Small frustrations and patience has never been my strong suit

On my desk I keep two fortune cookie messages from my first two meals in Seattle after returning home.
They say:
Your genuine talent will find its way to success.
AND
You may have the be patient; think, listen, and heed signs.

In the last two weeks my boss (who was new-ish and very progressive within our organization) was fired and my only regular coworker decided to retire. Next week. So my big plan for building a new catalog is on hold until the new boss is hired (as is the raise that former boss agreed to give). What's more, temp boss is a challenging personality. I am trying to get a better handle on him, but it mostly seems that he sees the library as a passive institution, the repository for dead works. When I asked him about the budget for materials and mentioned that former boss agreed to "agressively expanding" the collection by buying three books a month, he told me that didn't seem cost effective, better to wait for someone to ask for materials before we buy them. My coworker seemed to have some sort of kindred understanding of this man and now she is leaving, too.
And I am currently making more money doing laundry part time than I am at the library.
So, I guess my strategy is to build a compelling reason for why we MUST modernize and why we should have the funding and staffing to do it well. It is just going to take more work than I thought to convince the status quo that progress is needed.
It would just be so much easier if everyone did it my way to start with...