In some ways today has been a great success - in others not so much
Had a nice time out and sourced some good stuff, but then I decided I couldn't bear my printer any longer. I have an Epson printer and the quality is absolutely superb. Seriously superb. It has a designated photo black and I have never seen photos like it. Stunning. When it works!
The trouble is that sometimes, and there is no rhyme or reason, it dumps lumps of ink on a photo as it prints and then smears it everywhere. It must be the photo black as it only ever does it on photos bever ever on anything else. We clean it, we love it, we pander to its needs but still, it throws these oddities and it really annoys me. The only thing it ever really prints is photos.
So we tried, against our better judgement, an HP Photo Envy largely as the deal with ink was so good and because it was half price at PC world. We asked two people, independently, about what we would do if the photo quality was poor as there was no way we could see an example of the print and both said we could return it if the quality was not what we wanted. Fair enough.
We bought it.
Problem one - much larger so we will need to reconfigure the studio. That I could just about live with
Problem two - it's rubbish. The print quality is so much poorer than the Epson. The blacks are flat and matt not glossy and it is something I cannot live with.
Oh deep joy - I can't wait for the 'no, of course, you cannot return it' conversation tomorrow.
So printer disaster we then decided to hit the garden to clear some stuff before the rains came at the weekend. We pay good money for our green waste bin - we are going to use it!
We trimmed the bushes we were aiming to trim - a nice easy job with some secateurs, and then Nigel started pulling a dead bit. And another, and then another and then we went and fetched the chainsaw.
I am guessing gardening with a chainsaw is never a plus.
However, we revealed a whole new part of the garden we had never seen! It was at least a foot deep in 30 years worth of pine needles and there is now a massive hole int he garden right through to the pine trees at the back, but the stuff was all dead and we also managed to find and remove a vine sort of thing that had wrapped itself round everything for years. We pull it out every year and we now think we found the source. Bottom dead branches of pine trees sawn off and we now just need to break it all down and do 97 trips to the tip!!!
The sad thing is we found an egg on the ground. I am not sure if we dislodged it - there was no sign of a nest so it may have just fallen out of a nest or we might had jogged the tree it was in. It was quite large and white and looks - from t'internet' to be a wood pigeon egg. I like our pigeons. I have never gotten over the fact that they mate for life and when a goshawk took one of them in our garden (and ate it whilst sat on our barbecue) the other mourned for a week, not leaving the garden. So now not only have we seen one of the pair killed, but having found a new mate we have now seen one of its potential babies killed.
We were shattered and so filthy. Having now showered and surveyed the 'damage' we may possibly have been a bit brutal.
I have new scrapping to share - pages made for challenges on UKS this week.
This was made for the twisted scraplift challenge and is yet another for the Gone with the wind album. The arch perfectly showcased around the old courthouse in St Louis.
and this celebrates the 28 pages I made for the week of National Scrapbook Day. Even by my standards 28 paper pages was quite some going in a week.
Today I am thankful for
- finishing - we'd both had enough. We only went out to do a little light pruning. We have 8 black bin bags of pine needles plus what looks like another eight of trees we need to cut up. Some are 8" in diameter so hefty stuff.
