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At Woltracks, again...
Feb. 10th, 2005 08:35 amIn the aftermath of my trip to Kazakhstan, I've come up with some "lessons learned" that I should apply in case I get to go again. I've not really worked hard on this list; in fact, only some items related to clothing and bill-paying come to mind.
1. Leave dress socks at home. Take more work socks.
2. Dress trousers don't go well with tee shirts and especially not with sneakers or work boots. Take an extra pair of jeans instead, or lighten the suitcase.
3. The slippers I took were too informal for walking around the hotel, and doing so in sneakers all the time was a drag. Make sure you take casual, "indoor" footwear.
4. With me in Kazakhstan and Galina in Texas, nobody was left at home to mind the course of affairs in terms of utility bills, with, um, very poor results (cf. my lack of DSL connectivity at the moment). On the flip side, Galina and I did manage to pay all credit card bills and mortgage items for the period of my absence.
* * * I'm still finding it hard to sleep through the night, which today had an unintended positive side-effect: I got up at 5 am and was at work on the remaining translation for today by 6:30 am.
I had to interrupt that work with less than 700 words left to come to the coffee shop to resend yesterday's delivery (I forgot that certain servers between here and there filter out suspicious files, including zip files). Once the basic text is done, I've probably got about 2 hours of work to do with flow charts, after which I can either call it a day (the end result will be nearly 3000 words) or go on to the items due in about a week.
I would really like to get to a point (wouldn't every translator) where I could do 3000 or so words per day on a regular basis, which would provide bread on the table and yet leave me some time to think about other ways to earn money. Our part-time bookkeeper has set a sort of example for me in this regard. Since starting to do work for us, she's started an employment agency here in town, and a telephone message-answering service, too. Now, that's hustle!
(BTW, I intend to use the answering service next time I'm out of town and out of touch. Apparently, nobody - including me - checked my messages while I was gone, and I look forward to the task - that's right, I haven't done it yet - with trepidation.)
Time to wind this up and get out of here.
Cheers...
1. Leave dress socks at home. Take more work socks.
2. Dress trousers don't go well with tee shirts and especially not with sneakers or work boots. Take an extra pair of jeans instead, or lighten the suitcase.
3. The slippers I took were too informal for walking around the hotel, and doing so in sneakers all the time was a drag. Make sure you take casual, "indoor" footwear.
4. With me in Kazakhstan and Galina in Texas, nobody was left at home to mind the course of affairs in terms of utility bills, with, um, very poor results (cf. my lack of DSL connectivity at the moment). On the flip side, Galina and I did manage to pay all credit card bills and mortgage items for the period of my absence.
I had to interrupt that work with less than 700 words left to come to the coffee shop to resend yesterday's delivery (I forgot that certain servers between here and there filter out suspicious files, including zip files). Once the basic text is done, I've probably got about 2 hours of work to do with flow charts, after which I can either call it a day (the end result will be nearly 3000 words) or go on to the items due in about a week.
I would really like to get to a point (wouldn't every translator) where I could do 3000 or so words per day on a regular basis, which would provide bread on the table and yet leave me some time to think about other ways to earn money. Our part-time bookkeeper has set a sort of example for me in this regard. Since starting to do work for us, she's started an employment agency here in town, and a telephone message-answering service, too. Now, that's hustle!
(BTW, I intend to use the answering service next time I'm out of town and out of touch. Apparently, nobody - including me - checked my messages while I was gone, and I look forward to the task - that's right, I haven't done it yet - with trepidation.)
Time to wind this up and get out of here.
Cheers...
