Christmas tree tomfoolery + toy testing...

Isn't that a fun word...tomfoolery?

Today was bittersweet.

• Bitter: it was the last day of my Fall semester class. I had a great class and I hope the students go on to be public speaking rock stars. Or at least resist the urge to say "um" 30 times in 5 minutes.
• Sweet: I only had 11/17 students come to class and give their last speech today, so class let out early and I stayed on campus for a couple hours afterward to turn in my final grades.
• Bitter: I only had 11/17 students come to class to give their last speech today, so I had to give out some zeros.
• Sweet: Once I left campus, I came home for lunch and toy testing (more on that later). Our Christmas cards and some other print products arrived while I was gone, so opening the packages was like...Christmas?
• Double sweet: Our Christmas cards are addressed and ready for postage. While I was finishing them, Dan and I watched/listened to a Craig Lyons performance on Second Life.
• Bitter: There are a handful of cards that I don't have addresses for yet.
• Sweet: Dan and I had the final drawing for our monogram canvas giveaway.
• Bitter: I wish I could have given all of the participants a canvas.
• Sweet: We chose two winners instead of one. The giveaway was a lot of fun and I hope we can do something like it again soon.

Back to that Christmas tree tomfoolery. While I was busy cleaning our upstairs office last night, Dan was busy making our tree look like something out of Star-Trek.


And here is the reason I was cleaning the office and toy testing. This thing is huge. Actually, I don't think "huge" does it justice. It's at least two feet wide. I bought it a couple weeks ago after going back and forth about the purchase, and just received it yesterday. I've wanted a wide-format printer for a while and I was persuaded by a mail-in rebate—which turned into an instant rebate, but that's a story for another day. Meet the Epson R2880.



I printed a few things today and messed around with color profiles to test out the color. It's really make-or-break whether this new printer can print our business colors correctly, and overall print as close to actual colors as possible. We already have three printers from over the years that don't come close to printing our business colors correctly—that wasn't the objective when we got them (or inherited them by marriage). The only one that does is our laser printer, but sometimes I just need an ink-jet. Call me picky... crazy... whatever. I'm excited. I'll keep you posted.