest and to keep from going out of her mind after being stuck in camp for the last 13 days straight. She?s been busy taking care of everything around Base Camp while we?re up on the hill so that everything runs smoothly when we?re in camp. As a complement to her work, we have no idea what she really does, but I?m sure we?d realize the second that she started slacking off because things would go wrong.

Jedi Yak Master and I had to take time off from saving the Princess (we?ve moved from Madden onto Mario in Nintendo world) to complete some testing with the NASA team. While trying to liven up their Montessori like games a little bit, they decided that we were already hypoxic after our colorful pronunciations of words like ?dope? and ?pipe?.

Focusing on climbing for a few hours today, the team got a lesson on using oxygen systems and chose their personal masks for summit day. Spice would have gotten upset at Jedi Yak Master?s Darth Vader impressions, but was busy sucking down half a bottle of oxygen to demonstrate ?proper usage? of the systems for the team. We?re sure he?ll sleep well tonight.

MC