In the morning I got cold in the sleeping bag — like at dawn on a camping trip. You wake up but don’t want to crawl out; you shiver a little. I checked — temperature around 18 degrees. Turned on the air heaters. Yes, I really should keep diary entries both morning and evening. Otherwise everything that happened before lunch gets forgotten. It’s the last comm session now; I’m waiting for them to tell me about the call home — whether my family has arrived. It’s a day off, but we’re scrambling. Now it’s visual observations, now calculating coordinates of the observed object.

We work separately. Tolya does a lot of photography, carefully logging frame numbers and shooting times, while I do geology. With the EFO. Recorded 2 stars.

Let me tell you about our food. The ration is 65% dehydrated products, organized in a six-day menu with the daily food allotment divided into four meals a day. Its daily caloric value is 3,151 kcal, with 143.2 g of protein, 123.5 g of fat, 391.3 g of carbohydrates, and 469.9 g of water. The average ration weight is 1,165 g without packaging. Reconstitution of dehydrated products, packaged in polyethylene bags, is done with hot water at +58 to +85 degrees C and cold water at +10 to +25 degrees C.

This allots 900 ml of hot water and 400 ml of cold water per day, with total consumption of 1.7 liters per person per day. Water comes from the onboard SRVK and “Rodnik” systems.

For products packaged in tin cans, aluminum tubes, and film packets, electric food warmers are used.

On “Salyut-7,” for the first time, a buffet system has been introduced. On the starboard and port sides are panels, behind which are boxes with products: freeze-dried soups — peasant, kharcho, vegetable, very tasty — and natural ones in tubes — kharcho, borscht, solyanka, which we don’t like as much. We enjoy cottage cheese, beef, pork with potatoes, meat products, poultry, canned fish, coffee, tea, milk, juices in freeze-dried and natural forms. Bread — rye, Riga-style, wheat, Borodinsky, honey cake — in little loaves sized for one bite, so there are no crumbs; eight varieties total. Diverse, very tasty dessert — prunes with nuts, candied fruit, plums, candy, heat-resistant chocolate, cookies, etc. Dried strawberries, sea buckthorn jam, honey, and lots of other delicious things, so for us it’s a feast. We pick our own menus. You float up to a panel, open it, grab what you like, and eat whenever you feel like it; otherwise during work you put tasty things in your pocket, work, and snack. In general, I can say one thing: our food is excellent in both taste and variety. During the flight I’ve probably tried only half the selection.

During the day there was a concert for us from Ostankino. Yevgeny Shapin, a Bolshoi Theater artist and Tolya’s friend, came. I really enjoyed our conversation, and he sings magnificently. He sang us several Russian romances.

Then the guys played a recording of a conversation with Tolya’s mother, his teacher, and the school director. Everyone spoke so warmly. And for me there was a pleasant surprise — I heard the voice of Yuri Leontyevich, a good acquaintance of our family, the director of the sovkhoz in Enem, the settlement Tolya comes from. Lyusya and I met him while vacationing in Sochi. Today we started passing over the geological observation area — the Caspian, Aral, and Balkhash — again during daytime. In the evening they reported that Lyusya has returned home and is very happy with the vacation. Zhenya Kobzev is somewhat nervous. On the comm he speaks unclearly, says something out of place, and then I know he worries about it afterward.