Eyes opened...

I have no idea why this hadn't thrust itself in my face before, but in the three items I have left for the long-term job, I apparently overlooked the existence of nearly 10,000 words of footnotes! On the one hand, it's nice to have the "extra" work; on the other, it plays merry havoc with my planning.

I suppose the only reason this has never been an issue—why I've never made a point of making sure incoming word counts include footnotes—is because normally, footnotes represent a very small number of words. However, in one of the three documents I have left to do, footnotes account for about 1/3 of the payday!

Eyes opened. Lesson learned.

Pausing to catch my breath...

And it occurs to me that I've actually put together a pretty good haul for the day: 3,000 target words of the load that hit the inbox yesterday and another 2,300 source words of what I shall now call the Footnote Farm™ (previously "the long-term work").

In between, I've been reading Biting the Wax Tadpole (Confessions of a Language Fanatic), by Elizabeth Little. The title refers to the meaning of the characters, adopted by Chinese shopkeepers, that when spoken sound pretty much like "Coca Cola." I liked the book and thought it came to a close entirely too soon.

I am also addressing—between bouts of translation—a shortcoming to which I am slightly reluctant to admit: I am reading Tolkien's The Hobbit for the first time ever, and I've gotten about a quarter of the way into it. (The question arises in my mind, "Perhaps you tried to read it at one time, but the story simply didn't engage you and you never returned to it?" To which I answer, "Anything is possible. However, before The Lord of the Rings movies came out, I didn't know what a 'hobbit' was, the names 'Shire,' 'Gandalf,' 'Baggins,' and 'Took' meant nothing to me, and the things named 'Frodo' in my life consisted of (a) a snare drummer in my high school marching band—it was his nickname—and (b) a half dozen servers scattered around what preceded the Internet.")

What do I think of it so far? That's tough to say, especially in the context of having seen the LotR films. But the book has held my interest, thus far.

And while I risk having you, gentle reader, conclude that it is translation that comes "between" everything else, I must also report that I have been slowly configuring the Asus, with the most recent addition being Microsoft Office. Along the way, I learned that apparently, attempting to install Office on top of the Office software that came pre-installed on the machine was not a good idea (the software seemed to install, but upon rebooting, it had "disappeared").

Time to wind down before hitting the rack.

Cheers...