Near-real-time help...

After having finished two shorter documents on a certain aspect of property ownership in the old USSR, I pressed on to get some kind of mileage behind me in translating a third, larger document for the same client due early next week.

I see, by what is displayed on my screen, that my most recent lookup—about ten minutes ago—was право пользования, which I performed to make sure there wasn't anything better than "right of usage." I saw "right of enjoyment" but in the end, decided against its use.

So there I am, minding my own business, when about five minutes later, I felt an urge to pronounce the word "usufruct," just to hear it echo around the room. So I did, startling the cat that was yawning on the chair next to my desk.

I knew it was a fair-dinkum word, but had absolutely no idea what it meant.

A few keystrokes later, I found out:

u·su·fruct

Noun:

The right to enjoy the use and advantages of another's property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.

Hmmm. A word related to the usage of property. How about that?

Okay, so it's not as if my subconscious just spit out the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (the answer to which, as we all know, is 42), but coming up with "usufruct" when I'm fresh from thinking about "enjoying the use of property" is not exactly a case of "Maggie's drawers¹," either.

And I'm pretty impressed—I think—by just how forcefully the word came into my consciousness, too.

Now if my subconscious would only correctly pick the next Powerball numbers, that'd really be impressive!

Cheers...

¹A red flag waved from the rifle pits to indicate a complete miss of the target during Marine Corps rifle qualification.

Odds and ends...

While walking Shiloh in the big empty lot across the street the other day, I ran across some kind of rather shallow animal burrow (6-inch wide opening, about 10 inches deep). The sun was in just the right position to let me see some round, white objects at the bottom of the burrow.

Taking a closer look, it turned out they were golf balls, which was really strange, because while there is a golf course in the area, the closest fairway is about 200 yards away.

I came back a day or two later with a stick, that I planned to use gently to make sure I would not be sticking my hand into an occupied burrow when I tried to retrieve the balls. Shiloh preempted my intentions by boldly sticking her snout into the hole before I could bring my stick to bear.

The golf balls were half-embedded in the dirt at the bottom of the burrow, but otherwise in excellent condition. A veritable mystery.

Another mystery—why I have not been getting any client checks—would appear to have been solved. Apparently, whoever canceled the forwarding order for my personal mail failed to also cancel the forwarding order for my business mail, and so my checks have been going to New York these past six weeks. Grrrr.

The upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 on my Dell laptop continues apace.

Cheers...