Pressing ahead...

I was on the street at the appointed hour this morning to go to the полтинник (or more precisely, to hall 101 there) and support the pre-encapsulation RF tests, which went off without any hitches and were over by a few minutes after 9 am.

From there, Sergey Z. had me support the morning meeting, which is really three meetings in one: a "pre-meeting" that starts at 9:15 am (15 minutes before the main event), the main meeting, and an almost inevitable post-meeting session to resolve issues raised during the main meeting.

I almost managed to visit hall 111 again (the hall where the Proton is being processed), this time with a group of people who arrived after the first visit and who are to leave Baikonur tomorrow, but their excursion was postponed until tomorrow morning, when I am putatively "off."

Fortunately, a few minutes before I was to leave to go back to the Fili for lunch, I was called to go down to hall 101, where the spacecraft is being processed, to interpret and found - in addition to an interpretation assignment that was performed with dispatch - that the time had arrived for one of the "official" photo-taking sessions, and managed to get John P. to take a picture of me with the half-encapsulated ascent unit in the background. Thus, I may have something to post in a day or two.

Tonight, I'm the "on call" interpreter from 8 pm until 2 am and have the morning off tomorrow. From my perspective, everything appears to be going swimmingly.

* * *This afternoon, I felt I needed to do something as a change of pace; so I finally broke out the watercolor set that's been lying around for a couple of years and tried my hand at doodling. (Doodling was my son's advice to me a while back when I expressed a desire to acquire some drawing skills.) The results of my first session are mostly indifferent, but the session served its purpose.

* * *I have begun reading Wodehouse on my Palm at odd moments (while waiting for a 90-minute test to conclude, for example, when everyone is standing around anyway). I recall my mother telling me, when I was a boy, how unbelievably funny the Jeeves books were, an opinion I found mistaken after about a dozen pages (I didn't think Bertie Wooster was funny at all). Dipping into this literature now, I find the writing is absolutely hilarious (and, in fact, I am a little envious of how well Wodehouse weaves his words).

Ah, well. Live and learn.

Cheers...