Saturday was my 39th birthday. As birthday weekends go, it was one of the better ones.

We spent Saturday with my Mom. As per tradition, Mom and I went out shopping. Mom has been taking me on clothes-buying sprees for my birthday for as long as I can remember. Now she works for [Macy’s](http://www.macys.com). Woo hoo for the 20% employee discount! For me, getting dressed means putting on shoes but I will have to go to Washington, DC for meetings so I picked up some slacks and nice tops. Comfy things that I can wear on the train yet still look kinda professional.

Mom’s printer died while I was there. Wasn’t it nice for the thing to wait until I was there to stop working? It was an [Epson](http://www.epson.com) printer that she got for free with her iMac when she bought it from MacWarehouse. I can’t stand Epson printers. I had an Epson printer (Stylus 740) that I junked after a few months, Eric had an Epson printer that lasted maybe a year. Temperamental. Constant clogged print heads. On Mom’s printer, the black just decided to stop printing. New cartridge didn’t fix. 3 cleaning cycles didn’t fix. So Eric and I ran out to [Staples](http://www.staples.com) and spent $90 on a [HP 5740](http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/product_detail.do?storeName=storefronts&landing=printers&category=inkjets&subcat1=see_all&catLevel=2&product_code=C9016A%23B1H) for her. She doesn’t need anything big or complicated. Just a simple printer for mostly text files. I have always been very happy with HP printers. My 4 year old [HP 995C](http://search.hp.com/query.html?col=a3x80+b3x80+c3x80+c3x8765+d3x80+d3x8765&charset=iso-8859-1&hpvc=US+-+main&la=en&qs=&lk=1&rf=0&uf=1&nh=10&st=1&qt=HP+Deskjet+995c+Printer&ocoldqt=deskjet+995c&oc=34006) is still going strong. It prints via Bluetooth, shares nicely between all computers (Mac and PC, although the PC driver is heads and shoulders better than the Mac version). It’s fast, duplexes and has **never** had a paper jam. It has an immediate “cancel” button on the printer. Hit the button and the job stops. It will spit out whatever page it was working on and clear the job from the print queue. Fantastic for when you start a 30 page print job and find a typo on the 2nd page. To many printers will buffer up information and won’t “hear” the cancel command until a few pages have printed (or you clear the memory by turning the machine on and off).

Today we saw [Cookin’](http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/cookin116.htm) in Manhattan. It was *so* much fun. The girls loved it. At one point, Emily was laughing so hard I was grateful that I insisted she go to the bathroom before the show started. It’s Iron Chef meets Stomp! meets the Marx Brothers/3 Stooges. Little did we know that the show closed today. We saw the 2nd to last performance. For one of the final big numbers, the performers grab 4 people from the audience to participate and [Eric](http://www.9to5andotherwise.com) got pulled! He had a great time.

Here’s a picture of us with the cast:

And in the “it’s a small world” department…after the show I noticed out of the corner of my eye that someone was waving to in our direction from the other side of the theatre. Turns out it was my first cousin and her son! They realized we were there when they recognized Eric on stage. She lives about an hour north of Manhattan, we live in New Jersey and we happened to be seeing the same Off Off Broadway show at the same time. We live in a crazy world.