Where'd the day go?

One thing is for sure, I must've turned the electric kettle in my office on about a half dozen times, and each time but one I forgot about the tea I wanted to make and let the unit shut off and the water cool.

In other news, I worked a couple of thousand words for Feht's project, set off a photo cataloging session on the small Acer (whereupon someone who shall remain nameless squeezed between the dining room table and the wall and hooked the power cable to the 94% full 1-TB drive, bringing it crashing to the floor), and other stuff, mostly associated with getting Galina up to speed with some basic French.

It will come in useful, believe me. Further deponent saith not.

While going through Feht's text, I ran across the following sentence:

Как загнать свинью в коноплю, я знал давно.

Literally, this would be "I've known for a long time how to drive a pig into hemp," which really threw me for a loop. My usual reference, Luvensky's Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms, was of no help. Neither was Mertvago's Comparative Russian-English Dictionary of Russian Proverbs and Sayings (although frankly, I didn't think it'd be much help when I took it down from the shelf).

For some reason, looking at the Russian made me think of the English expression "teaching one's grandmother how to suck eggs," which frankly, never made much sense to me at all. (I mean, why would anyone's grandmother want to suck an egg?) This expression, along with one other I learned in the military ("What do you want, eggs in your beer?) are two "egg"-spressions—I could not resist, sorry—that befuddle me, but I go far afield...

Googling didn't help very much with the Russian, and while I have no idea how hard it might be to drive a pig into a patch of hemp, some of what I did find ("Swiss ban feeding grass to cows," or some such) led me to believe it is not all that hard.

Tentatively, I've translated the sentence as "I've known the basics for a long time." The search continues for a better rendering.

Cheers...