“It was cool talking to my family and hearing them sing happy birthday. I received lots of birthday emails. It is too bad there is not enough time to respond to all of them.”

“The day always ends with a phone call to home. We rely on satellite coverage, operating laptops, and lack of cell phone drops to keep a conversation going. It’s a delicate chain that often breaks.”

“Biggest impact of X operations was the unstow and restow... Don’t think they understood how much overhead was involved. Gave them lots of pictures and movies, before, during, and after to help them get an idea.”

“The X experiment runs automatically, and provides video to the ground of a process through which physicists study fluid mechanics. It runs at night to minimize effects of crew movements. Problem is, the experiment starts at 9pm and runs for 9 hours. If we must move around during that time, we float slowly, using minimal fingertip pressure for control.”

“Woke with no headache today after putting a sleep bag in front of vent. Tonight I sleep in a crew quarter, which will be a great improvement in living conditions and convenience.”

"I had a good day yesterday and was actually able to do real science for the first time. It was fun and interesting. Much of the science we do is just turning equipment on or off or cleaning out a glove box or whatever, but this was actual real science for a couple of hours. I loved it.”

“Life continues to be grand here – no mistake about that. But, after a couple of months, when one feels they are in charge of their environment, thoughts of home and family rise to the surface.”

“It is going to be a much, much, much different crew experience when you don't have a space ship sufficiently large to ever get away from each other during the day.”

“X and Y did a great job on the Progress trash gather. We’ve been swimming in trash for months and it will be great to have some free space again.”

“I did some serious cleaning – pulling tape and Velcro off of walls, straightening up modules, throwing out anything that didn’t look like it had a purpose. Some stuff has been there for years.”

“Stowage is one area that deserves some attention, because ground doesn’t really understand the problems of gathering equipment from multiple locations and tying it down for use at a work site. Walls are already cluttered, and it’s hard to organize a location nearby.”

“I look up the location of the next bag of breads available, hunt it down in another module, bring it back to our "table," bar code it, bar code the pantry location where it's going, separate out the breads which for some reason are packaged with "rehydratable meats," get those corralled into separate bags and stowed away in the pantry, and then eat.”

“Most items are buried deep in bags, sometimes three or four deep. Inside a locker, there is a CTB, inside of which is a kit, which has a Ziploc with a tool inside. This can really add to the cost of doing business.”

“You will start packing one area, get done with that, you think, and put stuff in the next area, which you find out doesn't match up… It took a lot longer than it would have if we had a Big Picture of how things were [supposed to fit].”

“SLAMMD weigh-in. Says I’m 180-186 lbs (about 10-12 lbs more than Russian scale). I trust their scale more than ours. SLAMMD varies considerably depending on how tight you hold the fixture.”

“I had to make some connections this week in the CIR rack – fluid quick disconnects, that took no less than 100 pounds of force to mate. The push force was toward the floor, so I literally stood on the ceiling and pushed upward with all my might. Tricky.”

“If we must move around during that time, we float slowly, using minimal fingertip pressure for control…. All of us quietly and slowly swimming around reminds me of a family of dugongs.”

“I went down to the Soyuz, which definitely has good orientation. It is very comfortable [to sit there] and I am used to the visual picture…. I [my brain] needs a visual orientation system to reference.”

"Smells are the most interesting. Node 01 is getting a bit ripe and X has no notice of it. I’m guessing it is from wet trash so I’ll see if it goes away when we change the bag later.”

“I slammed HARD into something with the top of my head and stopped instantly. I quickly looked around to see what unknown obstacle I hit and there was X, also rubbing his head… We slammed into each other head-to-head – we had a mid-air collision.”

“I want to clean up the eating area – new straps for the table, new Velcro, maybe even scrub some of the stains out of the fabric lockers. There are just odds and ends everywhere, and I would like to make it a little bit more orderly.”

Opening the hatch after docking releases "the smell of space," which to one flyer smelt like burned almond cookies.

The Soyuz spins on its axis while chasing the space station, which one crewmate linked to prior 'spinning chair trainings.' It was still hard to resist looking out the window.