One heck of a night...

I'm pretty sure I fell asleep when I went to bed, but for the past... I don't know how long... I have not been able to sleep. And my eyes feel strained, as if I have been staring at a computer screen all the time I was sleeping. Which in a way, I was.

I was working in my sleep. I couldn't tell you what I was translating, but even after trying to consciously clear my mind and think of something pleasant and relaxing, the analytical part of my mind would barge in and start working again.

This is not quite the same "nightmare" that I experience from time to time when I am otherwise sick. In those dreams, I am stuck translating the same piece of text and have the same sense of progress one might have when attempting to shovel sand with a large-mesh sieve.

Enough complaining. Maybe if I finish off the 40K Job and send it off, I can go to sleep.

Cheers...

Galina's okay, but..

Galina called. She's okay, but without power and not much power left in her cell phone.

According to our initial plan, Galina is to catch a flight out of LaGuardia tomorrow, but I placed a call to the limousine service, and got their answering machine. At least they have power. Hopefully, their office will open for business today. If not, then we're going to have to scramble for wheels, as the Oyster Bay line of the Long Island Rail Road is not operating today, to allow the railroad assesses damage and performs repairs. The web site gives no indication as to whether they will be running trains on that line tomorrow.

That all but takes care of "Plan B" for getting Galina to the airport.

Gotta keep trying, though.

Cheers...

Never underestimate what can be "done" in Word...

You would think, after doing this for over three decades, that I have pretty much seen every sort of idiocy committed using Microsoft Word.

And you'd be wrong.

A job came in to make the English version of a document, look like the marked-up Russian translation of that document that had recently been returned by the Russian commenters. There was actually not all that much translation, but a super-tanker load of things to highlight in one of four different colors, perhaps with strikeout applied, or underlining.

Things went fairly smoothly until I began to run into honest-to-Cthulhu revisions (in the sense of having been done with "Track Changes" enabled).

The first problem was that the stuff that was shown as having been added to the Russian document already existed in the English document. That's barely explainable.

The second problem was that some of the stuff that had been added then had the strikeout text attribute applied, which made the text look like a deletion. (I found this out by experimenting with the "Accept Change" button; clicking it after one of these strange constructs had been highlighted by hitting "Next" did not cause the text to disappear—it just changed color to black, the underscore went away, and the text remained with the strikeout line through it.)

But the job is done and out the door. More work has come in, some of which I had to send back.

I've been going at this for far too long, today. I need to take a rest.

Cheers...