Ready for b'ar...

I got up in plenty of time this morning to go to the ham breakfast, but decided that the time would be better spent at the store, finishing the inventory of personal items. That's done, now.

In the course of a brief rummage through stuff in my office yesterday, I ran across the packet of info associated with our purchase of the store. In that packet was... an inventory (sort of) compiled by the former owner. I seem to recall, upon first having seen it, that the prices were a bit... high. After having owned the place for nearly a year and a half, his prices seem... still high.

However, interestingly enough, after assigning my own valuations to what-all is here, I find that his assessments were, overall, about 25% higher than mine. (I, of course, am being scrupulously fair in my assessments... no, really! After all, I'm going to get taxed on my numbers!) So maybe my impression of his numbers being obscenely high is not warranted. Or maybe I'm the mood where a 25% overvaluation is not that obscene.

Customers are coming...

Cheers...

Moving along...

I got home today around 2:30 pm, and went to check on Sasha, who'd been having a bad day. Everything seemed okay for a while, but things turned ugly again, but not as bad as the last time. I tried to take a nap, but failed miserably.

The kids went off to Durango to do some shopping shortly before 6 pm, so when I picked up Galina from the store, I suggested we go out to eat. We ended up at an Italian place around the corner called Loradonna's, where I had a couple of beers and we both had the "all you can eat" spaghetti and meatball special.

Upon returning home, I resumed translating some occupational health materials, which are going to turn into a real mess in a couple of pages, because the material stops being sentences and starts being a table, where the first column lists all sorts of arcane chemical names (yech!) and the second column shows all of the nasty ways one can get into trouble with them.

I recall a similar job in my early days as a translator, where the major work consisted in translating things that ended up looking like "2,5-di-tert-butylquinol." I remember basically having to look up almost every word in the column, and I'll probably have to do the same with this upcoming list, but this time, I'll be able to look the entries up in an electronic dictionary, which ought to make the process go faster.

The only problem I can see, actually, is that whoever the miserable so-and-so is that compiled the original Russian file created the table containing these substances (and consequences) the way people used to create tables on a typewriter: using a monospaced font like Courier and spacing everything very, very neatly.

This basically kills any idea of using either Déjà Vu or SDLX to take care of the extensive repetition in the file, since even if the terms happen to somehow align themselves properly in the text, the fact that "аммиак" and "ammonia" are of different length will turn the nicely spaced lines of the table into a horror.

Furthermore, trying to copy a term that's spread out between two lines is impossible, unless you want to also catch a part of the other column. Try, for example, to highlight "nitric acid" in the following "table":

Nitric        Very
acid          corrosive.

I'm going to sleep on this and see if there is some way to solve this programmatically; otherwise, I'll just have to do this the old fashioned way... by hand.

It's getting late and I am sleepy. I am going to have to be particularly productive this weekend, as I have 19 pages due for client U and 5 pages due for client T on Monday morning, 10 pages duer for client M on Monday night, and another assignment for client T (which I haven't looked at) due by close-of-business on Tuesday night.

Cheers...