Wednesday-7:30am

Karma knows all the signs of Caroline's eminent arrival--her toys picked up, trash collected, etc. The office called (not Caroline) saying that I needed to sign a new rent agreement and she could stop by in a few minutes. (Rent went up a little after all--govt--not West Winds.)

The second Karma heard someone knock on the door she ran and took her "Caroline" position under the end table.

Made me chuckle! She is a creature of habit--as am I, I guess. But the next call was Caroline and her car wouldn't start--poor thing! She had no idea what was wrong with it or if it had just frozen up in the subzero weather or what. So--she'll call me to reschedule as soon as she has a car again. Car troubles! Hate dealing with car troubles! I hope it isn't anything that will end up being costly for her.

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Meanwhile--the Big Bite saga continues. Those of you who aren't interested in crafting dilemmas can skip down past the end of the eyelet pictures--hehe! But for my fellow crafters--I took pictures--and I am getting frustrated.

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This is the metal bump part that you have to balance the end of the eyelet tube on.

Line up the eyelet, eh? On the base?

Here I am using a piece of regular red paper. As you can see, once you have the eyelet in the hole, you can't actually see where that little metal bump is...

...so you try to line it up by feel--and it tends to tip around all over the place--and occasionally fall out out of the hole altogether so that you have to start over.

But you can kind of try to line them up as you are slowly lower the top cube--and then press gently. The back looks dreadful...

...but the front looks really good.

Problem--with the back so high (and the edges are really ragged) the paper isn't going to lie flat for layering. So I tried to reinsert the eyelet and pressed as hard as I could. Well, I can see why they warn against pressing too hard. It split the eyelet on the top..

..and this is what the back looked like. Not great--flatter, but still not flat. *sigh*

So--I got out my tiny hammer...

...and tried this tricky contraption with a piece of cardstock.

Same troubles with having the eyelets actually pop out while I was trying to "feel" the metal bump (I now have lost a couple of eyelets somewhere in the carpeting under the table).

With the gentle clicking sound the eyelets are set and they do look nice on top...

...but the backside!!?? Come on!! How can you use this on a card?

I took the hammer and tried to, as gently as possible, pound down the edges of the back of the eyelet--which marred the paper (you could see the hammer marks thru to the front) because I was trying to angle the hammer so I wouldn't flatten the front of the eyelet. *sigh* Flatter--but still nowhere near as flat as we have gotten them with the old hammer method. ??

The top looked really nice, tho.

BUT--the whole point in buying this was so that we didn't have to use the hammer, right? And if the eyelets sit so awfully high off the paper your layering is going to look pretty strange and lumpy-bumpy. ?? I have never used tags on my blog before--but I am going to add a tag for this frustrating machine and hope that somebody who knows some secrets about how to use it will come by and share them with me.

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Dagan and Leah will be over tonight. I'm wondering if Leah will be able to figure this out better than I have? Maybe she has the magic touch? I'll let you know.

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I called Professor Vinz yesterday and he did remember me! :) It was so nice to chat with him again. We exchanged email addresses. He went back and looked up the list of students from our class--spring of 2003. Seven years already! wow!

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I couldn't remember when the class was or the names of all the students--no surprise to those of you who know me--hehe! I can tell you what they looked like, mannerisms, things they wrote about, how they laughed, what kind of person I thought they were--but not remember their names. Sad, but true. A lifelong curse of forgetting "labels"--be it people, times, dates, streets, titles--you name it. I guess I'm a "content" person--ROFL!!

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Anyways, we had a nice chat and he was happy for me. Even sent me a touching poem of his to read in his email!! :):) Nice!

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I worked on a couple of letters yesterday. Am almost caught up with my snail-mail correspondence. Got half-way thru Ironman with Robert Downey, Jr. and will finish watching that today.

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Craft Night tonight. Leah decided that she should probably take some time to work on updating the Etsy account--and Craft Nights would give her designated time to do that. So she's been busy taking pictures of product and will work on posting tonight. I told her we should do that for a couple weeks or however long it takes. She has some jewelry that she has never gotten up for sale, etc. So--great idea!! I know I will sidetrack her with the Big Bite, tho--hehe! But she can leave pictures in my McLap and I can work on posting during the week, also. :)

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So--that's about it from Fargo for this sunny, frigid morning.

Wish me luck with the tricky BigBite--hehe!

Keep smiling!! :):)