GPS shenanigans...

Galina and I made jet lag work for us by allowing ourselves to go to sleep early on Sunday night and getting up at 1 am Mountain Time yesterday. We spent a couple of hours packing, and then got on the road at 3:20 am Mountain Time. (As it turns out, we left some fairly important items in Houston. File that under "lessons learned.")

The last couple of times I drove to Houston from here, I took what I call the "Southern Route," driving west on I-10 to Ft. Stockton, then up Highway 285 to Clines Corners, New Mexico. I particularly like the rather long stretch of Interstate between Ft. Stockton and roughly Kerrville where the posted speed limit is 80 mph.

Our Garmin GPS, on the other hand, wanted to route us via what I call the "Northern Route," up I-45 to Dallas-Ft. Worth, then diagonally over to Amarillo on Highway 287, where we'd pick up I-40 to Clines Corners. From Clines Corners, all routes home basically follow Highway 285 north to where Highway 84 splits off and ends just at the Pagosa Springs city limit.

I haven't figured out how to turn off the incessant jabbering from the GPS after it recalculates the road home, because it annoyingly keeps trying to turn you around to go where its poor little computer brain wants you to. (I'm sure it's not hard to figure out; it's merely a matter of priorities.) Eventually, however, the unit seems content to let us drive west on I-10, but then started jabbering again once we got to exit 523, whereupon it directed us down a series of small country roads that bring us to... the westbound I-10 on-ramp at exit 520!

Galina and I had a good laugh about that, let me tell you!

We finally decided to go with the GPS's suggestion to take exit 456 and drive north on Highway 83 to Eden, then west and north on Highway 87 to Lamesa, and then west on Highway 380 to Roswell, New Mexico. Once in Roswell, a right turn on Highway 285 pointed us home, as described above.

We pulled into town at shortly before 8:30 pm MT. As we passed the Malt Shoppe at the south end of town, we spied a huge crowd of spectators clustered along the opposite side of the road. They were looking at a small bear, possibly a cub, who had wandered into the grassy area that adjoins the Piedra River and was not doing much of anything except ignoring the crowd, which stood about 50 feet away. If it was a cub, then hopefully mama bear didn't show up suddenly and decide to discipline the crowd. There'd be a lot of knees and elbows suddenly, don't you know.

Man, but it feels good to be home!

Cheers...

The phone lines are becoming active again...

Clients have begun to call again, which is always a good thing, and the timing was impeccable. The only hiccup in the mix has been some strange new behavior in Word, causing the application to crash repeatedly unless started from the command line with the /a parameter, which prevents add-ins and templates from being loaded automatically.

Had the incoming assignment been more urgent, I would have had to run Word in this manner and then load Wordfast manually. The job did have a little slack in it, so I spent what ended up being too much time tracking down the solution, which involved a forum post that explained the crash as the result of an add-in or template looking for the wrong or a corrupted version of the wwlib.dll dynamic library (which sounded plausible, as Microsoft applied a particularly large Windows Update shortly before I left Baikonur; there may be no cause-and-effect, but my Fine Reader installation went south after the update was applied, too).

In any event, the forum post suggested that deleting the

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\version number\Word\Data

key for Word in the registry would solve the problem (since the key would be regenerated the next time Word was run). I followed the advice and the problem went away.

So now I find myself with two jobs to be done "as soon as reasonably possible" - one of them breathing hotly down my neck as a result of today's pereginations - along with a "part B" to write for this week's LJ Idol.

However, given the increasingly short time periods that have been available to devote to LJ Idol over the past several weeks, I'm now to the (dangerous) point where I'm confident I'll come up with something. It wouldn't do for "part B" to behave like a petard.

Cheers...