Saturday. We only know these days by the family meetings. The meeting was at 10 AM from Ostankino. Lyusya came with Vitalik and my friend from Grozny, Boris, with his son Umik. It was pleasant to talk with him, to see how Vitalik has grown taller and thinner. Umik has become a handsome boy. Nice to look at them. One Chechen, one Russian.

We had three comm sessions with them. For the third session they moved to Mission Control. Of course, Boris and Umik enjoyed it enormously. Our sons walked through the control room, sat at the operators’ consoles, and watched us on the big screens. Boris, good man, did everything he could to create a cheerful mood.

Near the Amu Darya I saw a white line of salt flats and takyrs (dried-up ponds) stretching several hundred kilometers and crossed by a gas pipeline or road. But what’s remarkable is that along this line there’s a sharp boundary in the sand’s color: in the northern part the sand is gray, as if moistened by water, and in the southern part it’s yellow — dry.

Northwest of the Aidarkul Reservoir, about eighty kilometers away, I saw four ring structures roughly a hundred kilometers in diameter each. Two of them overlap, and along the perimeter are scree of loose sand from exposed rock formations and chains of salt flats. I checked against the map — it turns out this is how the low mountain massifs of central Kyzylkum look.

Filmed it on movie film.

In the “Fiton” chamber, arabidopsis seedlings have sprouted to 2-2.5 cm, with four little green leaves on each. When we were taking a shower, just as we started zipping up the enclosure, the whole thing fell apart. We reported it to the ground. But then we regretted doing so, sensing that the guys at Mission Control were upset by this. We washed up — everything’s fine — we’re sitting, talking about life. We hear them start playing pleasant melodies for us. Apparently psychological support is trying its best.

At 1 AM I was still doing experiment M70 with the “Biogravistat” instrument. Tolya went to sleep. I like, after the day’s bustle, to tinker with biological experiments in the station’s quiet. They’re calming; there’s time to think unhurriedly, to dream, to reflect.