Dark days; gathering storm (literal and metaphorical both). Shares very much needed.

Nothing new to show for today. We spent the day dealing with outside chores in bitterly cold winds, then delivering wood to my s-i-l and her husband and their grandchildren. A couple of days ago, we had to go down the road to help out the folks whose horse we'e been helping to feed. The next storm is on the way, and if the radar map is accurate, it's going to be a big one.

There's gonna be a lot more of this, y'all. I hope you're getting yourselves ready. You're gonna have to do a lot of things you've never done before. And you're gonna have to learn to be self-sufficient in ways our parents and grandparents knew, but we were fortunate enough mostly to escape. [As it happens, Wings and I, because of our particular background, have more experience with this sort of thing than most. I can't tell you how often we use that knowledge already; we know we'll be using it more in the dark days to come.]

I have to get this house built. We have to be safe, and this is the only way to do that. We can't help the people around us who are going to need it if we have no safe home base ourselves. Seven winters of this, and my body is not going to be able to handle much more of it; I'm getting too old. And believe me, however much we've struggled, and yes, often suffered over those seven years? There are a lot of folks around here who have it worse, and we are not going to be able to stand by while this new order effectively sentences them to something much, much worse than what they're already enduring. This is a "choose your side" moment, and if you have even a sliver of a conscience, or if you think you just might have an eternal soul, there's only one choice.

We are decidedly nothing approaching wealthy. Not even breaking even. All the money we've raised has gone straight into the house, and it will continue to do so. Money from sales? That gets split three ways: house construction, daily expenses, and what we can squeeze out here and there for folks in worse straits than us. But there is now a sense of urgency to all of this that didn't exist before the country's politics imploded on November 8th. I have to do whatever I can to get this built so that I can focus on what surrounds us, and that means we need shares:

• Shares of our YouCaring page via the widgets provided, especially the widget code, which has once again been moved back to the purple box at the lower right-hand side of the page, that produces the image shown just above:
• Shares of Wings's site; sales also fund the construction (indeed, they are the baseline for it). Testimonials help (yes, I know I have a couple to add; I couldn't even find five spare minutes to brush my teeth this morning, that's how absurd the pace is here right now).
• I've added Lowes gift cards to our Amazon wishlist. Those will really, really help with materials costs from this point forward.

And before you share our links, please go share Laura's. Lin's spirit is where the water meets the light, but Laura will still need our help for a while. A fitting immediate legacy for Lin would have been funding her YouCaring effort fully by year's end, to provide Laura with the assurance of a safety net. There has been zero movement on it for at least a week, probably more. This is not acceptable to me; Lin's memory deserves better, and so does Laura, who has given so very, very much of herself in recent months for someone so many claimed to love. Please T/R/share/donate to her fund if you can. Especially that last. It's needed.

Thanks, everyone.

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