Printer done died

My trusty HP Photosmart 3310 up and died last night while I tried to print our annual Christmas letter (a hint, perhaps?). I have decal orders waiting and could not delay, so I ordered a new Epson Artisan 810 from Amazon with overnight shipping. Barry really loves Epson and has never been able to understand my loyalty to HP. He wore me down last night, as I was already having a discouraging day and did not feel like defending my position. I like many features of the Epson and the price was certainly right. I'll let you know what I think of it after I use it for a bit.

EDITED: Don't buy one. I'll post specifics later.

Not following the right news websites

Okay so we thought our XBox was broken, and the router has been misbehaving lately so we thought maybe it had decided not to do what it was supposed to, and also we worried that something had gotten unplugged and we fussed and we checked and we jiggled connections and said "what did you DO??" to each other over and over until FINALLY... Barry noticed the little box on the screen that said XBox Live will be down for maintenance on Tuesday, for as long as 24 hours.

Finally.

Duh.

And THEN when I Googled of course everyone else in the developing or developed world knew this already. Because, you know, they read their news.

Back we go into our cave.

BTW, Microsoft's 24 hours is just about up. And I wanna stream some Netflix.

I need a new blog!

Lately, in case you have not noticed, it has become trendy to be frugal. Living within one's means, or at least desiring to do so, is now chic. It's no longer cool to throw money around; it implies that one does not care about the suffering of one's neighbors and fellow countrymen. (Like about 10 years ago it suddenly became trendy to pretend to care about the environment.) So all kinds of blogs and websites are suddenly springing up around frugality, simplifying, living well under reduced circumstances, becoming debt free, repurposing, etc. I like to think I have been on this bandwagon since long before it was a bandwagon. I have long been a subscriber to Cheapskate Monthly and am even in one of Mary Hunt's books.

But I have put aside my snit over these johnny-come-latelies and am just trying to glean what goodness I can from the sudden wealth of words out there on the subject.

Many of these sources of words center around food. Eating well on a budget. Eating healthily on a budget. Eating well on food stamps. Gardening on the cheap. That sort of thing. And while I enjoy reading these and pick up good ideas, one thing that I notice is that they all seem to be aimed at an urban readership.

Take Poor Girl Eats Well, for example. Now I really like this blog. She does very interesting things with simple ingredients. Her goal is to give examples of meals that can be made for $8-$10 each, for a family of 4. This is a great idea, and I do find some goodies here. However, she is also an excellent example of my complaint. Her recipes count on two things: That you live near to a) a farmer's market that is in operation year round, and b) a Trader Joe's.

First of all, we don't live near ANYTHING. We are in the back of beyond. We drive at least half an hour to get to just about anywhere one can procure food.

Secondly, we do have a little farmer's market here in the New Albin town square, but at this time of year the farmers are all sensibly hunkered down inside nice warm farmhouses, not setting up veggie stands. The only thing they would have to sell would be wrinkly last-year's root vegetables, anyway. Our markets don't really get going until the middle of July, at least. And even then, they are, like, 5 people, max, each with a few examples of whatever is in season at the moment, which is exactly the same as everybody else at the market has. So one week, it's tomatoes and green beans, and the next week it's tomatoes and zucchini, and the next week it's zucchini and zucchini, and the next week it's tomatoes, zucchini, green beans and zucchini. And tomatoes.

And thirdly, while I would love to pop over to TJ's any old time, the nearest one I know of is in Woodbury, Minnesota. It's a nice one, I've been there, but it's about 3 hours' drive away. And up until a few years ago, most of the United States would say "Trader who?" when we mentioned Trader Joe's, and had no idea how amazing the chain is. There still aren't that many of them out there. Yet. For most of the country.

