Sooner or later

I get so impatient when I have to wait. This week has been quite tiresome that way. We had to wait over an hour at the vet's, although there didn't seem to be any great emergency. The walls there are thin, you can hear every word said in the treatment rooms; one guy had just gotten a ferret and hadn't a clue as to how to take care of it -- not food, not handling, why did it throw up (hairballs), is this normal, etc.etc. ad nauseum. We eventually got to see the vet, and find out that Cookie, the black and white cat, who is sneezy also has an irritation on her butt where she is licking all the fur off.. Antibiotics twice a day for a week, this for a cat that doesn't like to be picked up.

I'm also having to wait for the portrait of Grandma, we have once again been promised that it will ship next week. But what are we to do? The lady is the very last who can do this work on convex photos (this one is circa 1900), and from what we saw in her studio, she is an artist at repairing these images. Waiting again.

My mink fur throw is still to be finished, the furrier (is that a real word?) is waiting on the silk for the lining. Once again there is nothing I can do -- he has the coat all cut and sewn into a rectangle as big as possible, so I wait again.

My hard drive on this MacBook died this week. We took it to Best Buy who promptly put in a new 500 Gb drive (the original was a tawdry 80 Gb). To load the operating system would have cost another $148, but I said I could do it myself. AFter all, how hard could it be? I went online and googled "macbook new drive OS install" and soon found step by step instructions. It wasn't without a few false starts, but I did get it up and running. I am so glad that I had backed up my photos, all 827 of them, onto DVDs, just three days before. Tomorrow I will put them back in; I have already put them on the desktop HP as well.

There remains one job to do, and that is loading Parallels and then Family Tree maker. Parallels is a program that carves out a portion of the hard drive and installs Win XP (for me) as a parallel OS, on a virtual hard drive. Then you can install programs that can only operate under Windows, to wit, Family Tree maker. There are better genealogy programs, but my files are organized a certain way and I'd hate to have to manually restore all 3000+ ancestors. Also fortunately, I have the habit of backing up that file every time I use it, to the desktop and onto a flash drive.

My candle making a going well (i.e. keeping me interested). I have been trying out samples of scents from three different suppliers, some of them for truly strange odors. I am trying to get not only food related scents, but also herbal, or scents like aftershaves, or leather, or clean linen or sunny day, or tropical beach and sand. It hac been interesting. One of the suppliers had listed all the top notes, middle notes and ending notes for their scents, but my nose just says, Oh, maybe that's raspberries. Not a _____ I forget the word for someone with exceptional smell abilities. Some like onomatopea, but that's not it. One scent I am especially fond of is Jade East. That is a cologne N used to wear when we were dating (not made for years and years now) and it brings back those sex-laden times instantly. Funny how smells can trigger memory. That one is for sure a keeper.

I've also been making potholders (you know I must be bored, right? Or going through a delayed childhood) on one of those square pegged hand looms. But instead of the metal ones that yield a potholder the size of a coaster, this is a bigger wooden loom and is woven with cord (I use macrame) and yields a potholder obout 8-9 inches square. Too pretty to use, the family says, but good lord, they're potholders not works of art. I'm using colors that match the bright colors of the Fiesta ware. This pleases me, a simple thing. Now my fingers are sore and I am taking a break for a while. Hopefully this won't be one of those hobbies I do for weeks or months and then abandon; I have been know to do that, but more usually I just set them aside, to be picked up again later.

And what I really want is my daughter's bedroom. I could move all my craft stuff in there, and not have to put one thing away to have space to get to another. WHY can't I have empty nest syndrome? I mean my god, she's 30!

Time to try to sleep some more so I'm off.

Bumper sticker for the day: "A turkey with a Ph.D. is still a turkey."