Light day...

It's strange to say that, considering it's after 5 pm, but I've finished the document that is due tomorrow morning (all except the review), and I've also finished the little job the editor tacked on and asked me to do for Tuesday morning.

So, I am ahead of myself, which is good, considering I expect some major demands on my time once Galina leaves for Houston tomorrow morning.

She left this morning around 11 am to go to Farmington and get drinks for the store. I've since been working on the translations, mostly.

Most folks around here have grown deaf to the predictions of the weather weenies. If it snows, it snows. We need it, as the snow pack on the mountain is only 80% of its nominal level, and as we entered the snowy season this year, the folks who supply us with water announced that we only had 187 days of water left before it all went dry.

The newspaper editorial this past week made a big deal of it, which is not to say it's not a big deal. I just think not too many people are listening.

I'm sick and tired of sitting in front of this screen. I'm off to do something more interesting, like I don't know what.

Cheers...

Snap!

Jane Galt puts her finger on something I've been trying to crystallize:

College does not provide one the tools to make a living. For most people it is what economists call a signalling mechanism: something not intrinsically valuable, but only as a signal that the applicant has something else employers value. Which is to say, employers do not value your college degree because they value what you learned; they value it because it shows that you have sufficiently internalized middle class values to get through four years at school, whether through being born into the middle class, or having sufficient gumption to get yourself through college.

Amen.

It probably goes a way toward explaining why I've only had to cough up my transcript about four times since graduating from college. In each case, the reason for getting the transcript was to "punch" some procedural "ticket" (grad school entry, P.E. license application, and once each for employers B and T, for human resources reasons).

It also goes a way toward debunking (actually, dismissing) arguments from typically bright yet undisciplined students along the lines of "if the professor was really interested in what I know, he or she would [do this, which would prove how smart I am] instead of [that, which is tedious, boring, conventional, and something I'm not necessarily too good at handling]."

* * *Files are sent. The client sent some glossary files on Friday; somehow, I overlooked their arrival in my inbox. The bad news was that I "mistranslated" a very important verb (in the sense of: what I used and what the client uses are different; my choice is workable). The good news coming out of this is that my habit of translating consistently made changing the translation to the accepted term fairly easy and painless. Other than the one term, a look at the glossaries resulted in only a few other minor changes.

* * *Galina returned from Farmington a few minutes after my previous post, by which time I was feeling pretty lonely. I don't know how I'm going to get through the next couple of weeks.

* * *Drew called earlier, indicating that he and Shannon would be by around 7 pm, on their way to a farewell dinner with Brady. I wonder what's keeping them?

Cheers...