Where I Have Been

I know everyone is wondering what happened to me. Several of my friends have emailed and asked if I was still recuperating from my hike. Well, the truth is that my computer died. It just sort of sighed, made a weird whirring noise, and clicked itself off. FabGrandpa and I had to go to St. George, Utah, about 125 miles away, to the Best Buy store there, to get a new one.

We got pretty lucky on the price. For $459 plus tax I now have a brand new Sony Vaio laptop. It is pretty and new and shiny, but it has taken me a while to get used to using Windows Vista. I mean, it took me a couple of days to just figure out how to save a file with Vista. I am no dummy, but why does Bill Gates and Microsoft have to completely change how things work and look? I feel like it is an un-necessary aggravation to have to stop everything and learn how to use things all over again.

So, in the past couple of weeks since I hiked the Widforss Trail, we have been pretty busy: working, hiking, having fun, and I have not been able to tell you about any of it.

I will post tomorrow with some pictures of our hike on the Uncle Jim Trail. That one was only five miles, so I was not so worn out as I was on the other one. We also went to Nevada, and spent the night in Mesquite. I have some beautiful pictures of the trip over there, and IF I can find them, I will post some of them on here too.

I was able to coax the old computer to life long enough to save all my files to CD’s but there were sooooo many pictures that there are 10 CD’s of backed up files. I can’t find a thing. So, between learning how to use Vista, and the frustration of not being able to find things, and still having to load programs on the new computer, it is taking a little longer than I want to get back into the swing of things. Arrgghhh! Computers! I love to hate them!

Problem Solved

One of my favorite hobbies is collecting recipes and cookbooks. For most of my life, I have done this, and collected book after book. However, when Jim and I sold our house and all our stuff and moved into the travel trailer, the weight of books turned them into a heavy luxury I could no longer afford. With a GVWR of just 9,500 pounds, it became more important to have things like underwear, pots and pans, and a laptop than a couple of boxes of books. So, I picked out about 6 books with which I could not part, and sold the rest. My very most favorite cookbooks are:

A Taste Of Georgia

Eat Smart For A Healthy Heart

The FrugaI Gourmet

I started checking cookbooks out of the libraries in the towns we visited, and making copies of recipes I liked and thought I might someday try. But, then, I started accumulating this gigantic pile of paper. What to do?

I bought a scanner, and started scanning the recipes and saving them on my computer. But, the scanner only made a picture of the page. In other words, if I wanted to change the recipe in any way, I could of course print it out, write notes on it, and scan it in again. What a pain. And a jpeg file is huge—it takes up a lot of room on a hard drive. I had to have a better way. Especially now that I am eating a gluten free diet, I like to take the recipes I find, and use them as a starting point to change them around to make them gluten free.

The other day I was sitting there thinking about this problem and came up with a solution for it. I searched the internet for a freeware OCR program, and found one called TopOCR. I downloaded it, and installed it on my laptop. It is not that hard to use, and does exactly what I wanted it to do. It did take a little patience to figure out because the help files are not that informative, but it only took me about 30 minutes to get it installed and working.

I scanned my first OCR pages from a cookbook today and saved them in text format. Now, when I want to change them in any way, all I have to do is type the changes in the document. I wonder why I didn’t think of this a couple of years ago?

I am going to be experimenting with making gravy, using tapioca flour to begin with. I am really missing gravy now that it is cold outside. I hope to be able to post some gravy recipes soon. If anybody out there who is eating gluten free has any ideas about making gravy, I sure would like to hear about them.