Aggravation

Patience doesn't always pay off.

I am a scrapbooker. I love designing layouts and the cutting and pasting of pictures and embellishments to display the events in my life. There is a group that gets together once a month through my church and we crop for 6 or 12 hours depending on the month. There are also scrapbook stores that hold their own crops as well. I try to crop once or twice a month and I love it.

I am a perfectionist when it comes to my layouts. I want the titles and any other words on the page to be uniform and clean. I usually plan the layouts before hand and use my computer to type and print out captions and titles for the pictures I want to do before each crop. But that isn't always possible. I can use stickers and chip board letters to spell things out, but there are always so many left over that I can't use and it's frustrating to throw any of it away.

A couple ladies at the church get-together have die cutters and a Cricut machine I can use. But they are not always there every month and they don't always bring all of their supplies. So a lot of time I am suck organizing layouts and never getting anything put together. So I decided to purchase a Cricut machine for myself.

Now these machines are not cheap. The one I want is portable and runs anywhere from $200 to $250. I have seen them on sale for $189 down to $169. Last year, I found out after the fact, on Black Friday, a local discount store had them for $119. So all year I watched and waited. I saw the typical sale prices and had to keep telling myself to be patient and that they were bound to have a similar sale this year.

I was patient. I held back. I was so excited when Thanksgiving finally came and I could search the ads for my long awaited prize. And it wasn't there. What was there was the model that was twice as big as the one I wanted. Not nearly as portable, that model runs $250 to $300. It's down to $199 today. Still a good buy but not what I want.

So here I sit, eating my breakfast and bidding on the one I do want on e-bay. I could have done this a lot sooner and saved myself the aggravation. But that would have been too easy. And I guess I like to do things the hard way.