Following the plough...

Last night was the first of 9 night shifts at the MSR. It was a quiet night, once the excitement of the Progress docking had passed.

I got home soon after the end of my shift, after stopping at the Verizon store at the mall to complain about the shoddy quality of the "holster" I had bought there for my BlackBerry. In fact, I didn't even get a chance to complain: the representative who greeted me cheerfully exchanged my broken case for a new one. (FWIW, the clip that held the case - and obviously the phone inside - to whatever it was clipped to had broken catastrophically... as I sat in the car, fortunately, and not in a Bad Place™.)

Once I got home, I had breakfast and almost immediately went to sleep. Moreover, I slept for about 4 hours, which for me is pretty good, historically speaking, although a 12-hour "slam" shift of sleep hours will do that to you that first night.

I've been struggling with the translation since I got up. There are sections that flow from my fingertips as if by magic, and others that seem to make squeezing water from stone a viable professional option.

Apropos of which... I need to get back to work. Ideally, I think I'd like to lie down again at around 7:30-ish and get a couple more hours of sleep before going in for another session supporting the MSR.

Cheers...

Something's shaking...

I must have slept pretty soundly, because when I hit the sack at around 7:30 pm, with The Art of Fugue playing softly in my ears, I spent a pleasant time listening to the music and not sleeping at all. Finally, about 30 minutes ago, I decided that I had "rested" long enough - who knows, maybe I did drift off, briefly? - and sat back down to work.

I had forgotten how difficult it is to work a translation in addition to a shift at the MSR. Heck, it's difficult enough wrapping your mind around the fact that no, just because you have no obligations during the day, it doesn't mean you can stay up and have fun. A shift at the MSR is a work day like any other - just shifted - which means that the same constraints are in place as are in effect whenever your work requires you to hang out somewhere for 8 hours or more (i.e., you have 5-6 hours of free time in which to get everything done).

I've been doing a kakuro puzzle a day, and once you start to pay attention, it gets a little easier. For example, allocating 17 among two squares can only be done one way (9 and 8). The same is true for 16 (9 and 7). Allocating 10 among four squares requires the combination 1, 2, 3, and 4. Allocating 7 among three squares can only be done with 1, 2, and 4. And so on...

Yesterday, I ran across a "cook," to borrow a term from chess. That is, the kakuro I was working on had two solutions, because two adjacent vertical pairs could be swapped and still obtain the same sums vertically and horizontally. It's no big deal, but still, I was tickled to have found it.

We've been rather fortunate, weather-wise, here in Webster. Our proximity to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico has, I think, allowed us to avoid the more extreme frost conditions that have placed the weather people on TV at the focus of attention recently. It's still cold, though.

It is time, I think, to wrap up what's left of the translation and relax a bit before going in for my shift.

Cheers...