Booty

What a frazzling day. The man came to clear the gutters before I had prised myself out of bed, and then discovered that parts of the roof are riddled with termites. It doesn’t surprise me, but we could have done without that news just now – particularly having recently replaced the whole roof of our house in the hills. Plus the floor tiles need replacing…… two of the gutters leak…..
 
Then the author of the dissertation I translated sent an extremely rude email, disagreeing with some of the words I used and accusing me of not reviewing my work carefully. I’ve never, in all these years, received criticism like that – and would normally expect feedback from a client, if they have any queries, not a diatribe. Of course the client is always right, and of course she has every right to take issue with terms she doesn’t agree with, and point out errors (and there was one short sentence in the footnotes that I hadn’t translated – not sure how it didn’t show up in the spell check) – but what a way to do it! I then spent the best part of two hours writing a polite reply, going through her points one by one, suggesting alternatives and/or explaining why I had done something, but also giving her lists of synonyms for the two words she mentioned (yes, TWO words – one was ‘consider’, which I had translated in one instance as ‘believe’; believe being one of the synonyms for consider).  Ah well… and she’s a friend of a friend. She ain’t never gonna be a friend of mine.
 
There were other b---------n factors, but one good thing was that I picked up the pictures above from the framers. The recently restored photo of our girls, some little tiles that have been knocking about the house for years, one of my photos, in a frame I found in the attic, and the poster for Blood Brothers, the first play put on by the “New Players” (the original Players having petered out some years ago) – I was in the last Players play, Black Comedy, as Miss Furnival, a part I really enjoyed, and in Blood Brothers, as the poor mother – and that was a great experience too). It’s now about 5 years since the New Players anything on, time we got things going again, though it’s hard to compete with cable and satellite TV, the fact that most foreigners now live much further out, and the zero tolerance drinking and driving laws (The Players had a wonderful bar in the basement)!
 
And now it’s high time I got HH and myself something to eat.