It Had To Happen Sometime

It’s my first power outage at the hotel… Considering the major lack of capacity to meet the energy and water needs of the city, I’m actually quite surprised that this hasn’t come up before – I wonder how long it will last? Hmm…in any case, these things happen. It’s funny how you become accustomed to expecting things like clean water when you turn the tap and electricity when you flip the switch. After spending enough time in countries where those things aren’t a given, it’s amazing to think of how prevalent they are at home.

S is here, as I mentioned, and it’s really nice to have someone to talk to – it’s also nice to have another woman here who’s my age, or somewhere thereabouts. She’s very bright and very personable. We’re actually going to have “movie night” tonight – which means that we’ll hang out in my room, watch a DVD on my computer and drink some Cup-A-Soup. It’ll be good. (That’s the closest we’ll come to a night out…)

In addition to the tons of work that I have to do for this project, I also received a report to edit from Vietnam, as predicted. It’s late because they took three months to translate it, and they then told me to complete the editing as quickly as possible because it was already so late. Sure…because I don’t have anything else to do. Like write a master plan in under three weeks. I’m currently *still* editing an absolutely atrociously translated document that was translated from Chinese into English. Allegedly. I don’t think there’s a single sentence that I haven’t had to tinker with in some way. Odd thing, though – I’ve noticed this is true of Chinese-to-English and Vietnamese-to-English translations, things that should be singular are pluralized, and things that should be plural are singular, without fail. So even if a sentence is otherwise comprehensible, I always have to go fix that kind of stuff. They’re also not big on articles – I’ve had to insert the words “the” and “a” more times than I can count. “Etc.” is also tremendously popular, and sneaks its way into sentences and lists of all kinds, whether or not it should be there. Let me tell you, it makes for a LONG editing process. Especially when you come across the words “scientificalness” and “recommendatory”, among other gems.

Right.

I need to stop telling people I’m a good editor.