what’s another way to say “news”?

I finally sat down and installed the new hard drive in my laptop, and I don’t know why I was putting it off for so long! It took me longer to reinstall the OS than it did to swap out the drives, even with all the tiny little screws. The external enclosure I ordered came yesterday…only for me to find out I had ordered the wrong one. D’oh! So back to newegg it went and I borrowed one from a friend. Only to find out that it’s a hardware issue on the dead drive, which means taking it to a data recovery place and spending lots of money to get all my info back – super bummer.

Spring is certainly here, and that means flowers! As some of you may know, one of my other hobbies (and current obsession) is orchid collecting/cultivating. Recently, I’ve purchased a very large Brassidium that is simply stunning, and a tiny little Blc. Cattleya that’s probably 2-3 years away from blooming. But when it does bloom it will be blue! Ok, well true blue flowers are hard to come by but it will be more on the blueish purple than a lot of the pinky purple orchids. So far I have 12 orchids, 11 of which are on my desk at work. We don’t get enough light in the house with all the huge trees on our property for most of my babies to be happy. I’m hoping to remedy that eventually – either by setting up a grow room with lights etc or adding skylights, or possibly cutting down a couple trees or at least some limbs.

So here’s what the Blc. should look like when it blooms:

And here it is in it’s current state (don’t mind the huge hole in the background…that’s where the dishwasher is going) :

And here’s my Brsdm, the day I brought her home 🙂

You can see my beading stuff in the background – this puppy sits on my beading table, so I get to look at her whenever I’m working 🙂

I have been slowly working on some new pieces, though most of the finished ones end up being gifts. Lots of people I know have birthdays this time of year! Not to mention Mother’s Day. Silver prices have gone through the roof lately, so I’m laying low and not making any new purchases for awhile. Maybe I’ll get lucky and win the lottery!