The Epson Workforce 840 is literally the 4th printer we've had this year. Yes, we print alot, but not so much that we go through an inkjet printer every month!

Our journey to find a printer that works actually started after our Canon bit the dust. It wasn't a terrible printer, but it was old and hogged ink like no one's business (before you ask, we bought it before we started this blog - or yes, we would have reviewed it too). So, we headed to Costco and picked up an HP, and another, and another (damn, that thing was a piece of crap!) and finally when we were at our wits end, the nice people at Epson sent us their Workforce 840 to review.

Queue angels singing in harmony...

And it worked!

We've given it a pretty thorough test now (6+ months) and after printing mass quantities of stuff on both Mac and PC's we are happy to report that -- it still works! There are some things I've found are really cool about this all-in-one printer and only a couple of "iffy" things. Standouts that are make this my favorite inkjet so far are ease of networking setup, print quality and ease of installation.

Setting the printer up was actually pretty easy. Most of the printer is one piece and anything needing to be installed is clearly marked. I don't do instruction manuals... well, unless I absolutely have to. I get something home and I just want to take it of the box and make it work - reading is too time consuming The Epson Workforce 840 fit within my hopes for an easy setup. It was literally 10 minutes and I had it plugged in with ink installed. Going through the on screen setup prompts took roughly 10 more minutes, but I was multi-tasking while setting it up, so if that says anything about the on-screen prompts - you can safely assume they are pretty easy to get through without a single cuss-word.

The Workforce 840 has been the most straight-forward scanner/printer in our home office to date with regard to networking. Anyone with a networked printer can probably tell you that it's not the easiest task on earth to get a printer working on a network with both Macs and PCs. Epson's drivers were setup on the PCs straight off the disk and worked immediately. The Macs needed an update that was detected by OSX Lion, which once installed worked correctly without troubleshooting (A first!!).

Lastly, the print quality doesn't disappoint. We've run an entire paper ream's worth of flyers, printed photos and even some of those pre-fab perforated tickets with great results. I'm no printer connoisseur, so I won't go into major comparison here - I'll just tell you that everything so far has printed beautifully. There's not been any of those pesky "print head misalignment's" or any of the other anomaly's we have grown used to with the other printers we've owned. It's been pretty fricken nice to have a printer that "just works" without having to Google for support or rip out any hair during the installation process.

With all of that glowing good-stuff we've experienced with the Workforce 840, I have only one complaint: The paper trays feel super flimsy. Nothing has broken, but I feel like I have to be extra careful with them because they are very light weight. The parts that slide out for paper insertion don't fit together nicely, so your paper is somewhat loosely inserted into the printer. Although it hasn't caused any paper jams or anything so far, I could see how it would be easy to place the paper in the tray off center and cause a jam.

Overall we are very happy to have gotten this printer. It's actually become the go-to printer in our home office over our the laser printer because it's just easy to run off a copy here and there without the need to warm-up or clean heads or whatever else printers do that waste a ton of ink doing just to make one stinkin' print.

Epson Workforce 840 Benefits:

• Ease of networking capabilities with both Mac and PC
• Prints everything from photos to flyers beautifully

Epson Workforce 840 Drawbacks:

• Paper trays seem flimsy

The Mrs. gives Epson's Workforce 840 a 4/5

I really like this printer alot. Not because it was given to us to review either. I like a printer that just. plain. works. I don't need to micro-examine how every single pixel prints - I've always just needed a printer to do its job and PRINT. Network printing in a PC / Mac environment is extremely important to me and this is seriously the first printer I've had that's worked great with both right out of the box without Google'ing drivers and tech support - that to me is priceless.

I've wanted to learn to sew for a long time. However, my mom decided early on that she didn't want to teach me to sew, because as a child she was made fun of for wearing homemade clothes. My grandmother sewed all 5 of her daughters clothes and they all learned to sew as a way of life. As a result, they are the type of people that can look at something on a mannequin and utter in the next sentence "why buy that when I can sew it?"

Really?

How bout you teach me to sew? Mom? Aunts? Anyone?! Okay, screw it, I'm on my own here I see.

So, this Halloween I decided to buy and print off a couple of patterns from the McCall's online store and sew them myself. Mind you, I have very little experience sewing anything. I took a college class and dropped it after the teacher, who was at least 387 years old pissed me off for the last time when yelling at me about seam allowances. I figure if I screw up on a Halloween costume I can blame it on, umm, Halloween. I'll just say "What do you expect? It's a costume!".

My current experience with sewing is somewhere between being able to sew a hem on drapes (I didn't say a straight hem) and making a stuffed panda bear in the sixth grade that far more resembled a lopsided, black and white cyclops than a panda. Ellie (my 6 year old) wants to be a princess for Halloween, so I promised her I would make her a dress. And here I am - wondering what in the heck I've gotten myself into. Thankfully my aunt felt pity on my soul and decided to come over and help me figure all of this out this weekend.

So far, I have the pattern printed and taped together using my new printer (at least that part was pretty easy). I also bought some really pretty satin and organza fabrics to make the dress and I've already heard about 16 times that I'm crazy to try and sew these two as a first timer. Ha! Obviously they don't know me - I learn stuff the hard way. That's how I roll...

