Warrior up. And weep for joy, too. Sales/shares needed, of course.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

Today was all peaks and valleys, sometimes at the same time. Physically, it's been less than optimal; I've always had my good days and my bad days with my autoimmune disease, but lately, it's okay days and not-so-good days and bad days and frankly terrible-and-terrifying days. Any day out of the hospital is better than the last category, but today definitely fell into the outright bad one. And there's no rhyme or reason to it, no apparent identifiable pattern, and I can't get a handle on it.

Still.

We awakened this morning to good things, too. I think we will be fine until the first of the year. We still need to make sales, of course (and Wings needs to get some studio time to build up our woefully low inventory). But we owe a great deal of gratitude to a few folks right now.

And the morning brought us that up there (or, rather, it brought me that up there). Normally, I go out to pray first thing in the morning. Since I got sick in November, and especially since my last hospitalization a few weeks ago, I can't tolerate extreme cold, and my balance isn't good enough (nor a lot of other things) for me to go out so early. This day was sufficiently bad that I waited extra-long to do it, several ours beyond my usual time. And as I walked out, suddenly from just beyond the east fence, a raven flushed something big up from the ground, something with a white band at the top of its tail.

Now, there are two hawks that fit that description, one the harrier who has been here (and showed up while I was out there, in fact), and one the Swainson's, who is a hawk of summer and who has since ceded the land to the red-tail (who was also here at the same time). But this was big, and I couldn't believe my eyes, because they're almost never willing to come this close, much less on the ground.

It was a golden eagle — in my way, the War Eagle, and he led the raven on a joyous chaser around the skies,  banking and wheeling back and soaring directly over my head, around and around, making sure I could see the "eyes" on his inner wings and identify him clearly before swooping off northward to spiral up above the clouds. So I stopped and grabbed my old camera that Wings found for me last night, and got a couple of very distant shots. It was a message, clearly, one meant for me: Warrior up.

And so I am. This stuff is tough right now, no two ways about it. I can't really make anyone who isn't actually going through it (which, in my orbit, is no one) understand remotely what this feels like, much less how  bad it really is. It's miserable physically, and it's terrifying besides that, and we have zero answers (I mean, yeah, my heart is in great shape, but what's causing the artery problems if they're all clear?), and every single day is hard-fought and hard-won. The "won" part only comes when I wake up in the morning and see the light outside the window. But this was what I needed on this day, a reminder to warrior up. I have, and I will.

There's more. The one errand we did run today was to the post office. There was only one item in the box, itself a tiny box. We also had a slip that had been left in the box on Saturday, but we weren't able to pick it up until today; the counter closes at 11 AM on Saturdays, and two days ago? There was absolutely no hope of getting in there in the 2.5 hours or so that they were allegedly open. 

So, we sat in the truck and opened them up, one tiny box and one Priority envelope. And my family (my real family, the ones who have adopted me, adopted us, with bonds that go deeper and stronger than blood) sent us this:

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. 

No, not the tree. Click on it, and look closely. Right in the center front is a little snowman ornament that one dear friend sent us to add to our tree. 

Now look around the edges, the ends of the branches. Both reduced me to tears, but this is what left me sobbing openly in the front seat of the truck. My sister, by every measure that matters, went to the trouble of making — by hand! - twenty (20!) paper ornaments. Origami cranes. You know, cranes. And when they spilled out of the envelope onto my lap? The one on top was made of paper decorated with sandhill cranes. My namesake. So was the last one — bookends to the other 18, each unique, each hand-made out of beautiful, colorful paper. And all twenty-one ornaments are now on our tree, where they will stay until it comes down on January 7th (yes, we're doing the 12 days, and leaving it up through what here is known as All Kings' Day). And they will all have places of honor on next year's tree, too, and the one after that, and the one after that. People just astonish me sometimes, even those who know me well, because they flummox me with their ability to figure out what will touch my soul most even when I don't know the answer.


And with Christmas essentially over, we have lost our last shot at holiday sales, too. This last week of the year will be hard now, but beyond that, we have no cushion for the rest of the winter (and the weather will change, even if it's only to get really, really cold), much less for the emergency medical expenses of the last six weeks. 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. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, 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.