Greetings from work...

It's in between comm passes right now, and it's one of those deadly quiet times as night begins to seriously think about ceding its place to the dawn. Traditionally, the time when people are at their lowest ebb. It's almost as if you can't be alert at this time of day, no matter how hard you try.

No wonder military types consider it a favorable time to attack. But why speak of such unpleasantness?

Right now, it's early morning Monday in Houston (and nearly 3 pm Monday in Moscow), yet on orbit, it's still the weekend, so things are still slow. From my perspective, the respective control teams are going about the business of getting used to jointly operating the ISS. This is where the years of planning, negotiating, and working has led us. I'm sure there have been a number of "aha!" moments, on both sides of the ocean.

Meanwhile, the ISS crew hurtles around the planet once every 90 minutes or so.

Segue.

I didn't sleep well at all "yesterday." I don't know whether it was the traffic noise, the anticipation of Galina and Lee coming home, wondering what was going to happen on this week's installment of The X Files, or the fact that I had three glasses of green tea (which is probably laced with enough caffeine to halt a wounded rhino in its tracks), but I think I got only one-and-a-half hours of sleep, and I'd describe the quality of that rest as "fitful."

Despite this, I remained in the sack until 7:45 pm, at which point I decided that I will too watch The X Files (and that turned out to be a pretty good call...the character of Doggett has somewhat gotten "caught up" regarding what's going on, and he's now pursuing "X" files, but only because he's hunting Mulder).

Galina finally came home around 9:40 pm; apparently, Lee got dropped off at her boyfriend's apartment. We sat and talked a little while, until it was time for me to go to work.

Two hours left on this shift, by my clock. We'll need to find out whether the crew's going to change it's sleep schedule, as it will affect what time we're supposed to report here tomorrow.

Back to work.

Cheers...

Have we settled into a routine, yet?

The night shift eventually came to an end, marking the first time in some months that I've done simultaneous work. I give myself a "B" for the evening; I caught enough to be useful, but some details got by me.

I still remember my home-grown efforts to learn to do simultaneous interpretation. This was back in 1995, and I'd just been offered an opportunity to come to Houston and work the STS-71 mission, but only if I agreed to simultaneously interpret press conferences and other Public Affairs events to be broadcast during that flight. I said okay, and then set about figuring out how to acquire the needed skill.

Simultaneous interpretation requires the same mental techniques as acquiring a high level of proficiency at Morse code (yes, I'm a radio amateur - KD6JJA, if you must know). You've got to split yourself into basically three parts: one part is listening to what is coming in now; the second is "processing" what has been remembered a second or two ago; the third is outputting the processed result. When it comes to either "copying" Morse and simultaneous interpretation, the key - besides having a good grounding in the basics - is practice. I'd gained some facility with Morse at one time, so I knew that I could do the same in the area of simultaneous interpretation.

I started out by simply trying to repeat what an announcer was saying on the radio, in English, without attempting to do anything to the speech, just repeat it. It turns out to be surprisingly difficult at first, and tiring. After a day or two of application, it gets easier.

I then borrowed a couple of films, with Russian dialog, from my friend Feht. My idea was to listen to the dialog and attempt first to simply repeat it, and then - after a few days of practice - to start to try to interpret it.

The first film I tried to do this with was Divorce, Italian Style, with Marcello Mastroianni.

Big mistake.

Realize that, in order to properly dub the film, the pieces of Russian dialog had to match the pieces of Italian, timewise. Since it typically takes more words in Russian to say what is being said in Italian, and since the Italian is pretty rapid-fire to begin with, it turns out that the artists dubbing the Russian had to talk almost as fast as - if not faster than - the fellow who spoke at Mach 3 on the FedEx commercials from a few years back.

I sat back to enjoy the film.

Eventually, unable to find any Russian dialog that was slow enough for me to work with, I enlisted my wife to read passages from books into a tape recorder, and I used the tapes to practice. It was pretty discouraging work at first, but I managed to acquire enough skill to acquit myself for the STS-71 assignments. Other assignments followed, and the rest is history.

Enough reminiscing...I go back on console in a little over two hours, and there are things to take care of around here.

So here's the answer to today's question:

My erratic sleep schedule prevents me from saying I've settled into a routine. Today, I could not help but nap for a few minutes around 9 am while I waited for Galina to get dressed so we could go inspect the Pearland house. The house, by the way, is coming along nicely. We need to do some sheet rock work inside and dispose of the small mountain of junk that's accumulated in the back yard as a result of the renovation.

I formally went to sleep around 12:40 pm, slept soundly, and woke up alert and not wanting to sleep any more at 5:30 pm.

Cheers...