Quietly, and with passion...

Today was my first opportunity to interpret at the daily coordination meeting, where all of the parties involved - ILS, Khrunichev, and Astrium - get together and hash out any issues that may require attention to keep the campaign moving along smoothly. Not that there was any doubt, but I survived the experience.

Tomorrow, I am the "on call" interpreter, a 24-hour gig that doesn't require one to be anywhere in particular - aside from the area of the hotels - and doesn't require 24 hours of consciousness; one simply must be responsive to any calls on the radio. On Sunday, I'm slated to go into Baikonur town, which my boss here, Victor, thinks is crazy ("It's going to be 45 degrees in the shade!" he tells me, citing a Celsius temperature that's equivalent to 115°F).

I'll take my chances.

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My weight this morning was 215, according to the scales in the workout room. While this may indeed represent water loss, I have been weighing myself on those scales at the same time (before breakfast) and in the same condition (bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, in shorts and a tee shirt) so that any "systematic error" will be constant. And I've been careful to consume at least one 1.25-liter bottle of water daily, in addition to the other liquids I normally drink, so it's not as if dehydration is a looming threat.

Still, I need to get some more exercise in, for both conditioning purposes and weight loss, because chaque jour et en toutes circonstances, je suis de plus en plus enjoué!^[1]

Cheers...

[1] Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better!

Progressing through the fog...

I've done a couple of small jobs at odd times since leaving home, and this afternoon, after a nap, I felt it was time to finally get down to creating invoices for them.

As I think I mentioned before, I deliberately didn't install the Intuit InvoiceManager application on the HP because continued use of that program would only prolong the process of wasting keystrokes to enter data that could not be extracted, except piecemeal. (That's been why I've been so impatient with TurboCASH, and why I printed a portion of the manual this morning to help me in creating a set of books while I do my "on call" time tomorrow.)

Editing old PDFs was not really an option, not with the Nitro product that I bought. Creating Word and/or RTF files from old PDFs was also not an option, because the appearance of the resulting file differed significantly from what I needed. In the end, I created a prototype Word file for invoicing, filled in the blanks, so to speak, for each invoice by hand, and then "printed" the result to PDF.

After all that work, I am really looking forward to getting a handle on TurboCASH, believe me. Invoicing should be fun, and not a drag.

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There seems to be more of a "social" spirit on this campaign than I've seen on previous outings, at least if you consider the use of the media room downstairs. Shortly after our arrival, a showing of Caddy Shack was organized there, and Rambo was shown a couple of nights ago (a lamentable loss of time from one's life). Tonight, a screening of Airplane! has been announced. I frankly don't remember any similar activities taking place, say, during the Arabsat campaign almost two years ago.

The movie is scheduled to start in a few minutes. I might wander by and see what's what.

Cheers...