Markers. Life and love. A lot ahead, and sales and shares badly needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017;
all rights reserved.

Markers. The season abounds with them. Last night was a melancholy one; today, it's pure joy, the one-month anniversary of the day we finally, finally got around to formalizing everything. There are a couple more yet to come this month, though, and they fall more into the former category, but they're both still pretty raw. When we looked for the ornaments, we found some old photos, too, that bring tears of the ancestral variety. It also occurred to me that I've apparently lost the old ornaments I made as a child, when we had nothing, and I cut up cardboard toilet paper and paper towel rolls and covered them with felt and stars and glitter left over from some school project or other and strung them with thread and hung them on our dilapidated tree.

But we are determined to live. Every single day. Oh, by most people's standards, our idea of "living" is pretty modest; no aspirations for fame or fortune, no big travel plans (because my health no longer permits it), none of the usual. Just living every day in the moment, loving each other, being grateful for our home and this place and our animals. Being grateful for the beauty and joy and grace and love of each moment.

There's a lot ahead, and I suspect a lot of it will be difficult. I still have no answers, near six weeks on, and if the labs aren't back by Thursday, I won't know anything at all until about a week into 2018. That's scary. All of this is scary. I low-ball it for everyone, but don't think I'm being cavalier; I'm not. But at the moment, it's out of my hands, so we pray for the best.

But 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.