It feels like forever since I last had a full-on photo session, but it also feels like every single day this summer has been spent waiting for some appointment or other, which gets in the way of setting up for a real shoot. If it’s not contractors or other home repairmen, it’s some appointment I’ve got set up for myself somewhere, and all this waiting around to wait around some more has got me in a bit of a foul mood. Oh, and we have bees in our walls too:

Yes, they are honeybees, and yes, we are having them relocated this Friday. This is one appointment I had to sit around and wait on this morning, in order to set up the next appointment I’ll sit around and wait on Friday morning. Sigh.

As far as photography goes, I got tired of the black backdrop that hung on my photography wall for over two months, but was waiting until we got the walls painted to take it down. Then we decided to replace the carpet first, so I finally took the black one down and and got a contractor in the house to get an estimate on painting our interior, which, by the way, I’m still waiting to get two days later. The truth is, no matter what’s going on in the rest of the country, the housing market in our part of city is booming at a ridiculous rate, and there isn’t a housing contractor alive who moves quickly when it comes to dealing with a relatively small job like ours. Basically, no one needs our business, so if we aren’t willing to be a pain in the butt about getting service we’re going to be ignored. And I’ve been dealing with broken toilets (yep, that happened too) and air conditioners and bees the past two days, so I haven’t called the painter back yet to find out what the cost will be to get our house done.

In the meantime, I ordered this fairly cool-looking brick wall backdrop to hang for now, since I’m tired of both my black and my white one, and I’ve been – you guessed it – waiting since last week to get it in and hang it so I can shoot again. After a few days without it showing up on my front door, I checked Amazon.com (where I have a Prime membership, so most things I order from them I get in two days) only to discover that this particular backdrop I bought is shipping from China, something I failed to check before I placed the order. So, I am not going to be using any cool new backdrops anytime soon.

In light of this discovery, I’m currently washing my white backdrop and am going to hope most of the wrinkles fluff out of it in the dryer, and I’ll pin that one back to the wall so I can at least get some photos done soon, even if it is with my boring white background. I’m still not sure when I’ll get a chance, though, because this afternoon I noticed our refrigerator is leaking and I’m sure I’ll have to sit around and wait for a repairman to take care of that too. Oh and I almost burned the house down trying to use the new stove we had installed a few weeks ago, because the knobs on it are NOT intuitive at all, and in no way mirror the actual layout of the burners, so I am constantly turning on the wrong burner when trying to cook – unfortunately the burner I mistakenly turned on had a burner cover on it that heated up and started to melt. Luckily I caught it before it started a fire (the burner covers were some sort of cheap plastic and are purely decorative, well, rather, they were) but it was smoking something awful and stunk up the house for hours. Good times.

So yeah. At some point in all of this we still need to get the house painted, although the way my mood is lately I’d just as soon put it off until next summer; I’m pretty much over the home repairs for this year. The stress may do me in – that is if I don’t kill us both while using the new stove first!