Odds 'n ends...

Among my notes, I found something that had been posted on a bulletin board in the Moscow Support Room (where the Russian flight controllers work) at the MCC at JSC. It reads:

Если женщина молчит, лучше ее не перебивать.

If a woman holds her tongue, it is better not to interrupt her.

It seems to me that the humor here - aside from the unexpected use of молчать (to hold's one tongue, to be silent) instead of the usual "to speak," as in: don't interrupt when somebody's speaking - is of the same breed as in the quip: "If a man says something in the woods and there is no woman to hear, is he still wrong?"

* * *Four translation jobs came in today, and while I would be hard pressed to get them all done by COB tomorrow, if I really pushed myself, I probably could do it, as none of them is of any significant size. Deadlines range from tomorrow morning first thing to early February. I am not complaining, as every little bit counts.

* * *I had the water company come out to see if something other than our location (on top of a hill) might explain our poor water pressure. There are preliminary indications of a leak on our side of the water meter, but when I pressed the service guy to give me an approximate figure, in gallons per day, he couldn't. I will be monitoring the meter over the next few days, because it is no fun having to pay for water that's seeped into the ground, especially as there isn't much of the stuff available (snow on the ground notwithstanding).

* * *I'm not sure why, but the drain blockage has not gone away. I have determined that something is blocking flow between the drain access point next to the house and the one located about 25 yards downstream, just upstream of the septic tank. I will continue to fire bursts of hot water into the system, but if nothing is solved by tomorrow morning, I suppose I'll have to throw in the towel (and take out my checkbook).

* * *Last night, I began reading Under a Lucky Star, by Roy Chapman Andrews. The name rings familiar in my ears because I must've read his All About Dinosaurs about a million times when I was a kid, causing me to bug my parents about an equal number of times to go to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. I actually got to go a couple of times and there is a long-lost part of me that remembers how cool it was to go see dinosaur skeletons reconstructed from fossilized bone.

Cheers...