Five months of flight. Hard to believe we’ve been flying this long. The perception of time has already dulled. It’s getting heavier and heavier.

I’ve started counting the days. I didn’t used to do that. Days would fly by unnoticed. I can feel fatigue accumulating in how interest in work fades. I don’t even feel drawn to the porthole, though that’s our main occupation and entertainment right now.

Didn’t sleep all night. Last night I was entering parameters into Delta for a long time, got tired, and then couldn’t fall asleep. Got up. Started preparing the equipment. An enormous desire to do as much as possible, to do it better. So you have to prepare and check everything yourself in advance. I grumbled at the ground about yesterday’s sloppiness with the parameters, and they reply: “Valentin, some sense of humor you have — the operator nearly went gray last night from your unexpected call.” I got angry and said: “Those aren’t jokes, that’s work.”

Actually, it was uncalled for. I need to restrain myself; you can’t prove anything from up here anyway. I just did some exercise on the bicycle ergometer. It helps. You have to find the strength to stop and calm down.

Today we worked with the Bulgarian “Spektr-15” instrument. Complex dynamics, tracking objects from horizon to horizon. About ten instruments were involved: the “Niva” video recorder, a film camera, spectral equipment, mass spectrometer, UV radiometer, the French PSN, and the Czech EFO. In the evening there was a new Delta mode for the X-ray spectrometer — automatic star search by spiral and line-by-line scanning.

You look at Earth and it pulls in all your thoughts and worries, leaving only one thing — the grandeur of nature. You sit at the porthole and think — how little you know about it, how hard it is to be a mere spectator here. We’re lucky we can work in such a laboratory of Earth. But we are only students here, and will remain so for a long time, if not forever.