Expensive at the best of times (and these are not the best of times, by a long shot).

Photo copyright Aji, 2022; all rights reserved.

Greedy butts, scarfing down the bird seed and suet. I missed getting a shot of Miika with the thistle bag in her mouth; I did manage to get several through the window of her with her neck stretched up and her head stuck fully in the top feeder. That was before she knocked the hanging feeder onto the ground.

These two are expensive at the best of times (and these are not the best of times, by a long shot), and they're really costing us this week. They're two months overdue for their farrier work; with the holidays and with the patient load our horse vet carries, especially in winter, we couldn't arrange a time when they could both be out here — necessary, because Miika was so traumatized by her early experience[s] of hoof work (long before she came to us) that she has to be sedated. And she has to be sedated, because the damage before she came to us was so great that it's now a life-and-death matter to keep working on correcting her hoof issues. Anyway, Wings managed to coordinate it all this morning, so they'll both be out Thursday afternoon.  Between that and the cost of the two additional giant hay bales we got over the weekend (because Johnny had managed to find some good-quality hay at a decent price, and because it's becoming clearer by the day that we will likely have no planting season again this year), we're going to be out about $600 cash combined. If you want to help keep a couple of formerly badly abused and neglected rescue horses safe and healthy, the PayPal link is below.

Because this month has already set us back by a lot. It's slated to be an absolute mess of appointments, except that I'm waiting to see if they need to be rescheduled because Omicron is everywhere now. But this is our most expensive month of the year (followed very closely by July; I'm not even including April, which is tax month, in all of this). So while we had a far better holiday sales season than I could ever have hoped, we still have to keep the cycle going. This is our livelihood, after all, and there's a lot of expense ahead, medical and otherwise (and this has to be the year the drill the well because there's no other option at this point; "first thing," indeed). It's a twelve-hundred-year drought, and it's killing everything.

So, as always, it comes back to that: more sales. A lot more, because we have two years' worth of a shattered pandemic economy to make up for, by which I mean we need to gain more ground ourselves financially to be able to be sure of making it through the winter and the rest of the year. I've posted a ton of Wings's new work lately, and there will be more in the days and weeks to come. If I could sell one of the big works, like the belt, maybe I could get us on the drill list for the well that is the only thing that's going to keep this land alive. But I've got way too much to do and too few hours and other resources to do it. Which means that I'll be stepping back significantly in terms of my online presence, because there's just too much else to do, and I am no longer well enough to maintain the kind of pace I once did.

So, since we have to continue to make sales, links are here, and there's new work up today, with more to come this week:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (priorities are first and foremost, the ladders);
• 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 cover all this staggering outlay somehow and get us through twelve whole months of a new year, plus put aside enough for a new well when the ground thaws enough to drill in the spring. And 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, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.