Woke up at 8:20, slept poorly, fell asleep late. Tolya was fussing around the station, climbing somewhere, and I couldn’t fall asleep. In the morning I got up, went on comm, started making breakfast, and hurried to get ready for the television session to meet with the families. Tolya got up; we entered the line of sight of the Crimean communication station and saw our families on screen. Yevgeny Fyodorovich came — my instructor at MAI and a great friend. We showed them our plants and said, these are for you, women, our flowers, since we have nothing else to give. Vitalik brought a model airplane: he glued it himself — he gave me his word and he did it. Well done. Tomorrow he and Lyusya leave for Grozny, to stay with friends, so for two weeks I’ll be without a family visit. Today I spent the whole day practicing how to determine coordinates of ground landmarks using manual instruments. It’s going poorly for now — I can’t manage to make several measurements on a single landmark and precisely note the time for each, and that introduces errors.

I observed the cloud cover in the area of the Falkland Islands. It keeps amazing me. An enormous field of swirling clouds with a smooth surface, the center of the mass covered by a thin veil, and around the perimeter a trail in the form of a deep track, as if a mighty snowplow had passed over the cloud field. The trail is an arc, and at its end a round clearing, as though someone swept it clean, tamped it down, and pushed the clouds aside. The outer edge of the trail is roughened, like a freshly plowed field.

We repaired the water heating and dispensing unit. Got soaked; we drained the water into a container. Finally managed to get rid of the air bubbles.