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20 Jun ' 23:55
Omelan and I left early for the mountain in order to finish with the grease system. The highway was very busy this morning: we passed sixteen vehicles that I counted and I think I missed a couple. I'm not sure it was the time of day or if there has been a sudden surge in trade between Chile and Argentina.
We pulled the grease sprayer nozzle off of the mount, brought it into the cabin, and Omelan took it apart and cleaned everything. Sure enough, one of the air ports was clogged. Once back together, we went to put it back on the telescope. As we were doing the last turn of the spanner to tighten it into place, it sheared in half and was thus destroyed at the very end of our labour. After searching for a while and making a few calls to North America, we realised that we have no back-ups at the site. So we capped the air and greases hoses and are now running on three out of four sprayers.
We returned to San Pedro feeling that we had taken a step backwards rather than forwards. The one item of progress was Omelan's discovery of the oil leak location on our generator. It appears to be a slow leak dripping off of the bottom of the oil pan and probably coming from a bad seal above.
Back in town I worked for a couple of hours, and then went to the seven o'clock mass in town. It is cold everywhere, and everyone in church was in coats. Three girls were baptised. After the service, people gathered in front of the church and there were sweets thrown in the air so that the landed everywhere on the ground where children scrambled to collect them.
Matthew Hasselfield arrived this evening from the University of British Columbia. He had just arrived when I got back. After I greeted him he expressed disappointment that I hadn't reacted to his "Christmas presents". Indeed, I had not noticed that there was a pile of new equipment on our office floor which had arrived in his luggage: some disc parts, a web camera, tools for our generator, and other exciting goodies.
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