Waiting for Lee...

It's a few minutes past midnight, and I've decided to push my waking hours out to about 2 am and sleep in tomorrow morning as late as I can, so as to be in better shape to start my night shift at the MCC once Discovery lifts off. This also gives me a chance to talk to Lee once she gets back home from school... assuming she actually does get back home from school.

I watched Sweet November, starring Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, which I rented last night together with an Italian film whose title escapes me at the moment. I was pleasantly surprised to find the movie more or less lives up to the raves published on the carton.

The story, briefly, concerns a workaholic advertising executive whose life falls apart at about the time he is "selected" by an eccentric young woman to be her latest in a series of human reclamation projects. An interesting chemistry develops between the two, and if you listen closely, you can apply what is being said to a broad range of personal experiences. I cannot say the movie has changed or will change my life in a major way, but it may have subtle consequences. The ending, which is rather bittersweet, left me thinking hard, too.

I think I will go put another dent in Anna and the King of Siam, and then hit the sack if Lee isn't home by 1 am or so. There's no purpose served in pushing myself to stay awake now... there'll be plenty of that during the flight. :^(

Cheers...

Lone-Lee...

Despite an assurance to the contrary, Lee did not come home last night. I wish I could say I was surprised, but the truth is, I'm not. I love the girl tremendously, but she does have a serious problem that involves making commitments and then not keeping them. I don't know if I suffered from this when I was her age; I like to think not. She called earlier and seemed happy to hear I didn't have to go in to work until 9:00 pm tonight, saying that would give us a couple of hours to chat.

We'll see.

Got a call from a west-coast client, who had an emergency translation on his hands. At the time, I was in several miles away, having just completed a meal at one of the several Indian restaurants that dot the landscape here, so it was no problem to come home and pick up his e-mail and the attached file.

Technology is great. The time was you typically got an assignment via fax, and the quality of the received text often made you wonder why anyone would go to the trouble of faxing images that had degraded so much in repeated handling that they began to resemble gray splotches.

Now, among other wonders, documents are transmitted in PDF format, which affords a purity and crispness that, just a few years ago, your typical translator would have killed for.

So I open this PDF file and see... a scanned image that looks as if someone had made a copy of a copy of a copy of an original, dipped an arthritic chicken's feet in ink and allowed the animal to walk on the result, faxed the end product back and forth to some buddies a half-dozen times or so over noisy phone lines, and then shoved this final masterpiece inside of a PDF file. Ye gods.

My poor, poor eyeballs. At any rate, the translation is on its way back to the client; I think I'll hold off on the invoice until later.

In any event, the only upshot to having sore eyes right now is that it will probably be easier to go take a nap, if I can. I could not sleep past 9 am this morning, and unless I get some winks now, tonight is going to be one unpleasant shift, fatigue-wise.

Cheers...