a December 23rd, 2010

  1. The Christmas Lifesaver

    December 23, 2010 by myeye

    For Christmas I bought myself a dog blow dryer.  I’ve needed one forever, but until I moved to the boonies, had access to a grooming facility with high speed dryers and grooming tables and raised tubs and all that great stuff.  Now it is more than an hour away and I can only use it when the grooming day is done — 4:00 or so.  I needed to make some adjustments.  In one of the bathrooms at the Los Lunas house I added a hand-held shower head on an 8-foot long water hose, but the people hair dryer does not work on Cardis — unless you and the dog have lots to talk about.  So the dog dryer was on the list and I decided a couple of weeks ago it was MY Christmas list that it was on.  I found one that didn’t pull too much amperage (trying not to blow the breaker switches too often) and is bright green.  So, it’s at the house waiting for Holmes and the puppies.

    That’s not really what this post is about though.  It’s about how long a commute I created.  It’s about not getting home in time to watch the early news and falling asleep before the 10:00 news.  It’s about having so much to do in the morning that I haven’t read the entire newspaper since I moved the end of September.  The answer is to work from home a couple of days a week.  The problem I’ve encountered is that although I can remote in to my work computer and pull up documents that I created, I couldn’t see the paper files that contain anything created by anyone else.  So, for Christmas, my firm gave itself a Fujitsu SnapScan S1500.  It’s cute and compact.  It scans both sides of documents at once, can scan color or black and white, can scan the documents as searchable .pdf or convert them to Xcel or Word.  It’s able to scan 1000 pages a day.  So, my high school helper will start next week running my files through the scanner.  In addition to making my “work at home two days a week” dream come true, it will permit me to store closed files on CDs or DVDs instead of in banker boxes.  The scanner will pay for itself in cost of gasoline in no time at all.  Isn’t it cute?

    Opened Up — just needing to be plugged in to power and a USB port

    . . . and here it is closed up: 7″ x 11-1/2″ x 6″ H

    I know it’s not as cool as a bright green dog blow dryer, but I think this puppy will make my work life (and my home life) so much better.

    Merry Christmas to me!