June 7, 2005
Beth - I was right! 8:45 pm and the showers were mine. No hot-cold-hot-cold shower tonight…a small taste of heaven.

The Batch plant ran OK today. A few small glitches but we made sellable concrete. (twice!) One big problem is that the cement they have was bagged in 1500 kilo plastic lined super sacks. When the bags were shipped (over a year ago) all was good. Since they arrived however, the Russians unpacked the super sacks from their containers and set them on the FROZEN ground. On top of that it was snowing…no big deal.

The snow melted and now we have chunks of concrete that we are trying to blow up into the mini silo - 25 feet into the air. We are using a vein feeder to modulate the amount of material blowing into the silo. The chunks of concrete are large enough to plug the feeder and jam up the whole works. The supervisor looked at me tonight and asked what we are going to do. My comment was, "it’s not our cement; send us a crew tomorrow so they can repair it." Other than the water valve problem, where every time we try to blow the cement into the silo, the water valve opens and floods the mixer, everything else is working.

It looks like we’ll make our scheduled flight out on June 16th. Just not enough time to train anyone in another language to get out early. Speaking of translating, we got another translator, very lazy and very little understanding of technology. We’ll break her in as we have the others. They start in the office where everything is formal, but by the time Larry and I are done with them they are joking and want to stay in our area. Even Roy, the construction supervisor, sits with us at breakfast and dinner just for the laughing and joking. Everyone else in the camp is rather quiet. As a matter of fact, I think Larry is friends with just about everyone in camp. Several people walk out of their way to shake his hand and say good morning. He has turned into our own goodwill ambassador. He’s a good person.

We’ll now that I’ve rambled on, it’s time to put my clothes away and get ready for another "ground hog day".
Tomorrow I will walk to the original (Bema) explorer shanties for pictures. I can’t explain the stories of the original exploration without pictures and even then I would need to write a book.
Nanook