It's been a productive day, on the whole.

We went to CAF this morning to see if we were eligible for government aid with our rent. It seems we certainly are, though they can't tell us how much and we can't have any of it till our cartes de sejour are ready. It makes one wonder how anything gets done in France; government bureaucracy is so slow and everything depends on something else that won't be done for months. We may not see a penny before March. It is good, however, to know that we will eventually get something, and to have our paperwork started, and a list of what else we need to finish it, and to know where the office is and what the hours are. Also, being recognized when you come back goes a long way.

I sent out three job applications today, though one is still waiting on unofficial transcripts. That's something of a problem, since UCI is hopelessly behind the times on transcripts: no online transcripts are available, nor can I request transcripts by email or phone. I have to request them by mail or in person, and if I request them by mail, for unofficial transcripts I have to send a stamped envelope to get them back or have them sent on to the HR office in question. Where to get the American postage to put on said envelope is a bit of a puzzle. For official transcripts, I have to send a check instead of a stamped envelope, which will soon get expensive compared to getting an unofficial transcript I can photocopy myself (which is, in most cases, all that's required until you get much farther along in the hiring process). Still, it's nice to have a start on the job thing.

I went by the museum yesterday, and am going to redo their translation. They were surprised to hear that it was poorly done--remember how Jonathan and I were convinced it was the project of babblefish rather than human hands? Turns out it was done by an English professor, or at least someone claiming to be a professor of English. It may have been farmed out to students as a homework assignment by an English professor, but no professor worth the name would write "otherthere" in their translation. Amazing. Anyway, it shouldn't take too long to redo that and get it in to the museum.

I just got off the phone about half an hour ago with the managing editor of worldmeets.us It sounds like a more and more interesting project, and one that can potentially get me a lot of editing/translating experience to claim. It also sounds like I should not have too hard of a time being valuable; it seems good translators with editing skills who are willing to work for free are in short supply. It's an intriguing idea; it's sort of a meta-presentation of news, as much focused on the perspectival presentation of news as the news itself. Of course all news is focused on presentation, not on objective fact, but most news sites try to obscure that as a threat to their credibility. This one embraces it and makes it its foundational claim to authority: it's the site that presents the news from the perspectives of different countries for Americans. There could be some literary journalism essays in the making, depending on what comes out of this.