Surprised by bacon

So I had planned to go to the library this morning, to try to get something done. But Karen's unexpectedly working from home, yippee; and the water people are expectedly digging up the street outside our house, boo; which means that it is impossible for the car to leave the driveway, so lunch needs to happen here. A salad can occur - but there is no bacon. A salad without bacon? Unthinkable!

So. I have lit the charcoal, taken the slabs of cured pork out of the meat-fridge and set them to smoke for an hour or so. I am still a n00b at this, but oh: it is such fun. Even at this rough-and-ready level. (I have promised myself a proper smoker, at some point in the future; for now, the grill is good enough. Actually, that's the story of my life: promises for the future, making do for now. It's probably the story of most people's lives, I expect. Certainly it's the life of most stories.)

Scanners live in Sunnyvale

Oh, the fun we have...

This morning, as noted, I made bacon and fed m'wife and so forth; also, poked some at the scanned-and-OCR'd copy of THE GARDEN that Lethe Press will be reissuing when I get it cleaned up and back to them. This is my first conscious experience of OCR; it's fun trying to fathom out why on earth it makes the mistakes it does, but I'm getting a little tired of the same old same old, especially when there's half a dozen of them on every page. I'm actually quite reassured by the quality of the text itself - given that I was, lawks, thirty when I wrote it, and I'm older than that now - but oh, it is a bleak and gloomy book. Also, I know what is coming. So I can only steel myself to do a bit at a time, what with one thing and another.

This afternoon I zoomed off to the library and wrote a thousand words of newstuff, which is much more fun.

And then I came home and figured something out, which is that I'm dim, essentially. We've borrowed Katherine's scanner, and I thought it wasn't working because it didn't light up or buzz or do anything, nor did any bright new icon appear on my desktop. Hah! Why would it? It was waiting for me to ask it to, y'know, scan something. When I eventually understood, it went zoom! and there it was, scanning merrily away.

So I downloaded an OCR program and lo: we can has words. Early stories are recoverable, in-house. I wouldn't want to tackle a whole book without refined technique and probably other equipment, but for short stuff I could muddle through as I am, just on instinct.