When we went to pick up our final two koi, Ari and Maddy, we found another tree.  A serious must-have tree. It’s a contorted weeping pussy willow. I’ve always loved pussy willows, and this just begged to come home. The problem? how to fit  a tree taller than I am, with a snake-shaped trunk into a Subaru Forester.

Carolyn suggested we could stick the top up through the moonroof. This made a certain sense, but when it came to it, I suggested we lower it through the moonroof and let it ride in the passenger’s seat. You need to look close to truly appreciate the effect, because Willow kind of disappears against the background tree, but you can imagine the heads that turned as we drove down the street!

One bus driver actually opened his window for a better view. I think we should count ourselves fortunate that we didn’t cause any accidents. (that we know of)

The third problem of the day was getting it out of the car. We got one of our handy dandy fish-moving buckets, I climbed into the back seat and leaned across to lift the tree up onto the bucket. Then, I climbed across into the front seat (thank goodness for that moonroof!) and lifted it up to the rack on top. Meantime, Carolyn was perched on a stepladder outside the car. Together, we moved the tree across to the paint tray on the ladder. From there, with the two of us, it was an easy heft into the wheelbarrow.

We’re going to put it on the end of the garage. I honestly don’t know if the leaves turn a pretty color in fall or not, but it will be covered with poofy “kittens” in spring and be a fall of green during the summer. We’re hoping we’ll be able to prune it so that wonderful trunk isn’t completely lost in a fountain of green. The picture showed something that looked rather like a green Cousin It.

Then it was back to problem #1. Actually, not quite. I cleared weeds and grass from around the yuca plants along the West side of the house first. I’ll spare you pictures, but say I haven’t cleaned the dead leaves and pine cones, not to mention the grass, from around these plants since we moved here, and I don’t think anything had been done for at least a couple of years before that.

Then, of course, it began to rain.

I put the tools away and (a bit reluctantly, I admit) headed back to the office to try again with the scanner/OCR  interface.

I’d worked my way to a rather generic error message which reported the same way on both scanners and boiled down to “something in your installation is screwed.” Something that stood between me and some controls that supposedly existed.

That I could deal with. I deleted all scanner software and hardware (which for the big one took a good ten minutes just to delete!) and started from scratch. I got it up and running (a lengthy process, which necessitated a bunch of sitting around and punching “yes” and “no” because it wants to put in a bunch of stuff I really don’t need or want.) Then I began poking about and found one little option for scanning pictures that would make it default to the entire scan surface instead of its “selected areas.” I ticked the appropriate box, saved the profile as the default, tried a scan…and viola! Three times in a row it chose the entire image!

Success! …Or so I thought.

As they say, success is fleeting. Extremely. I opened the OCR program, tried a scan…and we were back to a partial image.

The big problem was, the OCR software never gave me a chance to intervene in the scanning process. You just poked the “get” button and either got a full or partial image, and never knew which you were going to get. According to one techno-site on line, there should have been a Twain interface access somewhere in one of the programs which should have allowed me to default to a full page scan, but I couldn’t find that. So I just kept poking every possible button in both programs, rerunning the scanner setup…until I finally found a spot in advanced usage that would let me access the scanner software during the scanning process. This way, no matter what the auto-select does, I can grab that little box and stretch it out to include the full page. I tried a test page, and got a perfect result. It’ll take a little longer, but not much.

Then, it was in to watch American Idol results while I tried to get this post together so I could bring you all up to date. Don’t know if it makes sense or not, but we do have a solution and Carolyn’s books can be OCR’d.

Now…I have to go figure out what happened to the anti-virus program on the main house computer. Looks like it’s been running naked for some unknown time! I have no idea what happened, but I’ve got to fix it before I go to bed. Probably just uninstall whatever’s left and reinstall.

I should be worried about how/why whatever happened happened, but y’know…I don’t really care at this point. G’night, all!