Lots of Sleep

Post written by Charlie:

For some reason, I was really, really tired this morning. My morning. It was actually late afternoon. I set my alarm to five and although it woke me up, I reset it to seven and promptly fell back to sleep. I did this two more times and finally woke up shortly before eleven. I did the math, using both sets of fingers, and found that I had slept just over thirteen hours. I'm not sure what I did that tired me so, but whatever it was, you would think that I could remember it. Oh well. I made it down to the galley in time for midrats and had a breakfast of half steamed broccoli and squash along with blackened marinated chicken and tater tots. It was pretty good, no complaints. From the galley I went straight to the lab to find that my whereabouts had been inquired into. Do you all remember Calvin, the funny guy whom I helped with the Nutrient Analyzer System (NAS)? Well, it seems that they're tossing it out into the sea tomorrow and he needs to get it ready to go and needs my help. He already had some of the reagent bags already strapped to the NAS and we just needed to test them out. It was a good thing we did since the bags of his NO2 and NO3 standards were dead, meaning that they didn't have any of the nitrogen compounds in them. We're still not quite sure what happened back at his lab when they were prepared, but this put us up a particular creek, leaving us with precious few paddles. Luckily he had a few extra bags with him so we were able to prepare a couple replacement nutrient bags. We're improvising to a great degree here but they should work after they've been sterilized. Anyway, he asked me to come back down at eight this evening to aid him in finishing it all up for deployment the next morning, an offer I happily agreed to. I've spread myself around in the science lab, so much so that I've become an almost necessary helper in various projects. Due to the fact that I was helping Calvin out tonight, I wasn't able to participate in the MOCNESS cast. Later in the night, some of the MOCNESS people came and told me how much more difficult it was without my assistance in guiding the net in and out. Just for those of you who don't know, the frame to the MOCNESS is all steel, and there's a lot of it. Just imagine how heavy it is and we have to shove and heave on it in order to get it in and out of its bracket. After I ran a few sample runs on the NAS to check it out with its current load of chemicals, I was working on and off with Rachel and Karen while every now and again heading over to help Calvin. It seems that I've become a necessary installment to the crew.

After the NAS work, it became time for breakfast. I had worked all through the night and hadn't hardly realized it until the clock hit seven, or in our case, 1500 GMT. So I headed down to the mess deck to snag some chow, but when I got back, I had some more filtering to do. It wasn't so bad. Just put the pipe in the cylinder of water and step back. Fold the filter when through and make sure the container is marked appropriately. After that, I headed up to write this thing, but I had a few e-mails to take care of, which took a couple of hours and now it's lunch time, so now I'll eat a little lunch and head to bed. I hope you all have a great day today and I will talk to you all again soon. I wasn't kidding about asking questions or leaving comments. Please don't hesitate or anything, I'm not going to bite. Anyway, goodnight everyone.