The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

I went to a "speed networking" event, which was like speed dating only for translation. It was in a very large room with bad acoustics, so it was very very loud. But it worked, in that in half an hour I met:

An Arabic>English court interpreter
A Portuguese & Spanish>English translator
A project manager to whom I have to send a resume
An English>Spanish literary translator
A Spanish & Italian>English financial translator
An English>Greek translator who has friends looking for French>English translations
A Spanish>English technical translator currently at Kent State
A Spanish>English court interpreter
An English>Japanese internationalizer
An English>Argentinian Spanish translator
A Spanish<>English translator
An English>Japanese financial translator

(Oh, and guess what, Christine Lavin fans? There really is a phone booth on the corner of 49th and 3rd.)

Remember the Scottish restaurant we played phone tag for twenty minutes trying to find?

I'm staying across the street from it.

My cold seems to have found a plateau level on which it's happy existing. I am not happy, because I don't want it to exist at all. I keep considering taking a sick day, but it feels weird to do that when I've already had the cold for a week and the worst (at least in terms of feeling truly sick) seems to be over. I'm constantly tired and I sound like a frog, but I've stopped feeling like a train hit me.

If you ever need a lot of money in a hurry, get into the hotel business in Manhattan. Ye gods. (Yes, I know it doesn't work like that, but $850 for three nights in a Comfort Inn? My credit card ought to have exploded by now, because next month's bill is going to have the ATA conference and the India tickets on it. At least I have the money for the tickets sitting in the India fund.)

I keep having to remind myself that it isn't actually October yet. It feels like it should be. I think part of it is the weather; if it's 60 out, it's October. Except it's not actually October until Thursday. It's gonna be a long October.

Apparently I'm physically incapable of being cheerful today.

When we last left our heroine, it was Tuesday, and she was making a list of Stuff To Get Done...

( Tuesday night )

( Wednesday )

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Panels I went to )

( NOLA in general )

I'm beginning to agree with the prevailing opinion in the office: why do all these people want to get promoted? Can't they just be happy as associate professors? (Because that ain't how it works, that's why.) I'm going to be really busy in October, November and (probably) March.

I don't know if the wind was just wrong last night, or what, but I just could not get the smell of secondhand smoke out of my living room. I wonder if I can reasonably request that people who want to smoke in the garden do it on the side of the building that doesn't have windows?

It occurs to me that if I'm going to the ATA meeting, I should get something put up on coffeeweasels.com so I can point people at it. Time to make myself a web-design hat to put on once in a while. (I don't have a web-design hat yet, because I haven't done it in years.)

Right. Time for some lunch, I think.

As it turned out, the cookie dough got put off by an hour and a quarter. It took me half an hour to get to the grocery store and back, and then I had to let the butter sit around for half an hour and soften up because I forgot to leave it sitting around when I left for the grocery store. Then it took fifteen minutes to get the cookie dough put together. It was indeed what I wanted, but don't ask me why, because I don't know.

I finally got done jumping through bureaucratic hoops to get proof of my degree for the ATA exam. It turns out that the registrar can't do it this week, but the College of Arts and Sciences can write me a "letter of completion", so I got them to do that.

I've got a whole big long list of rampant materialism I want to engage in when I've got a job again. Most of it is a long list of relatively small stuff, and some of it is a list of rewards I promised myself for various things, and some of it is peer pressure ("well, everybody else I know has one/does this/etc...."). But it's all stuff I haven't been able to do for two years without thinking about it and deciding not to, and I'd like to have income enough to get some of these things without worrying about them.

In aid of income, I believe I'll send out resumes after lunch. Anybody know anybody who wants to hire a French-to-English translator?

It scares me when things fall out of the sky and land in my lap, and I think something like that just happened. Now that I have time to remember to do it, I went and looked up the next round of ATA certification exams. I always had it in the back of my brain that I should take the exam sooner rather than later, in case I end up having to spend most of my working life not doing translation and therefore fall out of practice.

So I looked up the exam schedule on the ATA web site. They're holding one IN KENT, on June 25. I wasn't planning on leaving until June 30 anyway. This is bringing the mountain to Mohammed, to a severe degree. The timing couldn't be any better. Granted, this is not an easy exam to pass, and although it's possible to get hired without ATA certification, it would definitely help if I could pass the exam.

Looking at it one way, the universe has just confirmed that I spent the last two years doing what I was meant to be doing. I put in the work getting myself to this point, and now I get help, of a kind I might need, right when I need it.

So I went to the ATA conference in Toronto. General observations:

-I could live in Toronto. I don't like cities all that much, but I loved what I saw of Toronto.
-Standing up all day for three days in dress shoes I haven't worn in months is not a good way to make my feet happy.
-The ATSA conference was all about the presentations; the ATA conference was all about the people.
-I kept forgetting that $1 USD was $1.20 CAD.
-The Fox and Fiddle on John St. is a nice place for beer.
-The customs inspector on the way back into the US was slightly surprised when we handed him 13 passports from 5 countries.
-There is in fact such a thing as a French thesaurus, and I bought one.
-I also bought a $100 dictionary for $55 CAD.
-Having available internet connections in the exhibit hall was good. Unfortunately the e-mail I got was less so.
-Flamenco dancing has to be harder than it looks, but I wish I could do it.
-I got a fair bit of "Oh, you're a student? Oh. Well." when I was talking to people.
-OK, so I don't have any real translation experience. That doesn't mean I don't know anything about translating.
-There's a lot more market for accounting/financial/economic translation in any language than I thought there was.
-It rained. A lot.
-The PATH reminds me of the world's largest airport concourse for some reason. It did have a couple of good cafes, though.
-SDLX sounds like a better program than Trados. I'll have to try SDLX sometime soon.
-I drink entirely too much coffee at conferences, but it's free, so I drink it. I wonder how many pounds of coffee the conference went through?
-When in doubt, write it down. I know there are things I've forgotten because I didn't write them down at the time.

Now that I'm back in Kent again and more or less awake, I have to buy groceries. I hope it decides not to rain on me while I'm doing it. Today is the cold and grey variant of October.