David Wolf - Letters Home
Subject: Getting settled in on Mir
It's a bigger job than one might think when every item you touch just floats off if you don't Velcro it, or strap it down, or bungee it in place. Great - my long lost - and invaluable - electric shaver just floated by. The first place to look for lost items is in one of the air filters. A bowling ball would find it's way there in 0 gravity. Unfortunately its an obstacle course on the way and a lot of items don't make it all the way. One really learns, by the school of hard knocks, to work in little sequential steps. I keep finding myself with too many things in my hands and no way to put them down. Velcro is the lifesaver for organization -- but what about 150 film cans, 25 cassette tapes, 25 CDs, 40 sets of clothes, 7 cameras, 20 lenses, over 1000 components of scientific gear, 10 hard drives, 100 optical discs, 50 floppies, 2 critical PCMCIA memory cards (find them in all this), 4 watches, 6 computers (not counting the one we delivered for Mir -- which is working flawlessly -- knock on wood), 4 months of food, 30 packs of no-rinse shampoo, 60 more of body soap, razor blades, bottle of whiskey (just checking if you are still reading), and literally 6 tons more. The organizational/inventory task alone is daunting. Then come the radiograms instructing us to begin using all this. I just found my razor a minute ago. Darn, where did that radiogram float off to.
My cubicle (really the airlock) has a view that is out of this world. I share it with three spacesuits. More later. Taking a tour of the air filters.
Dave
