Prop load Saturday...

Yesterday was one of those days rife with rumor, but with no actual news until late in the evening, at nearly 11 pm, as to when propellant loading would begin. A couple of specialists from Germany arrived late in the day to aid in the decision-making process (they work a lot with solar arrays), and then upper management disappeared to conduct numerous telephone conferences with parties unknown, and the later it got, the more fidgety people became.

Finally, in the words of an unknown prop team member, "white smoke appeared" after a particularly long telecon, and the announcement filtered through the grapevine that prop loading was a definite "go" for today. Interestingly enough, Viktor had informed me and Maya at around 6 pm that we would definitely be supporting prop loading today; I wonder where he gets his info? :^)

I walked around our area three times yesterday evening, twice before dinner and once after, for a total of about 6 kilometers. I've also started to wear the pedometer that fell into a corner of my toilet kit. On most days I log somewhere around 10,000 "steps"; yesterday, the number was somewhat above 20,000. My record over the past week was about 32,000. I also managed to do the sales tax returns for our now-defunct store and have them scanned and emailed back home, with instructions on getting them to their eventual destination. With any luck, everything got postmarked the 20th, which is the deadline for filing the return.

The facility is all but configured for the operation, which will start shortly. Maya and I are in the interpreter's office on the second floor, catching up with the world on our computers. When I'm not actively on station downstairs in the control room (the interpreters swap out about every hour), I plan to put a good dent in the work that arrived the other day.

Cheers...

Loading is complete, but we're still not free...

Since this satellite is significantly smaller than the models I've seen in previous campaigns, I had imagined that it would take less time to load propellant. As it turns out, it took about as long or maybe even longer to load because the flow rate into the propellant tanks is proportionately less. We hit the 100% mark about 2 hours ago, and, as I sit down to write this post at about 6:15 pm, have about another 30 minutes left of closeout operations, so I think the concerns of one of the propellant loaders, who was despairing of catching this evening's bus into town for some recreaction, will turn out to have been needless.

I managed to exceed my self-assigned quota of personal work for the day by 20% without really straining. I even managed to translate the last part of and edit the whole of a schedule that had been sent over by the Russian side soon after lunch, which sets forth the events to occur during the so-called "joint operations" phase of the campaign, where all parties, having completed work on their individual parts of the project (the French, on their satellite, and the Russians, on the launch vehicle and upper stage) bring all those parts together into an integrated launch vehicle.

Tonight, I am told, is Viktor's birthday, so while a number of campaigners will be on the bus to the Luna (tomorrow is a day off for just about everyone except the prop team, who only have to come in for a short time to reconfigure the facility for Monday's fuel loading operation), we interpreters will likely be assembling in the so-called "mini-bar" a couple of doors down from the general dining hall to help Viktor celebrate another birthday milestone.

Maya and I sat around with Dwight last night, shooting the breeze about everything in general, with some excursions into the whys and wherefores of how these campaigns are put together, and some thoughts on what Lockheed-Martin's recent divestiture of its shares in ILS and LKE will mean to eveyone involved, including us interpreters. Let me tell you, there's a lot you can talk about as you're waiting to find out if you're going to work the next day or spend it cooling your heels while in the throes of uncertainty about what's to occur next in the campaign.

Me, I'm the on-call interpreter tomorrow, so there'll be no trip to town, which doesn't bother me too much. After all, it'll give me an opportunity to do some more of the side project that's on the plate (and of course, the sooner that project is completed and invoiced...).

I borrowed a novel titled High Fidelity from Maya, as I appear to have exhausted most of the books that (a) I brought with me (both of 'em) and (b) the few books I've been able to find in the TV room on the first floor, which is a catch-all for old paperbacks, magazines, PlayStation games, DVDs, VHS tapes, and a few board games. The book is by one Nick Hornsby, and apparently represents his first novel. I've gotten about 50 pages into it, and while I can't say anything bad about the book - there are some actually funny bits liberally sprinkled throughout - it's not exactly the kind of reading that grabs my soul.

Then again, reading this kind of tale, told in the first person with only enough of a mise en scene to keep the whole think from floating away like a helium balloon reminds me that NaNoWriMo is coming around on that celestial guitar again, and that if I continue my year-to-year progress, then this year I might or might not actually make it to the finish line. Of course, I will have those few days in the middle of the month when I'll be in Moscow after the campaign, and the actual travel day back home, followed by a few days of scrambling to recover my footing upon having returned to terra patria. We'll see...

If the prop guys were telling no fibs, then we ought to be getting perilously close to the end of the "hazardous operations" phase of today's work. I should probably stow my stuff in preparation for get-out-of-Dodge mode. Come to think of it, I'm hungry, too.

Cheers...

Hmmm...

"Half an hour" was up about a half hour ago. I checked to see that I wasn't somehow the only person left here at the полтинник, and was told that the latest word is that the prop team is about to wrap up.

I probably could have gotten another 500 words done in the interim.

Cheers...