Bleeding dogs and other headaches. Subscribers, sales, and shares always needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved.

Raven in happier times. IOW, a month ago.

Good lord, what a day. My began in the middle of the night, with a monster migraine thanks to . . . something I did to my right shoulder yesterday. No, I have no idea what. But back, shoulder, neck, head, all a complete mess today. A dear friend sent me one of those thermal heating pads last winter, the kind with the massage element, and I have it on my shoulders right this moment.

Early morning, because the window techs were coming to fix the weather-stripping problem with the windows. That got done, and fortunately went pretty smoothly What did not go smoothly was the problem of every fricking male dog in a mile radius finding its way here because of the Trickster Twins. Yes, they're obviously still emitting pheromones. No, no one can get at them in the enclosed dog run we built for them from stuff on hand (ProPanels and pallets and leftover chicken wire and a tarp for shade), but that doesn't stop them trying. And when I got up this morning (late; cf. migraine above), there was a new dog out there. Not "new" new; he's from somewhere not too far away, because when he was a puppy he used to come over and sit at a distance, wanting to play with She-Wolf and Raven but too afraid to come close.

Welp, he's not afraid anymore. Now, he's a full-sized pit-bull/boxer mix with something big like Lab or more likely Dane, fully as large as Raven, unneutered and younger and therefore stronger. Raven went out to chase him off this morning, but he kept coming back. Eventually, I got free of window people and everything else and went upstairs to try to work, and got interrupted by whimpering. I go downstairs and no raven; the front door's wide open, and Wings is out there in the field roaring at all the male dogs packed up on each other. When Raven came back, his left upper lip appeared to be in shreds, spouting huge gouts of blood in a spurting-artery waterfall. I say "appeared to be" because it all turned out to have come from a single puncture wound, a bite on the right cheek above the mouth, He got out of very, very lucky; I have no idea what happened to the other two primarily involved, but given that neither came back, I'm guessing they're worse off than Raven. (They're also not welcome here, and will be run off immediately; the main offender, the boxer/pit mix, had already hid under the sawhorses and leapt out at Wings, trying to bite him.) Anyway, it took us more than half an hour to stabilize the bleeding enough to take him to the vet, who was out for lunch, so we had a forty-minute wait, with Raven periodically breaking the clot and bleeding everywhere. He's an abuse survivor, which makes him 1) fear-aggressive, and 2) susceptible to major ordinary stress plus PTSD, and his BP was so high it was literally pushing the blood out.

Anyway, vet shows up, gives us antibiotics for him, uses tissue glue to close the wound, and offered to keep him until 5:30 if we didn't want to keep him confined at home the next few hours, but we took him home anyway. Leash walks only for now, and he's being remarkably cooperative, given that he's always been terrified of being leashed. He's wiped out, sound asleep on his dog bed. All this in addition to having to bury a grosbeak that whacked the window from an odd side angle (instantaneous), and yesterday having to treat a wire cut on Miskwaki's left hind. So, yeah, a day.

Tomorrow, I need to be able to spend some time at work on the writing. All weekend, actually. I haven't been able to do anything the last couple of weeks, on that or anything else, and that has to change. In the meantime, we still need sales, of course; on top of all of the medical bills, we still have to pay the ordinary bills, put gas in the truck, put food on the table, etc. Sales and Patreon subscribers keep us going (and keep me paying down this massive medical debt load). Speaking of my Patreon, on another but related front, my first goal is reached: I got that last subscriber (thank you, thank you!) at the $10/month level to hit my minimum goal. In actuality, of course, that's only on paper; I really need about $100 more in subscriptions, because at the $1,000 level, I lose about $100 in fees. So before I put myself back on my oxygen for the evening (which I have to do momentarily), I'm adding in a request for folks please to continue to share the links:

• My new Patreon, The Interstices (Writing Between Worlds);
• Wings's site, for sales;
• Wings's direct PayPal link;
• A way to buy me coffee (which actually goes to all of our medical bills, which continue to mount; something over $300 for Wings this week, to say nothing of all my own);
• Amazon wishlist, which mostly consists of supplies for half-feral puppies;
• Partial registry #1, from Bed, Bath and Beyond. There are new kitchen-y things on it now, stuff that I didn't realize we'd need to replace (either because the RV ruined it or because we gave it away when we had to downsize).

As always, I have more writing, more editing, and more general work to do, and I have to get back on it. Thank you to everyone. I know I owe replies to a bunch of you, and other stuff, too, and I'm hoping that next week I'll be able to focus better and get some of this stuff caught up properly.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.