The Plane, The Plane!

Well I am a few days behind. Nothing much happened on Friday, but Saturday was the big day - every two weeks the plane comes from Hono (as in lulu) and brings all kinds of goodies. Regular employees coming back from vacation, new employees just getting their first view of the island, supplies, especially fresh fruit, always a case or two of someomne's favorite beer, one guy even has a couple of burger king whoppers couriered out to him biweekly. I got the meds and emergency supplies that I felt we were deficient in and that made me happy. The big excitement of course was the 22 year old EMT from Vermont who came to fill the position here for a month until the new full time person gets here. Try to imagine an island with lot of young men who haven't seen a woman younger than their mother in a year - it's a scary vision. But it's working out well I think; she's an athletic type who will eat you for lunch if she thinks you are implying there is something she can't do because she's a girl. She knows her way around an ambulance real well and is working as hard on getting that up to speed as I have been in the clinic. She got introduced to the Ioke Beach House right away, with the appropriate warnings about the spices, and the glass refilling thing.
Yesterday the barge came in loaded with several hundred tons of supplies for the next 6 months; two big dump trucks, something like 100,000 pounds of concrete, enough gasoline and diesel fuel to keep us going (I think the jet fuel comes in separately on a tanker), god only knows what else. (Actually I think Jeff the logistician knows.) I watched them bring that barge in the narrow channel into the marina and it went without a hitch. Sort of boring, but impressive nonetheless. Today they started unloading the barge, a complicated ballet with the crane lifting containers off the barge, then forklifts loading them into flatbeds to be transported around the island where they have to be lifted back off the truck with a forklift and then unloaded or stored. The trick is that there are a limited number of forklifts and flatbeds, of different capacities, and so it has to be arranged for the right size forklift to be at each place at the right time, and as you might recall, forklifts drive kinda slow. It's an interesting dance, appreciated best by listening to the radio communications. I actually stayed in the clinic cleaning up and organizing today; Diana,(the EMT) was stationed down by the marina with the ambulance. The moment they started unloading, the rains came and stopped everything for a while. They were able finally to get going and everything went well, at least from my perspective - noone got hurt. Diana had time to go through and find all the outdated meds and supplies in the ambulance and was otherwise bored. I'll take bored anytime.
The plane also brought the rat team. They are doing testing to find out what kind of poison will work the best on the rats of Wake, and then they are confident that they can get rid of them. That will be interesting although I am sure it will happen after I leave. They say that one of their main concerns is whether the hermit crabs will eat all the rat bait; most things that are used to kill rats won't affect invertebrates, but then what if the birds eat the hermit crabs? They say they have never seen a place with so many hermit crabs before, so they aren't sure what the ramifications are. They're going slow for now.
The consensus is that the Mets did have the worst choke of all time,that ND has a good chance of going winless, and the Jets just continue to stink.I think, from a Martin sports fan's perspective, that I picked a good fall to do this.
Well that's all the news from Wake, where, as Carolyn said to Diana, for a woman coming to the island, "the odds are good, but the goods are odd".