Farolitos! Everyone else is taken care of now (including neighboring 4-leggeds). Sales and shares very much needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

Wings finally got the rest of the farolitos up on the west side of the balcony. We have our Christmas lights up, and before, like, Christmas, for maybe the first time ever. The rest of the day was spent on various tasks. It was River's last day working here until Tuesday, so he got paid, got a little Christmas bonus, and got a few small items for him and his mom to open on Christmas morning. [Our crew got Christmas bonuses earlier in the week, too; very modest ones across the board, but it was important to recognize their incredible work for us all year with at least a little bit extra.] Then I rode along with Wings to take some hay down the road to the various horses whose families need some extra help. They know his truck now, and they come running. [We also took care of someone else's pet food to keep the animals safe while the person deals with medical stuff.]

Tonight's dinner was straight out of the crock pot. I started it this morning: pinto beans with andouille sausage and garlic. Good for nights like this when it's bitterly cold. The day started out feeling more mild, but once the wind picked up, it was difficult to be out in it, so I wanted something warming for us both this evening. We'll have the leftovers tomorrow. We have the gift of some wonderful food to make Christmas dinner — a duck, plus the wild rice for stuffing and vegetables and so forth that we already had on hand (squash, asparagus, sweet potatoes, etc.), and a dear friend sent us a pie, so I'll thaw the bird tomorrow and make the stuffing, and it'll be ready to put in the oven on Christmas morning. And this year, for the first time in seven years, I'll be able to cook on the stovetop while the oven is going! In the RV, you could use either the stovetop or the oven, not both at once, which made for some interesting timing when it came to trying to make a holiday dinner. All the food will be hot at once this time. And spreading the prep out over two days will be easier on me, because everything exhausts me now. [Yes, we had dinner, and now I'm back on the O2 again to boost ability to, you know, breathe or do anything.]

Its been a hugely expensive week. I should have this new off-label scrip possibly as early as the end of next week to try to back off my autoimmune issues a bit so we can deal more effectively with whatever this other thing is. I did at last get some sleep last (mostly by ignoring what the hospitals told me), so I functioned a little better today, but I'm still beat. And we shelled out an ungodly amount of money on medical stuff. Everything's gone to that, or to other folks, so there will be no gifts for each other. We've given each other the house, and ourselves, and those are priceless.

Even so, everything has wiped out what little cash we had. We have to make some sales somehow, although now that Christmas is basically here, that's essentially done, and there's still almost two weeks left in the year, forget everything else. There's so much that needs doing, and so much I still can't do. It's incredibly frustrating to be so limited in my activities, and the extra burden on Wings is immense. He's finally gotten a little studio time, but that's been existing stuff, not new inventory. In the meantime, there's virtually no tourist traffic here, because there's no snow, for one, and everyone's hurting. It's a tough time. As I said last night, sales are way, WAY off this season. This is what usually gets us through the next four to six months, the holiday sales, and they're way down. Part of it is the mess that is our so-called government, with the fraud at the alleged top and the great swath of destruction he and his minions are carving through the country. Part of it is that that hedge-fund jackass built that stupid lift on the peak and blasted the mountain with explosives, and the spirits are now thoroughly pissed, and there is NO snow, so there is no tourism, either. I have no idea how we'll meet even minimal expenses, much less how we'll help our friend get down to her cancer treatment appointments. We couldn't do it this week, and her truck remains without a clutch. Forget what remains to be done on the house for now. We need to make some sales. A lot of them. But sales are not just what's going to keep me alive and Wings healthy; it's going to help other folks, too. Given the circumstances, I'm leaving up the donation link, too, and the registries have some new items on then, mostly lower-priced, to replace stuff damaged by the RV or given away when we first moved into it seven years ago. So please share our links:

• Wings's direct PayPal link;
• Wings's site, for sales;
• Wayfair gift cards, to replenish all the furnishings that the RV has destroyed in one way or another.
• Partial registry #1, from Bed, Bath and Beyond. There are new kitchen-y things on it now, stuff that I didn't realize we'd need to replace (either because the RV ruined it or because we gave it away when we had to downsize).
• Partial registry #2, from Wayfair. Still waiting for them to resolve this fulfillment/shipping problem they have with their site. Even so, I've added some things (kitchen/dining room stuff mostly), most of which are comparatively reasonably priced. Now, it's going to be mostly odds and ends that make this place more liveable, because of the sheer volume of stuff destroyed by too many years in the RV (e.g., by the oven and stovetop, by the wiring, by the water, by the mold, etc.), or that we simply gave away seven years ago because we had no room and no place to put them and despaired of ever being able to use them again. A CHANGE ABOUT WAYFAIR:  NO MORE CROWDFUNDING. Their Web site coding is bad, and it will not permit crowdfunded items to ship. Items purchased outright arrive in two business days, but you can't even get the others out of the warehouse. 

As I've also been saying, I am still catching up, and will be now for a while. But this is the holiday season, and the sales/commissions from these few weeks are what keep us alive throughout the whole long winter and spring months (to say nothing of what's in the offing medically), so please continue to share the links. And please refer folks to Wings's site (and if you have an endorsement, too, so much the better). I'll be trying, slowly but, I hope, steadily, to get caught up over the course of this week. We have some massive expenses coming down the pike, and a lot of testing yet to be done before I'm out of the woods. So please keep sharing all our links. For now, I'm just so damn grateful to be alive, to have a healthy heart, to be back home with the love of my life and our dogs, the whole world is beautiful, even in spite of my terrible depression. Thanks again, to everybody, and we love you all.

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.