Turn and churn...

I got up late this morning. I had planned to be up at 5:30 am to start on the translation that I hadn't done any of yesterday, but actually started closer to 7 am. Still, I was able to commit about 2000 words to phosphor in a little over two hours. Another, shorter assignment came in as a result, due Monday.

Interpretation seems to be picking up, but I can't really work up any enthusiasm for it. I already said no to a job that starts on Sunday, and I'll probably do the same for a three-week gig that starts the end of the month. I've also been queried about a 45-day assignment that would run from mid-November to the end of the year (this might actually be attractive if it weren't for the fact that it would turn me into an honest-to-goodness commuter for the duration).

Meanwhile, the job that was to take me to Sakhalin in late November or early December has been delayed. Yawn.

My walk with Shiloh today went well. It was the first time I walked "around the block" in quite a while, and Shiloh's first time ever. Shiloh seemd to enjoy it, too, especially the part where we spooked a deer (the dog really wanted to give chase, but my steady leash hand prevailed).

Today's household project was fixing the dining room baseboard heater. Along the way, I must've gone downstairs to turn the appropriate breaker off and back on about a dozen times, and learned that an "anticipation resistor" in a thermostat is designed to simply generate heat so that the thermostat shuts off power to the heater a bit earlier than it would be otherwise. I also learned how to disassemble and reassemble the components of the heater, as it turns out the limit switch on the heater was faulty. The dining room is now toasty. (Hooray for me!)

Feht called to say that Ken Fox, who was one of Feht's and my flight instructors, wanted to get together with us in the near future, but there is no hint of why. Galina says we very nearly bumped into Ken while shopping in Durango yesterday. I'll give him a call tomorrow to see what's up. In other news, Feht reports a pretty slow September and October, so he is attacking recently assigned work with gusto. We'll probably have get together next week to break bread and swap lies.

Dinner tonight was at the kids' house. Unfortunately, given Drew's work hours, he wasn't there. Shannon made some pork roast with some really scrumptious sauce, and I brought all the ingredients to make Bavarian Cream except the gelatin, so we put off making it until the weekend.

Cheers...

On mnemonics...

There is a class of mnemonics out there that provide only a minimum of help. Typically, these involve acronyms.

A good example is HOMES, to remember the names of the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). Here, if you are familiar with the names of the lakes, but need a little nudge to remember them all, the mnemonic can be helpful. (Unfortunately, all the mnemonic does is help you recall the names; the mnemonic "Only Elephants Have Massive Snouts" both helps in recalling names and orders the lakes from east to west.)

One acronym that never made much sense to me was DR & MRS VANDERTRAMP, which purports to help remember French verbs whose compound past tenses take être instead of avoir (as in: devenir, retourner, mourir, rentrer, sortir, venir, arriver, naître, descendre, entrer, revenir, tomber, rester, aller, monter, and partir).

The main problem with this (aside from all the footnotes, so to speak, concerning derivatives) is that you have four verbs that start with "r" in this list, so that unless you create yet another mnemonic to remember them, you are very likely to sit there and know that there are four such verbs, but be unable to remember what they are. In other words, you have to be really familiar with the list of verbs, in which case the mnemonic will only be of limited value.

(Personally, I prefer to remember six pairs of opposites, plus "retourner.")

* * *This whole ramble was triggered by the "anticipation resistor" I found in the Honeywell thermostat (Marcel Proust, eat your heart out). The 1/2-watt device was labeled with gray, red, and orange stripes, which make it an 82KΩ resistor.

That I was able to remember the color coding of resistors over these many years is due to a mnemonic that, frankly, some people would find offensive, so I won't repeat it here in its entirety. However, I don't believe that I am any less of person for having learned that particular menmonic (which, for the terminally curious, involves persons who "ravish our young girls behind victory garden walls," which very likely dates me, or at least dates the guy who taught me the basics of electrical circuits).

In fact, it seems to me that, to be effective, a good mnemonic is going to be edgy, outrageous, or even offensive to some extent. The point of the exercise is to remember stuff, and anything that supports that end is fair game in the mnemonic arena (which, IMO, hinders effective teaching of the subject). My personal mnemonic for the Russian grammatical cases, for example, is not suitable for genteel ears, but it helped me remember the cases.

Enough rambling. It's late now, and tomorrow promises to be an active day.

Cheers...