I'm still a day behind...

...but it's been that kind of week.

Based on my having roused Lee from sleep the past couple of days around 10 am with my phone calls, I drove up to her neck of the woods and called her from the Borders bookstore next to her apartment, leaving a message when the machine picked up.

I moseyed around the store, seizing a copy of a book from O'Reilly on community wireless networks, and calling Lee yet again, only to again be "answered" by her machine. I left another message.

I sat down to drink a mocha and called a third time. Same business.

Fifteen minutes later, I left a fourth message. By this time, I figured that she and Dwayne had gone somewhere and that I was calling an empty apartment.

I drove over to UBM Computers, just down the road, and browsed a bit. While they may have good prices on cheap hardware, some of their other prices seem pretty high. I spied copies of Microsoft's Small Business package for Office (Windows 95 edition) on sale for $50, which is a pretty gutsy price considering Windows 95 is officially a "dead" piece of software. In any event, they didn't have any printer cartridge refill ink in stock. Neither did the Auchan market down the road, where I didn't stay very long (just long enough to not find what I was looking for).

I eventually got home, cooked some food, ate, and went to sleep, arising at the usual time to get ready for another (and, for a while, last) exciting day at the MSR. On the drive in to work, I spoke with Lee, who had been sleeping soundly when I called and who had called earlier, while I was asleep, leaving a message apologizing for not answering the phone this morning.

We made tentative plans for me to repeat my pilgrimage up to her corner of the world once my shift is complete, at which point we'd figure out how to spend the day. I can afford to push my bedtime to a later hour, since my next gig starts at noon on Monday.

However, there are a couple of things that need attending to between now and the end of my shift. I better go do them...

Cheers...

Reading Parker...

Between coming home yesterday and going to sleep, I polished off Robert B. Parker's second mystery novel featuring the character of Sunny Randall, Perish Twice.

Parker has a beguilingly simple style of writing: each chapter is a kind of self-contained whole that seems awfully short. I'm thinking of typing one out, just to get a feel for the length of a "Parker" chapter, and to get an impression of what it feels like to write one.

This is a more complex story than I remember in most of Parker's mysteries (including the Spenser and Jesse Stone books), although the book's back-cover blurb, to the effect that any of the situations associated with the three women she's helping could lead to a fatal conclusion, seems a bit, um..., strained.

Then again, the one relationship of the three - those being with a client, a friend, and her sister - that could lead to Randall's getting killed is more than adequate for the job. The plotting is fairly intricate, and layered revelations of who is (or was) who in the story sort of remind me of Ross MacDonald's The Instant Enemy.

* * *It's been a fairly long time since I've written for publication outside of a fairly narrow circle (e.g., the article for the ATA Chronicle and my column in the quarterly publication of the ATA's Slavic Languages Division, The SlavFile). The other day, I sent a query off by e-mail to this one publisher, and received an answer to the effect that e-mail queries were not accepted!

"In this day of electronic everything," I asked myself, upon reading the response, "why would a publisher not accept e-mail queries?"

The only answer I can come up with is that perhaps the publisher doesn't want to have to deal with umpteen gazillion ill-formed queries from wannabe writers, preferring instead to deal with a great many fewer queries (even if ill-formed) via snailmail. Does that make sense?

Another possibility is that the publisher really isn't "tooled up" to do business electronically, preferring to go through the whole assignment/editing/production cycle the "old fashioned way," but this just doesn't sound credible. (I remember once dealing with a computer publisher like that, except that it soon went out of business. Duh.) I mean, if they really are computerphobes, why publish e-mail addresses for their staff?

Nope. It has to do with discouraging the wannabes; nothing else makes sense. So - echoing the musings of Harry Callahan - do I print out my query, flesh it out some more and send it to them via snailmail, or go on to something else? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I really don't know. But being as this query I have is a doozie, and that the article would blow the editor's mind once she sees the final product, I've got to ask myself one question: Do I feel lucky?

Well, do you, punk?

Cheers...

Random observations...

The script I wrote to fetch aerospace terminology (here, if anyone is curious) works. The same script installed on another page (not publicly accessible) does not.

This was what my client was talking about the other day. To solve this, though, will require me to see just what lies in my client's cgi-bin directory. (Initial guess is that it's an error associated with ftp'ing a DOS text file into a directory using binary mode, but that's probably wrong. Queries using Latin characters work fine and display properly.)

* * *Irina Ya. asked me to help her out with a phonetic keyboard on her new XP machine (a VAIO, BTW). [Over the years, Microsoft persists in providing support only for the "standard" Russian keyboard layout.]

After looking at the KBDRU.DLL file (which is the animal that maps the keyboard to a the standard layout), I ventured to install the KBDRUPH.DLL that I hand-modified and which works on my Windows 2000 Pro machines at home. Even though the files are of different size, their structure appears essentially the same, so I thought it was worth the risk (heck, the mod is reversible, after all).

Golly, gee, and shucks if it doesn't work. Hooray! (Surely, I must be able to parlay my skill at directly modifying DLL files into something profitable, no? :^)

* * *Finally, I feel a little like the fellow whose life felt empty once he'd finished viewing every page on the Internet. Specifically, my installed copy of Microsoft Word has informed me that I can add no more words to my personal spell-check dictionary; it's full.

"B-b-b-but," I'm thinking, "I'm not finished writing!"

Wunnerful.

Cheers...

Enjoying the day...

I drove directly to Lee's after the end of my shift. Up 45 to 610 and over to the west side of town, exiting onto Westheimer. The lights must be set up in a sequence on Westheimer, as I ran into zero red lights after the first turned green.

After a quick breakfast at the Golden Arches, we came back along the beltway. As Lee was less than enthusiastic about stopping at the flea market, we switched seats and I got out as we went by the place, agreeing that I'd call her on my cell to come get me, or that I'd walk home, or that I'd walk partway and call, or whatever.

I was hoping to find someone selling ink cartridge refills.

No joy.

I did buy some jamaica (hibiscus) flowers, which you can use to make a surprisingly good tea. I remember the first time I ran across these dried blossoms, it was in Florida, and when I asked the lady who sold them to me what, exactly, they were called, I was told it was "ha-MAEE-kah," and no amount of prompting could get me a spelling of the word.

Also, I ran across a fellow who was selling boxes of fluorescent light bulbs at $10 a dozen. These will come in handy at the store, especially since the retail on these bulbs is something closer to $2.50 each.

I left the market soon after, marching south on 35 with my box of bulbs held at "left shoulder fluorescents." Along the way, I found a wallet, devoid of cash but containing a bunch of ID and various paper, which belongs to a young man from Mexico who lives in Houston. (I shall mail it tomorrow, I think, to its owner.)

About halfway home, I decided I had done my walk for the day and called Lee to come pick me up. Once home, we both retired for a short nap.

I am now ready to face the evening. I would like to go see a movie, and the field seems suitably "target-rich." Lee is all in favor of going to see LotR... again, in her case. Who knows? Maybe we will.

Cheers...