Two Good Reasons For Not Having Children

Reason Number One:

Because then it might actually be weird that we treat our pets like our kids.

Last night Brad and I faced our fears and finally attempted to give Francine a bath in the World's Smallest Bathroom with the World's Worst Plumbing. That bathroom, by the way, is ours. It is so small that it doesn't even have a sink. There is just enough room to step in, close the door and stand in front of both the toilet and the bathtub at the same time. On the up side, it is pink . . .

Anyway, this bathtub I speak off devours an entire bottle of Draino Max about once a month just to keep draining, sort of. So you can inmagine our fear of what all the doggie hairs could do to that drain. Until last night we would give Francine baths, whenever we had the chance, during visits to my parent's house. This proved to be less-than-practical because it was both infrequent and a big mess in their bathroom.

Turns out that thanks to a new hair-catcher in our tub drain, the doggie hair wasn't a problem. The real challenge was fitting Francine, Brad and myself into the bathroom while trying to simultaneously wash the dog, hold her down in the tub and keep her from shaking the shampoo (and hair) off and all over the walls.

This is Francine being very tolerant of the two things she hates most, baths and photos:



Of course, afterwards we had to treat her like the little princess she is for being such a good girl in the bathtub. So we toweled her off, gave here a greenie chew to brush her teeth with and then encouraged her to snuggle up for a nice, clean nap on our bed.

Did I mention we refer to ourselves as Mommy and Daddy in front of the pets?






Reason Number Two:

Because then we might have guilt for buying new babies like this one;
The Epson Stylus Photo R1800.

Now, Brad and I had been comtemplating buying an archival photo printer for some time now, being that we take as many digital photos as we do. Mostly, however, we had been considering an affordable 4"x6" - or even an 8.5"x11" printer. We had dreamed of the oversized of course, but knew in our hearts (at least I did anyway) that they were realisticly out of our budget.

Brad told me that he though we had "pretty much decided" on the 1800 - which prints 13"x19" photos (!!!) - when he ordered it online from work last week and called me afterwards to tell me of the purchase. What Brad had not done was see the monster in person, so he had no idea that is is absolutely ENORMOUS. Have I mentioned how small our apartment is?


To give you some perspective, our old printer was about 16"w x 7"d x 7"h. The new printer is 24"w x 12"d x 10"h, about 6x bigger than my head (which is huge), and that's when it's closed up. It's also so heavy that I had to have the UPS delivery guy carry it up the stairs for me.

With this new baby we can print huge, arhcival prints from our digital photos, which is very cool (even if it does break the bank - savings-shmavings). The geeky catch, that Brad informed me of yesterday, is that our 5megapixel camera is maxed out to print about 11"x14" without losing quality. So now we need to buy a better digital camera. Also, as I mentioned earlier, Brad had no idea that the printer would be so big. Because of this, he says he needs to purchase a flat screen monitor too, to accomodate the space for it - even though it's on a shelf above MY computer on MY side of the office. (Hmmmmmm . . . maybe I just don't speak geek.)