No good deeds go unrewarded...

Galina and I were planning a quiet evening at home tonight, but right now, she's on her way to Durango, to the UPS office, to drop off stuff that UPS said they'd pick up (in fact they called us up to find out if we'd need pickup service today, to which we answered in the affirmative) but which, in fact, they did not pick up. This almost makes me think UPS did this deliberately, since they compete directly with small shops like ours with their chain of UPS Stores, and anything that makes small operators like us look bad only helps their bottom line.

I just finished 3500 words of an assignment due Friday or tomorrow, depending on who you are (me or the client, respectively). It really doesn't matter, since I finished the work, but the discrepancy is troubling.

Another assignment I got that is coming due on Monday desperately needs starting. It's going to probably be 11,000 words by the time I finish with it, and I only have tomorrow, perhaps part of Friday, and only part of the two weekend days to get it done. If we assume 50% availability on Friday through Sunday, that's 2.5 "units of availability," which means I'll have to do 4400 words tomorrow and 2200 words the other three days.

Do-able, methinks.

* * *Although I haven't obsessed about the almanac story, stray notions have crowded my mind at odd times (like this morning, while I was brushing my teeth). While it has been a long, long time since I've bought an almanac, I do seem to recall that this time of year is the prime almanac-buying season. (The analogy here would be to say that the cops should be on the lookout for suspicious characters watching television between, say, 6 pm and 10 pm at night.)

Second, it occurs to me that - unless almanacs have changed content dramatically - I'd be hard pressed to do anything really useful with data found in an almanac. The book is great when you're wondering if the St. Johns River in Florida is among the world's longest rivers (I think it is, at least among those that flow north), but what kind of mayhem could you possibly plan that would require an almanac. Target selection? Geez, I'm sure the bozos that whacked the WTC used an almanac to select that particular target.

If I were a little bit crazier, I'd go out of my way to buy and almanac and take it with me in my carry-on to Houston, just to see how serious The Powers That Be are about this notification from the FBI, but like most such whims that involve flouting authority (something left over from the Marines), I think I'll leave it at the door as I leave the house. Not to mention, I don't really need an almanac.

I think I'll run down to the store and do some last-minute shopping. I'm sure they'll close early tonight.

Cheers...

Duh!

I went down to the market to pick up some ham for our annual ham-and-blackeyed-peas soup, and on my initial pass through the store, picked up an armful of stuff, but no ham. Fortunately, I managed to catch the shortage while in the parking lot, so I went back and got the ham.

Efforts to migrate the old home-brew machine to the used home-brew that I picked up from one of our clients goes slowly. Just now I tried to put a dent in the item due Monday, and realized I needed to install a piece of software I wrote several years ago that basically does a "serial grep" on a text glossary file and does a formatted output (for example, the query "for dig" would find entries for "foreign dignitary" as well as "performance digest"). The reason I need to install it is because my comprehensive aerospace glossary is in a format usable by the program, which works a lot better than trying to do searches in Word documents.

A little over 4.5 hours left in the year, and I have to say: big deal. I don't feel festive at all.

But I am sure that'll change, if I give it half a chance.

Happy New Year, all!

Cheers...

Definitely the last word for the year...

I went to visit the Childreach site and decided to increase my personal sphere of influence by sponsoring a 10-year old girl in El Salvador.

That's two: one in Albania, and one in Central America. Who knows, this sponsorship may become something of a tradition.

As regards the future, I shall steal a line from Rostand:

Je l'attendrais debout, et l'épée à la main!

See y'all on the other side of the year! I have a feeling this next one is going to be special, in the best sense of the word!

Cheers...