1.267 coordinating, scanning

Here’s a funny thing. Part of finishing the Ford model was applying several teeny-tiny decals to represent the enamel badges on the hood, trunk, and rear posts. So I applied the little badge to the center of the trunk lid, and then I cut out and got ready to apply the tiny little script Fordomatic to the right side of the trunk lid, and suddenly noticed that the center badge decal was gone. Just gone. I looked all over for it and of course couldn’t find it. So I secured the Fordomatic and then on the decal sheet found a very similar badge decal and applied that to the center of the trunk lid.

About 10pm as I was shutting off the TV and getting ready to go to bed, something about my finger caught my eye. What the…

There, stuck to my left pinkie nail was the missing badge decal. So that’s where it went…

Monday 8/24/2020

So early in the morning I woke up obsessing about our somewhat frail volunteers fighting through those fire doors, so went down at breakfast and again at dinner to caution people. No problem, don’t worry, everybody said, even the 5-foot tall 80 year old. So I’m a fuss-budget. I’d have been a crap manager.

In the day I remembered that I have VueScan, a lovely piece of software that I’d often used for scanning photos, but which has the almost undocumented feature of doing automatic OCR to produce text and a searchable PDF from a scanned document. I put it to work scanning my father’s autobiography. I had two copies, and one copy’s binding had completely crumbled so it was no problem lifting the pages out one by one. And in fact I had the PDF of a 200-page book finished in under two hours.

After which, in the evening, it was not hard to finally resolve an annoying mystery that has been bugging me and my nephew and niece for a week: why I have two old scanned slide images of my father’s John Deere tractor, except when you look close, they are two different tractors. Turns out he sold the first tractor, the one we all remember, after we had all left home. Then he decided he still needed a tractor and bought for cheap another one from a retired neighbor. That info was in his biography and, thanks to modern technology, took only a little more time to resolve on the computer, than it would have taken to read the damn book.