Guide for document originators (continued)...

Just some random thoughts:

Colors Monochrome black text is so... 20th century! There's a reason most monitors can display 65,535 colors these days, so make sure you put at least a good half-dozen text colors on every page (the idea being that words of a certain color should have a particular meaning, y'know?). Don't forget that you can specify the background color of text as well!

Text boxes Use these liberally and make sure to group them whenever possible. Don't waste page real estate, however: make sure a text box containing, say, the word "облет" is just big enough to fit the word and don't worry that the English equivalent term is "docking port alignment maneuver."

Fonts Check out the Fonts dialog box in Microsoft Word. Besides the actual typeface, you can specify fractional point sizes, leading, character spacing, and positioning. Done properly, you'll get exactly the effect you want, but don't even think about changing a thing afterward: adding as much as a period could throw the entire section out of kilter!

Languages This feature is only useful if you plan on spell-checking your final document. If you accidentally hit F7 while working on your Russian-language opus and don't know what to do when Word displays a dialog box that starts out "Cannot find proofing tools for Portuguese (Brazil)..." just close the dialog box and keep on truckin'. Spell checks are for sissies, anyway.

Cheers...

Pagosa time...

I biked to the store to pick up a couple of checks and drop off some supplies, which I carried in my backpack, and then I was off to Wells Fargo, to create a new account for the LLC, and to the U-Haul place to pick up a truck.

Biking from the store to the Wells Fargo is not that bad, except for the last part, an uphill run to the light at the top of what then becomes about a 4-mile downhill into town. In any event, I negotiated the road without much problem, even despite the construction.

The young man helping me open my account is new at the bank, so the process took about three times longer than you'd expect. As I had some time to kill before getting to the U-Haul place, and as the bank is air-conditioned, this was not particularly a problem.

The U-Haul place is downhill from the bank, headed toward town. When I got there, the place was closed and nobody was in evidence. I figured the place closed down for lunch, and that the proprietor - the "thousand fleas" incantation goes here - simply had not told me about that.

Anyway, between waiting for the proprietor to return (there's not many places that have trucks available), quietly suffering his very slow typing skills, and hanging out while he loaded up the blankets and poured in some fuel, it took two hours to get the truck.

Upon returning home, it struck me that basically, I'll have no time to pack for Baikonur later, so I started to pack today. I'll need to make a separate list of items that can't as yet go into luggage (such as my USB keyboard and mouse) because I'm still using them.

Shortly after starting, Galina came home to pick up some bubble wrap for the store, and I took it there for her and decided to pass the last part of the day in the store, allowing Drew to go home.

Tonight, I need to finish packing for Kazakhstan, make a hard charge and figure out exactly what's going in that wharnkingly small truck, and if I can, how to best go about doing it.

Cheers...