Catchy Name Needed

I spent most of the day playing with our new color printer/copier/scanner/fax... magic machine that we got at work. I say "playing" but it wasn't entirely voluntary - I knew the new printer was coming sometime this week, and we had told them the sooner the better, since our old color HP has been dying a slow, ugly death for a good while now, and I really think it's not much longer for this world. (It took it all afternoon to print 10 copies of a not-very-big set of graphs, the other day.) All this happened in the middle of trying to work on a presentation, too - suddenly the Xerox guy calls, a little before 10, and says he and the tech will be there in an hour. We've been trying to get this printer since sometime last summer, but it took forever to get it approved and everything, so I think nobody really believed it was coming. So then I was running around in a panic, since we only had sort of a vague idea where we were putting it, and certainly we hadn't actually prepared for it to show up. (Where we were putting it was dictated by where the fax line was, actually, unless we want to spend money getting a new phone line run to the place where the old printer was.) There was a large cabinet in the appointed spot, and I had to get everything out of the cabinet - mostly reams and reams of paper - so that the cabinet would be light enough to move. I promise you, it hasn't moved an inch in the last, oh, seven or eight years. But once empty, it moved fairly easily. I eventually shoved it out of the way myself. The new printer is as tall as the old one but not as bulky. It would be much less bulky if it didn't have that whole copier/scanner apparatus on top of it - but it will certainly be handy to have. It prints fairly noisily - and it is too near my boss' office, I don't think she's going to like that part of it - but much, much faster than the old one ever did. And it duplexes. The thing is practically magic, I tell you.

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holidailies

My weekend up north got me thinking about air conditioning. Now, air conditioning is an amazing thing, don't get me wrong. Life in this climate wouldn't be tolerable without it. If you live up north, you may not fully understand this. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, who has a choice lives without air conditioning down here. It would just be insane.

(Having never lived outside of Texas, it took me a long time to understand that there are parts of the world where air conditioning is considered optional. The first time karen_d came down to visit me, she said something about renting a car with air conditioning, and I laughed. Because down here, you can't rent a car that doesn't have it. They all do.)

I was driving down the freeway today, and I rolled my window down some, because my air conditioning is being sort of cranky and right now we're still at the point where the outside air is sort of tolerable anyway - at least when you're hurtling down I-45 at 70 mph. What I immediately noticed was how much noise certain vehicles make. Pickups with diesel engines (very popular in these parts) and motorcycles seem to be the biggest offenders. And I was wondering if they get away with this partly because everybody is driving around with the windows up and the a/c blasting anyway, so they don't notice.

We tend to live in our own little worlds around here, at least this time of year. All over the southern half of this country, people go rushing from their air-conditioned houses to their air-conditioned cars, from their cars to the stores, with as little time outside as humanly possible. I'm not exactly advocating that we all stop and smell the roses or anything, you understand, because frankly, it's hard to enjoy smelling the roses when it's 95 degrees and 80% humidity. And it doesn't take but a few minutes of that before you smell a lot stronger than the roses yourself. But there's got to be some side effects of living in the bubble that we're not really aware of.

(I don't know if there's any real point to this little rumination. I was just thinking.)