From 0 to wa-a-a-a-y over the work speed limit...

Life was quiet this morning, until the phone started ringing.

Ring!

Can I do 5,000 words for Monday? Sure!

Ring!

Can I do 37 pages for Monday? Um, sure!

Ring!

Can I do 17 pages for next Friday? You betcha!

Ring!

Can I do 2000 words for tomorrow morning? Um,... er,... yes.

So here I am, awash in work. And of course I have to find out today that one of the BillPay checks never made it to the mortgage company. Whoo-eee! Well, at least that gave me another reason to go to the bank.

My Epson inkjet is sitting there, smirking at me because the black ink cartridge contains ink fumes and nothing else, which is going to make the 37 pages for Monday particularly irksome to do. I believe I will do it using two machines: one to work on; one to display the original.

Meanwhile, I shall have to start doing some OCR on the PDF of the 5K words for Monday if I am to have any reasonable prayer of making the deadline.

Then again, it is only Thursday.

Cheers...

Coming up for air...

My eBay purchases arrived today, but as luck would have it, I won't have an opportunity to do anything with them until at least Monday. Today has been a busy day.

The good news is that FineReader 6.0 did a magnificent job OCRing the PDF file, except that skill at formatting the end result still escapes me. Exporting the result directly to Word yields a document where the page widths vary, styles wander all over the area, and so on. While exporting with no formatting is a little extreme, I find it's less wearing on the nerves in the long run. Formatting the saved result took a llittle time, but it was not a horrendous job.

The two shorter items for tomorrow morning are pretty much done, and I've got about 2400 words left of what turned out to be a 3600 word job (not 5000, as had been represented... talk about having mixed feelings, though!). One not-so-good aspect of the job is that there is quite a number of masonry related terms to be found, and it would appear that -- as is the case with so many other things -- Kipling's line about East and West is dead on. However, the internal consensus is that I ought to have the document finished tomorrow by COB.

That'll leave the 35 or so pages distributed in about a dozen PDF files to do for Monday, which means the ultimate effect of the translation tsunami that appeared ready to engulf me around noon today is not all that tumultuous.

In any event, I should go upstairs now and find a pair of feet to rub. Galina spent a lot of time at the store today.

Cheers...