This week has been spent largely thinking about and working with Microsoft Word. Over the weekend I finished off a bunch of mail merges and got them out the door. There’s something really satisfying about getting a really big mail merge to work just perfectly without paper jams or other printer failures. Whee!
Then with that little Word excursion completed, I turned around and spent more time pondering some of Word’s more advanced features. Right now, we’re busily working on a proposal for a forms automation project and I’m having to remember all the (many) things I used to know about creating long documents in Word, including styles, autonumbering, and form fields. I even went back and read my own treatise on long documents that we have in the tips section of our web site just to get back into the groove.
Of course, after a while, too much of this stuff just starts to make your brain hurt, so we’ve also trying to spend time doing other things as well. James has been spending time outside chopping firewood and I’ve made a couple of batches of tomato sauce, so now there are tupperwares full of sauce in the freezer and wood in the woodshed. The good news is that I’ve found the world’s easiest tomato sauce recipe. Basically you chop all the tomatoes in half, chop an onion into slices and put it under the broiler for 10 minutes. Once they’re charred, you chuck everything into the blender with some spices and puree. No stirring, no sauteeing etc.
It’s a good thing the recipe is so easy because I’m surely gonna have to do it again. There are a LOT of tomatoes still out there quietly ripening.