![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Moving onward... upward...
Dec. 16th, 2001 12:29 pmThe last few pages of yesterday's batch of translation made me feel as if I was swimming through a vat of blackstrap molasses. I finally called it a night a little after 7 pm after having done my "quota" for the day (14 pages, almost 5700 words).
I picked up Six Days of the Condor, which was one of the paperbacks I picked up at the local library's continuous sale of little-needed books. Something about the title bothered me... the movie version of the book was... three days, wasn't it?
The foreword to the book explained it all. Yes, the movie was Three Days of the Condor, because movies need to move quickly. I started to read the paperback, and it pretty much paralleled the book, except for (obviously) the time frame and a few other points. Before I knew it, I was three-fourths of the way through the book.
The book, in my opinion, is pretty lightweight by today's standards of espionage fiction (about 160 pages, if memory serves). The plot is straightforward; there is no assortment of some dozen sub-plots that you'd find in a Tom Clancy thriller, for example.
There is also none of the extraneous baloney in the book that the producers of the film felt necessary to foist on the viewing public... particularly the deal where Malcolm tries to go to the press with an exposé along the lines of the "Pentagon papers," only to have it stopped ... maybe ... by The Powers That Be.
In any event, I finished the book and liked it more than my current memory of the movie, which has got to be a first, in my recollection.
* * * Back to translation...
I received 8 pages from my New Mexico client late last week, due Tuesday. I finally took a good, close look at it this morning, hoping to be able to polish at least half of it off before resuming work on the Tank Standard From Hell. New Mexico pays well.
Fortunately, it turned out the assignment was very similar to something I'd done a couple of months back. In short, I was able to review and correct all 8 pages of the assignment in just under an hour. I'll probably take a few minutes tomorrow morning to verify all the details, and then I'll send it off.
The tank spec work got under way at 9:45 this morning, with a break taken to eat breakfast with Galina around 11. So far, I've done five pages, but I'm in for a sequence of pages that does not have a lot of white space in it.
OTOH, I feel relatively fresh. The kids are up on the mountain, doing their snowboarding thing, and I believe I heard Galina take off for the store, which is open today and is accepting packages for shipment.
Back to work!
Cheers...
I picked up Six Days of the Condor, which was one of the paperbacks I picked up at the local library's continuous sale of little-needed books. Something about the title bothered me... the movie version of the book was... three days, wasn't it?
The foreword to the book explained it all. Yes, the movie was Three Days of the Condor, because movies need to move quickly. I started to read the paperback, and it pretty much paralleled the book, except for (obviously) the time frame and a few other points. Before I knew it, I was three-fourths of the way through the book.
The book, in my opinion, is pretty lightweight by today's standards of espionage fiction (about 160 pages, if memory serves). The plot is straightforward; there is no assortment of some dozen sub-plots that you'd find in a Tom Clancy thriller, for example.
There is also none of the extraneous baloney in the book that the producers of the film felt necessary to foist on the viewing public... particularly the deal where Malcolm tries to go to the press with an exposé along the lines of the "Pentagon papers," only to have it stopped ... maybe ... by The Powers That Be.
In any event, I finished the book and liked it more than my current memory of the movie, which has got to be a first, in my recollection.
I received 8 pages from my New Mexico client late last week, due Tuesday. I finally took a good, close look at it this morning, hoping to be able to polish at least half of it off before resuming work on the Tank Standard From Hell. New Mexico pays well.
Fortunately, it turned out the assignment was very similar to something I'd done a couple of months back. In short, I was able to review and correct all 8 pages of the assignment in just under an hour. I'll probably take a few minutes tomorrow morning to verify all the details, and then I'll send it off.
The tank spec work got under way at 9:45 this morning, with a break taken to eat breakfast with Galina around 11. So far, I've done five pages, but I'm in for a sequence of pages that does not have a lot of white space in it.
OTOH, I feel relatively fresh. The kids are up on the mountain, doing their snowboarding thing, and I believe I heard Galina take off for the store, which is open today and is accepting packages for shipment.
Back to work!
Cheers...
