We started the morning with pancakes made partially from left over
birthday cake batter (it didn't all fit in the muffin tins last night).
Luis turned 27 on Mars yesterday. What a way to celebrate a birthday!
The pancakes were good too and a good way to start what would be a
long hard day.

After a third day of wrapping up the engineering tasks we have retired
our avatar robots, the ones you've seen on the webcams running around
outside without space suits and outside the engineering tunnels. I
know they look like us, but the were really robots driven by state of
the art tele-presence technology (driven remotely by mimic action and
we receive sensory information from them). They are designed for
intense outdoor work that requires dexterity that we can not achieve
with space suits. But they cost $445,000 each so we only use them for
emergencies and at the beginning and ending of each crew rotation.

I am always surprised at how tiring it is to operate them. It seems
like they are doing all the work but it is intense mental and physical
work none the less. The avatars are useful but we are happy to retire
them and we are celebrating our first free night on Mars with a meal of
chicken tacos. We will start heavily into our science objectives in
the morning.