Holiday Goodness
When my mom got here Dec. 24, my husband put up the (very nice!) fake tree we got for free several years ago. Mom brought out the OMG GORGEOUS tree skirt (see icon for not-impressive rendition) she had made and put in 80+ hours on ( see detail here). It is amazing. She and the kids decorated the tree with just a little help from me (I got to watch, mostly).
I made dinner for Husband's family and us on xmas day, and the food was good. I also learned how to roast a turkey from frozen (EXCELLENT skill to have...) and made FANTASTIC pumpkin pies. Yay! The kids were adorable and just totally excellently behaved (that has since declined as they've gotten more overtired).
After mom went home after the hols, I finally wrote a family newsletter and assembled a photo collage page. Then I went to print.
My wonderful new laptop? Has no parallel port. WHU??? Our wonderful HP LaserJet printers...and I can't use them. Waaaaah! Kinkos got me through the first bit of that. Then I fought and fought with Word to merge my address book database after updating it (yes, I am a nerd with over 150 addresses saved neatly in a Word table). The file REFUSED to merge. Every way I went about it, it continued to refuse. Refuse, refuse, refuse. I asked seldear for advice and she suggested I make it into an Excel file. I did, tidied up the conversion blips, and mucked about again with the merge feature.
AND IT WORKED!!!
So...I wanted to print out labels. Sadly, I can't print to the printer, and when I tried to print on Husband's computer and printer, I killed his printer (LaserJet 5L--the upright paper kind--that has roller issues). ::sad:: Then I asked what I thought was a dumb question: could we just get a parallel-to-USB adapter? Apparently, it's NOT so dumb a question, and these critters actually DO exist. So I think that will be the way I get my labels printed. But not tonight.
I made dinner for Husband's family and us on xmas day, and the food was good. I also learned how to roast a turkey from frozen (EXCELLENT skill to have...) and made FANTASTIC pumpkin pies. Yay! The kids were adorable and just totally excellently behaved (that has since declined as they've gotten more overtired).
After mom went home after the hols, I finally wrote a family newsletter and assembled a photo collage page. Then I went to print.
My wonderful new laptop? Has no parallel port. WHU??? Our wonderful HP LaserJet printers...and I can't use them. Waaaaah! Kinkos got me through the first bit of that. Then I fought and fought with Word to merge my address book database after updating it (yes, I am a nerd with over 150 addresses saved neatly in a Word table). The file REFUSED to merge. Every way I went about it, it continued to refuse. Refuse, refuse, refuse. I asked seldear for advice and she suggested I make it into an Excel file. I did, tidied up the conversion blips, and mucked about again with the merge feature.
AND IT WORKED!!!
So...I wanted to print out labels. Sadly, I can't print to the printer, and when I tried to print on Husband's computer and printer, I killed his printer (LaserJet 5L--the upright paper kind--that has roller issues). ::sad:: Then I asked what I thought was a dumb question: could we just get a parallel-to-USB adapter? Apparently, it's NOT so dumb a question, and these critters actually DO exist. So I think that will be the way I get my labels printed. But not tonight.