Where the red ferns kill mockingbirds. Or something.

Oh. So I totally forgot.

Right.

Well, on Saturday or maybe Sunday ... Friday? I dunno. Anyway, we decided it would be nice to go for a walk around our apartment complex. Normally we walk around the same little trail. The trail goes around the newer construction that we live in as well as the new townhomes they built up that are part of the same area.

But then there's the old part.

About a month after we moved in, the apartment folks sold off the "old" part of the apartment complex. It's probably like, 20+ years old or something. At least it looks that way. I guess it might be like, 10-15, but since they're apartments, they age twice as fast.

Anywho, I wanted to really see where some of the roads went and how vast the older part is. I never knew and never paid attention when I looked at the satellite photos. Mayhaps a shortcut would show up! Or the road or sidewalk would connect to something fun!

So we're walking. And walking. And it's getting uglier and uglier. There are a lot of fountains, though. Asim liked those. And then I see that it just kind of ends. There's a road, but you'd have to cut across the grass. And besides, there's no sidewalk on that road. So Asim's getting a little fussy now, time to head on back. We venture onward, hoping a parking lot will loop back around.
Then Maria freaks out.

Sitting on top of a Dumpster is this giant freakin' coon. Like, huge. About twice the size of Asim. I didn't bother checking Asim's reaction -- I was too busy hauling him and the stroller away from this potentially rabid beast. And the coon just stared at us, like, what? It's the middle of the day, I gotta eat too, you know.

Since parking lot didn't loop around, we rumbled and bumbled through a lot of uncut grass to get back to another parking lot that got us in the right direction. And until we got back to our nicer part of the complex, we scurried quickly past every trash recepticle.

What's interesting here is that there are numerous Dumpsters in the older part of the complex. They are located under the various car ports. However in our newer part, there is only one. It's this giant beast of a compactor. You open the squeaky door, heave stuff in there (I throw stuff in there as hard as I can so it slams off the back wall and echos loudly ... it's even better if there's glass that breaks. Remember we're in a red state. So we don't recycle here.) and after every few openings/closings the thing automatically compacts. It's funny because it draws so much amperage to compact that the street lights around it go out when it starts up.

I haven't seen a coon since Machi and I were walking aimlessly around our hotel in Miami back in 2001. That one was also hanging around the trash.

Plug and play this

So I bought a printer for the ol' iMac.

It's an HP 2600n. I bought this because it's a color laser that's really cheap. $238, including free shipping.

I saw this advertised on Apple's Web site for $399. I thought that since it was on their site, it would work well with my computer. So I went to Amazon to see how much it was there. $241 + $11 S&H. But they stupidly say that it's going to come from Beach Camera. So I went to the Beach Camera site and well, it's only $238 there with free shipping.

It arrived on Friday afternoon.

Three hours after opening it and connecting it, it still wasn't working. If it wasn't for the nice weather and Asim's great smile, I would have thrown this thing out the window. The Mac simply wasn't getting along with it at all. Didn't show up, wouldn't print. Some test pages came out, but other than that, nothing.

When the hell did hooking up a printer get so hard? Isn't this supposed to be plug and play? My iPods were, my cameras were, and now my printers aren't?

I called HP support on Saturday to find out that the unit is a commercial one. So I'd have to call back during the week. I'm not doing that.

I poked around and queried on Apple's forums and got nudged this way and that on help. Nothing has worked, though. I've sort of gathered that maybe HP's updates are lagging behind Apple's OSX operating system.

Here's the strange part, though. When I went back to Beach to see what their return policy was, I noticed that the price had gone up! And they are now charging for shipping and handling. Incidentally, their restocking fee is 10%.

Thus, I will just sell it back on Amazon and hopefully break even.

As per having a printer ... well, I wasn't exactly hard up for one. I just kind of wanted to print out some random photos, blah, blah, blah. So not having one isn't a big deal. I think what I will do is go to the Apple store and see what they have there ... and make them prove to me that what they've got there works with OSX 10.4.9.

In other news, we went to a park near our house on Saturday for Asim's first barbecue. They have those nice outdoor grills that you chuck your own charcoal into. Although it was windy, things eventually worked out, and we enjoyed some nice weather and burgers. There will be some photos of this up soon on the Flickr ...

Also, I haven't given any love to the Diesel Jetta in a while ... so here goes ... this morning when I filled up I set a new record on 14.5 gallons -- 702 miles. The light was on for nearly a half hour and I was getting a little bit nervous. But I think the reserve is 2 gallons. I only had about 40 until the gas station ($2.65 for diesel!).

For my birthday weekend coming up, we'll be heading down to Louisville to hang out with my brother as he house hunts. Memorial Day is a nice long road trip to Lancaster with a possible stop in Pittsburgh if we feel like it. Asim hasn't been, so this might be a good time to show him where he'll be going to school.