Amirhan desert mission, day 330
Enembe and Ndali are still not back. They have been gone for two whole days now, and I'm getting worried. There is, however, nothing I can do for them from here, so I try to concentrate on other things.
I'm not alone here anymore, though. Ismen returned around noon. He was supposed to be out for another two weeks, but he said the snow had surprised him too. He had stayed for another couple of days after that, but soon enough he had realized the situation had changed with the snow. He wouldn't make it out there for the whole three weeks in these temperatures with the equipment he had. I agreed with him. As much as I would have liked to study Parallel Streams, it wouldn't have been worth it if it had become truly dangerous. And besides, the streams had iced over in those two days before he decided to come back. There was no science to do there, at least not with the equipment he had with him. With some other equipment, he might have gotten some curiously wonderful data from the frozen rivers. But you can't always get what you want. It had taken him four days to get back after he left because the snow was slowing him down.
There was one upside to him being back, though. He is a much better electrician than I am. During the rest of the day, after warming up inside for a while and having a proper meal, he went out and was able to finish fixing the solar panels. Or I guess fix may not be the best word, since he said he doesn't really know what he did to make them work, and never really figured out what was wrong with them in the first place. But the solar panels are up and running again, which means we could turn the heat up and switch on the computers. While he was making the panels work again, I checked the position of the new star to see if it was in the same position as yesterday. It was. I also took a walk to where we found the desert badger nest a couple of days ago to take pictures. I figured comparing our pictures from then and today, we could see how much activity there was around the nest, and maybe make an estimate on how many desert badgers there were.
Once we got the systems properly running again, we still had time to input the data I had gathered in the last couple of days after the power went out and he had gathered in the last two weeks while he was gone. It was late enough it didn't make much sense to try to begin any analysis, no matter how much I wanted to finally get to the Floating Rocks data. I know if I got to it now, I would be caught up with it through the night, and staying up wouldn't do any good to anyone. I did have time to visually compare the pictures from the badgers' (badger's?) nest from a couple of days ago and today, though. There were more footprints now, so there was at least one desert badger moving around the nest. However, there didn't look to be as much more tracks as I would have imagined from the size of the tunnel system, which indicated there maynot be as many badgers in that nest as could easily fit in there. Which is in line with the fact that we hardly was any desert badgers when we were filming in the nest with Ndali. I will have to run the pictures through our image analysing software, though, to see if my visual interpretation is valid.
I also asked Ismen's opinion about the two separate versions of what happened two days ago that I could remember perfectly well but that were impossible to have both really happened. He said it was weird, which doesn't really say anything. He also said he didn't have a parallel timelines with two things happening at the same time in his memory, not from two days ago or from any other time. He also agreed with me that there was not much we could do to find out anything about it before Ndali and Enembe returned and told us what they remembered had happened, and that it was weird they were not back yet. I hope they get back soon, so we can begin to hope to make some sense of this.
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Your topic for tomorrow is Seven.
~matu
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