Nine More Days

I composed a little poem to put inside our Christmas cards last year...

'Twas the month before Christmas
And all through the house
All the creatures were stirring,
including the mouse.
Seeds in the feeder,
The birds have been fed;
Traps have been set -
Six mice are now dead.
Snowflakes are made,
Stiffened and glittered, too;
Some on the tree
And one just for you.

Then Murphy's Law kicked in. Our printer went down. No warning. Just quit. Just like that.

I was devastated because I'd bought a whole case of ink specifically for that printer. The printer, like most everything else I own, was a dinosaur. I bought it in 2002. No one else would be able to use my ink. I had little hope of finding an identical printer in usable condition.

I came up with a different way to make my Christmas cards, which prompted some unplanned poetry...

Card stock and envelopes,
Three sets of printer ink
All have been purchased
For Christmas cards in a wink.
The computer is humming,
Fingers on the keyboard are flying.
The green light on the printer
Gives no clue it is dying.
"Print away, print away!"
The photographer demands.
The printer sits silent,
The photographer rants.
Troubleshooting commences,
All systems are go,
But the poor ancient printer
Still says "Heck, no!"
The photographer and her true love
Long for a winter night's rest
But not without saying
How this year we're blessed.
The printer won't work
And more mouse holes to seal;
But we love our new digs -
The fixin' up just makes it more real!

Because we had no printer and no funds for copies, we opted to write our Christmas greeting by hand. Which means my poem got shortened to just the first dozen lines. 'Cuz our hands got tired of writing!

Christmas passed. Valentine's Day passed. Easter passed. And then a miracle happened. I found the very same printer model, new in box! I wasted no time ordering it. It arrived while we were Riding the Rockies. So the new printer didn't come out of the box for a long time. Actually, we don't have a lot of time for printing during cycling season, so the brand spankin' new printer didn't come out of the box until... gulp... blush... um, last week...

But hey, it works! What more could we ask!

The shop we bought the printer from must have been trying to clear out everything associated with that particular printer. They stuffed the box to the max with a ton more ink cartridges and printer specific paper (although this printer will use any paper and the proprietary paper likely will work in any printer). Not only do I have the one- or two-year ink supply I'd bought a year ago, I have almost that much more in reserve now! And I have printer papers I'd never even seen, much less heard of, to play with!

Woohoo!

We retired the old printer and gave the new printer a good run through, me pulling my typical don't-waste-a-thing attitude. I didn't want to throw out the ink from the old printer until I used every last drop. Of course, open ink cartridges in an unused printer go dry. We ran the deep cleaning program several times before realizing the black ink cartridge was just too darned cakey to go through the printer. So that cartridge did get tossed.

One of the things I love to do is print my photographs on fabric, colorfast the fabric, and quilt the fabric into something magnificent and potentially perfect for the Denver National Quilt Festival. Without a printer for so many months, I didn't get any quilting done this year. I have no excuse now for next year!

I guess that means I also need to come up with a poem for this year's Christmas card. And make some new Christmas cards while I'm at it...

Geez, and I thought I was finally going to have a tiny bit of spare time again!

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