Saturday, December 7, 2019

A winter's dawn.

Photo copyright Aji, 2019; all rights reserved.
A winter's dawn.

Nah, the weather doesn't care about the Gregorian calendar. It travels an older road of time.

And the next storm is due to hit tomorrow, which means I have all the prep work to do to today. I've also been set back an hour by our Internet service inexplicably going out, and given that we pay more than the most expensive urban areas, it really burns that they don't have redundancy, even though they falsely advertise that they do. [No, people, that's NOT what redundancy means. Most networks figured this out before Y2K, and here we are 20 years later and they still refuse to get it. The amount they charge us allegedly for high speed and full up-time is extortion as it is.]

I'm extra-sore today because of the injections two days ago (and extra-broke, besides), but the work still has to get done and I'm off to do it in a few moments. I also have not had a chance to make a single sale, but I did at least post five new pieces here two nights ago: two pairs of earrings and three new Warrior Woman pins, all three of the pins bearing some new imagery. I also did a massive series of threads on our silverwork Twitter account last night, but I forgot that it was Friday, which means no traffic, so . . . ::shrug:: a waste of a couple of hours, apparently. Please share the links, because while, we have made a couple of sales over the last few days, which has taken the immediate strain off me a bit, there's no room for me to let up on the sales effort. Winter's already early and hard, and we've got about 7 months of it left. The rest is all cut-and-paste, but please read it anyway. It matters, because while sales are literally all that matters at the moment, what else the wind leaves behind is all the rest of the work, and ALL of the bills. But really, it's SALES. 

SALES SALES SALES. That's all it's about now. A lot of y'all don't realize this, but the Pueblo closes for much of the winter, starting usually a month to six weeks after the new year. Even before Christmas, the whole month of December locks vehicles out of the village, and that reduces tourist traffic a lot. Even though we're not physically there anymore, the drop in tourism affects us, too — and the numbers are down all over town and seemingly getting worse every single year.

What folks also don't realize is that this means that holiday sales are what keep us alive, through not just the end of the year but essentially the first six months of the year to come. If we could sell the belt featured below, it would keep us going well into the new year. This is it; this is what the whole year leads up to, and even in off years, Wings would still be filling commissions beginning around the first of October. 

This year? ONE commission. And there are, effectively, only a couple of weeks left of the holiday sales season, because it takes time to make things, to say nothing of shipping them.

I don't know what we're going to do.

I'm back to using my rescue inhaler daily, along with the O2 at night, to deal with the breathing issues attending the sudden cold. My pain levels, especially after putting my body through so much these last few weeks to protect the house, are completely unmanageable now. I've decided I'm going to refuse to cancel my doctor's appointment on the fifth, because even if nothing is coming in, even if we have a winter to get through, I have to be here to do all that. For those wondering about my own health issues, see here, although now there's a new wrinkle I'm not even going to bother to try to explain (suffice to say there's no affording treatment); with regard to the work being done, some of the details are here. Folks can help in several ways, and we really need it now:
Please share everything, because I'm suddenly back behind the eight-ball on a whole additional front, and yeah, I'm scared about covering everything and surviving, too. Thanks.


All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used 
or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

No comments :

Post a Comment