Hard-won knowledge, human and squirreline

So I had to scan and print some documents, important stuff for the HOA, and there's tax season coming up where you can't get the forms from the IRS any more. You have to go online, download and print.

So Handsome Son and I got to work last night  scanning and printing.  The scanning went just fine. The printing hardly went at all.  All the hardware worked fine, all the little lights and beeps and machines talking to each other.  But the printing was so faint it wasn't there.  

Many workarounds later, involving two sets of cartridges and two printers, and adjustments to the software, and all the permutations thereof, and still no success, I said to HS I didn't want to waste any more of his time, I'd postpone the printing until I got my temper back and tempered my language somewhat.

Then it occurred to me that the printer and scanner setup is in a room that gets colder than the rest of the house.  And when I had my downstairs fireplace insert working to warm the place, the thermostat didn't come on for ages.  

The houseplants upstairs love this, they don't mind a bit of cool, but I wondered if the actual ink in the cartridges had gone thick and slow, like oil in a cold engine...hm.  Anyway, I brought them downstairs overnight, and tried again to print this morning, and it actually worked. Such a low tech solution to what we both assumed was a high tech problem.  Throwing our energies into the wrong place.

Where the squirrel comes in is that the other day, you'll recall I caught him knocking down and dragging away the suet holder and being foiled by the fence and the weight of the suet block.  I put another cake of suet out, separately, which he quickly found and tried to swipe.  Again too heavy for him to get under or over the fence.  So he abandoned it.

This morning crowds of birds at the big suet block he'd abandoned and forgotten, while the squirrel applied his whole strength to yanking around the almost empty holder, tossing it, stamping on it, throwing it around gnawing on it to open it, and seemingly unaware of the whole free block of the stuff three feet away there for the taking...

As I watched him this morning, probably cursing in squirrelese, I thought, yeah, I know you you feel!