Not anymore.

Photo copyright Aji, 2023; all rights reserved.

[Today's post, but written early today when we didn't know whether we'd have Internet access today, or even for the week.]

See how the blue turns a dirty, smoggy white nearer the horizon? That’s smoke.

That was early this morning; it’s much worse now. The winds are much wilder, too, and I just saw a couple of small dust devils try to whip up something in our east field; after it hit the neighbor’s field, it turned into less a giant dust devil than a giant spiraling dust bowl. And you can see up in the photo how much the west fields are browning now. Ten days ago, they were as green as the aspen leaves in the foreground.

Not anymore.

This is all very bad, and it’s part of what I meant when I kept insisting that the pronouncements of our stupid media and also our so-called experts that the land is no longer in drought were dangerously, deadly wrong. This land has not been this dry, nor this aridified, in more than twelve hundred years. A few weeks of intermittent rain aren’t even a drop in the  proverbial fucking bucket.

And of course, the Internet’s still out.  They finally posted a notice on the local rag this morning, a whole day late, and then”updated” it to look as though it had already been up, but sorry, folks; I know to monitor these things, and once again, the Taos News lies through its colonizer teeth. So does IKT’s leadership. So do the federal and state forestry and land management entities. I learned through the grapevine yesterday that it was not one but two successive episodes of IKE negligence that caused first other folks’ electrical outage on Friday and our Internet outage now; I also learned that said “forest management” entities lied about the fire that is the source of most of our smoke, negligent launching a prescribed burn int he middle of dry and windy conditions off what they say (but Wings and I no longer believe) was a lightning-strike ignition (on a day and night with neither storms nor dry/heat lightning in the area in question). They also apparently decided to launch a prescribed burn north of Abiquiu, and that just as predictably got away from them, so now we have two wildfires raging not far west of us, and absolutely zero confidence in anyone in authority to tell us the truth about any of it.

And my weekend, and all my plans for using it to catch up, are shot. I needed to be able to spend a lot more time on chasing than sales than I've been able to do for months now, and that was part of what this weekend was going to be. Except not, because this place that is so goddamned determined to colonize everything into nothing but rich white outsiders pushing everyone else out cannot even maintain the bare minimum of public utility consistency even without all the added load of the current invasion. Thinking that we were okay for now was entirely predicated on the assumption of consistent sales for the second half of this year; if we don't make them, then no, we're not okay now, because I have to make everything stretch a lot further than it can possibly go.  There's a lot of new work on the site already, and Wings has more silverwork and gemstone bead items in rotation, too. All the links are listed below, so please share:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (current priority still the Zero-Odor sprays, because these days we're back to wet dogs again; and the liquid soaps, which we can't get locally); 
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

There's lots of fabulous work on the site, so please share all of the links. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.