Going Paperless: Scanning to a easier life

I've gone completely paperless.  Bills, receipts, school work, letters - all come in, get scanned and shredded. There are very few exceptions of things that I keep. 

As a single dad, documentation is your friend.  Being very organized is so important.  I cannot stress these two things enough. 

In a later post I will talk about OurFamilyWizard.com (OFW) which is a site my ex and I use to communicate.  Often I will scan things in and send them to the ex on OFW. Another tool that I will talk about in a future post is QuickBooks by scanning them in receipts and attaching them in QuickBooks.    

When I was going through my divorce, I did it from several states away. That meant emails, and lots of them to my lawyer.  There is a ton of documentation that goes back and forth and in todays world email or Dropbox (or similar cloud service) is the fastest way to transmit information.  But to email or share documents digitally, you have to get all this paper scanned.

I choose the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 Scanner for PC and Mac (PA03656-B005) (http://amzn.to/1y50Sq7) after doing a lot of research and reading reviews.  This scanner is a little pricy at over $400, but it is worth every penny.  

This scanner works at over 25 pages per minute and thats double sided in color. You can feed in receipts and full size sheets at the same time.  The software it comes with does optical character recognition which means your files are searchable.  While the OCR isn't perfect, it works pretty good.  You may have a scanner on your all-in-one printer, but the speed of this scanner makes going paperless practical. 

So far I have not used the software that it comes with to organize files.  I've found it much easier to manually sort my scans.  When I first used the scanner, I was using it wirelessly.  I found that every now and then the wireless connection would break and that scanning wirelessly was slower.  I've moved the scanner next to my desk and use it with the USB connection.  This scanner supports a USB 3.0 connection. 

Here is my workflow: 

The software will let you set up different profiles.  I have one that I have set up to scan receipts, letters, and other documents.  I have another profile set up just for the kids homework, since I email this off to my ex every night.  The profiles are set up to make a PDF file and you can set the resolution which will determine the file sizes. 

I have a specific folder inside my Dropbox that all my scans drop into.  The software will let you chose a specific folder.  From there I sort my files into folders by category (usually by company name). I also have a folder called "receipts" and inside that folder are folders named for stores and businesses.  

It's important that you use a folder inside Dropbox or some other cloud service that sync's automatically. That way in case your hard drive crashes, your data will be safe. This will also allow you to access your scans from your mobile device. There are a lot of times that I have accessed scans on my iPad or iPhone.  This also gives me the ability to email or share these documents instantly.

Dropbox also has a cool feature that you can enable inside your account. Most of the cloud services have a similar option. You can log into your dropbox on a computer and set the option to allow you to email attachments to your dropbox.  Simply save this email address to your contacts and when you have an email with an attachment, you can forward it to your special dropbox email.  Dropbox will automatically save the attachment to your dropbox in a special folder.  

Sometimes I get emails that have receipts that I want to save PDF's of (like amazon orders or iTunes), but they do not have an attachment.  If you forward this to your dropbox account, it will not save anything since the Dropbox Email only saves attachments.  You can save these as a PDF on your computer and move these into your dropbox folder, but this takes some time and requires you to be in front of a computer. Many times I'm mobile. In that case I forward these emails to pdfconvert@pdfconvert.me and it emails me back with the original email as an attachment. I then forward these to my dropbox email.  Another option if you are using a mobile device is to use a PDF Printer program. Many of these programs will let you save the PDF files to a cloud service.   

So get organized.  Go paperless. it's worth it.

Because Cake Balls are Awesome

When I was married, my sister-in-law would make cake balls for the holidays.  It was one of those treats that I really looked forward to.  Instead of being cake-ball-less this year, I decided to take matters into my own hands and learn how to make them myself. Turns out it's not that hard, and kinda fun.

Before I start with the recipe, I just wanted to say that cooking doesn't make you any less of a man. For years the male/dad/father role in the kitchen has been limited to firing up the grill while making grunting noises and dragging our knuckles between the kitchen and the patio.  I joke with people about dropping my man-card off at Bed, Bath and Beyond around Thanksgiving and picking it up after the first of the year. But thruth be told, there is nothing wrong with cooking without a vagina. I've gotten many complments and found that people actually respect my cooking, especially my kids! Well, maybe it's because I let them lick the chocolate off everything.   

