Friday? You could have fooled me...

I'm not at all sure that Friday means much to the US crew involved in the launch, so that probably means at least some work tomorrow and Sunday. (In fact, there's to be a reception of some kind on Sunday, late in the afternoon, which means that the interpreters will be working, at least during that event.)

Today was a real crowd-pleaser, if you're into multitasking. I ended up translating from English into Russian, which is not something I'm good at, but the fellow who checked my work made remarkably few changes to the text. (Of course, he could be subscribing to the "minimum acceptable level" school of translation, where "all your base are belong to us" is perfectly okay, but I digress...)

I got to interpret another session of Cisco router discussions between the Russians and French, even skirting close to inappropriate interpretation behavior by volunteering my two tenths of a cent worth of suggestions with regard to Cisco timeout settings.

I also got to do some Russian typing, narrowly escaped translating a letter from English to French, interpreted a bunch of short telecons. (Actually, in many cases, the client doesn't stick around to run the discussion; we're told what's required and it's up to us to figure out who to call and what to arrange. It's very different from the regime at JSC.)

Oh, and translated two documents from Russian into English.

The team that went to load the empty satellite container back onto the Airbus encountered the same wind problem we encountered while unloading the plane, so a bunch of people are at the airport right now engaged in loading ops, and I hope the wind has died down.

In between times, I've read Susan Grafton's Q is for Quarry, which I liked, and watched Under the Tuscan Sun again, and cried and did some serious longing to wander the Tuscan countryside, though there are undoubtedly a hundred other lovely spots in the world, too. At least a hundred.

I finally decided to quit "playing hurt," which around here consists of enduring a runny nose while using the "other brand" in the Puffs commecial. I visited the doctor's ofice (which in my mind I call the "sick bay"), where after checking me out, the doc (a fellow with the surname Gagarin... go figure) gave me some Claritin tablets. They ought not to play havoc with my blood pressure, but I've been asked to stop by again tomorrow to make sure alles ist in ordnung.

Time to go for a walk, methinks.

Cheers...

It's official...

I'm the on-call interpreter tomorrow, which really doesn't mean much more than I keep my radio on all night long starting at midnight, and won't be part of any impromptu trips to Baikonur town.

It's funny. Last night, a group of French participants sat outside the hotel (I'm on the second floor, facing the front) and carried on until 2 am (according to Olga, down the hall, whose windows also face front). Tonight, there's nobody. Not a soul.

Norton AntiVirus found 8 viruses on the VAIO, but fortunately, I can account for all of them (long story, having to do with Lion virus for Linux, which I downloaded onto my Windows machine to analyze). Others here are not so lucky, especially with their email.

Oh, well... that walk is still calling me.

Cheers...