Hey! Is it Tuesday already?

Yesterday passed in a fog of wild, work-related abandon. I was whirling like the proverbial Dervish behind the counter in the morning, serving two and three customers at a time. Things only got better once Drew arrived with the mail, but by the time late afternoon rolled around, and I was left alone in the store after Drew and Shannon went home for the day, I was one whipped puppy. To add salt to my wounds, Drew called to ask me to go shopping for dinner fixin's, which I did.

Afterward, I had that small problem with my computer, but finally was able to continue incorporating revisions into a document that assesses the so-called "performance probabilities" of various system functions on the station. The Russian original had only a couple of unmarked revisions that I could find, but made up for that by having entire pages come off the printer in a sort of discombobulated mess. Equations strewn about all over the place (apparently formatted to show up at particular locations on pages, instead of following the text).

I finally put it all away around 11 pm, feeling like the bottom layer of crud on the ocean floor (and that's pretty low), having processed 24 out of 30 pages. I fell asleep reading a curious book, published somewhere in the 40s, I guess, titled The Story of Secret Service, which consists of short chapters describing salient events in the history of espionage.

I woke this morning feeling fresh as a cucumber. Drew and Shannon went into Durango for one of their scheduled medical appointments, so Lee and I opened the store. I'm finding that it's impossible to do anything but serve customers when I'm in the store, so when Drew and Shannon returned, I headed off to the homestead to take care of some personal errands and get some work done.

It turns out, you see, that Galina had left Colorado without her driver's license, which a pretty nervy move for someone going off on a 1200-mile trip through three states, but I digress. I could not find it yesterday, after ransacking the Usual Places We Hide Important Documents Around The House, but I did find it today, in a rather strange place (don't ask).

At any rate, after creating and printing a flyer for a house she has on the market down in Houston, I sent the license, some other documents and the flyers to her for delivery tomorrow morning. I then proceeded to take up the translation where I left off last night, and got through all but the last two pages before having to get back to the store. In any event, those two pages do not appear to be much of a big deal. The third document in this series - which was sent to me as a ZIP file - is going to take me a couple or three evenings, methinks, but it'll help keep this lashup out of the poorhouse, at least.

Thinking back about that flyer, the only thing I regret is that it's not in color, the way any self-respecting real estate flyer should be. The only color printer in the area is an old HP DeskJet 660 that's been lying in the spare downstairs bedroom for a couple of years, I guess. At issue, I think, is the fact that HP is downright proud of their ink cartridges for this printer, given the impressive price one must pay to buy them.

One black and one color cartridge for the unit cost over $70 at the local, um, discount store (I'd bought a color cartridge downtown earlier in the day while picking up mail this morning, to the tune of over $40, not realizing I needed a black cartridge, too! I must be crazy...for paying so much, as opposed to failing to realize I needed two cartridges.) I'm tempted to see if I can breathe new life into the printer, but my wallet keeps asking, "Why?"

Now, it's that final, "glide path" part of the day, when all of the carriers have come and gone, and nobody thinks seriously of coming in to buy three 1-cent stamps. Feht called earlier, and he's invited me to have dinner with him and Maria and William at a local eatery to honor Maria's imminent birthday. I also have to turn over the Olds that he lent me shortly after the first of the year, since William has now been empowered by the state of Colorado to get behind the wheel of the monster (provided, of course, that an adult sacrifi passenger is riding next to him).

Time to start closing this place down for the day.

Cheers...