I had a tech-wiz kind of evening tonight.

Our living room/kitchen has only one phone jack, on the wall by the refrigerator, which is kind of inconvenient if the phone rings while you’re sitting on the couch watching television. So, since the phone I have in my room is satellite-capable phone, and I could get one of its satellites–which only needs an electric jack, not a phone jack–for only $15, I did. It came yesterday, I charged it overnight, and programmed it so now it recognizes the base as the source of the actual phone number.

Then, I don’t know if you knew, but I don’t have a printer. I sit in my room with my laptop and if there’s anything I need to print, I send it to Mom or Dad (depending on whether it needs color), and they print it for me. Except–(1) their offices and their printers are now two flights down and (2) I AM trying to get a writing business going, and being able to, well, print stuff seems like a plus. So, I bit the bullet this weekend and took advantage of the Black Friday deals at Amazon and got this nice laser printer, a Brother HL-2170 wireless-capable printer.

Only, when I tried to set it up … well, it recommends that, even though it’s wireless, that you do the initial setup with it connected to the router with a cable. So, I carried it downstairs and plugged it in behind Mom’s computer–but then I couldn’t get it to install on Mom’s pc. Hmm. So, I went and got my laptop, figuring that it was more important to get it attached to this  one anyway, and besides, it’s newer. And it installed with no trouble, so yay. Then I just had to make four trips up and down the two flights to get the printer and computer back upstairs, where I then also installed the printer on my netbook. (Yay for wireless.)

What else? Let’s see. There was the broken toilet that wouldn’t flush. I fixed that, too.

The one that hurt, though? The dvd-recorder downstairs. Understand, this is not a DVR. It’s a dvd-recorder with a hard-drive. The dvd-recorder part, though? Well, it stopped doing the actual recording part a few months ago, but it still at least played other dvds, and, well, the harddrive was still working to record things. But then, tonight? I put a dvd in to watch tonight and it wouldn’t load.

Okay, that actually happened a week or so ago, but the fix that worked then (unplugging the thing and rebooting) didn’t work. As soon as the power was on, it would try to load the disk. It wouldn’t open, it wouldn’t switch to the harddrive, nothing. So … I unplugged it and unscrewed the cover and more or less physically dragged the dvd out of the drive. I don’t dare put another dvd in there, but at least without a disk, it’s not trying to load one, and we’ve got access to the hard-drive again.

Just … no dvd player. Sigh. And we just got Castle’s’ season one, too. Why does it seem like so many things are breaking all at once? (Knock wood.)

The worst part? I didn’t get to knit tonight, because I was too busy fighting with the dvd-recorder.

Oh well. I’m still pretty chuffed that I got all four of those things working today.

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