Marks on paper still matter. Books on paper still matter. But there are alternatives and some of them fit our needs better at times.
With many cameras and phones and tablets, it is possible to quickly make a video with sound that lasts a minute or two. That can be attached to an email. It can be placed on drive somewhere in the sky and the link to the file can be emailed.
A regular old email with words of love or admiration or appreciation or affectionate memory can serve and also be an invitation to reply. All of these tools plus phone calls and text messages can cut down on our use of trees/paper. But marks on paper still matter.
I know some people who purposely write on paper with a pen and send the paper to friends. Signing a Christmas card in person and adding a short message is considered more personal. But in some cases, a piece of paper printed by a printer machine connected to a computer is still preferred depending on the purpose, the creator and the recipient.
That brings up our office printer. I just returned from Staples with several copies of our Christmas newsletter. We like their special paper and fast service. We don't use our own office printer much but we want it to work when we need it. Our current printer is probably the 5th or 6th printer we have owned and it has been the most trouble.
Some of the trouble probably comes from months of non-use. It is clear that a good bit of the trouble comes from our attempt to do things using wireless methods instead of old-fashioned wires from the computer to the printer. Lynn wanted to print some yesterday and I spent about three hours getting a single sheet printed. I finally decided to avoid being wireless. I wasn't even sure that our printer had some sort of recipient plug for a wire. Once I started looking for a connection point, I found one right away but the connection was a decidedly non-standard one. We now have six book shelves devoted just to electronics, wires, devices and media such as thumb drives, not to mention the four bankers boxes and what's in the basement.
Naturally, the last electrical cord I checked was the one that fits the computer. No magic wireless communication, just a nice long unbroken cable that reaches from the printer to the computer. Click on "Print" and it prints, Wow! Magic!
