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| Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. |
Early monsoonal patterns again this year, apparently. And, as with last year, some changes: We got rain overnight, soft, steady, soaking, and badly needed. That's not usually the time of day that it rains here, but climate change has altered that. In this one small way, it's for the better, at least in the abstract. But we're under no illusions that the overall changes are good. The mess that is the outside world now is proof enough of that.
I will likely be offline until late in the day, when I run the daily COVID-19 numbers. I've already been mired in several different projects piecemeal here, and I would like to get some sewing in this afternoon if at all possible. Still waiting on two shipments of fabric. The "other project," though, they won't wait, because it looks as though we are finally going to have enough warmth to plant next week. So I'll be spending a lot of this week sorting seeds and plotting out what goes where; our gardens will be significantly expanded this year because of current circumstances. Until the drought intensified three years ago and we got first crops destroyed mid-season and then no water for planting at all, we always raised enough not only to keep ourselves in fresh produce but to have plenty to give away. This year, we're going to have to raise more so that we have even more to give away than usual, because we already know that folks here are going to need it.
I'm down to two unopened loaves of bread (the only kind I can eat, thanks to my new mid-life allergies, and Wings likes it better, too), and the place where I order them is still closed. I may need to spring for a bread machine after all, regardless of our lowered sales, because this altitude defies all attempts at making GF bread the ordinary way. I wish I had more hours in the day to experiment with recipes, but there's just too much around here that has to get done, and because of the isolation requirements of this pandemic, it's back to just Wings and me now, no possibility of hiring anyone to help. And while I used to help with literally everything around here, I can no longer do that physically thanks to what nearly killed me in 2017, and so I have to pick up the slack in other ways. And I'm probably lengthening this post deliberately so that I don't have to go back to all the stuff I was working on just quite yet.
Anyway, the upshot is that we need to make sales. I think the fields are getting disced next week for planting; that's going to cost. So are the horses' vaxes and spring check-ups, which is tentatively scheduled for May 4th. Farrier's coming out Thursday to do more work on Miika's laminitic left front (she has to be done in stages, and yes, there will be masking and social distancing via the end of a lead). At some point, the dogs have to go in for their vaxes and so forth. And we both have doctor's appointments, which will be telemedicine via my laptop, assuming it holds, the first week of May. That's a hell of a lot of expense, over and above all the usual monthly expenses, monsoonal patterns of another sort, and I need to cover it somehow, hence the next graf:
Over the course of last week, I featured, on his site, some of his most valuable (and highest-priced) works. If we could sell them all, we could sock 90% of it into savings and be assured of making it through the rest of the year and into the next, barring disaster. I don't actually have any real hope of doing that, but if you're one of the folks who's been looking at these works and thinking that someday you might want to invest the money in one or more? Now would be the time; it would help ensure our survival through this pandemic and likely to the first of next year, and help us to be able to help other folks in our community here who are going to need it badly. So please, this week especially, share all of our links, because while we're all in isolation? Income is already at virtually nothing, and we can survive the isolation, but not the inability to feed the maw of all the bills. The links are here:
Note: For now, please don't buy anything off the Amazon wishlist; to do so would be crossing a picket line, and some of their workers have struck this morning to fight for safer working conditions because their lives are being put at even greater risk during this pandemic. If you find one of the items elsewhere, wonderful (I found a lovely convection bread machine with a GF setting via Crate and Barrel online, but I can't justify the cost, at least not now; we haven't had anything like the kind of sales that would permit that), but for the duration of the strike, please don't buy anything off the list from there. That said, if you can find Wings's KT tapes anywhere else? He uses those virtually every day, and we're almost out; that would save us having to go out and buy them locally, in person and at higher cost.
Other than that, 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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