Countdown!

As I write this, Lee should be boarding her flight to Albuquerque. Galina has been on the road since about 11 am, because she wanted to stop by one of our suppliers, who just happens to be located there, and to do so before said supplier closed for business today, Thanksgiving Eve.

That left me, Drew and Brady in the store today. I left around 2:30 in the afternoon, and have been going at the rest of the "external atmosphere" translation since around 5 or so. I figure I have about 6-7 hours before Galina and Lee turn up the driveway, so I may as well take care of this "cloud" that hovers over Thanksgiving and Friday. (Cloud is in quotes, because the 7,000 or so source words it represents is most welcome in light of the "drought" that is threatened in the aftermath of the cancellation of the Kazakhstan job, which I am sure is a figment of my imagination, but still...)

I am completely confused as to who is visiting whom these upcoming three days (Sunday is going to be fun... Lee's plane leaves for Houston at 9 am or so, which means we need to depart from here at about 3 am to make her flight. Ye gods.) What I'm pretty sure of is that everyone is going to Drew and Shannon's tomorrow, and then it'll be our turn on Saturday. The definition of "everyone" in the preceding sentence, I am told, is still an open question.

Anyway, time is a-wastin'! A brief dalliance with the word-count function in MS Word says I've only translated 1,000 of those words. Hopefully, by the time my head hits a pillow tonight (or tomorrow morning), I shall have whittled that imposing host down to something like 3,000 or so. Later...

Cheers...

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman...

In listening to Tennessee Ernie Ford belt out Sixteen Tons, it occurred to me that I really had only an approximate understanding of "high-toned" (as in: "Can't no high-toned woman make me walk the line.")

Google provided the following momentary diversion, in the form of multiple links to the following poem:

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Poetry is the supreme fiction, Madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it,
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms.
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene,
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, Madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

by
Wallace Stevens, 1922

Oh, and the meaning of high-toned? Merriam-Webster says: high in social, moral, or intellectual quality; pretentious, pompous.

Cheers...

Tiredness, thy name is translator...

Okay, 6-1/2 hours of translation after 7 hours of work at the store is... enough for now. I've "bagged" around 4800 words of target text, which is a good haul by any account. Hopefully, they'll make as much sense when I review them later as they did while I first put them down on phosphor.

Aargh! I just got a call a couple of minutes ago from Lee. She wanted to know where the exit for Villanueva was along I-25 heading north through New Mexico, as she felt something was fishy, road-wise. Mmm-mm. Looks like the girls overshot Santa Fe (which is where one turns north, toward Española and beyond) by about 35 miles!

's gonna be a long night, methinks. Their little detour loses about an hour, so I'd put their ETA at around 3 am. Thus, my idea of staying up to greet the travelers - which was already in jeopardy when I learned that Lee's actual arrival time in Albuquerque was about 10 pm - is already deep-sixed. OTOH, I need to make sure I don't fall into the arms of Morpheus too far from a telephone, in case my long-distance navigation skills will be required again.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Cheers...