Love/Hate Relationship

I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to computers, digital photography and imaging, desktop publishing and printing. I love the artistic process. I adore writing, designing, embelishing; most of the time, the hours I'm in front of a computer just fly by.

Tonight the hours have flown by, but not by choice. I am so tired right now, I could just lean back in my office chair and be gone, out like a light. But I can't sleep, because I still have the second side of 100 wedding programs to print. At this rate, I'll be lucky to have them all done by the time the father of the bride picks them up here at 8:30am. This has turned into one of those marathon jobs from the very pits of...Well, maybe not that bad, but right now I'm not in the best of humor.

The creative process was a blast and I'm pleased with the final product, but I've had problems with my Epson Stylus Photo 820 printer all night long. It's just not made for jobs like this - so many pages at a time for so long a time.

I've figured out I can only safely load 5 pages of this Gartner's program card stock in at a time, and I must be right there to make sure it doesn't misfeed. For, when it does misfeed, I end up having to run the nozzle cleaner on the printer several times before I can get prints that are crisp and not goobered up somehow (like that technical term?).

Even running the printer in high-speed mode (where it prints on both the forward and return passes across the paper), I've been printing since about 10:00pm, so almost six hours. And there's still side B to print on the backs of these originals. I've printed extras. Thank God he bought many extra pages!

I would KILL for a Kinko's or other all-night printshop. At this point, I'd pay them to run copies onto the program stock for me. Alas, our one such all-night business closed a couple years ago. Some day, if I really want to do desktop publishing on a legitimate scale, I will have to get a decent printer. It's too expensive to outsource that kind of work, and our home printers - even the good ones - are never up to the task. It just ends up being frustrating and crazy-making.

*Yawn*

So...Here I sit, babysitting the printer and mindful that I don't have to work tomorrow. I'm very thankful for that! It's not that I resent doing the job -- not at all. I really am happy to do things like this for people because it's my thing, you know? I enjoy having an outlet for it and get really pumped when people are pleased with something I've done just for them.

I just hate computer and printer problems. And this is far less stressful than the night before a morning wedding. I'm very happy in my shoes, thank you. :)

To her credit, Pangie stayed here and played games online with me, humoring me and keeping me sane. Brave girl! Actually, we found a funny game over at PopCap - PsychoBabble. You know those magnetic words you can buy to put on your fridge? This game has people arranging the same groups of words into sentences, then the participants vote on the funniest uses of the words. It's a riot!

But even Pangie flagged; she finally had to go home and snuff out her eye candles for a few hours before her nephew's ball game later this morning. Thanks, Pangie - I appreciate your hanging around as long as you did, and thanks for the backrub!