Ornaments and episodes. Sales and shares badly needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

From the other night; one of my few remaining old blown-glass ornaments. ::Sigh:: so much lost. My mom's old porcelain birds (and I do mean OLD). Other blown glass ones that would be collector's items now, some hand-painted, one in the shape of a balloon with a mouse in the basket. The hand-made ones from childhood. The ancient blue ball-shaped ornaments and the little green and clear faceted teardrops (again, OLD). Everything gone. 

But that glass-like thing along the right-hand side in the background? That's the cord to the oxygen concentrator. We have it strapped to the landing so that I can use it upstairs and down both, without needing to move it, because the damn thing is so freaking heavy. I can't use it everywhere, obviously, but I can at least use it sitting here on the couch or upstairs in bed. Yeah, I really need a permanent portable unit, but at more than $3K, that's not happening. And I needed it today. We had to run a bunch of errands, starting with an hour spent at the bank to start the process of clawing back some fraudulent charges on the debit card. People are just . . . ::shakes head::. That meant that we were out a lot longer than we anticipated, and we wound up having to cut it short, because I had my first real episode in two weeks or more. I had the nitro with me, so I ameliorated one bad trip with another, but it wasn't pleasant. When we finally got through all the holiday traffic and got home, the first five minutes on the O2 made all the difference in the world. [The CPAP is a no-go, though. It's physically painful in several different ways, entirely apart from the fact that it makes me feel like I'm suffocating. If the object is to make sure I breathe, making it impossible for me to do that doesn't seem like the best approach.] Doc follow-up tomorrow, so we'll be dealing with all of that.

For now, 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.