I'm like a kid with a new toy. I have a color printer. It arrived in my office in a beaten-up cardboard box from the distributor. Made in Malaysia, Singapore, and who knows where-all.

I unpacked all the oddly shaped pieces, the main body, the CDs, the cartridges and cables. Then I very methodically followed the step-by-step directions for assembling, loading the programs and test print out. Each goesinta and comesouta was easy to find (my father was an electrician and that's what he called male and female plugs).

It worked! I printed out the cat picture from www.catoftheday.com as a test and it was beautiful. Then I printed the map from the analysis I've been running on a particular part of the Valley. It is so much easier to grasp the patterns when each section is in a different color, than to try to do the analysis when everything is black lines crisscrossing each other.

It's nearly time to go home, but I'm hanging around, trying to think of something else that really needs to be printed in color (don't want to waste the ink on trivia). Well, I'll ruminate on it overnight and see what else there is. Maybe a single-track calendar and a multi-track calendar?

New tech toys are so much fun.