Hail, and well met! I'm Johannes Habernacher, mka Ensign John Havershaw, and I'm
the Webminister for the Barony of the Southern Wastes (incipient) and
also for The Quarter. Please feel free to
email me with any questions, comments or
criticisms you might have about these pages.
No, I mean it - please email me! Most of the populace of the Southern Wastes is at McMurdo Station, so during the winter (February through October), I'm literally stuck here at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station with only a couple of other SCAdians (in the winter, we're down to about 25 people here, as opposed to 150 during the summer, and we can't get to McMurdo easily). It's really, really boring down here in the winter - which is also the night in Antarctica! (The Aurora Australis is kind of nice, though - and it's much clearer here than at McMurdo, which is only a few hundred miles away. I've tried to take some photos of it, but they just don't do it justice.)
Summer is only four months long, but I love being able to get over to McMurdo - it's like a small town, with around 1500 people living there. When I came down here, I thought there was going to be like a small handful of crusty old scientists and a few other Navy guys on the whole continent, so I was really kind of shocked! (Actually, that more accurately describes Pole Station during the winter, so I pretty much got what I was expecting.)
Anyway, this winter, I decided to make use of my time by learning HTML, and like I said, I now maintain the Web pages of both the Barony of the Southern Wastes (incipient), and The Quarter, which is a tongue-in-cheek SCA newsletter put together by my friend Kathryne d'Inkepenne, who's on the support staff at McMurdo in her mundane life.
In the SCA, I love fighting (of course) and brewing (which I can't do here because the yeast doesn't ferment properly). Since coming down here, I've also learned how to juggle (I juggle snowballs - they're cheap as dirt; if you're doing it right, your fingers don't touch them long enough to get too cold; and if you drop them, they don't bounce all over the place and drive people crazy).
I used to think some people in the SCA had a bit of a hygiene problem - but here at Pole, we only get one shower per week, with a strict limit of two minutes' worth of water (they're living in the lap of luxury over at McMurdo, where they get two showers a week). Oh well, like some people say at Pennsic, "not bathing" is period - but I think when my tour down here is up, I'm gonna sit in a hot tub in Florida until I'm more wrinkled than a Shar Pei puppy, then sit in a sauna until the wrinkles are steamed out!