Gee, is it dark already?

Lee will be landing at the Albuquerque airport around 9:30 pm on Wednesday, and returning Sunday morning, bright and early. Picking her up should not be a problem, but getting her there in time to jump through all the security hoops may pose a challenge.

* * *The "highlight" of the day was getting the edited version of my translation back from the client. There were no outright errors corrected in my text, that I could see, but I was not pleased with the job, as it introduced some awkward turns of the phrase.

A long time ago - I don't even remember consciously being taught this - it occurred to me that cooperating with editors was a Good Idea in the grand scheme of things. In the translation field, this characteristic alone would be enough to distinguish me from hordes of other translators who have somewhere acquired the notion that there are only two ways to translate a particular sentence (their way and the wrong way), and that any change to their work must be resisted as if one's fate in the afterlife rested in the balance.

In the Russian translation business, I recall someone once telling me the general rule describing the relation between the translator and the editor: Я редактор - ты дурак; ты редактор - я дурак (When I'm the editor, you're the dummy; when you're the editor, I'm the dummy).

(I may not have it down exactly, but I believe that was the gist of the rule.)

So, generally speaking, I refrain from giving editors grief over changes they make to my work. Today's text came close to that border, though.

* * *A consulting job came in over the transom, involving a Perl script. The basic symptom of the problem was an error message, to the effect that an attempt to close a pipe to sendmail had failed.

For future reference, it should be kept in mind that the error occurs because the path to sendmail in the script may be wrong, as it was in this case.

It's nice to be able to solve problems like this for money.

* * *At the store, Drew and I moved stuff around and did some cleaning. Now, the FedEx PowerShip computer is in the back room (for the rest of its short lifetime with us; FedEx says they're going to come by Some Day Soon and reclaim the machine and its accessories). Then we moved the meter and the fax over to where the FedEx computer used to be. I finally left around 2 pm to go home and start on the rest of the job I received Friday, but I've developed a screeching, howling, Force-4 headache that barely allows me to blink my eyes - much less translate.

I've hopped myself up on some Ibuprofen, and that seems to have helped, but I'm going to take it easy for the rest of the night. I'll then have to hit the translation hard tomorrow, since it's due on Friday.

Cheers...