A distant launch...

I set the alarm late yesterday evening for 2:35 am local time, ten minutes before the scheduled launch of a Progress cargo vehicle on top of a Soyuz rocket. I figured I had a pretty good view from up here on the third floor of the Fili, and I was right—at least for the first ninety seconds or so of the launch.

At that point, the Soyuz was almost out of the field of view from my window location, and by the time I got dressed and downstairs to join Sergey K. and a member of the French team out in front of the hotel's main gate, the night sky had gone back to being bone-achingly clear, albeit with a half-moon hanging overhead. I did make it downstairs in time, however, to catch just the slightest rumble of the Soyuz engines as the sound finished racing over the distance from the pad to my ear.

The time since has been spent on Google Earth, determining for certain that the launch pad was over at area 31, almost 30 miles away from here.

Now the trick is going to be to get back to sleep (not that I have any pressing engagements tomorrow morning).

A trip to town...

Over the past two weeks, I had had enough of Area 95 to actually seek a change of scenery, so I joined most of the French team for a long-ish (5-hour) visit today. I figured it would give me a chance to walk around a bit and maybe do what I call a "Hemingway" (the act of sitting in a restaurant and writing a story out by hand, a description of which I seem to recall from early in his A Moveable Feast).

So, after gettng dropped off near the top of the Arbat (near the Palermo Pizzeria), I walked over to the Syr Darya to see what I could see of the recreation area on the river's bank—there were some people splashing around in the public fountains that are powered by underground springs, and a handful of sun bathers—and then I walked back to the Arbat and waited a few minutes for the Palermo to open at 1 pm.

The layout of the front room was pretty much as I remember it, but all of the strange stuff on the wall—the stuffed owls and the edged weapons—were gone. There was a new coat of paint on the walls and I counted six large flat-screen televisions hanging from the ceiling, displaying the same kind of mindless music video "entertainment" that's offered on a screen over at the Polyot.

I ordered a small (150 g) pizza with cheese, ham, and mushrooms (it had a house name, but I forget what it is) and a Shymkent draft beer. (Apropos of which, I had never heard of the town of Shymkent until I ordered my first Shymkent draft beer, so it's not as if drinking beer can't improve your geographical smarts—heck, I even know where Karaganda is, now—but I digress...) The pizza seemed just a tad smaller and noticeably lighter than the last time I was at the Palermo, but it did the trick.

In between bites and sips, I put down about a page of handwritten story before I started to merely outline the story line, and after about a half page of that, I found that my attention was easily distracted. I suspect a part of my mind was rebelling at the idea of writing stuff out by hand that will either have to be copied verbatim, or that will end up getting changed (or both, i.e., changed after it's put down in pixels). At any rate, I closed my notebook, paid the check, and left.

I ended up at what the Pinkertons call the "Strike" (because of the bowling alley on the second floor). Locals (and I) call it the "Arsenal," because that's the name of the complex. When I got there, I went up the steps to the second floor to see what was going on. Only one lane was in use.

I allowed my eyes to rubber around the area before asking how much it cost to bowl. I was informed the cost was 400 rubles (about US$13) per hour. I figured I'd roll a few frames for half and hour or so and call it a day, but for some reason, the automatic scoring system would not initialize properly, so I wasn't able to keep score, so at the end of my time, the management only charged me half price.

Almost immediately after I laced on a pair of house bowling shoes and picked out a ball, a bunch of kids installed themselves at the lane next to mine. It was a hoot to watch them bowl. They went at it sort of instinctively, with no regard for bodily coordination, attempt at ball control (one girl lofted her ball so vigorously, I wondered if she thought she was playing petanque, which I don't have the time to explain right now, but involves either rolling or tossing a ball at a target). There was also not the slightest hint of basic bowling etiquette, e.g., waiting for the bowler in the next lane to release his/her ball before starting one's own approach, and although I tried to set a good example, paying for a lane by the hour may make that courtesy hard to come by.

In the end, I was happy the scorer had malfunctioned. Despite not having bowled for probably 15 years, the number of gutter balls and other idiocy I committed would have made for an embarrassingly low score.

Overall, the scheduled hours made for a pretty town visit, but I somehow managed to muddle through and make the designated rendez-vous for the trip home. I am now fully recharged for another week (at least) of stand-down activities.

Cheers...