We’ve been on a bit of a spending spree as of late. You might think that it was stimulus checks derived, but you’d be wrong. It has more to do with the fact that for about a year we haven’t been spending much money and things that we need to get have piled up on us. What money that we have spent has been on groceries and with Amazon, but only for incidentals that the grocery delivery services couldn’t handle. We’ve been leading a pretty monastic life while in quarantine.

Earlier this month, after we got our vaccines, we bought a new desktop PC, because our old one was becoming too addled to work with any longer. Not soon after, our HP inkjet printer began acting up, throwing out the error message, “missing or failed printhead”. At first it was only intermittent and could easily be solve by cycling power on the machine, but all too soon it became a permanent feature. I went on YouTube U to diagnosis the problem and the video offered a number of potential fixes. I downloaded a new driver and firmware, thinking that the new computer was having trouble communicating with our venerable printer. Na-da. Nope. Not the problem. I popped and reseated the four ink cartridges and then popped and reseated the printhead, not once, but three times, as instructed. Still no joy. Exhausting all corrective options, I exercised the video’s final suggestion. I ordered a new printer and not an inkjet, but a color laser printer. I remember my first use of a color printer years ago at work. It was phenomenal, but that printer was also phenomenally expensive, about $10K. Nowadays they are a lot cheaper.

We’ve also ordered and received a new bed. It will replace our current bedding which we plan on moving upstairs for guests. No more air mattress here folks. The new mattress and frame are both very heavy. The delivery guy left it on the front porch and we were barely able to wrestle into the house. The frame was not quite as heavy and between the two of us we got it into the bedroom, where it still sits all boxed up, because first we have to get our current bed and frame out of the bedroom and upstairs. That should be fun. Before we can do that though, Anne has to deflate the air mattress upstairs. Why Anne? Because currently her quilting project is all over it and she wants to finish that project before any of this other stuff can occur. It’s a process, folks, it’s a process.

Finally, Anne is seen “modeling” her new tights that just arrived from Scotland. They are called Snags and while she has been doing phenomenally well while on Weight Watchers, it is my hope that this photo does not convey her ultimate weight goal. She says that they stretch.