And it's not even noon yet!

The amateur radio breakfast went well, and I even managed to do some grocery shopping afterward before returning home to finish the current assignment.

The last part of the document was a marvelous collection of boilerplate, which sped things along splendidly. Then I finished off four rather sparsely populated diagrams and settled down to the task of despeckling everything.

Then I noticed an interesting call for bids on a job involving petroleum engineering, and the sample translation was not very long, and it was among the kind of stuff I used to do when I worked as an engineer. So I "pushed" the despeckling "on the stack" and set about translating the sample.

And ran into some interesting walls, terminology-wise. And then realized that all of my petroleum references are for "upstream" work (i.e., drilling and production) not refining, etc. Still, I finished the sample and sent it off with my CV and a rate that will probably disqualify me (unless the quality of my work trumps price).

No such deed goes unpunished, because as I was putting together the outgoing email that put all of this together, I got a phone call to the effect that the document I'm working on has been revised, and would I please incorporate the revisions by tomorrow morning?

Fortunately, I think I can do that.

Cheers...

Weekend work!

The good news about that updated file (make that updated files, as there were two of 'em) is that the extent of the updates was fairly modest. Indeed, some of the updates corrected typos that I had already taken account of and corrected (with a corresponding comment) in my translation, requiring me to simply remove the comment!

What really took a lot of time was making sure I had caught all of any changes that may have occurred in a couple of hefty tables, since Word's idea of finding deltas in tables is fairly squirrely, ranging from some simply horrendous reformatting to the less sophisticated "mark the old table as deleted and the new table as inserted " technique. I estimate that, between all of the hullaballoo associated with slipstreaming the updates, I probably spent 4 billable hours.

Still, when it rains, it pours, so I'm on the hook for another 8,000 source word job (about half of which are in pretranslated segments), due Monday. So it looks like I'm going to have to be extra industrious if I want to get that done alongside a general cleanup of the house in preparation for Galina's return from Texas (presumably) late tomorrow.

Cheers...

A note from the other side of the world...

I sent an email to an acquaintance (a former tenant, actually), who recently returned to live in Japan and resides near the west coast of Honshu, about 350–400 km from the recent 9.0 quake, asking if I could help in any way. I generally refrain from sending such inquiries, because the flip side of showing such concern is making it just a little harder for the recipient—who may be in the thick of things and too busy to read your email—to get at other messages that may be of vital importance. Still, in this instance, I felt compelled...

I received the following response:

[We] are OK and so are my family and friends.

Yesterday's first quake hit mainly on the other side of Japan island, Pacific Ocean side. It was not strong here but lasted so long that I had motion sickness. When it finally stopped, I turned the TV on. Huge tsunamis were swallowing boats, houses, roads, cars and most likely lives. It was really REALLY scary. Now I understand tsunami is more dangerous than earthquake itself. Then this early morning, just after 4:00 am, there was a big quake in this area. It woke me up....then, well.....I was so sleepy and tired that decided to go back to sleep.

Cats (from the land that never quakes) felt it badly. They now do not eat and hide in/under the bed. My little pink house was OK. Nothing was broken. I filled the bath tub with water in case another quake hits and water stops. I have enough cat food. Enough rice for me but no ice cream.
:(

I really feel sorry for the people in the cities that were damaged badly. It is still cold there. They have no house, no foods, no water, no power. I wonder how animals doing. They also worry about the nuclear power plants.

Thank you so much for your email. I am safe.

There are a number of different reliable ways to help. Find one.

Cheers...