I'll let you know later how this turns out

To preface this article I have to say that we once loved Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas. We were married in their chapel and loved our stay there for our honeymoon a few years back; so when looking for a hotel to stay at for a recent trip to a convention, it was a no-brainer -- or so we thought.

To start off, we reserved three rooms, two of which were adjoined, for ourselves and our 4 kids. The third room was next door to us and held my in-laws, who flew in from Wisconsin and watched our kiddos while we spend 3 full days in sessions.

We arrived to check-in at around 5:30PM and found that the check-in line wrapped around the entire lobby, almost to the elevator area -- not exactly a sight someone towing 6 bags and 4 kids wants to see. I got in line and waited while it crept ever-so-slowly towards the front desk. After over an hour in line and a snide tweet to @phvegas about the long wait, I was finally able to check-in. The man at the check-in was nice enough to let the rest of my family come to the front and show ID to get a key, rather than making them wait it out in line as well. I was also happy to find that the hotel had actually made a note on our account that we needed rooms together and reserved them for us upon check in.

However, that is where my happiness with the Planet Hollywood ended...

When we arrived in our rooms, they were all relatively nice and clean with the exception of the black mold in the bathroom toilet area and the bathtub in our room, which had pubic hair in it (YUCK)! I held back my gag reflex and swore off bathing in the tub; opting instead for a shower. The only issue with the shower was the fact that the water took FOREVER to get hot.

Aside from the bathroom, the rooms were nice and the bed was comfy. We called the front desk and had a folding crib (ie: Graco Pack and Play) delivered to the room for our little one to sleep in. The man who delivered it was very nice and arrived quickly. After setting up the baby's crib, we watched TV for a bit and drifted off to slumber land around 11PM that night. Sometime around 1AM I was awakened by the sound of a fire alarm with sirens going off in the distance or possibly coming from the air conditioning vent, but didn't think much of it. I fell back asleep and not too long after, I heard it again and this time our baby was awakened. I got up to feed her and sat there listening while the alarm would go on and off for the following hour. I was exhausted and fell asleep, hoping that it would be resolved before the next night.

The Mr. and I woke up at 6AM, got ready, and left for the convention we were there to attend. At 6AM the alarm was still going off in the distance and I would hear it every now and then. We went down the elevator and walked through the Miracle Mile shops and the fire alarm began going off while we walked through and I thought to myself that the sound we heard must have been coming from there.

The next night we came back exhausted from a day full of conference sessions and the first thing I heard was those damn sirens again. I honestly thought to myself that someone had to have complained by now and hoped they were going to fix it. I mean, really, how could they not hear it?! I tweeted to @phvegas again that the sirens had been going off for days, hoping that they had someone manning their twitter account, but got no reply.  So we watched TV for a bit and fell asleep, only to be awakened several more times by the sound of the alarm (or whatever it was). I tried desperately to go back to sleep and finally turned on the TV to drown out the sound.

I was really in a jam because our baby was sleeping, so I couldn't just call up room service because it would wake her up, which is why I used to Twitter to try and get in touch. In addition, our days were so crammed full of sessions and activities that I had no time to go wait in line at the customer service area to complain.

Repeat the above paragraph for the following nights of our stay... By our final day at Planet Hollywood we were beyond exhausted.

We hadn't slept well for several nights and it finally got the best of me. While packing up to leave, I recorded a snippet of the sound we were hearing the entire time. It's very short because it was hard to capture sound with a video camera on my phone without kids talking over it.

The sound you hear in the very first second or two of the video is the alarm which would go on and on for about a minute and then there would be some sort of talking (that was hard to hear), followed again by the siren sound over and over. If I would have been able to sit there for a little while longer and record video, I would have been able to give you the full effect, but it was check out time and everyone was waiting on me (trying to keep quiet while I recorded the sound).

As I was checking out, I decided I would go tell the manager what had happened. I was wondering if there was an explanation or anything that they could offer (a discount wouldn't have hurt matters either). After waiting 15 minutes for the manager to come to the desk to talk to me, I told him that we loved Planet Hollywood and got married there, but that this stay was just horrible. I explained about the sound we heard and that it kept us awake for 3 days out of the 5 we stayed there, to which he responded "no one else complained, and there is nothing I can do about it because you didn't tell us about it". Really?! I tried explaining that I couldn't A. wake up our baby who was sleeping in our room to make a phone call in the middle of the night to the front desk and B. was VERY busy and could not spare the time waiting to talk to a manager prior to checkout. He began to get quite irritated and the more I explained, the more rude he became. For everything I said, he had some lame explanation as to why they weren't responsible for the sounds we all heard that kept us up all night (and to paraphrase: they aren't responsible our quality of sleep). I got fed up after 5 minutes of arguing with the manager and finally told him that my family would never stay at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas again and that I would be sure and tell everyone I knew that Planet Hollywood doesn't care about the quality of sleep you get at their hotel. To which he responded "I'm not responsible for what you put on the internet". Heh. Ya think?