No good alternative...

The word is one I haven't heard before and which Feht says isn't a real word: накоротке.

There's no entry for it in Multitran (although there is a phrase, "контратака накоротке" which is given as a military term meaning "hit-and-run counterattack"). My Oxford dead wood dictionary gives only an example: "произвести атаку накоротке" ("to carry out an attack at close range"), which gives накоротке an initial definition of "at close range," which doesn't work for the sentence I'm translating. So, it's back to Firefox.

The word appears often enough on the Runet, but short of finding a definition (no joy), the trick is to finagle a way (and there is always a way).

One of the Google hits is for an open source program called ++Sim that targets the IM segment and has the tagline "общение накоротке." Might there be an English equivalent? (Frankly, "messaging at close range" sounds pretty lame.) Hmm. I'm not allowed into the SourceForge page, so let's look elsewhere.

Aha! There's a forum post at something called huntclub.ru with the following (with my sight translation beneath):

Горизонтальный крупнокалиберный штуцер целесообразен для опасных охот накоротке (у нас - медведь на берлоге)

A horizontal, large-caliber short rifle is advisable for hazardous hunting <накоротке> (bears in their dens, where we are)

The title of the thread has накоротке in quotes, and suddenly, it occurs to me that I've often heard the phrase "up close and personal" in reference to hunting big game (there are, in fact, over 6,000 hits on Google for the search string "hunting bear 'up close and personal'"). Heck, it's almost a cliché.

There's not much to work with to check my hypothesis, but "Messaging up close and personal" seems to have a certain ring to it, and even better, it makes sense for the context in my translation.

Cheers...

What a day!

I must be flirting with burnout - an old acquaintance that once did me in back in my twenties - because do what I might, I found it enormously difficult to force myself to sit down and work today.

Fortunately, the 1800 words I had planned to work on today and tomorrow were interesting enough that I managed to get through 1200 of them by mid-afternoon. Then Galina convinced me to go driving with her (and didn't have to try very hard). Then there was dinner, but by that time, I had translated an additional 300 words of the piece I had worked on earlier, so it wasn't too hard to go back and polish off most of the rest after dinner.

Shiloh did her best to be a pest, and some other stuff got in the way, so by the time I sat down at my computer again, it was getting close to 8:30 pm. I had three sentences left of the 1800 words I had started with, and накоротке was in the first of them. I spent entirely too much time on that one word, but for some inexplicable reason, I was happy to invest both the time and the effort.

Anyway, I then spent some time formatting the OCR output to about a 5,000-word "horizon" (meaning that all of the text from where I stopped yesterday to 5,000 words past that point is now properly formatted, while the text past that point is not), and started translating.

I didn't track my progress, as I really didn't think I'd get very far, but I managed to eke out another 1,000 source words, which - if I stop now (and I probably will) - puts me only 1200 words or so behind for the day. Considering how I had intended to commit nearly 4000 words to phosphor today, and that I have a few days to make up the shortfall, that ain't bad.

(My, but I can go on and on about this, can't I?)

* * *The checks for the estate came in yesterday, and I got around to opening the box today. It's kind of weird to see the imprint in the upper left-hand corner, as it makes it appear that the estate is some kind of business (which, to the extent that it is a legal entity with its own Federal Employer ID, it is).

As much as Galina and I have put our stamp on this place, there's still a part of me that expects to see him sitting in his favorite chair when, for example, I turn the corner from the dining room. I think about my stepdad a lot; more than I expected I would.

Part of that thinking has been the repetition of moments I experienced when he was alive, when I'd be somewhere - like in Colorado - and think, "Wow, I ought to bring the old man out to see this place!" He never went, of course. I suspect that, during the last couple of decades of his life, he rarely ventured more than a few miles from home, and never more than a few dozen.

Another part of that thinking included the realization, one day, that he never, ever once told me he was proud of me. And when I stopped and started to turn over that curious thought in my mind, I realized I wasn't focusing on how my old man - and a lot of people like him - thought (and that watching touchy-feely television over Galina's shoulder has had more of an influence on me than I want to admit, but I digress...).

I've observed, over the years, that a lot of people simply don't take note of things when things are going well, though they will squawk if they have a complaint. For such people, an event has to really go over the top in a positive way - like winning the lottery or having a kid score a winning basket - for them to say anything about it.

For my old man, being proud of me wasn't something to make a big fuss over. Saying something like, "Son, I'm proud of you," would be a little like saying "Son, your hair is brown." (Apropos of hair, I do recall how, when I was a teen, he'd say something when he thought it was time for me to visit a barber.) In any event, my old man was not one to lavish praise on behavior that was normal and expected. If he hadn't been proud of me, I would have known it.

All that said, it occurs to me that he would have turned 84 last Thursday.

And on that note, it's time for me to hit the sack.

Cheers...