For Kelly

This blog is dedicated to my loving son, Kelly Ditto, because he cares about such things (and it might be a good idea to have a record of my office when it was clean once in history).

And there's more to the story than just being clean.

Perhaps you noticed the big black box behind my desk and were wondering what it is. Well, that's my Kodak ML-500 commercial photo printer. Yes, I'm now competing with Costco. Well, not exactly, but it does mean I can print up to 8x12s without driving to Costco to do it and it prints 8x12s in 13 seconds (5x7s in 6 seconds and 4x6s before you can blink). Not only that, the prints are professional quality, in every way as good as lab photos. You may be asking, "wasn't that a little extravagant? Well, yes, but not as bad as you might think. You know me. The machine retailed for $25k. It is rated for life use by "feet" of paper and is rated at 250k feet. It has 30k feet on it which means I can print about 300,000 5x7s before it dies (at a mark up of $10 per print that means it can generate $3,000,000 in revenue). Well, anyway, I bought it from this super nice guy in Texas who runs a photography studio and uses these machines and bought 50 of them from WalMart photo or somewhere so he'd never have to worry again about printers. He kept 6 and sold the rest. Oh, he sold me mine, with $400 worth of paper and dye, and a dell computer to run it with XP pro and the drivers installed, for $2300. Yes, two thousand three hundred. I know, itis still a lot of money, but last week I generated $1,000 in photo revenues and next week I'm already scheduled for $2,ooo so it will be worth it!

Also, perhaps you noticed that there is a monitor on my desk. Jeanne has been on me for quite a while about getting another monitor in my office so when people come in to look at their pictures they won't have to crowd around the monitor on my computer desk. I've been putting it off because monitors are expensive and I'm the cheapest man in the whole world. So, yesterday, Emily and I went to Costco to do Sunday dinner shopping and there was a monitor, "display only" on close out for $199. I took it as a sign, since it was the very day I was cleaning my office and bought it. On returning home it was discovered that the monitor has a base unit that allows one to rotate it 360 degrees on its base. Absolutely perfect for its intended use.

Thanks to Annie for teaching me about little miracles (and big ones as well!).