Thanks for all your kind words. It was fun to share my wonderful surprise with you. Typical of young men, my son failed to let me know that, while his plane was leaving early Monday morning, his girlfriend's flight home was not until 5:00 that evening! So, I had to make runs down to the airport in Albuquerque twice in one day . . . and entertain the girlfriend until she left. Yes, he'd invited his new gf to come stay as well. She was very nice, thankfully; an archaeologist that he'd met while still in grad school. Sooooo, I took her out to lunch and then to the beautiful Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, a museum in Albuquerque showcasing the art, artifacts, etc. from all the many pueblos in New Mexico. She loved it. But, I've been catching up on work around here ever since! As for cookbook computer programs, thanks for your thoughts and ideas on that, too. Yes, on one hand, I do think that I could make up a very basic one myself but, as OA mentioned, a search engine to find specific recipes based on ingredients at hand, sounds so practical. Like you, OA, I'm really not that interested in a lot of new recipes; I have probably over a thousand of my own favs that I'd like to put in and then access. Good point about the ability to add pics, too! My last cookbook program was MasterCook, which was great until it developed it's problems and caused so many computer problems. It had a feature to not only search but, as you start to add an ingredient or cooking term, a short selection pops up to choose from. I quickly got used to this feature and it made adding my recipes so much easier. It also had a spell check with all the gazillion cooking terms and ingredients in it. That was very handy, as well. I think I'm going to read more on the Living Cookbook program and make a decision today. Gotta run and take out the trash and the dogs now, though. Lynn

We are a mixed household. I use a cast off Mac and a cast off desktop PC. I have recipes on both computers, but the MAC lives in my kitchen. I have a Recipe Zaar membership and transfer recipes from GW to my private cookbook. The online availability is nice for any computer I use and won't get lost in a hard drive crash. I like being able to access recipes from my parents kitchen, too. Looking at the demo page on the Yummy Soup website there is an online library. Would that work for both computers or is it just MAC?

Just my opinion but... I think that referring to a book or binder is a lot faster than sticking a CD into the computer, pulling it up and than rifling through the CD looking for pages that may or may not be as organized as they need to be. Even if organized, it would still be a matter of the scanning and then looking through the scanned and digitized pages one at a time. If I were you, I'd spend the time typing the recipes -- yes, one by one -- into one of the great many recipe programs. I like MasterCook but there is one that has been posted here that is a web link for a free download. Once the recipes are in a recipe organizing program, you can sort them, combine them, print them, find them, search them by ingredients or pretty much anything else, menus and much more. Truly inspiring. Joe

I have a basket, random books with random "inserts", and looseleaf broken cookbooks.... So years ago I decided that I had to start typing up the ones my mother wrote out on several pages of notepad, the shriveled clippings, etc. Then I started typing up anything I was actually going to be referring to during cooking, because I have too many zones in my kitchen and it's easier to move a paper than a book. And I started typing up the changes I'd made when they came out well. And the things I threw together that came out well (like my olive drab soup aka green sludge, which looks obnoxious but is really yummy). Here's the secret for the techies like Buehl (from another techie who hates drudgery): Toss the programs. My recipes are in Word. No fancy gizmos to make shopping lists, calorie counts, etc., but the typing is fast and easy. Makes it easy to e-mail them to friends, print them out, etc. And in the end they're still just paper recipes that are easier to read than my own horrid scrawl, or my mother's beautiful, but impossible to read, hand. Oh! Important to only do several at a sitting, and to have a conversation, TV show or other amusement, or the typing becomes pointless busiwork rather than a nice way to clear out yucky paper clutter that's disintegrating. Which puts the printouts back in the basket--but the real recipe storage is on the hard drive.