I did something quite uncharacteristic for me yesterday. The new printer I ordered was delivered yesterday afternoon. That’s not really the uncharacteristic thing – though I’ve had the old one since about 2001 or so. Imagine that. A year that was once the epitome of the concept of the “future” is now far enough in the past to have become somewhat murky in my memory (though, let’s face it, last Tuesday is kinda murky in my feeble little mind). I mean other than you know what, I don’t really remember much about 2001.

It (the printer) wasn’t exactly new even back in 2001. It was an HP LaserJet 4 that came with both the standard paper tray and a second high-capacity one that could hold a full ream of paper (plus it had a network card in it – a pretty expensive option back in those days – so I could just plug it into my home network and print from anywhere). They were “surplussing” it at the Law College and I got it for $25 (including full paper trays and a brand new spare toner cartridge for when the one that was in it ran out).

I think it was about 8 years before I had to change the toner on that sucker, and it printed a lot of stuff for me – not the least of which was a few hundred “lost dog” flyers when Siggy went missing way back when.

Of course it was big and heavy and really cranked out a lot of heat, which was OK in the winter but kinda sucked in the summer.

Unfortunately after a few years I started to notice my computers making surging (or whatever the opposite of surging – declining maybe) noises, and upon further inspection I found that, with the printer turned on, the voltage in my office outlets was swinging down and up quite wildly. So from then on, I didn’t turn it on unless I was going to actually print something (which probably saved a lot of electricity, considering this thing wasn’t exactly Energy Star compliant).

Still it was quite serviceable up until the past year or so when it started insisting there was a paper jam when the HC tray was in.

And then finally in the last couple of weeks it just scoffed at any print jobs I sent to it.

So, sadly, it was time for a new printer. One thing I really didn’t want to mess with was an inkjet, so I resigned myself to paying out the ass for a new laser printer. Much to my surprise, the damn things have gotten pretty darn cheap.

I don’t print all that much and have no real need for color (I can do that at work if I really need to), and I wound up getting a nifty little monochrome laser printer that has both Ethernet and Wireless, will do (it claims) 27 ppm and automatically duplexes for $99 (plus it’s black and fits nicely on top of the little black “retro” fridge I have in my office). Can’t beat that.

It came with a “starter” cartridge that’s supposedly good for 700 pages, and I sprung for a “high yield” one that claims to have an expected life of 2,600 pages.

I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to print my obituary out using that sucker – at least, assuming the printer itself lasts a few years.

Anyhow, the part that was actually uncharacteristic was that as soon as I got the sucker hooked up, I dragged the old one (all 500 pounds of it) to the Town’s electronics dumping area and got it right out of my life.

Granted, part of that was because it was a good excuse to stop at the store and buy beer but still, normally I’d have kept the thing around intending to fix it or get scrap parts off it or just in general kept it sitting around and in the way somewhere for a few years until I got bitched at enough to motivate me to get rid of it.

So I’m pretty proud of myself. I know it aint much, but, hey, for somebody who can barely walk….

It’s actually been a thoroughly productive weekend here. My new sump pump came on Friday (the old one had a bad switch and wouldn’t stop running). Fortunately it was in the sump pit (got three of ’em in my basement and with the snow melt and rain, those puppies are really humpin’) that has a backup pump in it, or there would have been a great deal of urgency in replacing it. My rather conservative estimate is that this one sump alone is pumping about 2,000 gallons of water an hour.

So, anyhow, that came on Friday afternoon and I installed it after work (now I need to see if I can find parts to fix the old one – pump’s fine, just need a new switch).

Yesterday morning, the DB upgrade at work apparently went fairly smoothly, but the stuff I’m responsible for wasn’t working. Turned out they’d set up a new DNS alias for the new DB server (so that the old name would now point to the new server’s IP address). It eventually dawned on me that our server no doubt had the old information in its cache, so I flushed it (so to speak), and all was well.

Made me feel as if I was worth the extra money they weren’t paying me to work on Saturday.

Then yesterday my wife was kind enough to go out and get me new curtains for my office. Did you realize they expect you to iron the folds out of those things? I mean, shit, for the price of them they should be wrinkle free (roll ’em up and put ’em in a tube or something). It was really difficult having to watch her sit there and iron them (so I didn’t – I used the time to set up my new printer, ditch the old one, buy beer, and then watch a few episodes of “I Hate My Yard” on DIY). Took her forever.

