The Weekly Wrap-Up: August 21-25, 2017

Technically, I suppose, this also covers last week as well. I wasn't in on Friday, so I didn't write a blog post. I took the day to do some work at home. It was a good day. The rest of the week was mostly spent on French and more doctor visits and lots of meetings. Oh, and I went to the State Fair on Tuesday. That was fun.

But we're back to business this week. Monday was pretty much entirely meetings from 8:30 to 4:00. (It was very difficult to get steps in that day.) I finished up French then and worked on Outreach proofs. It's always a nice change of pace.

I also did a little impromptu work on the fellowship hall. We're redoing it (and when I say we, I really mean other people with me offering an unsolicited opinion), so on my way through, I occasionally pick up a scraper or something. I'm sure it's not at all annoying for our dedicated crew of professionals. Of course, this also means no chapel for a few weeks. It's weird, I'm so used to being there Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00. Also, I hadn't realized that chapels seem to be the only time I see certain people.

My latest project is Hakha Chin. I've worked on it before, but we had to change the font, so we're going back over everything to make sure it's copacetic. Which it's not. There's a glyph missing, and it's pretty prominent, so I'm muddling through as best I can while I wait for the head of production to tell me how to fix it. Although I did just add four pages to a 52-page document, so we'll see how well that goes.

Aaaaand, that's about it. Time to hit the reset button and get rested up so I can do it all again next week. 

The Weekly Wrap-Up: August 7-11, 2017

First, a conversation with myself.

Jessica: Hey, how's it going?

Also Jessica: Great! I don't have cancer!

J: Oh. That is good. Was that a possibility?

AJ: Yes. There was a 30% chance that I had cancer.

J: I didn't know that.

AJ: Not many people did. I wasn't telling a lot of people because I didn't really know anything yet. But I think most folks knew something was happening.

J: Yeah, you've mentioned some health issues. And you had surgery, right?

AJ: Yes, back in July. The surgery cleared up some of the issues, but it also highlighted some other problems, like the possibility of cancer.

J: So are you healthy now?

AJ: Not entirely. But I'm on my way to being healthy, so that's good.

J: How can people help you now? 

AJ: Prayer is always greatly appreciated. Pray for my health to improve, for the tests to keep coming back with good news, and for the work to still get done. Also, pray for my finances, or contribute if you're able. All of these tests and the surgery have really wiped out my savings and bitten a huge chunk out of my credit card. (Ironically, if it had been cancer, everything would have been paid for by Aflac. But, you know, cancer vs. money... I know which I'd choose.)

J: Anything else?

AJ: No, I think we're done now. On with the regularly scheduled programming!



So, yeah, crazy week. I finished up my Hindi files Monday and sent them off into the ether. It's always satisfying to finish a project because it means we're making progress, and it's not always easy to tell that progress is being made. Don't think that the only languages we're working on are the ones I mention here, though. There's another gal doing what I do in Chile. She's working on some different languages, like Odia and Chinese. It's easy to keep just a few in our repertoire at a time so we don't get super confused.

This was T&M training week. I guess about 40 people were hanging out at the local church where we do training. This was the first time we've tried to do everything on the app, which had some positives and negatives. It's nice to get feedback on it since we've spent literal years building it. I hung out with the training folks for a few hours over the course of things, and I took the group photo on Thursday. It's nice to see so many different backgrounds and ministries coming together to learn more about T&M. It's a great window into how what I do is utilized around the world.

Finally, my latest large project is French group 2, which I'm actually taking through about four stages. It's a lengthy process, made even more so when I run into situations like this:

It's a little small, I know, but let me show you what it's supposed to look like (except in French): 

Neat, clean, one line of text, right in a row. 

So what happened with the first picture up there?

Our translator, instead of putting one part of the verse in each line, put the whole chunk of verses in each line. So where a phrase should go is an entire paragraph. 

I don't speak French. I could maybe puzzle out a few words based on my limited Spanish. But I somehow have to figure out where each part of that phrase should start and stop. 

I'll get fixed in proofing, yes. But somehow, I need to make sure all of the text is readable and ready to proof. 

This is just one issue I ran into. It's the most severe, which is why I used it for my example, but it is by no means the only problem. 

