A pretty tiring day...

I started the day in the store, which is always an eye opener. Things went well while I was there (I'm always in a good mood, it seems, when client checks come a-hoppin' in the in-basket!) After Galina finished her yoga class and went home to freshen up, she came to spell me around 10 am.

My cell phone started ringing immediately. With some breathing room visible around the 60K job, I took a couple of pages from a client in Houston, and a few more with a few days deadline. These I can easily do as a change of pace, as I am well and truly starting to feel the effects of translating all this text about matrices, and Jacobians, and integration steps, etc. ad nauseam.

* * *I've mentioned before how this work reminds me of my first translation-related job, back with Plenum Publishing Corporation. And although I've forgotten most of the names of the people I worked with while at Plenum, one name I have not forgotten is Tom O. whose explanation of the various kinds of infinity I do not remember, remembering instead the clarity of the exposition.

You see, I hired Tom to work in my little "division" and if memory serves, he was a plain vanilla English major at the time. For reasons I never did fathom (not that I'm knocking them), Tom's interests turned toward mathematics while working at Plenum (must've been the result of reading all those MDF translations) and he started taking postgraduate courses in math. Eventually, he earned a PhD in the subject, and the last I'd heard, he was an academic.

On a whim, a day or two ago I did an Internet search for Tom. And while it's relatively hard for academics to hide from the Internet, what made my life difficult for some little time was the fact that Tom is the namesake of a 17th century English writer who has earned his own posthumous niche on the 'net, so it took a little digging, but I eventually arrived at a likely candidate who might be "my" Tom.

It was.

His reply brought back a flood of memories. Unlike me, Tom kept track of many of the Plenumites he and I left behind. What really hurt was the news that Sylvia, a matronly woman who ran the typing department, and Ed, who was our liaison to the printers, have died. I hadn't thought of either person in years, but just reading their names brought back a flood of memories (the most vivid one of Syliva was a tête-á-tête we had on the nature of being a supervisor, and how could I have forgotten the running debate Ed and I had as to whether Casablanca was kitsch - with Ed taking the "pro" side?).

Anyway, I hope I break with ill-developed tradition and keep in touch with Tom.

* * *My mom called last night and left a message to the effect that my dad was now in the hospital. When I returned her call this morning, I found out he's okay and raring to get home, while the doctors seem to want to do more tests. I hope everything turns out well, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a trip to the East Coast in my near-to-middling future, to help out with the household for a while. I am, after all, fairly mobile in my ability to translate.

And that brings me back to translation. I finished 16 pages of the 94 in the big document; at that rate, I might be finished with it in 5 more days, but I have a feeling the text is not linear in that sense. Things may get sticky. I've noticed, for example, that the bottom line is cut off of many pages in the PDF source document, as are some right-hand edges. Also, I've noticed at least one place where pages are out of order in the PDF. On the other hand, the text so far is fairly straightforward, as the document is a user manual for a FORTRAN program. (Go figure.)

Time to go wind down. Ciao.

Cheers...

Ad Nauseam

This means "to a sickening or excessive degree," as in:

She went on ad nauseam about my need to eat foods I'd never heard of.

The combination is often misspelled "ad nauseum" (probably because of some phonetic hints). In fact, as of a few minutes ago, there are almost 52,300 hits on Google for the misspelled variant, as opposed to about 49,700 hits for the correct spelling.

NOTE TO SELF: There is a "seam" in "ad nauseam."

Cheers...

The ring of recognition...

From P. J. O'Rourke's review of Living History, in the Weekly Standard of June 30:

Nausea, however, is interesting compared with the actual symptoms of going-through-the-motions sickness induced by "Living History." The book does not contain even a dog-worthy return to the vomit of the Lewinsky scandal.

Can anyone say "Kipling" dear friends?

That's the second time something like that has happened in a couple of days, that I've noticed (and I'm sure there are all sorts of literary allusions floating about that zip merrily past and above my head at near-light speed).

Recently, I bought a paperback book of fairly old short stories by Louis L'Amour, stuff that would've been meat-and-potatoes in the 50s and 60s, in my opinion. In one of them, the sole survivor of an airplane crash in Alaska looks out over the scene before him and notes the "black battalions" stretching along the horizon.

Did someone say "Service"?

The O'Rourke review is precious (and based on skimming the book on which it's based, apparently accurate).

Cheers...

P.S. BTW, the occurrence of the "n" word is purely coincidental.