Make room for new toys!

Ack! Have I mentioned how small our place feels these days? It's like when you decide to get your hair cut, suddenly it's in your eyes every five minutes!

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A couple of weeks ago, we offered to review a Brother printer and it arrived yesterday in a very big box. After walking around the elephant in the room for a couple of hours, I asked Hubby, "So, where are we going to set it up?"

Unfortunately the only real answer was "the office" although in the past year it has metamorphosed from a computer-centric workspace to a sewing room/storage room/clutter magnet. Aside from cleaning/rearranging things, we would have to carry the 30 kg (66 lb) box up two flights of stairs.

I started by hauling out a few things that no longer needed to be there -- a spare office chair (which causes much pain to all who choose to sit for longer than 2 minutes), an aluminum step-ladder, an empty plastic CD-case (three drawers surrounded in lovely faux-wood mac-tac), and a small bag of garbage. Then I rearranged a few things until there was a space big enough to accommodate the printer. I also tidied Hubby's desk (or rather, found the desktop), and shuffled a few more things (including a booster seat and Halloween decorations) into hiding.

The next task was to set up the printer on the network, though the hardest part was following the 1-2-3 instructions for loading the toner -- the label for step 3 was inside the printer! However, once that was done, it was pretty straightforward to set up and I also managed to install the drivers on my computer and print to it.

The printer we got to review is the Brother HL-4070CDW which is a full-colour laser printer with a built-in duplexing unit. It retails for about CDN$650/US$500 and we get two months to put it through as many tests as we can imagine.....

I will definitely be printing the insides of my Coffee Haiku books (a project which has been on the back burner since August due to our crappy Cannon printer and its inability to print clean copy twice in a row), Christmas-themed stuff, some knitting and sewing patterns I've bookmarked "to print later," more Cuppajoe Cozy labels, some Creative Miscellany bumf, and maybe even a zine, you know, if I get bored.

So, expect a full review of the Brother sometime after Christmas. Until then, let me know if you need anything printed.