Does your dog bite?

A real Clouseau moment, apparently, during yesterday's offload: When asked how many containers they needed to have transported, the French team replied "three." Consequently, an appropriate number of flatcars were added to the consist that was to haul the spacecraft from the airport to the processing facility. The transport plane's content, however, revealed there to be five containers on board the transport aircraft.

What accounted for the difference? Well, the other two containers belonged to the U.K. branch of the company, whose personnel are here to fuel the spacecraft.

In other news, since I am the "on call" interpreter today, it fell to me to go in at 5:30 am to support the early start to the day that was agreed to yesterday, except that somewhere between yesterday and this morning, the people who were to start work early decided not to (and somehow, the word never filtered down to the level of the person who enlisted my attendance this morning).

I've got a good attitude about this all, however, and it doesn't bother me (though I think it is worthy of mention, obviously).

* * *I've been pretty good about exercising so far this campaign. Last night, I did a 400+ calorie walk on the treadmill and followed it up with a bicycle ride, stopping off at the Kometa to touch base with Vladimir V., who was not there when I stopped by. The French team had apparently already gotten into the shipping containers, as there was a box sitting in the corner of the reception area containing a backyard-sized inflatable swimming pool (which I had heard rumors of earlier).

I ended up meeting Vladimir as I biked back to the Fili, and we chatted for a bit in the shadow of one of the buildings in our area. The air temperature during the evening and the early morning is actually quite pleasant.

Cheers...