MDRS Day 1

In the interests of conserving bandwidth, I will edit links once I return to Earth.

Well, it's begun.

I arrived about fifteen minutes late on Saturday, and made it to the hotel for a warm welcome by my teammates. I was the only girl for the moment. We realized we had to rent a few cars, and so we set about doing that.

While we were waiting we chatted and picked our commanding officer, XO, and chief engineer. David was named our commander, Derek the executive officer, and Jeffery the tech whiz was named Chief Engineer. Auvi and I are quite content with the choices. The rental cars arrived almost an hour late, and we went shopping. After fighting the holiday rush and spending two hours shopping, we finally managed to get on our way.

We were in a two car caravan, and that made it rather difficult to stay together during the rush hour traffic in SLC. After a few false starts, we managed to make decent headway towards Hanksville. We got seperated once more, but we eventually ended up at our destination six hours later. By this time it was nearing 10pm MT, and I had been up since 1am MT. I was a tired kitty.

The leaving crew was extremely helpful and made us dinner. The start of our two weeks of living on pasta. Before we slept, the elder crew told us about the HAB mouse, and when I went to my bunk I swore I heard something slamming against the bottom of my bunk. It couldn't possibly be a mouse, however, because it sounded much larger. And I was absolutely certain that I felt something slam against my sleeping bag, but it was just the HAB itself shaking. After an hour of lying awake panicking about a mouse being in my room, I finally fell asleep.

We awoke at 6.30am MT, for breakfast and training. We got the brief on the simulation suits (if I told you what they were, it would ruin the surprise!), I got a tour of the observatory, and I was trained on the ATV.

It was warm today, relatively speaking, and the water pipe under the toilet unfroze! Which means, we had a working toilet for an hour. Then, we realized it was leaking. Bad, bad, bad. My CO is cleaning it right now, as I write this, and I'm making dinner. Auvi is helping him, and Derek and Jeff are out running about picking up our last crewmember. Frozen/leaking toilet = no bathroom for us women. It's not pleasant at the moment.


I had my first HSO moment today as a result of that, actually. My CO got something in his eye as he was trying to work out where the leak was coming from, and I had to administer eye wash so that he could clean it out. Nothing serious, but I still have to write a report about it.

The guys are great, the place is pretty awesome, and I already smell horrifically. Mars is amazing in the sky, but the moon is so bright that I can't see the Milky Way band. It's clear tonight, so we're hoping to get out to the observatory and do some celestial sight-seeing.

Will be more coherent tomorrow, I swear.

End Day 1

Commander's report
Daily Check-in