Starting over…

Although I love my life, the to-ing and fro-ing especially during the six months

of the summer when I rent in the mountains, sometimes (o.k. often) brings its

own set of problems.

The first trip up, I take linens, towels and most of the first necessities. I unpack the doubles of other items that have been left in storage. Then I make lists of what is missing.

It often takes three or four trips to finally get things back into place (I would have said totally, but 100% never happens).

Then there are the machines that have been left there to re-start, with more or – today’s case – less success: the coffee machine works great normally and I had already used it so why, oh why was it only putting out colored water? One sip and I knew something was wrong, I mean even sound asleep I know when there’s not much coffee in my seemingly full cup.  Call it need of coffee, call it simply not thinking, I checked the capsule, returned it to the machine and proceeded to get another cup of even clearer brown water.  It was only then that I thought to myself: hmmm was that an old capsule or a new one? Searching through my memories (even first thing in the morning a rather delicate task) I realized that, in truth, I had not put in a new capsule. The thus-brewed cup of coffee was almost too strong!

not necessarily mine

Then it was booting up the printer: it spends the winter at my landlord’s so first challenge was to remember how to hook it up to my computer: negotiated rather successfully if I do say so myself.  Pulled up the letters that I wanted to print; hit the buttons to print, the machine whirled, made its usual noises and produced a piece of blank paper. Hmmmm.

Second try before I remember that perhaps I had taken the ink cartridges out for storage.

Sure enough – they were in the box of office supplies. Insert cartridges: re-print first letter – obtained a few little blue bits about two-thirds down the page. Re-try  with the same effect. Take out cartridges, re-insert, re-try: still not much and certainly not the letter! Run the cartridge cleaner, try re-aligning and finally managed to end up with a great print of only one of the four cartridges – the blue, but as the letter was written in black… no letter.

And yes, somewhere along the way I had checked to see how much ink was left in all four cartridges: supposedly enough to write two letters at least.

similar to mine

At that point I decided the letters would wait until I get home tomorrow – especially as I do have a full new set of cartridges there (yet another of those items that hadn’t yet made the list).

That, together with the miserable weather (Wednesday at home it was 90°F, today in the mountains it is just barely 42°) means the third thing that has gone wrong or is off: great the rest of the day’s undertakings, activities and tasks should go very well indeed!