The morning funnies...

I was awakened at 4:27 am by what seemed to be an insistent, steady tone coming from somewhere nearby, but couldn't figure out what it was. After a few seconds, it occurred to me that perhaps it was a fire alarm, so I rose quickly, pulled on some trousers, and went over to the charger to get my radio.

Along the way, I passed the air conditioner - which had been apparently replaced yesterday during the trip to town, as the old unit had been wheezing along and providing indifferent cooling for about the last week - and it seemed to me that the tone didn't quite have the insistent and widespread quality of a fire alarm and that it was, in fact, local and close, so I held off keying the mike to notify our duty security officer.

I glanced at the air conditioner, and then reached out and turned it off. It was not the source of the tone. I went to the door of the room, put my hand on it as a precaution before opening it, and then stepped out into the hall. The noise was very definitely coming from inside my room.

I stepped back inside and closed the door. After turning my head this way and that to get a bead on the source, I concluded the noise was coming from inside my closet, but what could it be? The only thing inside my closet that could possibly be making such a racket was the safe. I opened the closet door and, sure enough, the tone became louder. I tapped in the combination to the safe and opened the door. The tone stopped. Very strange, I thought to myself, as I got undressed.

As I drifted back to sleep, I theorized that since the safe is battery operated, perhaps the tone was an indication that the battery had drained down to a critically low level. (Of course, sounding a loud, continuous tone when voltage reaches a critical level seems to me to be an ideal way to accelerate complete battery discharge, but maybe I'm missing something.)

I went back to sleep, only to be called by the duty operator in the Russian control room at shortly before 7 am. Were we, came the question, actually going to start operations at 7 am, per the schedule? I said I'd call back, pulled on some clothes and went downstairs to see if any managers were lingering over coffee before catching the 7 am van to the полтинник. They were getting up to leave, but I got an answer and relayed it back to the caller.

So it's been that kind of day, so far, balanced by having a phone call go through successfully to Galina at around 7:15 am. We spoke for just about 20 minutes and I think we both hung up the phone in better spirits.

Currently, I've got a load of laundry going in one of the the new washing machines whose operating panel has been designed using a peculiar collection of hieroglyphs presumably intended to allow people familiar with such technology to use it. I'll go down in a little bit to check whether I deciphered those arcane symbols properly. Then I must get ready for a trip out to the "vault," which adequately describes a heavily reinforced underground room within a stone's throw of the launch pad that is used to house electronic equipment that will monitor the satellite up until shortly before liftoff.

Cheers...

Yesterday's market visit...

The vault visit went pretty much as expected. The exciting part of the operation was passing through the security checkpoint, because little else was going on.

Yesterday, I embarked on another trip to town, hoping that the temperature wouldn't reach the same heights as it did a week ago. I joined a couple of the ILS managers in wandering through the market and for lunch at a place whose name translates as The Smile Café, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Our first stop was in the enclosed building in the back, which houses a number of refrigerated cases from which all sorts of perishable goods are sold: cheese, butter (in bulk), meat, cold cuts, sausage, and so on. Dairy products tend to be sold based on percentage butterfat contained (we do this with milk), and there are actually grades of milk sold in Russia and here containing 6% and 9% butterfat, which is about twice and triple the amount in the 3.5% milk commonly sold at home. Cream is sold in 10% and 20% grades, and one of my companions bought five 200-g cartons of the 10% for coffee.

I seem to remember the building used to be air conditioned, and maybe there is some cooling going on, but not down to the normally frigid levels we Americans are used to. I bought a "hank" of the smoky string cheese (чечел) and 100 rubles worth of salted mushrooms, and it was a good thing I did, because by the time folks were running about at 3:45 pm making last-minute purchases, the чечел was gone (largely, I am told, because I had shared last week's purchase with some of my fellow campaigners, who agreed that such a product was very well suited for consumption with a cold beer).

We stopped by the spice sellers, who also sell dried fruit and nuts, as one of the managers wanted to buy some roasted cashews. Cashews were available, but of the unroasted variety, so eventually, almonds were selected instead. I bought a small amount of green tea from Samarkand, mostly because it reminded me of a variety of tea I had bought called "gunpowder tea," in which the individual leaves are rolled into themselves, forming small, oval-shaped granules. I've since made a couple of small pots of the stuff, and it's quite good, and resists the tendency some teas have of imparting a bitter taste to the brewed product after a short time.

We then hit the café, where we had a portion of lamb шашлык (shashlyk, or roasted skewered meat), some фри (fri, possibly a corruption of the French frites or the American fry, referring to potatoes), and I tried some Karagandinskoye beer from the tap (which I cannot distinguish from Shymkentskoye... mostly because I lack sufficient data points :^). The only soda available was Pepsi, and there was no ice to be had. Such is life in a small city in Kazakhstan (~80,000 residents).

After lunch, we returned to the market, where my companions took some time to select some souvenirs, while I just grooved on the scene about me, after first taking this picture:


The trip home was uneventful, although in addition to buying all of the чечел in the market, it turns out we campaigners bought out all of the decent beer from the wholesaler next door. (I found this out when a late customer came back empty-handed, saying the only beer that was left was the No. 9 version of Baltika, which is a vile beverage consisting of beer (maybe) fortified with some alcohol, giving it quite a kick and that's about all. Apparently, such beer is called "bière blanche" in French.)

After dinner, I joined a group of people from ILS and the Astrium prop team (from the UK) in a walk to the Kometa. We arrived while the French were still sitting in the courtyard, enjoying their before-dinner socializing over light drinks and snacks such as pistachios and olives, and followed them into dinner for my first experience with something called cassoulet.

It is said that cassoulet is a rich, slow-cooked bean stew that defines the cuisine of Toulouse, which is where the Astrium team calls home. The dish - which had been brought in prepackaged - consists principally of haricot beans, sausage, and duck. It was served with an estate-bottled red wine called Bourgueil. I've got to tell you, it took quite a bit of will power not to go back for seconds (I had actually eaten dinner previously).

After dinner, folks loosened up and there was a small exhibition of what I can only classify as "object manipulation" tricks, such as passing wine corks through each other, and derring-do involving one's dinner knife, posed mostly in the context of the French vs. the Brits. My contribution to the mix was to do a close-up coin trick (the only one to have stuck with me since my gigs at the Forks Hotel in Buffalo), which seemed to get a favorable response (nobody went for a hook, dig?). Then someone passed around a bottle of Armagnac. To make a long story short - or perhaps it's too late for that - it was a pretty nice evening.

On the way home, a group of us stopped to toss a rugby ball around outside the Kometa, and when that was over and we got ready to walk back to the Fili, someone - Dave, I think, who is a former rugby player and a member of the prop team - noticed a bright light high in the sky, moving east to west (but passing very close to Polaris). The dot moved too fast to be a high-flying aircraft, so we concluded it was a satellite, or maybe even the ISS. Mention was made of a web site where one can research such passes, and since last night, it's been confirmed that (a) we had seen an ISS pass, and (b) there will be another pass tonight, at around 10:17 pm local time^[1]. In any event, when the ISS finally winked out, our group set off for home.

Cheers...

[1] According to heavens-above.com (data embedded in URL), here are the details for tonight's pass:

Date	Mag.	Start time	Alt	Az	Max time	Alt	Az	End time	Alt	Az
21 Jul	-2.3	22:17:01	10	SW	22:19:48	55	SSE	22:22:36	10	ENE