I discovered these in 12-packs last year in the beer section at Walmart, and now they’re selling them loose near the door. They are actually quite good. They taste like real lime because they’re naturally flavored. The alcohol is malt rather than tequila, but the drink still tastes like a margarita to me. They have 8% alcohol in an 8-oz can, roughly equivalent to the 4-5% alcohol in a 12-oz beer.

The Straw-ber-Rita and Cran-brrr-Rita are tolerable but unremarkable. They taste somewhat like the fruit juice they’re supposed to contain.

The Mang-o-Rita, however, appears to be made with toxic waste from a chemical factory. It’s artificially flavored and has nothing in common with mango except a vaguely yellow color. In addition, it is artificially sweetened, unlike the others. I took one sip. Well, two, actually, because I couldn’t believe anything could be as bad as that first sip tasted. Then I poured it down the drain. I’m going to write the Budweiser people and complain. Who are their taste-testers?

I haven’t tried the Raz-ber-Rita, and I probably never will.

If I could be a musician, I’d be Mark Knopfler. Seriously. This piece gives me goosebumps. I think it’s because it shows he’s a truly great musician and not just a great entertainer. Also, he’s one of the few rock guitarists who does finger-picking.

http://youtu.be/p0rlZVrf9R4

Every now and then, I get an assignment of a very high level: interpreting for a public figure or agency leader, translating an important document, interpreting for a multinational fact-finding group. It’s a challenging and exhilarating change from the day-to-day grind.

I was at an event in El Salvador or Colombia a couple of years ago, and saw a familiar booklet lying on a table. When I picked it up, it struck me: I translated that! It had been assigned to the worst translator in my office in about 2006, and I was the one who had to clean it up after she was done. (Anything we produce that will be published, released to the public, or used in court is always edited by a second linguist.) I leafed through it, impressed with how nice it looked and wincing at one or two of the word choices I had made. The booklet is used all over Latin America now.

The document I’m finishing today is a cooperation agreement between agencies in two countries. Fortunately, it’s not written in heavy legalese, but it has been very challenging nonetheless. After it gets reviewed by another translator, it will be ceremoniously signed by representatives of both agencies involved. There will no doubt be some mention in the media overseas.

My name isn’t on the booklet anywhere, nor will it be linked with the international agreement. Translators are usually invisible, unless you happen to interpret for a press conference or get chosen to work the last round of the Miss Universe pageant.

Every time I take on a tough assignment, I’m more aware of the gaps in my language knowledge. I’m more literate and educated than the average American, but there’s a lot I don’t know about finance, business, law, science, engineering, law enforcement, theology, politics, and so forth. If my ability to talk about these things in English is limited, it’s even more so in Spanish!

When you’re doing simultaneous interpretation, you have to come up with the words in the second language immediately. Some of my colleagues will stop and think, trying to recall the right term, and then they miss the next sentence altogether. I’ve discovered, though, that if I understand a concept, I’m good at improvising an explanation and moving on. One time, for instance, the term “plea bargain” came up. I didn’t know the standard Spanish term for it (turns out there isn’t one), so I said, “plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence” and went on. It wasn’t a perfect translation, but it was adequate.

It struck me that I have spent my whole life doing that: improvising or paraphrasing my way around the holes in my vocabulary in one or the other language. My vocabulary has grown tremendously in the last four years; dating and marrying a very articulate Colombian is helpful that way! My Spanish writing and speech are becoming more polished and of a higher register. But invariably, there will be moments when I have to scratch around for vocabulary, and end up improvising.

Monday afternoon there was a magnificent Florida downpour. This is my back yard. In the distance you can see my shop. The bare ground in the foreground is an ancient brick patio. Other non-grass areas have recently been reclaimed from the encroaching jungle. The creek alongside the garage is a brick walkway, which has sunk over the years.

http://youtu.be/8FIiTemINTY

I spent the weekend grouting the new tiles in the kitchen. The downstairs floor is finally done! Since Alicia left, I tiled the bathroom, breakfast room, kitchen, and laundry room. It involved moving appliances around, which made it even more of a hassle than usual. But it’s done! I’ve repainted the baseboards. Last night I nailed them back up.

Alicia is due back Friday night. I have an enormous amount of cleaning to do by then.

Sorry I haven’t been on all that much. WordPress is blocked at one of my work locations, and when I’m home I don’t have much time to get on because of all the work on the house.

I’m reading a British mystery novel, and the detectives keep eating beans on toast. I had never heard of it before. Apparently it’s a common thing there, like donuts for American cops. Sounds disgusting.

