And I Guess That's Why I Call It the Blue

1. Dave is heading home, and there is great rejoicing! Ainsley may be miffed that she at least has to start the evening in her own bed. For two weeks it's been me, Ainsley, and Madeline bunking together. We have arrived at what Ainsley deems an equitable distribution of space: Ainsley gets two-thirds of the bed; Madeline and I share the remaining third. And if this arrangement seems a bit dodgy, I get the sweet bonus of waking up in the dead of night to find a little arm wrapped around my shoulder or feeling a gentle kiss on my cheek or hearing Ainsley wake up singing, "This is a song about moms! Moms are great!"

Worth the kink in my neck.

Current location of Alaska.

2. Dave's intermittent trips give us a good reason to pull out the atlas and laugh about the original size and location of Alaska (huge, northwest of Washington) which is not to be confused with the current size and location of Alaska (slightly larger than Hawaii, south of California).

HT: Dave Barry, my bud.

3. Tim, who has been burning the midnight oil, to Kolbe: I remember when I was young and carefree like you.

4. Kolbe, quoting Rhett and Link on how to vet a wife: Ask about her favorite movie. If she says 2001: A Space Odyssey, Spaceballs, or any other film with the word "space" in the title, marry her immediately.

5. In an effort to put into practice some of the pointers in Putting Your Best Foot Forward, I did a chemical peel the other day. If you are interested in smoothing out your complexion and embarking on a chemical  peel, please keep in mind two words: chemical and peel. I'm fairly certain the pesky problem I was attempting to fix is gone, but so are patches of my face.

6. Various technological devices under my roof can predict with uncanny precision just how much of a hurry I am in. Anticipating a dramatic and highly entertaining whine-fest, they act up accordingly. The night before last, when Tim was in the final stretch of a chemistry power point presentation, the printer, known hereafter as Printer, pumped out slide after slide until all came to a grinding halt, and Tim muttered something about ink cartridges and shuffled off to bed.

Today I had five pages I needed for my class. A mere five pages. Hoping against hope, I pulled up the document, hit print, and . . .  nothing. Here's the thing about Printer: Printer is old. The error message screen is not as sharp as it used to be, meaning that I can read it only with the aid of my reading glasses and a flashlight. So, glasses and flashlight at the ready, I peered at the error message screen which read Out of Cyan. And all I can think is why, why, why, in the name of all that is holy, must we call this ink Cyan. Now Black is Black. We don't muddy the waters by calling it Midnight or Onyx. No, we call it Black because it's Black. Red, I now know, is Magenta. Why it's not Red, I can not tell you. No one asked for my input. It's Magenta, and I accept this. But Cyan, see, I'm not exactly sure what Cyan is. Is it Yellow or is Yellow Jaune (or is it Jeune? No, Jeune is Young, so Yellow must be Jaune as in Jaundice which mean Yellow, all of which begs the obvious question: Why can't we just call it Yellow?)

I go to the next room where we store computer supplies and dig through a tub full of ink cartridges. And the tub is in a dark, poorly lighted closet, and so I go in search of the handy glasses and flashlight only to find that not one of the packages bears the word Cyan. And so back to the computer I go to Google Cyan so that I can figure out if Yellow is Cyan or if Blue is Cyan. I'm sure everyone reading this is scratching their heads wondering how someone can get this far in life and not understand that Cyan is, in fact, Blue (as Google so helpfully informed me). Why Blue is not called, hmmm, Blue, I do not know. No one asked for my input. I slap Cyan into the slot marked Cyan, close the printer, grab my specs and my flashlight once again, and peer into the error message screen. Did you change a cartridge, Printer asks and helpfully offers three responses:

Press 1 for Yes
Press 2 for Yes,  #$@&%   it!
Press 3 for Cancel 

Kidding, kidding. Printer never swears. Printer leaves that to me.
I press 1, and Printer purrs to life . . . and starts printing page one of Tim's thirty-three page power point presentation.

You know, killing a print job should be easy. Oh, yes, it should. But then again, Red should be Red, and Blue should be Blue. Sadly, we don't live in a just, equitable, or logical world. I figure out how to halt the process somewhere around page twenty-two or twenty-five. Ainsley and John will have months of scrap paper for water colors and pirate maps! Producers of pulp paper and ink cartridges -- those would be the fine folks who dreamed up Cyan and Magenta -- are looking forward to a good quarter. Oh, how they love Science Fairs, 10th grade power point presentations, and challenged individuals like me who don't know their Cyan from their Jaune and can't manage to kill a print job without a loaded firearm.

7. Head over to Jen's to add your Quick Takes.