Time is inexorably drawing toward May 13th, when at 12 hours 58 minutes our rocket launches and our great work begins. Yesterday, when I woke up, for the first time I felt a kind of equilibrium between “I’m flying” and “I’m just here on a work trip.” Now I sense that a flight lies ahead. There’s no anxiety of anticipation — only the anxiety of measuring what time is left against the work that still needs to be done on Earth. Our doctor came; we’re off to morning exercises. After weightlessness training, there was a meeting with the rendezvous specialist Yura. We had a useful discussion covering the entire rendezvous procedure, the setting of initial parameters, and contingency scenarios. The sessions take place in the conference hall; we’re isolated from everyone by a glass partition.

For the second day in a row I’ve been sleeping after lunch — clearly, the body is beginning to unwind. I walked to the court and ran into Shatalov. He said he’d just come from the state commission on the rollout of the launch vehicle with the spacecraft to the pad — everything is in order. Tomorrow at 7:00 AM the rocket will be transported to the launch pad, and by good tradition the entire expedition will come out to see it off. Shatalov told me I need to stop playing tennis — you never know what might happen. And Kobzev and I recalled that fateful day when I was training with Lyosha Popov — he warned me too — and I injured my leg on the trampoline. I played very carefully today, and still decided to stop playing from tomorrow on, just to be safe. Tomorrow is the big day: in the evening there’ll be the state commission to confirm the crew for the flight, a press conference, and a meeting with the chief designer.

We went through the documentation for the day of station transfer; tomorrow we need to go through the reactivation days and study the transport ship procedures up to docking — writing out timings and every nuance. A cold sore popped up on Tolya’s lip — that’s the last thing we needed. As always, the closer you get to launch, something or other pops up on everyone.