9

Another busy day in paradise. The experiment went well yesterday and now we're pushing on to CORKing the hole. We are spending today cleaning the hole and making sure it is deep enough for our experiments before we deploy the CORK. But that all happens on the drill rig floor. Today, I'm going to be busy in the lab preparing our microbiology experiments.

Since today marks the start of the single digit countdown, you can now hear people say "8 more wake-ups" and "less than 9 days 'til land" up and down the halls. We're starting to talk about how we're going to budget our time so that we leave when we need to and still get as much science as we can get done done. Totally different mood on board today. Our science is still in full swing but we're most definitely talking about how we're going to wrap up this expedition.

Everyone can tell we're toward the end of our cruise when we go for meals because the cooks are getting very creative. We apparently have an over-abundance of raisins and eggs because both ended up in our meatloaf this morning. It wasn't bad - just strange. But whatcha gonna do? What meal would you make with carrots, raisins, meat and eggs?

But we've still got lettuce, so who can complain?