Not exactly insomnia...

I timed my television-watching just right, happening upon the last out of the seventh game of the World Series just a pitch before the last Dodger batter grounded out. And so the Astros are, for the first time in the franchise's history, The Champs.

The occasion was marked by an individual who felt compelled to drive through our neighborhood with car horn blaring mere minutes after the end of the game. I admire their resolve. Me, I was in the mood to fall asleep, but couldn't.

So here it is, a quarter after one in the morning and while I don't feel all that tired, I'm tired enough to shut down for the night. I spent some time getting to within 5 index cards of my first pass through the episodes of my memoir, in preparation for arranging them into some sort of comprehensible order. Along the way, I ran across some other posts that I should probably consider for the book.

Rack drill, here I come...

Wildcards are still my friends...

Further to a post of mine from August 2012...

Let's say you have an abbreviation (could be a TLA or it could be something else). There is no apparent expansion of the abbreviation in the document. That said, there's nothing to prevent said expansion from appearing somewhere in the text.

For each letter of the abbreviation, use the following template in Word (with wildcards enabled):

<[xX][а-я]*>

where "< denotes "start of word," "xX" denotes a starting letter, for example, "аА" (both letters so as to catch words that start with either lower- or upper-case letters—this is an improvement over the technique from 2012), the "*" at the end denotes "zero or more of the previous character" (another improvement, which will catch single-letter words, though admittedly their appearance in abbreviations is rare), and ">" denotes "end of word."

So, for example, if you are looking to see if the abbreviation ПКЛ appears, you'd search for:

<[<пП>][а-я]*> <[<кК>][а-я]*> <[<лЛ][а-я]*>

As it turns out, ПКЛ appears in a document I am working on (more precisely, in the title of the Russian source file). Using this method, I've determined no three consecutive words start with these three respective letters.

Back to the face!

Cheers...

Back to sort-of normal...

The second and third assignments of the month came in today, which gave me an opportunity to get come work under my belt before I had to take a nap again.

Drat.

I've required more and more time to recover from chemo after each successive session. It's been two weeks and I'm far from chipper, which suggests that the medicine is doing a pretty adequate job of poisoning me, while keeping the cancer merely in check.

As it turned out, I had another sleep session that lasted until shortly after noon.

As I pick my way semi-randomly through my LJ, I keep finding patches of text that—for the moment, at least—sound like they'd fit into my memoir. That said, I get the feeling I am only creating more work for myself.

Ideally, I'd like a good first edition to be completed by mid-December (around my birthday).

Another wave of deliveries—four or five items, if memory serves—is gathering steam to hit the mailbox, but perhaps the item I am anticipating the most is a "Hippo Noto" notebook that, according to the USPS, should be delivered tomorrow. The notebook contains 500 pages of Tomoe paper from Japan (also known as "Tomoe River" paper, if I'm not mistaken), and my experience with such paper in notebooks created for the Traveler's Notebook has been nothing but awesome. The paper is really thin, but also super tolerant of fountain pen ink (it does not bleed).

Cheers...