Socking us in.

Photo copyright Aji, 2022; all rights reserved.

Smoke plume socking us in this morning. That amount of blue was not visible to us; the camera filters out a lot of the glare even when I don't bother correcting for it. All we could see was the dirty white, especially from ground level. It's so bad out there that we're both wearing masks whenever we have to go outside, and we're still coughing, congested, eyes burning. 

On Friday they had a column collapse in the Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Wildfire Complex, which is part of our problem now. You know when the smoke plume rises into a really high tower? Well, there's a point at which that hot smoke smacks into a ceiling of high cold air (and it was bitterly cold Thursday and Friday nights, down below freezing). When that happens, the plume collapses; think what happens when the air gets forced out of a balloon by sudden cold.  Trouble is, it flattens out on all sides, like a mushroom cloud, so it extends far beyond the fire line . . . and that smoke plume? Ain't just smoke. It contains hot ash, but it also contains live embers, and they get flung far and wide in all directions, starting ew spot fires beyond the fire lines. That, plus a shift in wind direction, is what happened here, and now it's also heading south toward Las Vegas, and they lost acreage on containment.

Also, today, the winds kicked in right on schedule, so a lot of that, but by no means all, has been blown out now . . . only to be rapidly getting replaced from the west by the blazes there that have escaped containment. There are two below Valles Caldera, threatening Bandelier. To get here from there is about a two-hour drive. 

The winds face no such impediments.

And our world is still in flames.

Despite all of that, and a bunch of other colonizer nonsense too, we were blessed this weekend to make a really good sale, and so we'll be able to cover the most urgent expenses in the weeks to come. But I'm still increasingly disabled, and I can't work if I can't get the pain under control, or get back my ability to walk [mostly] unhindered. That's the point of the extremely costly therapy: rewiring my brain to lower my pain response and let my body start finding ways to heal a little. So we will still need to make steady, consistent sales over the course of the coming months to keep everything above water. Links are here:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (priorities are first and foremost, the other ladder, the Thermacell lanterns [the flies are already out, so the mosquitoes won't be far behind], and the liquid soaps, which prevent our hands from cracking and bleeding given that we're forced to wash them fifty times a day;
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

We're still hoping to put aside enough for a new well when the ground thaws enough to drill in the spring, too, Nah, we've given up on the well. No one's available to drill before the latter half of summer, and the tax burden means we would never be able to afford it anyway. But it's perhaps even more of a good time to make a purchase, because Uncle Sam is a vindictive colonizer, and my current stress levels about paying it all are off the charts. And there's lots of fabulous 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.