Hitting the Wall...

There comes a point in some assignments where you achieve a level of fatigue that is such that your ability to continue interpreting becomes severely degraded. If it happens at the end of a work day, you have the rest of the evening and the night to recuperate. If it happens before the end of the day, the results are not pretty.

I call it "hitting the wall," having borrowed the term from marathoners, based on my conception of what running a marathon must be like. You can't just stop, but you feel you can't go on.

It happened to me yesterday in the middle of a discussion on loads (which is a subject with which I'm fairly familiar).

Worse, it happened to me again this morning, during a discussion of ballistics, which really started to worry me. As I appeared to recover later in the morning and received a lot of extremely nice feedback from the engineers in the audience, who appreciate the fact that I have more than a passing familiarity with their jargon, I've concluded that ballistics just may not be my strong suit.

After work, everyone went back to their respective hotels (the Ukrainians like extended-stay places, which have kitchens that allow them to minimize per-diem expenses for food, and I'm staying at the same place) and then met at 6 pm at a place called Logan's Roadhouse. The joint served decent enough food, but a restaurant has to serve absolutely outstanding food for me to get over gimmicks such as small buckets of unshelled peanuts to nibble on while waiting for service (with the floor being the receptacle for the shells).

The toasts were mercifully short, and I got back a couple of hours ago.

One more day to go in this meeting, and then I am free until Monday.

Cheers...