Woke up at 6 AM, but felt as if I’d slept well, and lay there for 2 hours daydreaming about how our family will go on vacation after the flight. Got up at 8 and started preparing the station for receiving guests. Today on comm is Volodya — a calm guy, but either he’s shy or something — he addresses us with commands hesitantly and sometimes gets confused. I told him about it, and he seems to have taken it without offense. During the day we performed a test of the transport ship with settings calculations for executing automatic controlled descent. True, some subtleties were already somewhat forgotten, but the test went well. During the day I did a lot of photography; today I saw Antarctica for real for the first time — a large white massif of a mountainous continent at a distance of about 1,500 kilometers, which at first I took for a gigantic iceberg. It was clearly visible.

In “Fiton,” some pods have dried out and released seeds, and new green pods have appeared. That’s great. Peas are growing in the “Oasis” — thick-stemmed, crooked, like a saxaul tree, only rising slowly; its lower leaves are starting to dry out, and it has tendrils. Tomatoes are growing in “Svetoblok.” Interesting to see how big they’ll get; right now 60-70 mm. In the evening there was a comm session with the families. My Lyusya is vacationing in Pitsunda with Vitalik, so only Lida, Tolya’s wife, came. It’s all right. The guys will be here soon and will bring letters.