Short shift...

Well, Olga and I are "on station," as it were, until only 5 am or so this morning. If the crew is on schedule, they're just about finished with what the Russians call утренний туалет ('morning toilet', where the noun is used in the sense of 'grooming'), which translates into the vague and more impersonal term 'post-sleep' on the U.S. schedule.

From there, the crew will dive directly into lunch, skipping breakfast since this is a short day (Olga and I will, of course, be return later in the afternoon for crew wakeup in preparation for the docking of the next Progress cargo vehicle).

* * *I got a boatload of meds today via FedEx from Colorado, as all of my pills seem to have run out at nearly the same time. "Ouch" on the bill to pay for them all, but it's a necessary expense In reading 1633, I was struck by a plot point regarding the tool-up to manufacture some 20th century pharmaceuticals. Although the book talks about antibiotics, I was wondering: It'd be pretty tough to control high blood pressure (and presumably manage many other conditions that we take for granted) in "Grantsville," wouldn't it? Good thing it's only a story.

* * *Talking about having my imagination run away with me, today's ISS capcom, with his red hair, young face, and his businesslike dress, comes across looking (on the small screen in front of me) quite a bit like Conan O'Brian, whose visage can be seen in these early morning hours on a few silent, closed-captioned monitors left on and tuned to commercial networks in various corners of the MCC.

One thing that is not imaginary is the quantity of spam I'm seeing in my (unfiltered) email feeds. For yesterday morning, for example, I had 137 messages arrive in my mailbox in the period from midnight to about 9 am, of these, 7 were "real" messages; the rest, spam. Ye gods. Spam filtering is certainly one reason I can't wait to get home (and boy, is it low on the list!).

* * *In other news, apparently AOL is blocking any http requests whose referrer is 'www.livejournal.com'. The buzz on Slashdot is that this is some kind of preparatory move associated with AOL's imminent offering of weblogging services. Personally, I think one should never underestimate the capability of large media organizations to act in stupid ways.

Cheers...

Feels about like midnight...

But that's a long story. Olga and I have been back for almost two hours.

Ten hours to go.

This coming week, I'm going to try to move my sleep time up from the 3-pm-to-10-pm slot, so as to have some time available in the evening to do something, maybe, before my shift. My work schedule pretty much remains unchanged (midnight to 8:30 am) except for Thursday and Friday, which will be somewhat longer.

I'm typing this while listening to the shift handover on my headset. The whole show for the docking with the Progress starts in just over 2 hours. I need to go review some documents.

Cheers...