I was supposed to meet Calvin down in the main lab around eight in the evening, but when I woke up, I had the sneaking suspicion that not only was it probably not eight, but it was several hours past it. I had set my pager to chime at eight and couldn't quite figure out why I, once again, slept through the alarm. Even with my earplugs in, I can usually hear it, especially since I put it right by my head before I sleep. The earplugs were a necessity this night since somebody was dismantling a metal cabinet with some kind of electric saw, one of the noisy variety, other people decided to camp out in the hall and hold a loud-but-not-quite-yelling conversation while the stupid fog horn kept on wailing and wailing. So anyway, I pulled the plugs from my ears and checked the pager, only to find that it was a quarter after eleven. "Uh oh!", I thought to myself. "I'm late for midrats." I hustled downstairs to grab some breakfast and met Calvin down there. I apologized for my tardy behavior and he said that the bags were still under heat and the system was still running, so even if I had gone down at eight, I would have had to wait at least four hours before we could do anything. Lucky me. When we finished eating, we headed back to the lab to work out the rest of the kinks in the NAS and get it ready for dumping. Once again, we worked all through the night. I used almost an entire row of electrical tape to button down all the hoses and tubes to make sure the turbulence of the water doesn't rip anything out when it hits. It actually looks very neat and trim. Of course we had to place it in its cage and hook it up with its battery and bags of standards but once all that and the last minute testing were finished, we deemed it ready for deployment. I took a couple of pictures of it when we wrapped up and I'll try to send them on soon. I have to compress them before I can send them and I don't have a means to do that right this minute. I'll get them on, don't worry.

After all that work we went to breakfast and had waffles. It's Wednesday so we have to have something that begins in W, like waffles. "Hey guys, it's waffle Wednesday!" I just went for the potatoes but I snagged a waffle too. It was pretty good. When I had my fill, I wandered on upstairs to tell you all how the evening went. The weather is really nice out right now. There's a stiff breeze and it's a little chilly, which stirs up the waves a bit, but it blew away the fog so you can see quite a ways now. We also sailed just south of St. Matthew island yesterday before sunset and you can see the peaks coming up above the water. I was lucky to snap a few pics of them too. Again, I'll send them on as soon as I can. If you check the site the webmaster posted, I'm sure you can see where we'll be in the next week as we finish up and head back to Dutch Harbor. Keep informed everyone and have a good rest of the day.