I love newsletters!

Well, despite the fact that I blog about once a month now, Marc and I are doing pretty well at keeping up our quarterly newsletter. He wrote a beautiful letter last week, pouring over it for hours, sometimes editing for days. Thank you, Marc (It's not that I don't enjoy sharing my news with people, but I often find myself with writer's block when it comes time to write the newsletter).

So hubby writes the letter, I email it to my dad, who has this great computer program that formats newsletters. He works on it for a few days, sends me a few copies, which i edit and return a few times (I guess Marc and I are both rigorous editors), and it's finally ready to go. Thank goodness! Composing and editing are done! Time to move on to printing, note-writing, stamping, addressing, and stuffing. Yee haw.

I'm the kind of person who likes to finish projects like this as quickly as possible. I want to print out my happy letters, all 160 of them, and get on with it. But I also want them to look nice. Picture quality is especially important. So when I began printing them out on our stone-age printer with the broken feed tray that is propped up on an ink stamp, I judged the print quality unfit for our letters. ...Let me just try to print them out on our nice new HP Officejet 7310. I bet they'll come out beautifully. And they did. The only problem is, Rachel said not to print them on the nice new HP. Hmmm.

No problem, I'll print out a master copy and send it to town with Marc, who's doing a trash run for the Land. There's a print shop there that will surely be able to handle this menial task. My only concern at that point was that Marc would do the trash run first and then forget to wash his hands before transfering dump-ick to the master copies (am I psycho-perfectionist-lady or what?!) Sadly, Marc called me from town and said they had terrible print quality there and that our stone-age printer did a nicer job. So, back to the drawing boards.

After lunch, I mosey on back into the office to begin printing from stone-age. The first side printed fine, but when I tried to print the second side of each page, the paper would get crumpled up and jam the printer. Or it would fold down one corner of the page and smudge the ink a bit. Hmm. Psycho-perfectionist-lady started to loosen up a bit. (Please forgive me if you received a smudged or slightly wrinkled newsletter) Later in the afternoon, Marc brought in a nice man from LA and introduced him to me. Great timing..."Hi, nice to meet you. THIS PRINTER IS FROM THE PIT OF HELL!!!! Oh, excuse me, I'm just trying to..."

Oh, I forgot to mention, the stone-age printer not only crinkles paper and smudges ink, but the only way to print on the second side is to hand feed the paper, one by one. This means sitting at the computer and commanding it to print every single time. And you know what? I timed it: stone-age printer takes exactly 60 seconds to process the print command. It doesn't even start to print until a full minute has passed. Did I mention that I was beside myself with frustration?

At dinner, I told Rachel my sob story and she agreed that the HP 7310 printed a nicer looking letter, say nothing of the hassles with stone-age, and that if I'm willing to pay for the extra ink, I should use the nice new HP7310. She did warn me that the 'nice new HP7310' has a dark side and that she's experienced more problems mass printing with it, but, wanting only the best, opted for this route.

I had some success with it, until I noticed that if I commanded it to copy more than one at a time, it would pick up 3 or more pages and print segments on each one. Hmmm. Not a problem, I'll just print one at a time. And this I did, until, it started printing out with thick white lines running horizontally across our happy faces. No problem, I bet the ink cartridge just ran out. I change the cartridge (as Rachel warned me it would probably take more than one cartridge for 160 pages), but alas, the lines are still there. Back to stone-age.

At least I only had the second side of about 20 copies left to print, so the process of hand-feeding and printing one at a time (at 60 seconds a pop) wasn't as torturesome anymore. In fact, it gave me the opportunity to catch up on Elena and Rachel's blogs. And it inspired me to write one of my own. Oh, I think I forgot to mention that we ran out of paper, so I had to go to town today to pick up a pack and finish the job. But you know, these are the kinds of things that make our lives interesting. I don't know what I would blog about if everything went smoothly in life.

One more thing, Blue Star is coming to install our On Demand water heater next wednesday. Happy, happy day! Three cheers for hot, running water! ...Not having things for 2 months makes you really appreciate them.