One of these days…

Since David and I have been married, we have found ourselves on occasion saying, “One of these days _____ (fill in the blank with any item/action that does not lend itself to our current phase of life/budget).” For example, one of these days: -we’ll buy ‘dry clean only’ clothes -we won’t have to adjust the rabbit ears every time we change the channel -we’ll tip generously -we’ll fly on an airline other than Southwest (and use the skycap service even though they charge a fee) -we’ll eat out at a restaurant for which we DON’T have a coupon -we'll run the ‘dry’ cycle on the dishwasher without worrying about the added energy expense -we’ll hire a legitimate landscaping company rather than using our “amigos”

Well, we had another one of those moments this week. David needed to send out his graduation announcements and rather than buying labels which are expensive (“one of these days we’ll buy labels for our envelopes”) we decided to print the addresses directly on the envelopes. I’ve done this for the last couple of years with our Christmas cards and it works pretty well as long as I don’t feed more than 5 envelopes at a time into our ghetto printer. Well, David’s envelopes were a bit fancier, made of thick paper, and half the size of the envelopes I’ve printed on in the past. We couldn’t get the printer to feed them through and kept getting a “paper jam” notice accompanied by an obnoxious error beep each time we tried. After 10 minutes of hearing that annoying beep from the printer, the tension was mounting.

David wanted to just hand-write them, but I was bound and determined to get it to work. “Ah-hah! I have just the tool!” I went to the kitchen and grabbed a fondue fork. The two-pronged design lent itself beautifully to shoving the envelope through until the printer caught it. However, each of the 49 envelopes (50-1 that was destroyed in the trial and error process) had to be fed individually. The sequence: David clicks on the mail merged address, opens the print function, clicks ‘print selection’ and hovers the cursor precariously over the ‘OK’ button awaiting my signal. In the meantime, I load the envelope and position the fondue fork precisely in the center ensuring a balanced feed and give the signal, “Go.” And on to the next envelope.

So, in summary, one of these days we’ll have a printer that doesn’t require use of a fondue fork to feed the envelopes! In the meantime, we’re having some good laughs.

A photo capturing the intricacies of positioning the envelope. What concentration!