My old friend, Fatigue.

The furthest I got out of the house today was about 4 meters away, where I tried my luck at taking out more of the bush along the northwest border of the house. The job really calls for clippers, which are in Pearland, if I'm not mistaken (actually, the job calls for a backhoe... but that's a whole different way of looking at things!).

The rest of the day was spent cleaning, and stuff. I moved some furniture around between the master and spare bedroom, after vacuuming and shampooing the carpets. I freed the china cabinet in my office of extraneous junk, by piling most of it on my desk (shudder!) but managed to do something intelligent with the junk (throwing out three wastebaskets of stuff along the way) before giving up and putting the residue in a small box under my credenza.

The day was not stress-free, however. After learning the Lee is working at a gas station not far from the Pearland house, Galina wanted to go down to Houston and get her, and take care of some stuff related to some real estate we own down there (beside the Pearland house). However, Shannon is slated to take Huntur to California at the end of the month, to go visit Huntur's other grandparents, and had been relying upon Drew to take her (and apparently Drew was looking forward to the trip as well). This resulted in some, um, friction, the details of which I don't want to go into. I am not at all sure, however, that all ruffled feathers have been smoothed. One thing is sure: Galina and Drew cannot both be gone at the same time; I cannot work the store by myself (nor can any other one person).

Drew kind of lost it when he learned that Lee was in Pearland working at a gas station, despite my explaining that - as I understand it - the job is temporary while Lee is looking for one of those high-paying tech support jobs. He was still ticked off, mostly at Dwayne, wanting to know what he was doing to help out. I must remain mute on that subject, as I don't know, but suspect the answer is: not much.

So between cleaning and stressing about Lee, by the time 5 pm rolled around, I was well and truly tuckered out.

I have not yet proceeded to make comments on my freelancer's work, nor have I looked at the editing job due Tuesday. I suppose I should do the former before it becomes unconscionably late to do so, and I should at least take a look at the document due Tuesday to get a feel for how long the job will take to do.

After all, the next dancing class is tomorrow night!

Cheers...

Ooohhh! I love surprises! .....not!

From a couple of days ago:

Your assignment, Alex, should you choose to accept it, is to read the Russian, compare it to the English, and incorporate changes in the English file using revision mode.

Well, friends, it turns out that the Russian document client U wants me to work on is 100 pages long (~19000 words). The original English is 76 pages (~13000 words).

Ay!

Assuming a 15% "expansion" going from English to Russian (i.e., that on the average, it takes 115 Russian words to express what is said in 100 English words), that places the "original" translation at 13000*1.15 = ~15000 words.

That means there is a net increase of 4,000 words in the translation. (That word - net - gives me the heebie-jeebies: if the Russians deleted, say, a couple of thousand words while making changes, that means that there are more like 6,000 new words in the document. Idahwannathinkaboudit.)

Faithful followers of these missives will know that translating 4,000 words is a pretty nice day's work. But these 4,000 words aren't necessarily sitting there, all in one place, waiting for me to stumble across them and translate 'em. I have to hunt them down, somewhere within the 19,000 words of the Russian text (and also fix any mistranslations, or actually: make them apparent).

So, besides the translation, we're talking about an editing job. On good days, I can edit 1,000 words of target (English) text per hour for 8 hours, after which I need to rest. Do the math. The edit will take at least a couple of days.

The client wanted the work back Tuesday morning (and yes, I told 'em on Friday I could not work on the job this weekend).

I wrote back a couple of hours ago, saying "no can do." (I'm good, but I can't do 24-30 hours of work in one day... not and have it be of any particulary high quality, but I digress...)

So, I will put on my Kreskin hat and predict that I will have a phone conversation with the client tomorrow.

* * *In other news, I've finished my comments to my freelancer. All that remains is to actually sent them.

It's shaping up to be an interesting week already.

Cheers...