Horses and bills. Doors and trimwork. Scaffolds and extension ladders and painting and shares needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017;
all rights reserved.

Today involved a lot of waiting, but it was also more productive on a lot of fronts. First and foremost, the horse vet was out: Miskwaki's blood has been drawn, even if he didn't like it much, and we should have results Wednesday. 

We paid Ice's bill in full, so my tough guy is all taken care of now. It was much more than I was expecting, but that's the way these things go; when he first went down, we had no reason to think we couldn't walk it off — or, failing that, that the cost of a farm call, a shot of IV Banamine, and a nasogastric tubing wouldn't take care of it. But the time it was clear that it wouldn't, we were in the middle of it, and there was still no indication that we couldn't pull him out of it. And, of course, the single biggest expense was the IV pheno on Sunday morning. She said that my reaction to her report on Ice's labs was the same as her own: The tumor that was visible was NOT the initial tumor, but rather the spread of a much larger one that had developed somewhere internally, probably many years ago, and had finally grown enough 1) to impinge on the gut and displace it, causing the primary colic, and 2) to begin to bleed out suddenly. Because he was bleeding internally by the end. The expense is an enormous hit for us right now, but we know she has trouble collecting on a lot of her patients, and she does amazing work for us with ours (she came out three separate times in the space of about 12 hours for Ice last weekend). We need to keep her paid up, so all that remains now is the bill for Miskwaki's labs, which she hasn't generated and invoiced yet (~$100, reportedly).

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

On the house front, some substantial progress. A lot of it is stuff that's been in the work for weeks, but today was the payoff — specifically, finishing off the trim work for the interior doors. Above is the door leading off the open area at the top of the stairwell into our bedroom, with the scaffold in the left foreground. Below is the master bath:
 

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

And below this are the two downstairs doors, to the small bath and the utility room:

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

The photos don't remotely do them justice. They're all the same color, like those from the first two photos; downstairs, they were in shadow, thanks to the massive storm that moved through.

The photo up at the very top of the post is of what we all accomplished today. Before leaving, Tony and Reynaldo built that makeshift scaffold for me. Wings brought up the extension ladder, and I got the right half of it painted on my own. [If you click on it to enlarge the image, you'll see that it's got a base coat of paint on it, where yesterday was primer only; it's that pearlescent white left over from the top coat in the master bath.] The ladder was on a step that was sufficiently high up to allow me to do it on my own. To do the left half of it, though, the ladder had to be extended from a couple of feet lower, which made it much less stable, so Wings held the ladder for me while I did the edge work and rolled the upper reaches. The roller extension let me do the rest on my own, as well as the lower part of it that required crouching down on some really uncomfortable still-fractured toes. Tomorrow, the sponging on of the three metallics (silver, copper, bronze) occurs, which means more  of Wings holding the ladder for me on the upper reaches of it. Then Wednesday, sponging off of the pearlescent white, and over the weekend, all the touchups, including edge work on the blue walls. Yeah, I'm beat.

And we have a lot more to do, a lot of expense yet to come. Cabinets are my current source of stress, and it's a lot of stress at this point, all the more so after $1,540 out the door today for Ice. We need sales, badly. We also need shares; the more of the cards we can accumulate, from folks who are willing to donate credit card points, etc., to them, the less cash that will have to be diverted to creating an actual kitchen. So here are the links:

• Wings's site, for sales;
• Lowe's cards (the physical version) via our Amazon wishlist;
• Lowe's e-cards (delivered via e-mail) here; and
• Home Depot cards via the company site. The e-version using my e-mail address is great; I take the tablet to the store with me, and they scan it off the screen.

Just like last night, I will likely be up late tonight, working. I have a ton of stuff to get plotted out on the house for the week, and other work to catch up on because it gets cray again tomorrow. Love and gratitude to everybody.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.