Snow. Also a little lost girl, and a lot of upcoming appointments. Also a collective next goal of $3,500, so sales and shares are needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved.

That was the view a few minutes ago. Now, it's just snow. It's collecting, too; the temperature dropped in a matter of seconds this afternoon just as the storm hit, enough of a change in barometric pressure to make my left ear pop.

It's been a day. We took care of the next step in the USPS claim with regard to our friend and client's stolen item. It was stolen right out of the package in transit, with everything put back together exactly as I'd packed it. For those of you who've bought Wings's work, you know how many steps unpacking it involves, much less repacking it. That was the sole progress I made on anything today.

Photo copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved.

River showed up late, with a few-weeks-old puppy in tow. Absolutely adorable, but it shrieked the whole day, and I couldn't get anything under way until well after noon. [Yes, the puppy went home with him; he was apparently just on dog-sitting duty today.] Then I couldn't find one of the chickens, one of the silvers; I assumed she was off under something pecking and scratching. I found her in one the lay spots under the coop itself; she'd clearly been gone since early this morning. No indication as to what happened, but given that she was in brood position in one of the concealed nests, and there was a broken egg next to her, my best guess is that she became egg-bound overnight and in the process of trying to lay it, her little heart must've given out. She doesn't seem to have suffered; everything seems to have . . . just . . . stopped. I think it might have been Opal, but I'm not sure; the weather was too bad to get a good look at her sisters for comparison (their markings are very nearly, but not quite, identical). The photo above is from almost a year ago, when they were just beginning to move around the coop; she's one of the six black-and-white Silver-Laced Wyandotte chicks in the photo. We've wrapped her up and placed her in spot where she'll be safe; it's too cold and wet to bury her tonight.

I have to spend tonight packing items for shipment and paying medical bills. On that last, there's a long, looooooooong way to go, and between Wings and me we have four appointments upcoming over the next week and a half, so I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel yet. I'm setting two separate goals, as outlined below, because they're both dunning me steadily now. And I'm exhausted, physically and mentally both, so the rest is mostly cut-and-paste.

The overall goal is my $25K+ in emergency medical bills. I've been trying to raise an initial $1,700 to take care of two specific bills: the local ambulance and one hospitalist's fee. We're $145 of the way toward it. Those are now covered (thank you, thank you again). The next goal is two-fold: One is the cost of the ambulance when they transferred me down to Albuquerque, which is $2K; the other is one of the Lovelace doctors, which is $1,500. That's $3,500 total, and the next phase of all this with regard to the new platform. Then I can turn my attention to the really big ones, which are the hospital bills themselves (Lovelace in particular is going to be bad, because, well, cardiac cath). A caveat: I have a lot of kinks to get worked out yet, but PayPal is now theoretically linked to the progress meter on the site. I say "theoretically," because I've just discovered that I apparently have to set up at least one other page to make the subscription "purchase" possible. Eventually, if you subscribe via PayPal (it's a monthly thing like Patreon), it will show, although for now the only way to do it is to hit the PayPal "Subscribe" button. I'm hoping to get that figured out and fixed tomorrow. I also need to figure out how to pin it to the main page, so for now, the only way to access it is here. Please share this link around on social media and elsewhere. I still need to raise the $3,500 as fast as possible, because there are thousands' worth of hospital bills stacked up behind it. It also means that we need sales and I need to get my subscription platform up and running (and you can still subscribe via PayPal even now). So here are the links: 

• Tonight's post elsewhere (finally, some weather);
• A way to buy me coffee (which actually goes to She-Wolf's & my medical bills, and now Wings's too);
• Wings's direct PayPal link;
• Wings's site, for sales;
• Amazon wishlist, which mostly consists of food for the half-feral pack;
• 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. There are some things left on both registries that I thought by now I might be able just to buy outright, but medical bills (mine and She-Wolf's both) have to come first.

Please check out the new platform, share the links, get your friends to participate. I've got a long road ahead of me, just in terms of diagnosis and, I hope, eventually treatment. Being able to pay off the medical bills will go a long way toward keeping me as healthy as possible in the meantime. Thanks, everybody, from both of us.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.