Winter is coming. Ice Blue needs to stay in her home.

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

Yeah, I know that this is normally the point in the day where I'd post the link to our crowdfunding page for the house. I'll get to it tonight, never fear, but for today, when traffic is higher, someone else's fundraiser needs to be at the top of the page.

Those of you from the GOS know her as Ice Blue. She is, if memory serves, a fellow horse person. She's also faced more than her fair share of obstacles in recent years. One of those has been debilitating: She survived a massive stroke a few years ago, and has spent the time since doing all she can to recover her health, but she is permanently disabled. If you've had stroke survivors in your family, as we have, you know that that is an extraordinarily difficult task even under the best of circumstances. 

Now, she's faced with an enormous and entirely unexpected expense: Her county zoning board has informed her that her septic system is no longer up to code and must be replaced entirely before May of 2017. If she fails to do so . . . I gather that the ultimate result was left hanging, but the threat of homelessness is very real. We know a little bit about what that feels like, too.

Despite an excellent credit rating, her bank refuses to allow her a home equity line of credit to pay for it. She has no family resources upon which she can call for financial assistance. She's already made inquiries and has been given an estimate of $4,525 for what's described as "a basic system," which she says is a good deal, and I believe her. It's about $3K less than the cost we'll be facing when we have to replace ours in a few weeks, once our home is nearly complete (the old one was installed incorrectly seventeen years ago, and cannot be salvaged, so for us, it's both replacement and relocation, hence the higher cost).

But no matter how good a deal it is, it's useless if you can't raise the scratch. What a decade or two ago would have been obvious options for a lot of people simply don't exist anymore for much of the population. You can thank your Republican officials for that. In the meantime, winter is coming, as ASoIaF fans would say, and since she lives in a part of the country where winer is much like ours, that whacks about six months out of the year that are open for the actual replacement work. You take the entire winter season out of the equation, and next May gets here very, very fast.

I don't want her to spend the winter wondering whether she'll be homeless in the spring. I also don't want, Spirit forbid, to have her septic system decide to give up the ghost between now and then.

She's trying to raise $4,750 to cover an eventualities that crop up over and above the quoted price. Personally, I'd rather see her pull in about $6K, just to make sure everything's covered all the way to the end. We can do this. We've raised this much and more in the past; this shouldn't take long at all, provided people, yes, keep sharing the link to her fundraiser.

Here's the GoFundMe link.

You know what to do.

She's got $65 toward it, thus far; the dear friend who brought this to my attention kicked in some, and so did we. If 100 more people match the $65 total, she's got $6,500, and she's got the septic system covered plus a cushion for whatever eventualities are pretty much guaranteed to crop up during the process.

Surely we can find 100 people able to give $65. Or even $50. We've done it before; I know we can do this, too. Here's that link again; please join us in giving what you can, and please share her GoFundMe link with all of of your networks.

Thanks.


All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.