Neat Receipts, Goat Milk, Trail Maintenance

It continues to remain quiet around here. Construction hasn’t resumed yet, maybe next week. Mario has finished opening all of the trails on the property. I’m happy to be able to once again walk on some of the longer loop trails through the outer parts of the property. I spent one morning raking leaves throughout the spring area. The leaf litter was very thick. Now I can walk more care free through this area without being so concerned about stepping on a snake.

I recently bought a new laptop, my old one died. John is fantastic with computers and without him I would probably spend a small fortune on tech support. One of the more challenging programs to reinstall on my new computer was Neat Receipts. I have been using this program since we moved to Costa Rica to track all of our expenses. I really like the ability to scan and store the receipts in a data base and then to be able to run various reports. As it turned out the version of Neat I was using wasn’t compatible with my new operating system.  John spent several days researching how to install Neat version 5 on my computer. It appears Neat released version 5 well before they were finished doing thorough testing. The program has many problems. Fortunately the users are allowed to vent their frustrations and help each other in the community portion of Neat's website.

Once the new version was installed I spent many, many hours getting the old data ready to be migrated to the new version.  All of this reminded me of the SAP implementation I helped with at my former employer in Seattle. I was successful in getting the old data into the new version and began scanning the stack of backlogged receipts. One went in just fine and then the second one made the program crash. Yet another bug in the software. I was going to give up and revert to using a manual spreadsheet for tracking our expenses but John went through Neat’s site some more and found the solution to the problem. It’s up and running again and the backlog of receipts are all scanned.

This morning John and Mario visited a small goat dairy farm. I had been asking Mario where we can acquire raw milk and other unpasteurized dairy products. He asked around and located a family in town that produces and sells goat dairy products. The goat was milked on site, that moment for the purchase. A woman showed John how she makes yogurt and gave him some starter cultures. John came home with some cheese, the yogurt cultures and two liters of still warm, fresh from the goat milk. I started the yogurt making process and will see how it turns out in a day or so.