Hitting the ground at a fast trot...

A busful of folks turned out this morning at 8:00 am to go out to the airport and help get the arriving satellite and associated gear off of the Antonov cargo plane, onto the railroad consist, and over to the 92A-50 building, known colloquially around here as the "полтинник" ("pol-TEEN-ik", the name of a coin having a value of 50 kopecks).

As I was assigned the task of riding on the train with representatives from US and French security, the Kazakh railroad, and the Russian organization doing the actual move (ЗЭРКТ), I let my colleague Rafael do most of the talking during the early part of the day, as in the end, after the train ride, I would have put in in a 12-hour day.

Given the number of people involved in this gig, there was a wholly inadequate air conditioner in the "doghouse" - the name for the shelter we sat in, which sits on a car whose major purpose is to trace out the "envelope" of the satellite container (so that nothing accidentally comes into contact with it while the train is moving).

It was so warm that I couldn't read the book I brought along, and it's probably all to the good because I would have felt like the escapist non-intellectual in the crowd. The French security guy hauled out and started reading a hefty paperback, the first volume of a multi-tome history titled L'épopeé cathare by Michel Roquebert, about Catharism, while one of the Pinkertons next to me unlimbered a well-thumbed copy of Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

I finally got back to the hotel around 8 pm and put the finishing touches to the translations that I managed to fit in "between the cracks" over the past couple of days, including an hour this morning (as I rose at 5 am local time, which is a typical response to jet lag this early in the campaign).

I go into work late tomorrow, which is good because the alarm clock I took along with me doesn't work, not even after replacing the battery. Something will have to be done about that. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep.

Cheers...