Only $350 needed to this weekend's mini-goal!

Thanks to a couple of very dear friends, we are over half-way to this weekend's mini-goal: $800 to reach 15% raised against our overall goal for Stage III. We only need to raise another $350 to make it to that marker. Think we can do it by tomorrow morning?

I hope so, because my goal for the coming week is to get us, by next Saturday, to the 20% of the overall goal for this stage. That means raising an additional $1,000, which would bring us up to $4,000 total raised so far for Stage III. And we're going to need it.

First thing tomorrow, the fill arrives. Our crew chief will probably rent the Bobcat and bring it with him; the guy who rents out the tamper also provides the operator. Tuesday, the cement truck shows up again with the pump; meanwhile, the guys will have rented a bull float. In this heat, a monopour has to be done fast and with a great deal of skill, and they'll need all the technical help they can get. They'll be hard at it to keep it from setting to fast while the heat rules, and also to beat the rain that's pretty much a guarantee for mid-afternoon.

I'll have photos from both days, but when the images will really start to get interesting is Wednesday or Thursday, with the arrival of the adobes. In the meantime, we have to raise enough to be able to reserve windows, and that's likely going to set us back a couple grand right there. It's going to be another hugely expensive week, and I can already feel the migraine building as I'm trying to juggle these costs.

I feel the need to emphasize again that each fundraising stage does not raise anywhere near enough to cover all costs. We're paying huge chunks out of sales and what we've been able to put aside over the past several months toward this process. But that's nowhere near enough, hence the fundraisers. It's easier all the way around if we break it down into stages, and even stages within stages, which is why I'm focusing on these mini-goals each work. The totals are so far out of range as to make it impossible for me to get my head around the how of it, and so this is the only way for me to keep chipping away at the project and the costs and still hang onto what remains of my sanity.

So please keep sharing the link to our YouCaring page. Please go directly to it and share from the widgets on the page itself. Please also keep copying the code from the purple widget box at the lower right-hand corner of the page, and pasting it anywhere you can think of to post it. Finally, please continue to share the links to Wings's site. Selling a couple of his collections in miniature, his mixed-media work, his concha belt? Any one of those would get us well into next week, get the walls going up and the windows set aside.

Thanks to everyone who's helped us get this far. This week is going to one that stretches us to the limit in terms of time and financial resources both. I've got a lot of follow-up to do, a lot of projections to lay out for the next couple of weeks, and a lot of thank-yous to write. And if we can just raise another $350 tonight, we'll have made the weekend's mini-goal, and I might just get a little sleep tonight. 

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