illiterate and need to find the amazing hover tool

right about now, i'm kicking myself for not taking more than one year of simplified chinese in college. why...why?

on shorter trips, i used to kind of just force myself to ask for help reading stuff everywhere. it was a matter of saving time, and not too bad, because you were going home in a few weeks. but trying to live life here and having to ask people day after day gets tiring, especially when oh, 75% of the people you ask to help you read something look at you like you're stupid (or maybe kind of cute, in a dumb way) because you can speak perfectly fine, but are pretty much illiterate. if i'm trying to meet people, this is okay, but if i'm exhausted and just trying to find the right thing to order or buy or how to get home, it is not so fun. trying to decipher stuff at the grocery store generally means a shopping trip that takes 5 times as long as it normally should. forget doing it for everything on the restaurant menu.

it's also humbling (although kind of fun) to read with little ones who can read better than you. going with M to a nearby migrant community to hang out with the kids, I find that although i'm supposed to be reading to them, if the book is chinese, it's more likely that they are reading to me.

i know the long-term solution is just to learn more characters, and i'm trying (got a Chinese version of InStyle to learn characters from). but in the near-term i am on a quest to find a pinyin (romanization) hover tool. i did a minor editing job the other day, and their computer had this amazing tool where if you hover over the characters in a doc or online, it gives you the pinyin. it was so great. but being a little muddleheaded, i didn't look to see what program it was and have been googling to try and find one. does anyone have any idea where i can get a tool like this?

P.S. as a non-sequitor update, D's stomach is actually doing relatively okay (most days), but he is rapidly losing weight. he can't seem to get full here. feel free to throw bulking-up ideas our way.