I feel that it's important to learn to cook on your own for a few reasons. The first is that you need to be able cook for yourself and your kids. Seriously, you can't eat out every night!  You need to teach your children to cook. It's an important life lesson and it will come in handy when they move out on their own.  Especially when they are in some college dorm and trying to eat more than Ramen Noodles.  When you move onto your next relationship, cooking for your date gets you major brownie points.  Besides, cooking is actually fun - and yes there are gadgets and power tools in the kitchen. 

Back to our cake balls. 

What are cake balls you ask? They are a sweet cake center coated in chocolate. They are little balls of pure joy and proof that balls taste great (wait that doesn't sound good).  They are pretty easy to make, and I'm going to give you the recipe and a few things I learned making them.  

I usually make a double batch, one of chocolate and one of vanilla.  The recipe below is for one batch and makes 30-40 balls. 

What you will need: 

-One box of cake mix (chocolate or vanilla works well, stay away from mixes that may be too moist like those that have fudge in the title. Just plain old cake mix)

-Vegetable Oil (for cake)  

-Milk (for cake)  

-Water (for cake)  

-12 oz Tub of Cake Frosting (or instead a can of condensed milk)

-1 lb Chocolate Wafers or Chocolate Chips 

-Solid shortening (Optional - 2 table spoons depending on the choclate you get) 

-Chocolate melter, double broiler or glass bowl and a pan

-Wax Paper

-Cookie Sheet

-Plastic/Rubber Spatula

-Dipping Tool (You can make this. I used Aluminum Welding Wire) 

-Cookie Scoop Tool

-Whisk or Mixer

-Large Bowl

Note: The above is for a single batch. If you make a double batch just double everything.

Step 1) Bake the cake per the directions on the box. Let the cake cool throughly. 

Step 2) Crumble the cake into the bowl, the mixture should not be lumpy
Step 3) Mix the 3/4 of the frosting or the whole can of condensed milk with the cake in the bowl   

Step 4) Put wax paper on the cookie sheet and scoop the cake/frosting mix onto cookie sheet using the cookie scoop tool

Step 5) Put the cookie sheets in the fridge and let set 12 hours

Now we get to play with chocolate.  This is the good part.

Step 6) Put the chocolate in the melting pot, double boiler or glass bowl. If you are using the double boiler or glass bowl do a google search for how to properly use them.

I use the Wilton Chocolate Melter Pro (http://amzn.to/1HIw9lv). It takes 20-30 minutes to melt 1 lb of chocolate. 

If you grab Wilton Candy Melts (http://amzn.to/1tmL0II)  from Wal-Mart or similar add 1-2 teaspoons of the solid shorting to the melting pot and pour the chocolate wafers in. The shortening will thin the mixture out and make it easier to coat the cake balls.  This REALLY makes a difference!  If you do not add the shortening, the cake balls will still taste great, but the chocolate will be hard to work with and will get clumpy after you coat a few balls.  

If you get dipping choclate wafers like "Ghirardelli Candy Making & Dipping Melting Wafers" you don't need to add the solid shortening.  

You can easily overwork the chocolate, don't stir more than you have to. When working with the chocolate  make sure that everything is dry. Water will ruin the chocolate. Try to use dry rubber or plastic utensils with the melted chocolate and avoid metal ones if you can.

Remember: The chocolate has to melt slowly!

Step 7) Coat the cake balls and place them back on the cookie sheet. This is the fun and messy part. 

You may find that using a fork or stick will help you coat them. Basically anything you can stick into the ball and get it to stay upside down.  Just swirl the cake ball in the melted choclate and you may need to twirl it to get some of the excess choclate off. 

Step 8) Let the cake balls set, you can put them in the fridge if you like but do not freeze them or they will crack

Step 9) Enjoy your sugar induced coma!

Quicktip: For maximum fun, feed your kids as many cake balls as they want before exchanging them with mom (kidding - sorta!). If mom is on a diet, she will definitely enjoy a big bag of these babies!