A real circle... the wagons kind of day...

It''s been an interesting day so far, and to tell the truth, I've overstayed my scheduled time at the полтинник. The issues I've handled today have ranged from supporting a meeting on joint operations later in the month to tracking down the whereabouts of a piece of wood that's to serve as a flagpole during tonight's Bastille Day celebration.

Dinner last night was held outside, and the menu included French champagne (some of which was sipped to the tune of Louie, Louie, go figure) and skewers of barbequed chicken, pork, beef, and salmon. A good time, to use a cliché, was had by all: a couple of the French guys ended up teaching a couple of American gals a new card game, while I spent my time practicing my French comprehension skills.

An enterprising blogger at Dinosaur Gardens has posted about 100 MB of mp3 files from an LP record of Vladimir Nabokov reading excerpts from his own work, including chapter 25 of part 2 of Lolita and something titled An Evening of Russian Poetry, which I had never run into before.

The latter is an interesting item, a lecture on Russian poetry delivered almost entirely in English, itself in the form of a poem. I was particularly taken by the following lines:

The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know,
and there are certain customary twins
in Russian as in other tongues. For instance,
love automatically rhymes with blood^[1],
nature with liberty^[2], sadness with distance^[3],
humane with everlasting^[4], prince with mud^[5],
moon with a multitude of words, but sun
and song and wind and life and death with none.

[1] любовь / кровь
[2] природа / свобода
[3] печаль / даль
[4] человечно / вечно
[5] князь / грязь

* * *I've lucked out in this campaign as far as assignments during propellant loading operations are concerned. During last year's campaign, I was assigned to support such operations, which while not strenuous, do tend to keep you at the полтинник for much of the day while much of the rest of the team - banned from the facility owing to the hazardous nature of what's going on - takes what amount to a couple of days off before the commencement of so-called "joint operations," during which all parties in the campaign start to integrate the various pieces into a rocket that will eventually boost our precious payload into a neverending, nondecaying orbit high above a single point on the planet's surface.

The Bastille Day celebration starts at 8 pm and my day tomorrow starts at 5:45 am, so I better get a nap under my belt, methinks.

Cheers...