Why yes, Virginia, there is a crocus in my yard.

And with that title I must now tell you this has nothing to do with a crocus. This has to do with my inhumanity to myself.  As you know, in the past 3 weeks I have thrown myself off the treadmill, face planted on the sidewalk at the kayak course, dropped my camera that I loved face down on the asphalt and now I have a concussion and a broken arm all because I changed the ink in the printer.  Of course you want to know how that one happened, don't you?

Icarus, the calico cat is the one to blame on this one.  Icarus attacks the printer every time I print something.  So I contrived to put the printer inside the cabinet. Of course the shelf had to be lowered to facilitate this.  That being done I could then put two boxes on either side of the tray the printed stuff comes out on.  The boxes are there to hold the baby gate off the tray.  This makes it so Icarus can only swat through  the tiny squares, but she will hit nothing.  This is all well and good until the printer needs a little maintenance like an ink cartridge installed.  Looked easy enough during the planning stage.

Now the printer sets clear to the back and it is dark back there. On first glance it appeared that if I just got on my knees I could be on the printer level and I could see better.  But of course those are the same knees that were present for the landing at the kayak course and they did not want to be knelt upon.  No problem.  Here is this lovely box of printer paper.  Let me just set down on it and Holy Shit!  Printer paper boxes are not very sturdy.  I shot backwards off of that sucker and whacked my head on the bottom of the office desk which is very hard!  And somewhere along that ride I sustained a laceration to my left forearm and my left elbow, but nothing compared to the knot that mysteriously appeared on my right arm.

As I lay there bruised, battered, and bleeding staring up at the bottom of the desk I wondered if there really is a God.  As the stars blinked on and off in my good eye, I also wondered just who that doctor was trying to fool when he told me that I have osteoporosis and what ever I do , don't fall.  Brittle bones my big fat patootie!  I am ten feet tall and bullet proof.  If anything was going to break I am pretty sure there should be a bone protruding through skin after any one of those "mishaps". 

I have,however decided that I must start being a little more careful.  So, I am going to give up exercise althogether!  Now that the treadmill is safely ensconced in the basement I think I will sell it and have some one drag it up the stairs and out the door.  I will need to give up walking cause sidewalks are very hard.  And it looks like even this computer is out the door.  Or maybe I will just put the printer back on top of the cabinet and get a spray bottle and squirt that damn cat.  Oh, crud, I will probably slip in the water on the floor and break my neck for sure.  No winning around here so I guess I will just go to bed. 

Have a good one!

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Well, that printer did not last long, did it?

I went off to Staples about a month ago and bought a new printer.  The last one is now setting over there with the last three that I am sure would work if they just had a little tweak here or there.  So this time I got one of the little higher priced ones.  This one has the individual colors which the man assured me was the wave of the future.  Big mistake.
Did I want the extended warranty?  Nope.  I figure it has a one year warranty and that ought to be good.  So I bring my little printer home and man am I proud.  Got me a new printer and I am stylin'.  Well, about the first thing that happened was I ran out of black ink.  So off to buy that.  Few days later I am out of blue ink.  Actually it is called Cyan.  By now I am wising up.  I buy all three cause I know what is going to happen next.  By this time about 10 days have passed and I am off to buy black ink again.  This time I splurged and got the one that has lots of ink.  Another week three colors later I go to print a mailing label.  Well all went well until about half through the printing it decides to print in pink.  Post office ain't buying that I am here to tell you.  So I go into the maintenance program and find I need to clean my print head.  Two labels and it is now printing orange.  By now I am wiser.  I put the label which is half black and half orange in the copy place and make a black copy.  Day 15 and I am now off to buy more ink.
Now I am spending more money on gas and ink then I am paying for rent.  Now the maintenance program recommends I do a deep cleaning for the print head.  More ink.  But we are making progress, we are now printing in blue.  I have now had it with this thing so I call Staples.  "Did you buy the extended warranty?"  "No".  "Too bad because you have to deal with Hewlett Packard now.  If you had bought the extended warranty we could have handled it, but you didn't so now all you have is the HP parts and labor warranty and we don't do that."  OK, well thanks Mr. Staples guy.  Gonna buy my next one from China.
So I made myself be calm and dialed the HP friendly help center.  I got a wonderful guy named Michael who lives in the Phillipines and actually spoke pretty good English. I explained my tale of woe and guess what he had me do.  Clean the print head.  More ink.  Unplug it.  Plug it in.  Clean the print head.  While it was cleaning for the upteenth time he offered to sell me an extended warranty.  I asked him just why in hell would I want to buy an extended warranty on a printer that does not work?  Michael got the idea that I might be getting testy so after 1 hour and 6 minutes he sent me to his supervisor.  He had me take all the ink out and remove the print head.  He then had me clean it with a lint free paper towel and replace it.  Put the ink in and prepare to print.  Nope.  The printer now knew I had put in a used cartridge and was having none of that.  So I poked the ok button a couple times and must have pissed somebody off inside that printer, because now it rejected the ink as counterfeit.  But the supervisor knew how to outsmart it so I printed out an email. Beautiful black email.  But now I could get no color.
To make a long story short, Farouk is going to send me a kit with a new print head and all four inks!  I can hardly wait until it gets here.  Total time on the phone was 1 hour and 58 minutes.  But I made 2 new friends today; Michael who I shall never speak with again and Farouk who has promised to call and check how the printer is working when the kit with the new stuff arrives.  That was my day.  And how was yours?