Biology is a harsh mistress. It demands meticulous observations, long hours, sticky situations and smelly substances, not to mention dealing with confusing and inconsistent evidence. Do I really need support foulups?
I spent about 4 hours today -- in the heat of the day -- crashing through the underbrush looking for the damn goat tracks from the orbital pics. I was covered in welts and bleeding scratches before I stumbled onto one, and it was not the one it was supposed to be. MS kept telling me -- despite how much I yelled at them -- that it was a calibration problem. How can it be calibration? The PPS should be accurate to a tenth of a meter, and it's not like positioning satellites are some brand new idea. Our landing craft hit their marks. The transport that dropped me and my habitat set down within earshot of where I am right now.
I checked the Mission Support logs and there was no report of calibration issue. So someone was messing with me, or they were covering for a bigger problem. I'm actually hoping it was about me, because anything else would be too awful to contemplate. The Planetary Positioning System is pretty much mission-critical gear. If that isn't working then it's hard to imagine how anything could go right.
Anyway I have a better feel for the local flora. The southern hilltop region is almost completely impassable except for the paths maintained by the DAF. There's something that looks like a fern but cuts like razor wire. My field clothes repelled it, but my arms and face and neck are rather raw at the moment. Even the less well-endowed plants have some kind of very itchy toxin we don't a have a cream for yet. I'm also not a big fan of whatever burrowing animal leaves hollows that collapse under the overburdened human female. I'm guessing that if I hadn't been wearing a pack I could have walked over them unscathed.
Of course using their paths means a greater chance of direct encounters. Once I get the remote sensors in place I won't have to make the trips and can run things from the comfort of my hab. Well, relative comfort. The dot matrix printer made an unreasonable racket all night long. I have a lot of mounting brackets to print, so that shouldn't be as big a problem in the future, but I'm not sure when I've heard a noisier printer.
As an aside, I need 360 accelerometers to make my brackets and I only have 288. Logistics assures me that they'll have the missing 72 before I need them. We'll see. As long as no one is messing with me.
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