Okay, we’re up and running again here at jverse.com. Hope you like the new site! There are still Photo Galleries to correct, Art Galleries and a Videos page to build, but the long, detailed slog to perfection may be long and detailed.
Instead of waiting, I decided it was time to pull the trigger.
Bam. We’re live. It’s a go. Thanks for coming. Please kick the wheels and press the buttons and let me know what you think… keeping in mind that the Videos, Art, and Photo Gallery pages ain’t all there yet.
Here’s my bonus fun for you today:
It’s a horror story, kids. Sit down and grab your flashlights. Here’s how it starts. We have two computers in our house. First there’s my laptop, which is virginal and pristine, never connecting with the net or games or any program except MS Word. It’s where I write. Second is our 2TB desktop PC, which is chock full of Angry Birds, mp3 action, and other goodies. It’s also the only machine with a printer, a Brother 2200 laser printer.
The Brother is a workman-like beast. It doesn’t do color. It churns out receipts and fat manuscripts for us because I prefer to line edit on hard copy. That’s right. What a Neanderthal. But I see things on paper that escape me on a screen, and I spend waaaay too much time in front of computers every day. It’s nice to take a print-out to the couch or outside.
Occasionally the workman-like beast is prone to jamming. Yesterday I tried to print a block of 50 pages and it hummed and whined and failed. Jammed again, I thought. So I opened the tray and reached in without looking. My eyes were on the prompt window on the computer monitor.
!!!!!SOMETHING SQUIRMED AGAINST MY FINGERS!!!!!
“What the hell?” I muttered.
I leaned away from the computer and glancing into the printer… where I found a wood beetle as fat as my thumb… AS FAT AS MY THUMB… skittering inside the paper tray with its nasty antennae lashing in confusion…
“Geeeeeeeeeeee!” I shrieked like a four-year-old Barbie, ripping my hand from the machine.
Fortunately, this desk sits in our living room. I yanked a handful of paper and bug from the printer, threw open the back door, hucked everything onto the patio, grabbed a spare shoe, and WHACK WHACK WHACKED the yellow mushy guts out of the foul beast. Holy crap on a stick does a wood beetle as big as your thumb have a lot of goo inside it.
Now the big question. How does something as big as your thumb get inside a printer that has no openings larger than a 1/8″ seam?
Could it have come inside a ream of paper as a larva? Grown inside our printer for days or weeks, dancing madly not to get sucked up into its gears each time I printed a file?
Rod Serling, are you there???