Dream on...

The plan for the day is pretty ambitious and does not - surprise! - involve nothing but translation. (Of course, similarly planned days have, in the past, resulted in my doing nothing but translation all day, but one must strive, no?).

One thing that would help immeasurably would be 25 or so more sentences along the following lines:

The pavement will be constructed over an area of 24,555 m². In areas of new construction, the surface will consist of two-layer hot, fine-grain type A, grade I asphalt concrete, 6 cm thick, and coarse-grain type B, grade I asphalt concrete, 7 cm thick, with a road base made of compact type B, grade II asphalt concrete, 10 cm thick, and a layer of V-10 concrete, 24 cm thick, and an additional base layer made of graded crushed rock, 10 cm thick, and sand with Kf ≥ 2 m/day with a protective–dividing interlayer of geotextile.

Back to the face!

Cheers...

Behind...

Well, as the day has turned out, I got a lot less done than I figured. For one thing, the day on which the town dump accepts paints and solvents - an impressive collection of which my stepdad made over the years, most of which don't show any signs, when moved from side to side, of containing any more liquid - wasn't today, so it was a good thing I called before we piled the junk in the Ford.

Then it turned out the little game of having the pharmacy and the doctor touch base to okay the refill of my BP meds never quite played out yesterday, so I shall have to get the parties together again on Monday for a retry. The pharmacy claimed they sent a fax, then claimed they called but got no reply; the doctor's office says no fax was received and that calls from pharmacies are put right through to doctors, and though I still have a few days of meds, I had been hoping to take care of getting them over the weekend.

I don't know quite why - though I have my suspicions - but Galina came up to my office to watch television this afternoon, which put a full nelson on my productivity, but I've really not spent any time at all with her in the recent past, so I figure it's all for the better.

On the other hand, I had planned to translate somewhere around 5000 source words today, and I'm only about halfway there. So, donning my "replan" hat (that's the term used at NASA when a schedule, such as the one for mission operations, has to be redone in real time), I need to figure out what my next few days will look like.

Cheers...

Random jottings...

Shiloh continues to impress me with her intelligence (that, or all the other dogs in my life have been, um,... developmentally challenged). She appears to have excellent situational awareness, so that when Galina went out the door earlier today to go shopping, Shiloh ran from the kitchen (point of egress) to the couch in my office, so as to confirm that Galina's next stop was the car.

Shiloh's behavior continues to befuddle me. We've got her "trained" to the point where she will sit and stay for fairly long periods (albeit under observation) before getting a signal that it's okay to go to her food bowl. She will sit and stay and then come on command in a controlled setting (inside), but get her outside, and it's a whole different story. She tears around at Mach 6 and doesn't care who knows about it.

(When she does finally calm down, by the way, she is very good at trying to - literally - wind the lead around you by running in circles. If you don't pass the "owner's end" of the lead behind your back, you will end up trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey!)

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I've stumbled across a package called Floola, a Windows program that purports to help manage the iPod's "content." I've only just begun to work with the package, but the fact that you can run it off the iPod itself is already a good start. Hopefully, the application will have a way of rationally dealing with Audible downloads.

One other thing I'd like to learn to do is figure out how to have podcasts downloaded outside the aegis of iTunes show up as podcasts in the iPod's content hierarchy.

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I received a letter from the lawyer today. Apparently, the naturalization people decided that they could release my old man's application for citizenship without redacting anything. (Well, that's a load off my chest!)

There was a lot of stuff in the application that I knew nothing about, and there's a part of me that's been sulking on that account ever since opening the letter. I recall those times when I did express curiosity about the old man's past, only to be uniformly rebuffed as, somehow, trying to invade his privacy.

Looked at another way, I suppose it says something about the man that he was frank and open with his government (to the point of admitting to having been fined for causing a ruckus or two in bars in Belgium in the early 50s) in a way that he was never frank and open with members of his own family, ar at least me (presumably, my mother knew all about the fistfights and the name - not his own - the old man went by for a while after the war).

I'm about cooled down for the day. Time to get some shuteye and hit the ground running tomorrow morning.

Cheers...