Ordering Pretties

Like Gollum in The Hobbit and Tolkien's subsequent books, I am mesmerized by pretty things, and, yes, they do have some power over me. Not enough that I sacrifice my life to them but enough that I take great pleasure in creating them. I think of the embroidery I've done, the knitting, the painting, the pottery, the list goes on and my insides warm. Yesterday I spent almost three hours placing my bead order from the Fire Mountain catalogue.

My buddy, Donna, and I usually do it together but she is away so I tackled the job. As you can see from the image here, this is a huge book of goodies and her page numbers were from the slightly newer version, while mine were from this one. Oh, and we had some things to order from the online sale items. All of this made for some confusion and cries for help from the online realtime help offered by Fire Mountain.

I sat down just after 1 p.m. and tackled the Excel list we had worked on together last Friday, the addendum Donna had sent Saturday, and--can you believe it?--the second addendum from Sunday morning. I also had to finalize pearls that I wanted as well as other beads and findings. By the time I had finished the total was quite high but I don't intend to order for at least six months so I'm not too disturbed. Paying shipping is not much fun. There's nothing 'pretty' about it. I'd rather order a lot at a time and put the money into beads and findings.

Finally, just before 4 p.m., I was done. My back ached, my shoulders sagged and my eyes were bleary from too much screen viewing. I stood up to think what to do next. Finishing the washing and making up the bed with the clean sheets were actually welcome changes from sitting in front of the computer for three hours.

This morning I checked my email, logged on to the Fire Mountain site and checked the progress of my package. It has been shipped and will arrive Thursday. Computers can be wonderful, can't they? So now the work is over and I can just anticipate opening my package of pretties.