One of the things, believe it or not, I look forward to once the expedition starts is catching up on my sleep. My goal for a big trip is to get at least eight hours of sleep per day. With midnight creeping only a few minutes away, I'm still ticking off tasks and sleep seems farther and farther from my grasp.

I'm number crunching now it's making my head hurt - trying to calculate the amount of food we will carry in our sleds, where to position our resupplies, the distance between food caches and the locations of crevasses. If there is a simple logarithm, to figure out all this I don't know it.

A note to all those still in school: Listen to your teachers. You WILL have to use this stuff when you get older. (Although, I still have yet to find the practical application in polar travel of calculating the area under a curve.)

Today was busy. Checking Dong and Bill's gear, finalizing the shopping list, tracking down gear and supplies and finally shopping. We are on a fairly tight time crunch so there is a subtle pressure that hangs over each of these tasks. At the supermarket, we attracted more than our share of curious onlookers pulling 180 soup packets off the shelves. Or scooping up 180 Rittersport candy bars, 36 salamis, four bottles of olive oil, 20 packages of butter... You get the picture.

I wondered if the checkout clerk might be able to file a workman's comp claim from suffering some sort of 'repetitive use' injury from scanning so many items without a break.

Upon leaving the store, Dong offered that it was easier to go grocery shopping with me than his wife. A statement which he decide to follow with a thorough description of how men and women are different when they shop. My apologies to any offended party - I'll work on the entire team's discretion in the weeks and months to come.

Not sure if I'm naturally unlucky or what, but the customs officials in Punta Arenas are on strike again. It seems that when I was here last year they were striking as well. This many not mean much to you or I, but if you were a portion of freeze-dried dinner, you might raise an objection. After all, you were scheduled to be in a sled making your way to the South Pole.

Special thanks go to Adventure Logistics and Expedition's staff (ALE) in taking out an extra big scissors to cut through all the red tape. The aforementioned food is safely in the Bodega 3 (storage) awaiting tomorrow's massive food pack operation.

You may not realize it but there are big changes happening to the Save the Poles web site. Tim Harincar of Webexpeditions.net is working diligently to get the site 'South Pole ready'. please note the addition of route tracking on a Google Earth map and Newsvine link on the home page. Of course, we are all holding our breathe for the completely revamped Global Warming page featuring Wolf Ridge's climate change curriculum, updates from Center for Biological Diversity, Seventh Generation info, great RSS feeds and much much more. Come on Tim, I know you can do it!

Image: An early view of a rapidly filling grocery cart in Punta Arenas' Lider Supermarket. Oh yeah... Pringles!

Remember, it's cool to be cold. Save the Poles. Save the planet.

For more information, please visit www.savethepoles.com

For information about guided Antarctic expeditions, please visit http://www.antarctic-logistics.com/

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For technical inquires, please contact webexpeditions.net