Slept well — only 7 hours, but felt rested. Medicine from the morning. These days don’t engage us with the work. The thing is, medical experiments require many preparatory steps: unpacking medical kits with sensors, cuffs, medical belts, paste tubes, wipes. Then you install electrodes on yourself according to the diagram and attach all manner of sensors, carefully adjusting them, working for good trace quality on the medical equipment screens. And then you sit there undressed, covered with electrodes and festooned with sensors, among floating wires and cables like seaweed, waiting for the comm window to begin, so that on command from the ground you can warm up by doing exercise tests on the cycle ergometer with graded physical loads. And sometimes we just have to lie still, transmitting all 12 ECG leads to the ground — then you hang in the air for the entire session, shivering from the chill.

I’ve said it before: the hardest thing in a long flight is communication with the ground, and you must constantly rein yourself in to avoid a blowup. The people on the line are different, and some, of course, forget that a person up here is working day in and day out, even when he sleeps, and sometimes earthly concerns, problems, and interpersonal tensions are transmitted to us through their emotions and intonations. So sometimes a tactless word, an ill-timed joke, or something else knocks you off track for the whole day. In short, you can’t show your mood to the crew.

During a talk with a radio correspondent, he asked us what wet cleaning is like on the station. We answered: “Everyone at home knows what that is.” Down there, trash collects on the floor and dust settles on furniture; up here everything floats — dust, bits of debris, food crumbs, drops of juice, coffee, tea — and it all deposits everywhere, but mostly on the fan grilles, which we cover with gauze wipes. That’s how, in weightlessness where everything floats, we collect debris, then roll up the wipes with the debris and replace them with fresh ones. So you need to clean periodically, both for our own comfort and because guests come to visit. The technique is as follows. We have moistened wipes impregnated with catamine — a cleaning agent with good washing and scrubbing properties.

With these we wipe the panels, the table where we eat and work, handrails, hatch frames, and the faces of consoles and instruments. Some housewives manage to do this every day; we do it once a week. There’s also a general cleaning, when we vacuum hidden spots where dust and debris accumulate. For that we open panels to vacuum the nooks around cable bundles, pipes, fan grilles, and dust collectors in the gas-liquid heat exchangers. Sometimes we find things there that we’d long given up for lost. How they got in, through which airflow — that’s sometimes a mystery. To help with searching, we’ve adopted an ordinary inflatable balloon. If something floats away, we release the balloon at the spot where we lost it and watch where it drifts. That’s where we go look.

Today, working behind a panel near the floor of the working compartment, I see two connector plate blanking plugs on the station wall glowing with light. What the devil, I think — are they pass-through, and are we relying on nothing but plastic plugs? When we entered shadow I looked again — they don’t glow; so they’re transparent to light, which means they go through to the outside. Later the ground confirmed that these are indeed glass hermetic connectors, but there’s nothing to worry about — everything is secure. We enter the comm session. They tell us: “We’re transmitting a musical greeting from your wives.” We hear Anna German singing “Echo” through heavy interference — Turks, Spaniards, and French are bleeding through. Then came a talk with the head of the medical group. He briefed us on the medical monitoring results. Tolya’s pulse during the cycle ergometer test was 146 — just slightly higher than pre-flight, which was 140. Blood pressure — normal for a stress test. No ECG changes. My pulse is racing — 160-165; blood pressure at rest is 130/72, under load 160/56. Then Anatoly Dmitrievich says: “Guys, you’re eating poorly. Valentin has lost 6 kg already, and Tolya 2.9 kg.” Nothing terrible, I answer — they were extra anyway.

Now I weigh 72 kg. Excellent. I’ve become slender as a cypress. Especially the legs — they’ve become elegant, thin, like a tadpole’s. Tolya’s legs have “slimmed” by 15% in circumference, mine by 26%, but even at full load on the treadmill, the legs run and don’t hurt. The ground asked: “You’ve increased your exercise regimen — how do you feel?” Tolya answered that after workouts his shoulder and arm muscles ache. At maximum load the muscles pull fine, but he runs out of breath.

Yesterday during sunset, as the Sun touched the atmosphere, I saw its lower part begin to pulsate, as though it had melted, and waves ran across the Sun’s surface, then bands appeared parallel to the horizon: one wide, sand-brown in color, and below it another, thinner and dark. There were others too, but I didn’t manage to write them down. Through a filter I saw two sunspots.

Two days off ahead, but as on Earth, lots of things have piled up, and we need to try to clear them in these days. And of course the great relief valve is the family meeting. A recharge. It’s so pleasant to see your loved ones and talk.