Ready... set...

I am condemned, it seems, to live with a dog that has her own internal alarm clock set to 6:15 am, 7 days per week.

I type that with a smile on my lips, since I am truly not a big fan of sleeping in just for the heck of it. I got up with a smile on my face and bounce to my step. The night was not completely peaceful. After another hot day, the bedroom was pretty stuffy, so I cracked a window open before hitting the rack. Around about midnight, by the clock, a tremendous gust of wind came by and turned the room I was in into a large whistle, waking me and everyone else up. It was an exciting moment or two, let me tell you.

So here I am, at my work place, ready to take on the last 13 pages of a document that has taught me quite a bit about lightning protection, if you include the Web research I did to understand more of what was being discussed.

One thing I hadn't known - or was confused about - is that lightning comes in two flavors: descending and ascending. Furthermore, both kinds of lightning may be of a positive or negative polarity, which has to do with which direction the electrons are flowing. And so on...

A quick examination of the day's work shows that a little over 5 pages are occupied by figures or whitespace, so I "really" only have 8 pages left to do, and at an hour a page, well... you get the idea.

Enough lallygagging. To work! ...go!

Cheers...

The hard part is over... now for the hard part!

I finished the text portion of the translation about 15 minutes ago. Now, I have to go through and add all the graphics (and any captions that go with them). I hope that will not take very long.

The document is apparently a collection of articles on various subjects having to do with electrical engineering, and when I got to the end of the article on lightning protection, which I was translating pretty much without requiring recourse to a dictionary, I started a new article that basically was a series of questions to and answers from some high-falutin' Scientific-Research Committee, and then on and on.

In the middle of it all, Shannon came bursting into the office and asked me to look at Sasha. She didn't say the dog was having seizures, but her tone did not imply anything positive. Indeed, Sasha appears to have had an argument with a porcupine, and lost. There were quills all over her body, which I took out fairly painlessly.

What became clear later was that I had missed several quills that had hidden themselves in her coat, and some others that had embedded themselves in her muzzle and tongue. Brrr. Drew and I got most of the remaining quills out, but could not get the tongue to hold still long enough to get them out. Since Sasha was not making a fuss about her tongue, we decided to see what nature would do, though we will take her to the vet on the first sign of an infection or other problem.

Anyway, the day's translation toll currently stands at just over 4800 words done, for a total that's just short of 19,000 words for three days. The figure captions will probably add another couple of words, but I rather doubt that the total will actually reach 20,000. OTOH, I must hand it to my editor: to land within 5% of the target word count is pretty good!

Back to work!

Cheers...

Done... mostly.

It took me nearly 4 hours to take care of the little "extras" that the client wanted incorporated in the work. Specifically, the instructions call for all graphics and equations to be included in the translation.

Yech. I'd forgotten just how mind-numbing it is to cut and paste graphics, and the fact that my workhorse desktop runs on a "relatively" ancient 300-MHz CPU inside of 64 MB of RAM and a pitifully small hard drive, and mind-numbing-ness just gets worse as the system's performance degrades.

I'm impressed, though. Through it all, my desktop only crashed once.

In any event, the figure captions weighed in with another 700 words, which brings the final total to 19535 words, which I shall have to invoice as soon as humanly possible after sending the job in.

I started to review the work after I finished with the graphics, but I feel I'm too close to it right now. The problem is, even if I rip through the part I translated at 3,000 words per hour, it will take nearly a full day to just read the thing (this assumes I don't refer back to the original).

What makes me less than deliriously happy right now is having found more mistakes than I care to see (especially when I'm this close to the work) after having spent an hour spot checking the parts I translated towards the end of the three sessions over which the work was done. So... I think I will invest a couple of hours tomorrow morning and look at those areas again, and then just spot check the work.

* * *There is a vague feeling of a lack of something in my life. I suspect if I were to review my posts for the past, say, month, they would tell a sad tale of preoccupation with work.

I'm good at what I do; that's no lie. Indeed, the alacrity with which I jump at new jobs may simply be a way of avoiding facing up to some stark realities, as if working real hard will solve my other problems.

Is this what being a workaholic is all about? Am I a workaholic?

I certainly don't want to work all the time. I want to get out and walk in the woods, and go visit friends, and go watch movies, or just sit and do nothing. I realize that life is not one big vacation, but it seems to me more and more that there is no time for any rest or relaxation, except in very rare, brief intervals. Am I being unreasonable?

June, you're the month I make a concerted effort to change course, at least a few degrees.

I know I can do it. I must...

Cheers...

Cheers...