Word to the wise: when building template files in English that will then be translated into another language, leave plenty of white space. I don't care if it looks weird. Your graphic designers will thank you later. 

I still owe you a conference post.

The Weekly Wrap-Up: July 31 - August 4, 2017

We are famous for our acronyms here at OMS. We have ECC, MFM, and DWIM. SEMBEC, MECS, and CAM. You name it, we've probably named it better in a such a way as to spell out some pleasingly tripping little phrase or set of letters.

Such is the case with IAL.

Oh, you've not heard of IAL? It seems to be something exclusive to OMS, at least in this form.

What does it stand for? I'll tell you in a minute.

First, let's get the week out of the way.

I started out in French, of course, finishing up some proof files. I haven't worked much on French. I like the language, very lyrical, but I'm horrible at pronouncing the words. They always seem to come out with a Spanish accent, since I took Spanish in high school and college. I regret doing that somewhat. I think French would have served me better for studying history, as many historical documents were written in French during the medieval period. Latin, of course, is useful for most earlier things, and I guess if you're looking at church records. But when the church and state began to separate, French became the lingua franca. <---- obviously.="" p="">
As soon as I finished French, and I do mean almost exactly as I was uploading files, I was asked to secure some Korean files. We had a bunch of old files that had watermarks on them for various reasons. We fixed most of them way back when, but for some reason Korean got left out of the mix. And we need Korean because we have at least three Koreans attending T&M training next week. Since most of the training is going to be in English, it would be nice to have some clean files that they can actually read.

Securing files is pretty easy. It has to be done because we don't want people making changes to them or copying or formatting for their own (possibly nefarious but probably not) purposes. However, we still need them to print, so we run some fancy batch processes in Adobe and give it all a fun password so we can de-securify them in the future if needed.

We had a really great prayer rally this week. It was far outside our normal activities. Normally we sit around tables and sing and pray and listen to sermons and speakers and what not. It isn't bad, it's just a little tedious to do the same thing month in and month out. But this week, we did some prayer walking around the city of Greenwood. Some people went to the mayor's office, police stations, fire houses, hospitals, neighborhoods, local businesses, and elsewhere. Then we came back and heard testimonies from everyone's experiences. There were some real God appointments with people, which is very cool. I actually stayed in the building, though. Kathy and I went around to each office, work station, and public area and prayed over the people who inhabit them, the future inhabitants, and the future decisions and actions that will come from each space. Because we are pretty much up in everyone else's business (but in a good way), we had some specific things to pray about for each person. I hope they really felt God's presence in their area when they returned.

After finishing French and Korean, I turned my attention back to Hindi. New group, same job, making sure proof corrections are in and cooperating with the surrounding text. I'm not sure if it's easier to work with a language I sort of understand or one in which I have no idea what is being said. The temptation is to try to fix translations, which is a bad idea as the only language I speak with moderate fluency is English. (Although I did use the word 'cessation' today and was asked to please speak in English next time.) However, with character languages, I don't know any of the rules, and what I think is helpful may actually turn a phrase into something very rude.

Oh well.

I had another doctor's appointment yesterday. It took longer than expected, and not in a good way. I'd appreciate prayer over that whole mess.

I satisfied the creative part of my brain this morning, as Mike told me, by prepping some stuff for training next week. They needed posters for the 12 principles of church multiplication. I'm not sure what Mike meant by that, actually, because I literally spend all of my time creating booklets.

Whatever.

I'm not sure if they'll ask me again.

I thought it was creative.

Finally, we come to IAL. I first encountered IAL my first or second week at OMS. They had a training event right after CROSS training, and as my boss was recovering from a medical issue around the same time, I think they figured I might as well learn something else until she could give me work to do. What is it?

Interactive Adult Learning.

Basically, how do we make learning fun by focusing on the learner and not on the teacher. I'm still not totally convinced it works for everything, but it can be a very useful exercise, and it does break up the monotony of listening to a lecture eight hours a day. They needed guinea pigs this afternoon to listen to practice presentations, so I volunteered my services. It was a fun experience, and I'm always glad to get out of my office for a bit.

And that's the week. Be good, everyone.