Where has the day gone?

It's nearly noon. Wow.

I've not done anything of note today, except rise, eat breakfast, and exercise, and I've got Feht's son coming by later in the afternoon to talk business, so I better get off of my corpulent duff and get to work on the 2,000-word item due tomorrow.

Cheers...

Up against it...

There are times when having a good, culturally literate vocabulary isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially if you're plagued with short snatches of translation angst.

In my current translation, I ran across the Russian sentence "Приходилось объяснять прописные истины бизнеса."

Without thinking too much about it, I wrote:

The copybook maxims of business had to be explained.

which is a perfectly workable translation, if I say so myself, except for the part about "copybook maxims," which may be beyond the ken of most modern readers. (Or am I just a pessimist?)

I am familiar with the variant "copybook heading" from Kipling's poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings, but Google only notes a hair more than 1,000 hits for the phrase "copybook maxim," with most items on the first couple of pages being pretty highbrow.

I also seem to recall reading somewhere, a long time ago, something to the effect that such maxims are, in reality, pretty shallow - or perhaps I was reading something written by one of those "smooth-tongued wizarda" Kipling talks about, I'm not sure.

In any event, I went back and changed my translation, to read

The basic maxims of business had to be explained.

Cheers...

Summing up the day...

I didn't get as much done as I had hoped, but I did manage to translate about 2800 target words, so that's something.

As Houston area property owners, Galina and I have been keeping up with the maps from the National Hurricane Center, and it would appear that every few hours or so, the point at which Hurricane Ike is expected to hit the mainland keeps creeping up along the coast.

The latest 3-day projection shows it coming ashore directly over Galveston at about 1 am on Saturday. Hopefully, by tomorrow morning, the landfall point will be north of Galveston Bay, which won't do much to slow down the wind, but ought to do wonders as far as the storm surge is concerned. (Right now, there's a 90-100% probability of tropical storm force winds in Galveston Bay; an 80% probability of 50-knot winds; and about a 50% probability of hurricane force winds.)

In other news, we picked up a used desk from the Methodist Thrift Shop in town, and aside from one slightly cockeyed drawer, it is a nice piece of equipment.

Cheers...