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| Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. |
More of the work. It's endless.
He wasn't able to finish up with her yesterday, and it's going to be too cold and snowy/icy/windy/pick your poison the next few days. Don't say "Get a farrier." We've tried. There aren't many around here a couple are completely unreliable, and none of them specializes in laminitic horses, which requires a very particular type of trim. he always winds up having to do it himself.
But not today. The winds are hellish, and while yesterday's high was 61 (that's SIXTY-FREAKING-ONE), tonight's high is 20 degrees less (not factoring in a massive wind chill), and tomorrow's low is being projected at five below zero. Don't even ask about pain levels; there's no vocabulary for this nonsense.
Also no vocabulary for all the other stresses. My laptop continues to die apace;; the keyboard is causing me three times as much work, at least. We both have medical appointments this week. The Pueblo is now closed for two full months, which puts tourism income in the negatives. And January was, quite frankly, a hell month. As a friend said a little while ago, January was "the longest year of our lives," and she's not wrong. February, unfortunately, is starting to look a little frightening, too — and I'm referring less to the money front, although that's always an issue, than I am to everything "out there," so to speak. The rest of this colonial-ass world. For folks like us? This has always been the case, and yet everything's being taken to new and terrifying depths, and the dominant culture is busy playing around just look at the nonsense going on in Iowa.
Meanwhile, we have the work. Always. One foot in front of the other right now, and very slowly and painfully, at that, but it's how the work gets done. As I've said, even though we have some light at the end of the tunnel on Wings's dental work, I still need to make it rain on a regular basis with sales and subscriptions, because there are all the usual bills and expenses, upcoming taxes, the urgent need to replace this dying laptop (and the camera, too, eventually, which is also a tool essential to our livelihood), the repairs on the house, and, if I get really lucky, all my one-year follow-up testing. [I'm using "lucky" ironically, because getting it done guarantees a lot of pain, discomfort, and inconvenience, not the least of which is all the travel obstacles. To say that I don't want to do it is massively understating it. Unfortunately, I need to do it at some point.]
Also unfortunately, I'm still reduced to trying to get work done with a torn ankle and subluxed forearm, hips, and knees, and now two barely functional hands, and a laptop that continues to deteriorate by the day (a camera, too, and both are essential for our work — not just mine, but his). The pain is . . . very bad these days. It's not a function of weather or cold, mostly, but of deterioration. In desperation, I'm adding one last supplement, a costly one, in hopes of getting it to ease off even a little, but it won't be in until next week. I'm also trying to plan for all the expenses of winter to come. The Pueblo closure started Saturday, and as I said above, is slated to last two full months this time, so it will be worse than usual. In that period of time, there will be taxes to pay, his scrip to keep refilling, his dental work to try somehow to get done, and forget about my own follow-up tests, to say nothing of plumbing/wall repairs or all the work still unfinished on the house; I'm scrapping everything, because we can't afford it. Yes, I'm due for follow-up scans and biopsies already, and they're not going to happen, because we don't have five figures' worth of scratch to waste on it. I've still got to make sales, try to drum up new Patreon subscribers, do whatever I can to bring in more money, all on top of everything else. Folks can help in several ways (sales are always preferred, but the wishlist helps, too right now, what we can use most are coffee, cleaning agents, and Amazon cards for the things I'm not going to put on a public list, like supplements and glucose tabs and underwear). Oh, and I will have at least two new works later today, ones he finished last night, so please share the links:
Please share everything. Thanks.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
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