In preparation for a family Turkey Day visit, Jen and I have been hard at work cleaning up the Estate, so we decided it would be a good investment to have a cleaning service come in and help us get a leg up on the hard work so that we could concentrate on other important chores. Saturday morning I let four strange women enter our house and buzz around with mops, vacuums, and squeegees while I trapped myself in the basement with the cats in order to stay out of their way. Given that we’re not made of money, it took us both a little time to come to grips with the idea that we were considering paying someone to clean our house, but overall they did a pretty decent job, even if they didn’t mop the baseboards or clean the windowsills as we would have liked. Now we just have to keep everything clean for the next two weeks.

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Now that we’ve got a fancy-shmancy color laser printer, I set up a Yahoo Pipe which scrapes Craigslist for Xerox Phaser supplies in the Baltimore, D.C. area in the hopes that maybe somebody somewhere will be divesting themselves of a bunch of toner cartridges. Please?
Meanwhile, my quest to find a usable service manual for this model has been met with a slew of pay-for-PDF websites, ranging from $5 to $25 in price. Good grief!

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I signed up for Angie’s List last week in order to vet out some local service providers (the houselceaning service being the first). I’d have to say the information is good while the presentation is bad. I did some design and architecture work on a very similar website a number of years ago, and while there are difficult problems to solve with a user content driven site, this one makes that simplest of actions, search, all but impossible to find. I probably should have done the monthly tryout first. Oh, well.

I also signed up for Freecycle this morning in order to get rid of our old kitchen cabinets and some other stuff we’ve been collecting in the basement; I’m going to post some stuff tonight and see if we get any takers. I’d have to say the Freecycle interface is about as helpful as the Angie’s List design.