Mushrooms, ho!

In a world gone appointment-mad, it is trendy to talk about making an appointment "with yourself" that brooks no interruptions from the rest of one's life. (Somewhere, I recall reading about some fine folk who took the concept further, penciling in time to spend with their kids. I find that an odd application of the advice, but I digress...)

So despite the fact I have several hot files waiting for my tender affection, I decided to take a couple of hours off this morning and do something that had absolutely nothing to do with work.

Basically, I egged Drew into letting Galina and me take a drive this morning in his Honda (the Ford just isn't a mountain-road car). My purpose was to see the state of things out on "Fourmile Road" (which winds its way through about 30 miles of back country around Pagosa Springs). The year before we left for Houston - that'd be 1995 - the conditions were right and just about the entire road was lined with Shaggy Mane mushrooms (Coprinus comatus) at about this time of year, give or take a couple of weeks.

I didn't expect to see any mushrooms, really. The purpose of the trip was more to get out of the house and focus my eyeballs on something further away than a computer monitor, if for just a couple of hours.

But I did see some mushrooms. Not a whole lot, but some. Moreover, I was so excited to see them, I harvested almost all of them before it occurred to me to record the joyous occasion:



The photo shows two relatively young mushrooms on the left, with a third specimen on the right that has pretty much finished its cycle of consuming its cap (the result is a black liquid - actually a suspension of the mushroom's spores - that characterizes the mushroom's other common name: Inky Cap).

We got home shortly after 11 am and proceeded to have a brunch consisting of sunny-side up eggs and, of course, the mushrooms.

I've left a few cooked mushrooms uneated to see whether cooking disrupts the Mane's self-digestive process (I'm pretty sure it does, but don't recall ever seeing it in print). I've also left some trimmed raw pieces on a plate to track their progress; they should be a icky black mess by tomorrow morning, I'm sure.

In any event, it's time to go back to work. I have a feeling it's going to be a long day.

Cheers...

Uneasy...

My plan to import the assignment into DV didn't work out so well. There was so much cutting and pasting and joining to do that it was actually faster to junk the approach and do the thing by hand.

I know what is bothering me, at the root. Since I'm getting paid x cents per word to edit, where x is about one-third of my usual rate, every time I end up deleting an "edit" word (and the text they sent me is pretty verbose), I actually end up paying the agency the difference between the edit rate and the translation rate for that word.

(I base this assumption on the fact that I've been given a list of how many "edit" words are in each file. Presumably, my invoice should reflect those numbers, with the excess counted as "new" work.)

Of course, the editor and I will have a talk about this, assuming I feel I can keep a civil tongue in my head while I do so.

Anyway, despite the fact that this is not a good state of affairs (small sums add up after a while), I'm getting the feeling that I should put this out of my mind and get this assignment off my plate, even if it costs me a few tens of dollars.

The alternative is to let the text stand, but then I'd feel even worse.

I haven't even tried to measure productivity for the day. For sure, though, it's somewhere between "lifeless" and "dismal."

Time to go rest.

Cheers...