For Crying Out LOUD!

For those who wonder sometimes why I don't get more painting done.  Or what my ratio of "other stuff" to painting time is some days.  Settle in before reading...grab a coffee, or something stronger. 


So, on Tuesday Susan B is here working steadily most of the day while I'm trying to get some painting done.  Two days prior, I wanted to get some prints done.   My large printer decides it won't play nice with the ink, so I have to order new ink before I can try to do some reproductions.  There goes my window for framing, but maybe the ink will arrive and I can get Susan to print for me.  Ink arrives...no time to load and print yet. I have a show in 3 weeks.  I get some painting done, but also need to check in with Susan to see what she needs from me for her task.  She spends much of the day getting all my contacts loaded into that the data program I bought for record keeping.  


OK, so I need to print postcards.  My small printer doesn't want to play nice with the heavy paper, so we have to feed one sheet at a time.   I begin to show Susan how to do that and aforementioned printer decides not to take any paper at all.  Great.  
 At least I can get Susan to finish up and print out mailing labels after that, for postcards that don't yet exist....but that means there is always hope and we're prepared if we do get postcards.  yay.  Printer takes the label paper.  double yay. 


After Susan leaves, I load photos of the two commissions I made progress on to show clients via e-mail.  Now if you keep up with this blog, you may recall last May my PC died and I now use a MAC.  um-hum.  I keep my images in iPhoto - a MAC program.  I like that I can drag and drop images into various other applications and into an online gallery for my clients.  So that's what I did....I dragged and dropped two photos into their respective online gallery folders, which are supposed to automatically send them into cyberspace with their sister photos.  


Thank goodness, I emailed copies before this, because what happened next was a huge cluster farce of craziness.  My folders would not accept the images, the gallery would not recognize my passwords, I had to reset passwords via email ( "NO, thank you I did NOT forget my password - YOU won't recognize my password,"  I mumble to the computer. It's actually more complicated, but I'll keep this short.  LOL. hahaha)  I go retrieve my new password page and follow directions, come back to my photo album to drag and drop and gasp!  the albums are gone.  AND those photos are gone.  no.  nonono.  oh no.  Eight months of photos are gone, to be exact.    


I spend the next hour trying to find said photos.  And come back and MORE galleries are gone.  Oh this is really not good.  I have to stop before I destroy all my images or worse.  These are family photos, client photos, art work photos.  My entire album of artwork images that took Susan about 2 days to create for me - gone. 


I spend 2 hours the next day at the MAC genius bar.  (Include travel time - that's 3 hours of painting gone.)  No luck.  I "won" the "You've stumped a genius" award from my nice genius guy who could not figure out what the good grief happened.  Really.  I'm not loving my MAC at the moment, but we think we had a corrupt file or program cause all the grief. 


This story continues, but I shall not.  To end this rant, I'll close with uplifting news.  My MAC is now attached to an external hard drive with 1 Tb of storage space for backup every day.  yup.  
My photos are gone, except what I had not erased from my memory sticks and what I could find on my online web gallery once that was recovered ( which thankfully included my art work album. yay - I had enough sense to back that up)  I lost most of my painting time today,  recovering what I could.    My humor is still intact, although my emotions are sorely in need of a rest.  


And I'll paint tomorrow.  At least that's the plan.