I have finally escaped the clutches...

...of the revised document I've been working on.

Finishing the translation was fairly routine. Incorporating it all into a final product took a surprisingly long time. The damage to the client is still significantly less than if I had retranslated the whole thing (what used to be the case before Word's "compare documents" feature).

I have downloaded something from Microsoft Labs called "Ribbon Hero." It purports to be a game that helps you master the "ribbon" interface that Microsoft introduced in its Office 2007 application suite. Poor l'il me, I need all the help I can get in this regard, because I'm not quite to the point where I can keyboard the old menu choices from memory. (Then again, some number of them no longer exist even if my keyboard memory was perfect. Alt-F,V no longer brings up "print preview," for example.)

Cheers...

Exquisite dinner...

The kids invited me over for dinner this evening. My contribution for the evening's festivities was to buy the wine for dinner, and since the main course was to consist of Omaha steaks (filet mignon, wrapped in bacon), I selected a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. (I probably would have made the same selection if fish had been on the menu..., or perhaps not, I don't know.)

Dinner went well and so did the conversation, and here I am back at the old homestead.

My first conscious recollection of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo is that it was the wine we drank when Tim Zagat (he of the Zagat surveys) hosted the crews of STS-74 and Mir-20 (and yours truly) at a very cozy restaurant in Manhattan's Little Italy. I recall how after dinner, as we walked back through the streets of the neighborhood to our van, Tim stopped and introduced us to a very distinguished-looking older gentleman, expensively dressed (this you get from me, who normally has the fashion sense of a dead horse), who was strolling down the street in our direction in the company of two very attractive young women, one on each arm.

I recall the man - later described to me as the guy to see if you wanted to get anything really done in New York - had a powerful and magnetic personality. When he looked at you - paid attention to you - you got the very definite feeling of being the center of the universe at that moment. It was an interesting dynamic: he was who he was, and we... we were Tim (who seemed to know everyone in town), a bunch of space fliers, and an interpreter.

So every time I drink Montepulciano D'Abruzzo, I am reminded of that evening, and of the adventure that followed our reentering the van. :)

Cheers...