Turns out you can only get them in, like 63″ length, so, being the talented seamstress she is, when she got done ironing them, she had to shorten them up for me, too.

I’ll tell ya, I’m tired just thinking about it.

As if all that wasn’t enough, I finally went over my taxes one last time and clicked the button to file them. And I figured I might as well go ahead and print them, too. I mean, what with the new printer and all.

Now where’s my damn refund?

And now tonight is a big old teevee night, too. It’s the season 4 finale of Shameless, which I am gonna miss (not to worry, there will be a fifth season). But Nurse Jackie starts up again next week, so that will help fill the void. Some.

It’s also the season premiere of Game of Thrones, which I am most definitely geek enough to really like. Have to watch that one on my own, though, as it’s too violent for my wife (she should read the books – the show is pretty tame by comparison).

On a lighter note, though, VEEP also starts back up tonight. I just can’t get over little Anna Chlumsky all grown up. Plus there’s a new show starting tonight called Silicon Valley, which I don’t know much about and don’t have high expectations for, but, hey, it’s HBO and it’s another geek show, so I’ll give it a shot.

With all this going on, it’s a damn good thing I’m off tomorrow. I’m gonna need the rest.

First, let me say that NCAA basketball is dead to me, so I don’t really care (I’ve moved on to lacrosse and that’s not going all that well either – actually, women’s lax is doing quite well so that’s good), but I was reading something this morning that said today’s two Final Four games are not on over-the-air teevee, but are only on cable channels and that they are on three different channels with three different announcing crews. This seems pretty bizarre to me. CBS (or Viacom or whoever owns them) presumably pays a lot of money for the broadcast rights for this stuff, and you’d think the advertising money they can get showing the games OTA on CBS would be way higher than they can get on a cable channel. Plus, why three channels? I mean if, say, 3 million people were gonna watch on one channel, it’s not like 9 million are gonna watch on three. Seems silly to me, but then again I’m not the type of crack network executive that would do things like buy the Sci-Fi channel and put “professional” wrestling on it on Friday nights (never mind changing the name of the channel to “SyFy”). Shoulda just renamed it the “sigh” channel.

So I just noticed that it’s April 5th (aka, 10 days to taxes) and my tax info is sitting there on my desk. Funny thing is, I did my taxes back at the beginning of February but I suffer from “fear of filing.” Anytime I have a decent refund coming, I’m afraid to file the damn things lest I’ve unwittingly made some egregious error that Turbotax didn’t catch. Which is silly, because I’m only getting a refund because I pay a ridiculous amount of property taxes and a somewhat less ridiculous amount of mortgage interest every year. It’s not like my taxes are even complicated – I have no hidden foreign assets or funky home office deductions and I don’t even bother to write off my charitable contributions (it’s not like I’m Andrew Carnegie anyway). And the interest rate on my savings account is negligible.

I’m not like the rest of you limousine liberals out there hobnobbing with Hollywood stars driving your Priuses (Prii?) and drinking your fancy Starbucks coffee as you head out to your weekend house in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard or most likely some other place that I’ve never heard of because if I’ve heard of it, it can’t be trendy enough. No, we’re simple pickup truck driving folks out here in real America. Well, OK, I drive a Hyundai (Korean car and Japanese tractor – maybe I’m not a very good American after all) but I’m hoping to buy a plow truck this year. So I’ll shoot for a Ford.

But, still, I have this fear of pulling the trigger on my returns (and am too lazy to motivate myself enough to go over them one more time). It’s really more of a fear of the possibility (no matter how remote) of having to deal with the IRS. Or any authority (maybe this is why I’m a mostly “good” person – I don’t actually believe in a god, but on the odd chance that there actually happens to be one, I don’t wanna have to get scolded by him/her) – it’s what keeps me from speeding (much – I do the obligatory five mph over the limit so that I feel like I’m getting away with something) or breaking the law in other ways. I just don’t wanna have to deal with the cops. And I don’t want people coming to my house and ringing the doorbell (fortunately that doesn’t happen all that much out here in the boonies). Basically, if I don’t already know you’re coming, you shouldn’t be coming. And if you ring the bell, there’s about a 5% chance I’ll do anything more than peak out the window and give you the stink eye.

