Black Scallops

.

I took this with my camera, as you can tell from the shadow of my arm appearing in the lower right corner. More about the scanner later. But first - aren't these cool?? I'm so happy with them. While sitting at a show earlier this year, staring at my wall of Sticky Notes, I decided I really like the stitching best on black or white so I've been focusing on those colors lately. I won't be doing these exclusively but this is what I've been working on lately. These lend themselves to a multitude of notepad covers which will provide all kinds of colors.

So about the scanner. Sunshyn left a comment yesterday about maybe I had switched to the Vista operating system and that's why my all-in-one Epson scanner is having difficulties. I was pretty sure I was using Windows XP but I did take a moment to confirm that. The reason I was momentarily confused is that I had originally thought my laptop was going to come with Vista, which was fine with me. I know you can pay for a downgrade to Windows XP because I've seen it on our customers' invoices. As I got started using my new laptop, I forgot about it - until I saw a Vista recovery CD in my laptop's CD collection. I asked the guy at work who purchased this for me. We both thought it was going to be Vista, but it's clearly XP.

Secondly, I took Sunshyn's advice and Googled my problem. First hit was FixYa.com with my exact problem listed! I thought I'd hit gold but the solution was to reinstall the software, which I've already done several times. I read a bunch more stuff and ended up posting my own problem. I can't find the info now to confirm, but I think you can pay one price for unlimited questions or a one-time price for one question, which you don't pay for ($12.99) until it's resolved (and you click accept). The categories range from soup to nuts - looks like a great site. You too, can be an expert, if so inclined & capable.

I eagerly checked my email later last night - the response was I should download new drivers from epson.com. Been there, done that. Still, I went through the download section meticulously, and downloaded everything listed under my Epson model for XP, even if it didn't look like it was related specifically to scanning. Still no change.

So I wrote back that information and added that I'd gone through the trouble shooting steps and where I got stuck there. Maybe that will yield something.

I cannot believe how stuck this is making me feel. I really need to move on with other projects but this is bugging me big-time. I used Steve's scanner this morning but it automatically sends the jpg to Snapfish or some stupid thing. I didn't want to deal with figuring out how to do it differently so I whipped out my digital camera and took the above shot.

Speaking of the digital camera - you may remember how pleased I was to see that I can stick my camera's memory card directly into my new laptop and voila - pictures! Note to self: don't forget to take the memory card out of the laptop and put it back in the camera, especially when you're on vacation. :-) Yup, that's what I did - left the memory card in the laptop in the motel room. Luckily the photographs I wanted to take weren't earth-shattering but it was a good lesson, one I have not forgotten since.

.