Sorry Mom!

I wasn't feeling particularly inspired to write about something specific today, so I decided to Google "blog prompts".  This got me to thinking - maybe I will write about "Google"...

When I was a kid my mom had a recipe card file full of wonderful family recipes - you know, the kind only Mom can make. One boring summer day shortly after we got our very first computer I thought I would help my mom out and put all of her treasured recipes into a homemade cookbook.  I got into the word processor, and with my less than stellar typing skills set to work transcribing each precious ingredient from card to computer. It was a long process, but I was determined to see it through.

I should mention that I have always been full of wonderful ideas - and when I have an idea I want to act on it immediately, full steam ahead.  The problem with this is that when I am in the middle of executing one of my wonderful ideas, and I have a new wonderful idea - well... You get the picture!

So there I was typing page after page, and inevitably a better offer came along... I don't remember now what that offer might have been, but I wasn't about to miss out on it. So I speedily "finished" typing up all of the precious recipes, printed them out, and threw away the old stained, faded and torn recipe cards. After all, I was pretty sure I had copied all of them... Hadn't I?

At the end of the summer when my birthday came along, I wanted my mom to make one of my favorite "family recipes" - Frozen Pineapple Torte. She set about looking for the recipe in her newly typed recipe binder, only to find that it wasn't there. Uh oh. Upon realizing that I had left one of my favorite recipes out of the binder, I decided that I'd better inspect it more carefully.  It seemed that this was not the only recipe missing, and there were also many other recipes that left out important information - like the zucchini bread that only directed you to pour the batter in the pan but did not indicate a baking temperature or time; or the lasagna that referenced layers of sauce, but had no indication in the ingredient list or in the directions of how to make or acquire said sauce.

Needless to say, in this pre-Google era, once these recipes were gone, they were just gone.  You could try to remember exactly who you got a recipe from, and hope that if you called them they might be able to hook you up. But there were several casualties of my "good deed" that have never been recovered.

In this day and age, we are so very blessed to have almost everything at our fingertips on the "information super highway". Say what you will about the "evils of technology" - sure there is evil out there, and yes it is more easily accessed now than it was when we were kids.  But seriously - without Google I wouldn't have known what to do when my one year old son got a macaroni noodle stuck up his nose. And when our dishwasher broke down, I would have had to pay a repairman to come fix it. In the old days if you lost or broke a part on your home gym, you were out of luck. And if you lost a user's guide to any of your appliances - forget about it!

You can find anything on Google - including blog prompts for those days that you are staring at a blank screen and can't think of a thing to write... Now, about that Frozen Pineapple Torte.