About yesterday...

After my early post yesterday, I got involved in a couple of phone calls and ended up at the McD's a bit late for breakfast. Reading a book over "brunch" caused me to be late getting out of Pearland, and I ended up arriving at my work site in the MCC about 6 minutes late.

By that time, Mike T. (the fellow replacing Alex K. on the latter's day off) had already started in on the radiograms. Mike is a top-notch translator who works as fast as I do (if not faster), and in both directions. Unfortuntately, he can be rather single-minded in his pursuit of what he sees as the goal (i.e., he likes to do things his way). Frankly, I wonder how he and Alex get along.

Anyway, by the time I was set up, there was basically only one radiogram left to do, so I did it. I also finished off one that Mike'd started, but abandoned when the Forms 24 came in (the latter pretty much have priority over everything else).

Before doing that, I set about doing a "QC" on the documents Mike'd done.

"Don't bother," he says, "they're posted." (Meaning they've been given back to the Ops Planners and made available to the flight control community.)

"What about footers?" I ask.

"I've never put them in before," he says, as if that makes it okay. I decide not to pursue any of these issues, as all of them represent faits accompli.

Anyway, the plus side of all of this is that all the radiograms were done by about 2 pm. I eventually ran out of things to do and after Mike left at 5 pm, started working on a severe case of boredom.

* * *The store lost out on a couple of hundred dollars of rebate income last month when I forgot to submit our UPS report on time. I've been up since 7:45 (was awakened by Lee and company returning from wherever), working on the report that must be submitted by the end of today.

Right now (9:15 am), Lee is on the cell to the store, which I'd called to find out the address to which to send the file. I've been tasked with obtaining more phone cards for the store, in the meantime.

* * *And now it's alost 10:30, and I'm showered, shaved, and ready for the day. As soon as I order the phone cards, I'll take off and take my time getting to JSC. It looks like a pretty nice day.

Cheers...

Almost done!

It's about a minute to quitting time as I write this, but since Alex K. has elected to stay the 3 hours past his appointed quitting time in order to QC the radiogram translations that have been pouring from my keyboard since my arrival - and especially since he is checking the last two I've finished a few minutes ago - I can't very well get up and leave, can I?

I am tired beyond comprehension.

* * *On the way in to work today, I stopped by the local courthouse to see about renewing the van's registration, which runs out today.

I was encouraged by the fast-moving line of supplicants at the motor vehicle department, but fell disappointingly short in the cash department, as a 30-day temporary registration extension (which is what I need, seeing as how we're going to register the car in Colorado as soon as I get back) costs $25 cash. I could only scrape up $22, plus a couple of dollars of "Miyako money" (coupons for a local Japanese eatery). Time was short, so I opted to return in a day or so.

One happy side note to this experience was finding my PRETEC DC530 camera/MP3 player, albeit in the glove compartment of the van. There have been several well-and-truly hot days down here that the unit has spent (along with a 128-MB Flash Card) in that compartment.

During a brief break in the course of the day, I extracted the Flash Card from the PRETEC and examined its contents, which appear to be fine and none the worse for wear.

* * *Alex seems to be about finished with his QC, so I'm going to cut this post short and get ready to blow out of here.

Cheers...

Home again... and NOT to work...

Alex K. looked up suddenly as I started to pack my stuff and asked "Are you done?" in a tone that conveyed incredulity.

"Yes," I answered.

"Outstanding!" he says, with a big grin breaking out on his face, "I thought we'd be here for another couple of hours. You're fast!"

He'd begun to get on my nerves during the day, by calling my attention to every change he was about to make to my translations. Far and away the greatest portion of those changes were not really necessary, in my opinion, and while I have no problem with his making them, I did start to have a problem with his calling them to my attention.

After all, there seemed to be a never-dwindling number of radiograms in the queue (two were added around 6 pm; go figure), and every time he diverted my attention to look at a change, I'd lose my train of thought. However, by 6 pm or so, I'd cooled off and channeled my efforts into the home stretch, to finish the job.

* * *Among the rest of the festivities of the day, I agreed to do a 16-page standards document by next Monday, and a 4-page job for my current client by Thursday morning. I am not lifting a finger to address these documents tonight...

Tomorrow, I'm working Loop 18 during another simulation, but this assignment parallels (approximately) the times I've been working on the Execute Package, so at least there's no effort involved there.

I need also to invoice my as-yet uninvoiced work for April (Execute Package and one sim plus three documents).

* * *I watched Kiss Me, Deadly last night. It's a 1955 film starring a bunch of people that - according to the IMDB - never went on to superstardom, including Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, Wesley Addy as Pat Chambers, and Maxine Carr as Velda. Robert Aldrich produced and directed the film, which is considered a classic of the film noir genre.

I think I see why. The cinematography is very clean; the sets are spare. I found the faces of the characters to be very expressive as they played out their roles. Sure, lots of the dialog was a bit on the corny side, but I did like the film, on the whole.

The thing that bothered me most about it, though, was that the characters of Hammer, Chambers, and girl-Friday-and-more Velda just didn't fit into the molds I'd created after having read (and reread) Spillane's stories. In the film, Hammer is described as the kind of private cop who specializes in divorce work and who, after getting evidence against an errant wife, would pitch Velda at the husband to get even more leverage. That's not the Hammer I came to know on the printed page; nor Velda, either.

Moreover, the character of Pat Chambers - supposedly one of Mike's closest friends - was about as friendly toward Hammer as one usually finds the D.A. to be in Spillane's tales (that is: not very). The only evidence of any kind of friendship between these two men was Hammer's reaching into Chambers' breast pocket to cadge a cigarette (big deal).

The DVD I watched made a big deal of the two different endings that the film had been distributed with, and though the shorter version is only about a minute shorter, it's easy to see how a completely different interpretation of the ending would result. I wonder what Spillane himself thought of the film?

In the end, I'll probably watch the film again, just to see the furniture of the period in Hammer's apartment. Nice film.

Cheers...