Good morning from oh-dark Moscow!

Despite unloading quite a bunch of stuff on my sister-in-law, I now find myself with a need to repack my remaining bag to make sure everything fits.

We ought to be in Baikonur by mid-afternoon local time, and hopefully settled down and ready to hit it hard tomorrow morning.

Cheers...

Made it to Baikonur...

There have been a bunch of changes since my last campaign, and so far, all of them have been for the better. The principal one of these is not having to fill out Kazakh customs forms in duplicate, which have always a source of annoyance to everyone, including the customs officials (especially when we are leaving the country, because of lost copies of incoming forms, which had to be submitted along with duplicate outgoing forms).

The rooms at the hotel have been renovated. The old shower stall was too small to be considered a phone booth and the slightest contact with faucets would turn water from pleasant to scalding, but the new unit looks like something out of Star Trek (though with a strong Las Vegas flavor), and I have no idea how to operate it.

Arrival briefing is in 90 minutes, and the wrong set of briefing slides was translated into French, so I better bone up on the slides in the correct breifing presentation so as not to seem tongue-tied during the meeting.

Roskosmos has invited us to a Proton launch tonight, intended to resupply the ISS. I'm looking forward to it.

Cheers...