Adventures in invoicing...

It turns out that, for these recent jobs, invoicing involves handling:

• output from the invoice manager, which is typically either a printed invoice or a one-page PDF of same.


• output from Word (for my expense report); same choices


• a scan of a signed timesheet; same choices


• one or more scans of receipts; same choices

It occurs to me, as I type this, that if I can find an inexpensive alternative to Acrobat, then I won't end up having to print out the stuff that's not on paper to begin with, scan everything, and then print the scanned items into one PDF file. That route is time-intensive, especially if you find you've omitted something along the way.

I feel about 200% better this morning. Last night's dinner and drive home really took it out of me, although I did get a number of compliments on my work at the dinner.

I'll need to be back out of the house in just under 7 hours, headed back into town for yet another dinner.

Cheers...

Another find...

My mom was conscious of "health food" back before such consciousness was cool.

There were times in her teaching career when she couldn't find permanent work, and was reduced to hanging out at home, waiting for a call to do substitute teaching. When at home, she'd fire up the AM radio and tune in WOR in New York, and on days I was home from school for some reason, I'd join her and we'd listen to Carleton Fredericks' program Living Should Be Fun. Fredericks was a doctor, but of the Ph.D. variety, not medical, but he put on what seemed to me at the time a pretty credible program on the benefits of unprocessed food and vitamin supplements. My mom, as usual, took copious notes.

One thing that was mentioned on the program came flooding back into my mind when I was throwing out the moth-infested boxes of food in my dad's pantry (something similar had happened to us in Webster, so I knew what to look for, and found it). Very nearly every open box that I opened further to examine had a few moths and some suspicious clumps of content enmeshed in what seemed to be spider silk, looking more like a poorly planned dust bunny than a coccoon of any kind.

However, when I peeled back the top of the box of graulated sugar, which my dad used for the occasional cup of coffee or tea, it was pristine. There was not a single moth in the box. The contents had not been disturbed.

This was something that had been described by Fredericks on his radio program, and served as a demonstration - said Fredericks at the time, in his very cultured, cultivated voice - that granulated sugar was so devoid of nutritional value, that no pest will bother with it.

Among the tapes that I found were a couple whose labels have "CF" written on them, in my mother's hand. I suspect they may be recordings of Fredericks' program; it will be interesting to listen to them, but not now.

I also took the liberty of taking a cookbook from the house, and in flipping through it a few days ago, I caught sight of several pages in the back covered with handwriting. Recipes, of course. Again, in my mother's hand.

Heck, I'm not at all sure I've ever committed anything I've cooked to paper as a recipe. It's just never occurred to me. Then again, I've always been a pretty much seat-of-the-pants kind of cook, constructing dishes out of basic components and basic operations. Plus, to be frank, I have no idea who in my immediate circle would be interested (or maybe I've just got the wrong attitude). Most of the recipes in the book seem rather straightforward, and I might just try one or two, out of curiosity, as none of them really evoke any memories of childhood.

Why? I guess because I don't ever recall my mother cooking anything according to a recipe, really, except perhaps for the once-in-a-blue-moon cake or dessert. At any rate, my dad was (and continues to be) a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy whose dietary habits are fairly predictable.

In fact, while typing this, I am reminded of the New York strip steaks my dad would broil on Friday nights (as in: every Friday night), and of accompanying my mother to the Sullivan Meat Market on the north side of 37th Avenue, near 81st Street, in the neighborhood where I grew up in Queens, to buy them, and pretty much all of the meat that our family consumed. My mom was a picky buyer, too.

The Sullivan Market was a traditional butcher shop, with sawdust on the floor, saws hanging on racks, and a walk-in reefer in the back, run by - who else? - the Sullivan brothers, Tom and Ed, and I despair of estimating how much real estate you'd need to harbor the virtual herd of cattle they handled in the course of their many years of work. The last time I visited the store was in 1979, and if memory serves, by that time only one brother was running the business, and he was looking pretty old. Some years later, as I passed by the location, the market was gone, as were virtually all of the stores our family used to patronize when I was a kid.

Daylight is burning. I need to focus on the here and now... there are just over six hours before I leave for the next job.

Cheers...

What were you doing 25 years ago?

Assuming you are old enough to have been alive 25 years ago today, whatever it was you were doing, it was because Stanislav Petrov did nothing.

Cheers...