Today, it seems, a higher power decided to rearrange our schedule. We lost power early this morning and Jonathan had to go out and refill the gas generator. I really can't wait until Jolly Green is up and running again - manual fueling is a royal pain. So I let everybody sleep in a bit to recover some of that lost sleep. I'm just glad the UPS actually woke Erik up - I had just incorporated the constant beeping into a really bizarre dream. We *are* running on few enough systems that I think we would have been okay without power for a little while. This afternoon, when Paul was working on Jolly Green, we cut down to crucial systems only and made it down to about 4 amps. And I'd suspect most of that was refrigerator, which would still survive a bit without power.

And then our EVA was called off - Dean and Curtis were going to go scout some spots further from the Hab for their geology studies, but with some rain, neither ATVs nor suits seemed like a good idea. So they joined forces with Elizabeth, to work on the observatory path, while the soil was wet and workable. It looks a lot better now. They extended the rock boundary that signifies the pressurized tunnel, filled in some spots, and removed some of the more obnoxious rocks in smaller pieces and used them to fill in other spots. I am very impressed and happy that things are getting safer - I've always hated going up to the observatory at night because I can't see the path and a few steps were too big for someone with relatively short legs.

And we wrapped up before starting dinner with our human factors test. That's always an adventure - it's amazing how difficult (and gross) filling a test tube with saliva is, especially when everyone's suffering chocolate withdrawal (chocolate is one of the many things we can't eat prior to the test). And then everybody just lets loose a bit - the crew has a rather disturbing fascination with dinosaurs (I had to veto a patch of Buzz riding a brontosaurus across Mars...). And some of the human factors questions in the survey prompt some fascinating discussion. I'm sure they'll get some interesting data from us, but it's kind of frustrating after the 50-billionth time we get asked the same question with a slightly different wording.

Hopefully the weather will clear up tomorrow and the guys can get outside.

Emily Colvin
Commander, MDRS Crew 60