Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The new workpace workout

I recently switched jobs, which means I switched offices. I brought my computer with me, but I am using the printer that came with the office. About a week ago, the printer started only printing on the edges of the paper, leaving the middle mostly blank. I don't print much, so I just sent my print jobs to the printer in my old office and walked down the hall to get my stuff.

I've finally decided that it might be nice to be able to use the printer that takes up a good portion of my desk, so I looked into getting a new toner cartridge. I don't do much ordering of office supplies, so I was quite surprised by the $100 price tag ($80 for reconditioned). Out of curiosity, I checked out how much a new printer would be. About $150. And it would probably work better than this one, which has to think for a while before printing.

So maybe I'll get a new printer. Or maybe I'll keep using the printer in my old office and call it exercise.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Setting a bad example

A couple of months ago our friend J (who witnessed this) emailed me to tell me that he started a blog. He had been reading mine for a while, and I had inspired him to try it himself. I think I remember him commenting that he wasn't sure he had anything to talk about. I guess reading my blog made him realize he didn't really need to have anything to talk about in order to have a blog.

Anyway, my recent blog hiatus had me thinking that I was being a really bad blog role model, and I was hoping that J was doing better than I was. Turns out, no. He hasn't updated since August 20th. I'm a bad influence.

On the other hand, I took a small group of Girl Scouts to a water park last weekend, and we had a total blast. Even though they're all teenagers. So I'm not all bad.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

We were glad that beef was the only thing we had to hide

When G and I go on vacation, we typically have mild adventures. This is probably mostly due to the fact that we almost never have reservations anywhere or anything more than a rough estimate of where we plan to end up. One of our little adventures on our most recent trip involved our border crossing from British Columbia back into the US.

We had spent several days in British Columbia. Since we had been camping, we had a cooler with some food in it. (We had a terrible time finding a grocery store on this trip. It seems every town has a Future Shop in it, which we thought might sell food but in fact sells electronics, but grocery stores are less evident. When we finally found food, it seems that many things are ridiculously expensive. Cream cheese? $4. Cheddar? $7. Produce? The same as here.)

But I digress. So we get to the border, and the guard gives us what I assume is the usual once-over - checking our passports, quizzing us on where we're from, etc. Then he asked if we had any beef. G had just bought a beef kabob at the Public Market in Vancouver (that's another entry entirely), so he told the guard about it. We were instructed to park and take a yellow piece of paper inside to talk to agriculture.

Inside, we were grilled again on our hometown and asked about various food items we may have brought with us from Canada. Then the agriculture man took our keys and searched our car. That's right - searched our car. While we had to wait inside, out of view of the car. It was kind of weird.

Bottom line, the beef kabob was confiscated, along with some roast beef and breakfast sausage we had forgotten about and the core of an asian pear. We were then allowed to cross the border, back to the land of $0.99 cream cheese.