Taking the bull squarely by the tail...

I suppose that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I saw this coming, as soon as it became apparent that the "odd" tax return - the one that had been filed electronically and then printed out - had quite a bit of text in it.

The final count is over 6100 target words, and though I was able to reuse some of the text from other returns, there was enough additional material to make life not so pleasant for the past... 9 hours. In the end, this job overall looks like it's weighing in at closer to 18,000 target words than the 11,000 estimated by the agency.

The silver cloud to this all? Well, this job looks like it's going to get billed at closer to 18,000 target words than the 11,000 estimated by the agency.

The thing that bugs me right now (aside from the fact that I haven't translated word one of The Last Of The Horror) is that, in the "fog of editing," I managed to make several changes to the text I reused from already completed documents, and I'm not at all sure I'm going to remember all of them when it comes to going back and vetting those said completed documents one last time.

I hit the phone-your-dad-in-the-hospital lottery earlier today. Lately, I've been calling pretty much every day, but nobody picks up the phone at my dad's extension, which is typically explained by him being out of the room for prodding and poking, or sleeping, or I can only imagine what else. He sounds a few hundred percent better than the first time I spoke to him after he entered the hospital, but still far from steady.

I also took a few minutes out to make a new batch of sweet iced tea for the kombucha scoby, although if I'm gone for much more than a couple of weeks, I don't know what'll happen (I might ask Natalie to decant most of it into a container and refrigerate it, but how long will it keep in the fridge?). No matter. Aside from the investment in sugar, the tea was very nearly free to make, so we'll see.

I'm feeling spunky. While I'm waiting for Natalie, let me see if I can pare down the 3700 words left of TLOTH (which sounds like a good name for Cthulhu's kid brother, no?).

Cheers...

Vent comeback?

I may not watch television - especially when I have a killer deadline looming - but there was something about the announcement of who, given a choice between a singer and a ventriloquist, would walk away with the grand prize on... is the show called America's Got Talent?... that caused me to sit down and pause for a couple of minutes.

Ventriloquists, or "vents" as they're called by just about everyone I've ever hung around, inhabit that same strange fringe of show business as magicians, stage hypnotists, sword swallowers, jugglers, and mentalists. Back when I did a regular gig under Broadway at a dismal little place called the "American Theater of Magic," we had no vent on the bill (and if you ask why a magic show would want a vent, it's because the boss wouldv'e said "Why not? We've got a sword swallower and a geek!" The audition, if memory serves, involved a mirror and breathing.). At any rate, our underground enterprise was riding - or trying to ride - a wave of interest that had been generated by Doug Henning, whose Broadway hit The Magic Show was the talk of the town (or maybe we just imagined it to be).

I was pleased to see the vent win. It's about time, speaking in principle. I say that because I saw this guy perform for the first time shortly after the announcement, and - Holy Toledo! - I just about cried during the performance of Roy Orbison's Crying. This fellow - Terry I think is his name - sure has an interesting approach to the art. I wish him luck.

In other news, 3 of 4 tax returns have been reviewed, and I finally decided that since all of the changes I mentioned in my last post were "spit shine" changes (i.e., smoother wording, as opposed to corrected wording), I'm not going to sweat it.

But I do need to jump on that last document.

Cheers...