I used to feel that way about the phone, too. I used to tell people, if you’re gonna call me you need to send me an e-mail first to let me know you’re gonna call me. I fixed that by not having a phone anymore. Or at least a landline. The only people that call my cell phone (do they still call them that?) are work or my wife. One I don’t mind talking to and the other I can’t avoid (I’ll let you figure out which is which).

I actually have to “work” today. A bit. They’re upgrading Oracle on one of the database servers from 10g to 11g (which means we’ll only be one version behind, which is actually pretty “bleeding edge” for my particular organization). So once they’re done, I’m supposed to go and check to see if anything’s broken. A real thrill.

Fortunately, I happened to glance at the work calendar, and found that I’m off on Monday. This was a pleasant surprise. I think my original intention was to be able to properly prepare myself to watch SU win the National Championship on Monday night.

Guess I’ll have to find something else to do.

So I was perusing the headlines yesterday, and caught one that said something to the effect of “Marijuana cookie bought in Colo. pot shop blamed in Wyoming student’s suicide jump” which if nothing else is a really long headline. Sounded like bullshit to me, and I didn’t bother to read the story, but I saw another headline today that said “Student Dies in Colorado Fall After Eating Pot Cookie“.

“This was not a suicide, and he was not a regular drug user,” said Michelle Weiss-Samaras, a spokesperson for the Denver coroner’s office.

So, so much for the whole suicide thing. Still, it proves marijuana is a killer. I know I’d feel much better if he’d been drunk when he fell.

Then I was watching the teevee last night and I saw a commercial for something or other that had Jennifer Garner asking, “what if you could shrink your pores just by washing your face?”

Wait, what? Why the hell would I want to shrink the size of my pores? Aren’t they, like, the size they’re supposed to be? Personally, I don’t think you ought to be fiddling with the size of your pores – it could interfere with your ability to sweat.

So you probably heard that SCOTUS did away with the aggregate limits on campaign contributions yesterday. Let’s hear it for our democracy: One Dollar, One Vote.

Oh well, back to work.

Hah! It’s actually April 2nd. Gotcha.

In other news, today was stupid meeting day, and for the first time in longer than I can remember it wasn’t cancelled. These aren’t the type of stupid meetings where you just have to sit there and pretend to be somewhat interested in the proceedings (or at least not start snoring), but the kind that the mid-level mucky muck insists on having so he can grill everybody and make us all feel uncomfortable and hate our lives even more than we ordinarily do. So we’ve been quite happy to have the goddamn things cancelled, but today it appeared that the show would actually go on. This of course led to lots of fear and loathing, and I actually came to work early in order to properly prepare myself for discussing just what the fuck it is I do around here.

Of course mister mid-management was late to the meeting, and it was my hope that I could get my part over with before he showed up, but much to my delight he never showed up. I was torn between relief and pique that he feels he can get us all filled with angst and then not only not show up for the stupid meeting that he insists on scheduling every month, but doesn’t even bother to send an e-mail saying he won’t attend.

Something tells me that if I did that, I’d hear about it.

But, whatever. I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and the stupid meetings are both more comfortable and more productive when it’s “just us” in attendance.

In other news, I happened to go to my LinkedIn page today (because some guy in Mumbai looked at my profile, and I was hoping he was hiring though it would be kind of a long commute) and in the list of “people you might know” or whatever it is that they have there was a guy who was “connected” to me in some convoluted way (like, he worked with some guy I once worked with, but not at the same place I worked at). Anyhow, the amusing part was that I actually know the guy.

By “know” I mean I met him about once, and that happened to be when I was delivering my oldest stepdaughter to his house on the night of the Senior Ball (for the high school I actually graduated from 20 years earlier – though I of course didn’t go to the Senior Ball).

I was pressed into service that night because my wife was working for Hospice or the VNA or some damn thing, and I had to go and meet the parents and take pictures, which was pretty awkward for me, since I was born without social skills.

Hard to believe, but that was almost 16 years ago. Time sure does fly. Except when you’re stuck at work until five o’clock.