Other literary sources (Terry Pratchett) indicate that vindaloo (hot curry) is a favored meal for cops on the night shift. I don’t think I’ve had curry in decades. I read somewhere that it’s the most popular food in England.

In older British detective stories (most notably by Dorothy Sayers), the restaurants of choice are French, perhaps because Lord Peter is a man of means. When actual British food is described, it sounds heavy and mildly disgusting: steak and kidney pie, sausages and mash, fish and chips, kippers, black pudding, Cornish pasties, spotted dick…

There’s an old joke that says that heaven is where the project is directed by Germans, the labor is supplied by Brits, the Italians provide the entertainment, and the French provide the food. In hell, the Italians direct the project, the French provide the labor, the Brits supply the food, and the Germans are the entertainers.

My dad’s parents were German immigrants. Dad used to buy sauerkraut from time to time. I hated the stuff. I always thought it was made with vinegar, but in a Guideposts article by someone raised in Alsace-Lorraine (the German-speaking part of France), the writer describes vast vats of cabbage fermenting with salt. Later I read about kimchi being buried in the ground to ferment. A friend told me that the Vietnamese make something similar from mustard greens. It turns out that fermenting late crops is a simple way to store them as a winter source of vegetables.

I taught ESL at a language school in Dallas for a year. More than half the students were Korean. Whenever I walked into the classroom, there was always a pungent aroma, something like spicy garlic. At a wonderful restaurant in Koreatown, I discovered its source: we were served a dozen varieties of kimchi, many flavors and degrees of hotness. It made its presence known long after the meal was over.

Seven years later, I briefly dated one of my former students. She didn’t like kimchi herself, but she made me a couple of varieties. I kept them in my fridge and nibbled at them over the course of a couple of months. The kimchi lasted longer than the relationship did. (She was an illegal alien and I wasn’t in a position to deal with that.)

Do you have any idea how hamburgers and hot dogs come across to people from other cultures? When you think of them objectively, hot dogs are quite disgusting (ground up meat by-products stuffed into a sausage skin). Hamburgers are greasy and bland, not tasty like the grass-fed beef of other countries. French fries… bleah. Ketchup… yuck.

Maybe that’s why Subway is my default. My wife, on the other hand, is addicted to spicy wings from the Publix deli.

My dad grew up in the Depression and World War II. He joined the army when he turned 18, just after the war ended, and served as a photographer. He never talked much about his years in the service; I don’t think it meant much to him.

He once told me about a time he was part of a group taken to drive back a convoy of vehicles, and how he ran to get one of the big trucks, only to have the sergeant pull him in favor of someone with more truck-driving experience. Dad had to drive a smaller vehicle instead. That’s the only story I remember him telling about his military service activities. He never talked about what life as an army photographer involved.

One story I did hear several times (and have in writing) is of Dad going AWOL one weekend, hitch-hiking home and having life-changing conversations with his sister and with a kind driver who gave him a ride. Those conversations and a Gideon Bible led to him committing his life to Christ and becoming a missionary.

The GI Bill paid his way through college, where he studied for the ministry and also met my mom. For that, he was grateful.

At Dad’s funeral in 2010, someone from the Army was there to present his widow with a flag. It turned out that he could have been buried in a military cemetery. I don’t think he would have been interested. He had purchased a plot in Wheaton, IL in 2000 when Mom died, and he wanted to be buried beside her.

Dad rarely identified himself as a veteran, and he didn’t have the manner and attitudes of many of my friends who are ex-military. He never used the VA medical system. He had no old Army buddies. His attitude toward authority (which I inherited) was not at all military. He was patriotic, but not blindly so; he disagreed with many US government policies and decisions. As a missionary, he considered himself an emissary of God, not of the USA.

When I was in high school, I toyed briefly with the idea of joining the navy. Dad said he didn’t think I would enjoy it. Upon reflection, I realized that he was right. I wasn’t the type to be under a rigid, authoritarian system, and I didn’t identify enough with my passport country to be willing to serve it blindly.

I have a lot of friends who are veterans. Sometimes I think they gained things from the experience that I lacked for much of my life. Maybe I would have had a clearer sense of what it means to be an adult, a man, if I had served. I wasn’t comfortable with authority (neither being under it nor exercising it) until I was in my mid-40s. I might have felt less marginal to American culture if I had spent my first four years of adulthood in the armed forces instead of a state university. And it would have been nice to enter adulthood trained in something practical like electronics.

But I’m pretty sure I would have been miserable a good part of the time.