Sunday, December 31, 2017

My 2017

I haven’t written anything for many weeks. This is mostly because I’ve been rather overwhelmed by the volume of work I’ve had have to handle.

This past year, it’s been almost like “all work, nothing else.”

After science textbook translation work, I had a surprise phone call in early February from a client company that had been quiet for a few years. At this moment, this project of a new production line became my project too, and it’s still going on and expected to last at least a few more months.

In June, I had a meeting with a representative of a Japanese insurance company that was setting up its business in Singapore. And this project materialized in August with an agreement signed and, as I believe, I started working on the first file in the following month. For the first many weeks, I was dealing with Dr. Huebner, father of insurance education, and his works, mainly “Life Insurance” and “The Economics of Life Insurance.” I also encountered trouble about the 2000 speech by Csaba Sziklai, “The Power of Advocacy.” I eventually had to obtain the original speech CD, in which even the MC of the event couldn’t pronounce his name correctly. Huebner and Sziklai required me to do much research. About this project, I still have two files to finish.

And there were a few jobs to which I had to say “No” because of these commitments.

Overall, 2017 has been a year of work, allowing me to recover some money which I lost because of that idiot.

And this year made me realize how little people remember me as well as how little I remember them.

About books, the only new book I read was “The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam” by Chester L. Cooper. Others were those I had read once or many times before, like books authored by Kondo Koichi, Kaiko Takeshi, Fredrik Logevall (Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire) and David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest), all about the 1st/2nd Vietnam (Indochina) Wars.

Now my wish is to visit Saigon again (and Hanoi) late January or early February because it will be the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive.
 
Where are you, Lessie? I'm looking for you. Shame on you.