Easter Bunny visits South Pole

Although we have plenty of fresh eggs this winter, we awoke on Sunday morning to find a different kind of treasure hidden all over the station.

At first it didn't register with me that there was anything out of the ordinary even though I was finding random ping pong balls in strange places. There has been an ongoing war using a huge bucket of balls that we got over the summer so it's not uncommon to sit on one or step on one around the station. I think it all started with a practical joke played on our System Administrator Nathan, who opened a cupboard above his desk and had hundreds of ping pong balls rain down on him. Since then, the little plastic balls get thrown around at people and they seem to be no longer be contained to the Game Room.

But ping pong balls showed up in the blankets in the laundry room...

...and on the anunciator panel which shows the location of fire alarms going off around station.

There were just too many ping pong balls in too many places. Every drinking fountain seemed to have its own collection.

The greenhouse was particularly hard hit, not only a ball amongst the dying sunflowers but also

...in the control room on the CO2 tanks...

...and above the sink in all of the beakers.

The Easter Bunny found creative places for the balls like the sign out board for the entrance to the Emergency Power Plant.

Door handles were the perfect ledge for them.

In the Galley, balls outnumbered the glasses in the dish racks.

It was a cute Easter morning treat and we later found out that the culprits were up at 2am distributing ping pong balls. They've all been cleaned up now and put away but I know we're still going to be finding a stray ball here and there come May or June but at least they won't be rotten like real Easter Eggs.