I’m usually not morose. I wouldn’t say I’m an optimist–that’s Dave’s thing–but generally I’m happy. Yesterday was a black hole.

The main source of my bad mood was an expensive machine. Seems silly, I know, especially since I’m usually so good with machines. I have a mechanical mind and I recognize that they’re mostly just dumb robots doing our exact bidding.

The machine in question is a Microboards DX-2 CD/DVD duplicator and printer. If you’ve ever thought it might be fun to get one, don’t. Or buy mine. I hate it.

We’ve had it a little less than a year. It has never burned and printed more than 5 CDs at a time without my rapt attention to every detail. It is supposed to be able to handle 100s unattended. And yesterday, it broke. Its dumb little robot arms came up before the CD tray opened, the CD tray opened and it was all jammed up. In trying to disengage the arms from the drive and vice versa, I broke one of them off.

Defeated, I dropped the whole mess in Dave’s lap. I’ve tried to get help from Microboards before and had little success. Dave managed to get them on the phone and persuade them to send him a new piece. I have my doubts about whether it will work. It has never worked properly to begin with so I don’t see why it would start now.

I think the thing I hate most is we still owe money on the darn thing. That and it doesn’t work. Did I mention that?

Okay — to recap:

1. Never buy anything from a company called Microboards.
2. Just pay someone else to burn and print your CDs

I’m going to Paris now. Let’s have lunch in that cafe in the Musee d’Orsay.

Ah, I feel better already.

Life has been so crazy lately that I’m taking a moment out of my day to remember that on this day one year ago Dave and I were hiking in the mountains above Meiringen, Switzerland.

It was a gorgeous autumn day. We had lunch at the top of the mountain — Roesti with Gorgonzola cheese and a sunnyside-up egg. Talk about comfort food!

We were gone for about 10 days in all last October and traveled from Paris to Geneva, Bern, Meiringen, Lucerne and Zurich. I spent my 45th birthday in Paris. At the end of the day, we decided to go up the Eiffel tower on the spur of the moment. It was a bit foggy so we couldn’t see much beyond the Louvre, but it was still wonderful.