So what I need is for someone to start a blog on living well, within one's means, in the heartland, in the countryside, starting from scratch. Start with the premise that there are no upscale grocers within reach, that there are no downscale grocers within reach for that matter, and that it's not growing season so starting a garden this very instant is not an option. Teach me to make wonderful, inexpensive, healthy meals from what I can buy in bulk at Sam's Club and keep in the basement for weeks between shopping expeditions. Teach me to use the limited number of green things that I can buy, and in the limited time that I have before they go bad in the fridge. Teach me to be imaginative with dried herbs that keep, rather than assuming that I will be buying fresh herbs every few days.

My friend Lisa said I should just start this blog for myself, but I want someone else to teach ME. :o)

Catching Up

Shortly after we started on our vacation, my laptop quit recognizing the AC charger, and my battery quickly ran out, so boom, I'm without my principal computer again. I still had limp-along Internet access with my work computer and Barry's iBook, but it's just not the same. Upon returning home, I contacted Dell and sneaked the repair under the last 60 days of my 3-year on-site next-business-day warranty. "Next business day" translated into "Three days later," but I did get a new motherboard last night - and boy does it feel good to have my 'puter back!

Now I have a lot of blogging to catch up on. The next few posts will be in no particular order, I'm afraid.

Twenty-four hours?? HA!

I'm mostly back. Mostly. This was a real mess. I was without a 'puter entirely for over a week, and then got it back but without any of the software that I had collected over the years, and then very shortly a CD/DVD drive that quit working again as I tried reinstalling stuff - and so I got to have the OS re-reinstalled and start over. And then the drive quit working again. We finally decided it was one particular install disk that it didn't like, and as long as I keep that disk in another room where the 'puter doesn't have to even look at it, we're okay.

So here is what I lost:

• All my software. And in reloading things I'm finding that most of my versions were so old, I can't even reinstall and will have to upgrade.
• All my bookmarks. Ugh.
  
• All my old email. That includes folders and folders and folders of family and friend history. I thought it would be backed up but it is not.
• All my old email ADDRESSES. That probably means YOUR email address, too. I may never get back in touch with all those people now. This really breaks my heart. Please, I'm begging you, if you are reading this, please drop me a line so I'll have your address back.
• All my bookmarks. All of them. I have years and years of bookmarks that are gone.
  
• All my saved passwords. All my financial website passwords are nuked; my eBay userIDs that I don't use very often; my various email addys which I couldn't check even by webmail from my work 'puter because I did not have the passwords.
• There is also some stuff that I hope is still on the backup server, like all the family photos I still had on my hard drive and a couple thousand fonts I had bought a couple of years ago, but hopefully they can be recovered.
  

I still have some software to reinstall, like iTunes; I'm back to a really old version of Photoshop, and I'll have to buy Microsoft Office again. I also can't use my old Quickbooks anymore and am waiting on Quickbooks Pro to arrive so I can do a restore on my data.

It could be much worse, and I sure hope I have learned my lesson not to be quite so dependent upon a computer. (Probably not.)

One good thing is that I found a deal on Quickbooks Pro: Amazon has it on sale right now for about $160 with free shipping, and then if you apply coupon code BYAPSEGV, you get another twenty bucks off. It retails for $200, so that's really good. I'm thinking of upgrading the church's Quicken (even older than my Quickbooks) with this one.

Going dark for awhile (hopefuly a short while)

My Dell Inspiron's CD/DVD player/writer drive died a few months ago (a slow death; it dropped functions one by one until it could no longer even see disks in the drive). I have extended support from Dell, which used to mean they sent a real live person out to your house, who fixed your 'puter and you went on your way, but now it means you spend half an hour in an online support queue, then you chat with someone on the other side of the planet for a couple of hours, and then - or at least this is how it is working for me this time - they wipe your entire hard drive, restore your system back to as manufactured and let you start fresh. Augh! I asked for a week to do some frantic backing up, but my time is up in... let's see... 14 minutes. Dell is going to have a techie call me at 3:00 Central and start wiping.

So if you don't hear from me for awhile, that's why. I'd appreciate someone sending a rescue party if I'm not back within, say, 24 hours.