Uneasy spirits.

Photo copyright Aji, 2021; all rights reserved.

The last several days have been a time of uneasy spirits, as though they know something is coming and can’t quite decide what to do. We have birds that are never here this time of year; insects and butterflies, too. And then there are the less fully-formed kind, the ones you hear faintly but never quite see, the invisible ones the dogs chase until they lose them, confused, beneath the pall of smoke that is busy choking the life out of everything here now.

Something is coming. It won’t be anything good.

Meanwhile, this has been an impossible week, and it’s only Tuesday: no Internet, which means no work of the income-generating kind, while the bills that are due NOW are shrieking and gibbering in my face. If they can’t troubleshoot the problem today and also fix it, then who knows how long we’ll be stuck in this limbo, incommunicado and under siege from the bills? If it requires replacing the main cable, we’re screwed, because we’re already in the negatives, and I don’t have any way to bring in enough to pay that now.  And it means that I will have to cancel my biopsy next week, and any chance at getting treatment under way now, too.

“Uneasy” is an understatement.

Also meanwhile the land is dying. Wings has spent much of this day already hauling hoses up to the north field in hopes of keeping the willows up there alive long enough to receive the winter snows, always assuming we get any of those, either. My beloved fire maple is already turning yellow and red, the green fading three months too soon. Our largest stand of red willow is mostly dead now, no longer fed by the pond or anything remotely approaching normal precipitation levels, and that feels like an omen of the worst possible kind here. But without the well, everything will continue to die, because colonizers keep moving in uninvited and leeching resources already strained past the breaking point by their global depredations.

It’s no wonder some ghosts are abroad now, probably in mourning for the world they left thriving, now watching it die from their side as we watch it die from ours.

That’s not the only thing dying. My chances of pulling us out of this spin are dying with every day I can’t work, and it’s all the fault of the public utility that refuses to do its job properly, and that privileges “businesses,” which they define as colonizer businesses in town and county, over ours, which is . . . ? What? Nothing because it’s tribally-owned? 

And still, all the rest is cut-and-paste; I can’t even get into the file at the moment for the text, but when (IF?) the Internet’s ever back up again, I’ll deal with it then.  All the usual is below:

This is our second-most-costly month of the year, thanks to certain biannual expenses, and every year, I think this will be the year that I get ahead of it, and every year, I get crushed instead. This time, it was all these medical expenses that did it. But the upshot is that I have to find ~$3,500 before the month is out, ~$1,500 of it by the first of the week, and I'm nowhere on it. My Patreon is down by 3 figures these days, and I don't have the health to do it daily anymore. And now we might finally know why; labs indicate lupus as a likely culprit. You can read the details of that here. I need help, though. The fatigue alone is kicking my ass, and I don't have time for it, because the bills won't wait.

So I have got to bring in sales to cover anything, and push has come to shove now. I have to be able to pay this $1,500-ish on Monday. There's another ~$2K lurking that has to be paid the following week. I also can't do it alone, so please share our links. There's a lot of work in progress right now, and the new cuff is done, and it's up here. It's . . . there aren't really words for it. Not for the work involved, and not for the power and beauty of the result. It really needs to be snapped up fast:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (priorities are all the mosquito-prevention items, especially the portables and the patio-surface ones, because Wings can take them around the land with his as he works);
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

And if you've been contemplating a purchase? This would be a very, very good time to do it; I've got to make up this staggering outlay somehow. There's lots of fabulous new work, so please share all of the links. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.