MY PRINTER JUST DIED

Well, it finally happened. My old printer up and died. It didn’t stop in the middle of a print job, nor did it crank out slow images and then cough and wheeze and limp to a halt. One day I pushed the print button and the green light, the light that means the printer is in ‘go status’ simply went out and I heard no more from that printer, ever, never again! We’d been together for years. It sat silently while I wrote my novels, short stories, food articles and loaded photos from my cameras (I’ve had three cameras since I’ve had this printer) onto iPhoto in my computer.

It wasn’t a beautiful printer, but goodness, we all have warts, metaphorically speaking. She was an old thing with a couple of cords that connected her mechanisms to my computer. I got used to the tangle of wires that some times got in the way of other activities in my work area, but then one day, someone got a foot tangled in her wires and the poor thing came tumbling down, breaking the gizmo that holds the printed page. That was a couple years ago and I thought she was a goner. But she kept printing and with a bit of duct tape her broken part was easily repaired. The only tape I had at the time was bright pink duct tape and I thought that for the time being that would do the job. I always intended to get black tape so that the damage would be less visible. Needless to say, that never happened and I carried this old machine out to the garbage room, cords dangling and the bright pink tape atop her head like a silly bonnet.

The printer and I had done a lot of work together this winter. Some days the constant bad weather made feel as though I had been put on house arrest, so I wrote and revised and printed up copy after copy, leaving a trail of paper marked and slashed with red pen scrawls across the unwanted phrases and words.

I didn’t just hibernate all winter writing and printing, I also went out with friends and family. We ate and drank in some interesting places and of course there is alway NYC Restaurant Week where you can get some pretty yummy food if you select well. And I talked about other topic besides the writing life. Some quite horrible things have taken place in the world recently and though I have no solutions, I am terribly concerned about some of this political strife.

And this winter I’ve been seriously involved with photography. I always take my camera with me wherever I go and try to never miss what I think might be an interesting photo. Though lately I seem to have a lot of photographs that were taken from opened windows or from a sheltered area.  This photograph was taken from a quick trip to a friends rooftop garden looking down on to the street below. The sun was just setting and a chilly breeze was beginning to blow and we were forced to scurry back down to the lobby and into her apartment.

And then there was always the, “and it’s snowing again today” statement that the New Yorkers got used to hearing. I captured a lot of snow photos, and many of them from my terrace because I just didn’t have the interest to get into a heavy coat, put on my gloves, slap on a hat, and wrap my self in a woolen scarf. And after all, I was a writer, I didn’t have to go out into the cold because I worked at home.

This is a scene of my office area. This old printer made it through the transition from our seven room apartment to this downsized one-bedroom abode, it made it through this long winter and only stopped working just a little after the first day of spring. It fit perfectly onto a shelf in my book case and one of my concerns about getting a new printer was how the new one would fit into our small apartment. Space is a premium in this little home of ours. We looked at a lot of printers and they were all larger than the old one. We decided to go wireless and found a spot for the new printer under my husband’s desk. After all, a wireless printer can go any where and still be operational.

The last time I saw my old printer was a day I carried it out to the garbage room on my way to visit with my daughter and our new granddaughter.

Yes, this has been an eventful winter, not only because of the snow and cold seemed to go on forever, but just before Thanksgiving we were blessed with another grandchild. She’s now four months and it looks like she’s getting used to grandma and her ceaseless use of the camera. Our granddaughter is a real New York baby and has been traveling on the subway trains since she was only a couple weeks old. I looked at her lovely, little smily face and forgot about writing problems that I have, or adjusting to a new printer, or dealing with character development and really who cares about formulating a plot. Yep, life is good.