The moose that saved the Christmas cards

Last week wound up being surprisingly busy, which is wonderful for me, as the roller coaster of the past few weeks has involved
1. determination
2. reading through the want-ads and not finding anything appropriate
3. depression
4. renewed determination
5. reading the "How to Apply for a Job" books
6. depression
7. renewed determination
8. advice from all fronts in direct contradiction of advice from books and in some cases my own good sense
9. depression
all in all not leading to much progress whatso ever

I am editing the dissertation of a friend who is writing in English and that has put a lot on my plate. There are sections of it which are related to my field of interest, so the editing bears no resemblence to the process of correcting a materials sciences dissertation- I did that two years ago. There, all you can do is pleaed for a reduction in the number of times "thus" is used and make sure that the subjects and verbs agree and that tenses are uniform.

We were supposed to meet again this morning, and for that reason, I was up until 3:30 in the morning trying to work through more of her text. It should never have gotten that late, but our visit to my in-laws, a painful thing these days, dragged out much later than I had hoped and my anticipated brief call to my parents turned into a major production.

#1 daughter to the rescue. (If there is one thing I can do, it is beating files into submission. Maybe that should be on my resume. One learns doing groundwater modeling or GIS work, that data is a many-formated thing. And then there is Germany with ,'s for .'s Very bad things happen to comma delimited text files. )

In this case, it was getting my parents' Christmas card address list from MS Works database format onto another computer and into Excel. Not difficult, you say, and I agree, but talk a 76 year-old through the process some time soon and you will know that it is not an affair of two minutes. (Granted, this is a 76 year-old who addresses his Christmas cards using a mail merge and has for years, but still, I cannot get him to leave unused windows open on the desktop.) This never would have happened if evil Dell had properly installed the software that my parents paid for! Word 2002 is part of the Works 2004 Suite, but Dell installs a demo version of Office XP and didn't install the registerd version of Word 2002. The demo version of Word can only be opened 50x, which leaves them completely without word processing software. We don't know what installing a second version of Word on the computer would do and it's not the thing you clear up a week before Christmas as you are fighting to get you Christmas cards out.