Coming Soon-A Picture of Me! (& Printer Talk)

Well, I decided to spend the big bucks and get a photo taken of myself to put up in my sidebar.

Yes, I went to Wally World and spent the whole $4.88 to get the special photo deal done to have my picture taken in true frugalite fashion. Well, I guess it would have been even more frugal to have Yankee Bill or a friend take a photo here in the house or something, but I figured I could spring for the $5.

So the pictures should be back in a week or so. We did have to buy a new printer for the house a week ago, no matter what we did we just couldn’t coax any more life out of our old one. We decided to spring for the copier/scanner/printer type so I’ll be able to scan the picture in. Yankee Bill and I decided the scanner/copier option was worth it because we refuse to buy the expensive school portrait packages that come home with Buddy and Princess, we always get the least expensive ones, and this way we can make a few copies for the Christmas letters etc with the scanner. (Lets face it, most folks just look at the picture and toss it after cooing over how much the kiddos have grown. If you are lucky they get a starring spot on the fridge for a month or so first). And no, I didn’t actually do the math, it was more of a general “I get the feeling it will work out to be worthwhile” sort of thing.

The old printer will only semi reliably print out in black (which sometimes fades to odd shades of pink and blue no matter what we do) so we will use that one for our scrap printing until it dies and use the new one for things that need to be “nice”. Luckily for us the old one runs on a serial port and the new one runs on a com port (or is it vice versa? YB hooked them up).

If anyone is curious, this is the printer we bought.

I actually did go to 123inkjets and price compare the cost of replacement ink cartridges on all the printers we were looking at and then compare that to the average number of pages per cartridge-that’s how we picked this particular model as being a decent deal. You have to watch that with printers-sometimes the models that are very inexpensive to buy have very expensive ink cartridges. They lure you in with the cheap price, you think you are going to get a deal-then the first time you go to buy ink you almost have a heart attack! I also like buying a printer that has individual color cartridges so you can just replace what runs out, and not have to throw out all the colors just because the blue is running down. This particular printer has 5 colors, not just 3, and prints photos that are AMAZING (which is wonderful since we rarely use regular emulsion photographs anymore).

Go here for an old article on saving money on printer cartridges, and here for an idea to save money on paper.