jay | A day in Nerva

Spain is on Central European Time, despite being relatively far west. So the sun rises around 8am and sets around 7:45pm, presently.

Nerva is one of those small (5000 people) white Andalusian hill towns... Typically, before dawn the town is quiet after the last bars close (2am, here). Then, stirring, around 6:30-7am. Still dark. My windows are open, unless it has been raining. I turn over, look at the clock, and go back to sleep. Around 7:30, the sky begins to lighten. Roosters crow... one, then multiples in a kind of round. Then car noises begin, my alarm goes off at 7:45 and I drag myself up. Sometimes checking email, then showering. Downstairs for the team breakfast at 8:30am. It is still before midnight in California...

Breakfast... toasted baguettes, typically. With tangy fresh-squeezed zumo de naranja (orange juice) in a tall thin glass. Cafe con leche, in the extra-large cups. Jam and butter and olive oil. The Spanish tend to nibble their toast sleepily. A few look hung over. A few Americans ask for eggs and bacon. People dribble in. Around 9:15, we make the day's announcements and plans and people drift off to the lab, located in the museum in the town of Rio Tinto (4 km away), or to the borehole site.

Here's a 9:30am view of the mine, driving out of Nerva towards the lab... Nerva has no castle on a cliff or old church or boot factories... it is an Andalusian hill town (on a small hill) surrounded by a huge 2000-year-old industrial waste site. Effectively. But the colors are pretty, even if little grows on the land surrounding the town. It *is* a Mars-analog site, after all ;-). Albeit one with bars and culture.

We work from about 9:45am until 2:30pm... then head back to the hotel for lunch (the hotel is the pink building with the sign).

Sometimes, if cores are coming in and we're behind, some of the Americans will work through lunchtime -- ordering bocadillos (sandwiches) to be delivered from the hotel. Everyone else goes back for lunch. Lunch today was bread, bottled water and tinto (red wine), a tapa (snack) of plates of olives, then small individual plates of some kind of potato salad scooped up with small breadsticks. Then the first plata was churrasco minero (a hearty spiced stew), followed by pitchers of sangria and a second plata of broiled chicken with potatoes and asparagus, followed by coffee and either fruit or flan for dessert. This was actually rather ordinary... by Casiano's standards, at least. Sometimes we have paella or fresh fish.

Today I awarded Casiano a thank-you picture, signed by the NASA and CAB team members, for keeping us well fed and happy :-). Javier from CAB is on the far right.

Then we stop back by our rooms, freshen up, and head back to work around 4pm. Leaving most nights around 9pm, unless we're swamped processing cores. Dinner is usually at 9:30pm. It is similar to lunch, but with more tapas (sardines, calamares, meat or cheese slices), different main dishes, and more wine flowing. By 11pm, we separate... some to bed, others back to the lab for another hour or two, some out to the town square to talk over a drink or two. And some updating their LJ, although I've typically gone out beforehand and then gotten online, myself... to bed around 1:30-3am, most nights. The routine agrees with me :-). Here's a picture of tonight's dinner, as we finished:

Today was my last full day here on this year's deployment -- I handled international friction (issues between NASA and CAB), defused personnel issues, sent files to

hopeforyou, and talked about our middleware code with my CAB counterpart here (Jose-Antonio).