Not an auspicious start.

Photo copyright Aji, 2019; all rights reserved.

I aspire to such levels of relaxation. Also of physical flexibility. I will never achieve either.

She's lying more or less at my feet at the moment, instead of on the dog bed. I wasn't supposed to be here right now — I was supposed to be with Wings at his follow-up — but the smoke is so bad here today that we both thought I'd be better off staying indoors as much as possible. Given the town lies lower than our place here, the smoke is undoubtedly worse, trapped as it gets in the valley. So much for the first day of summer: Smoke, and gale-force winds, and we can only hope the latter blow out the former. not an auspicious start.

This week has been trash pretty much across the board. I lost two full days to UPS's . . . I don't even know what to call it. I confirmed last night with the night manager that someone on the day shift dummied up the records; our delivery was never in put onto a truck. So they falsified the first report of "receiving business (i.e., our residence) closed" two nights ago; then yesterday again falsified the entry that we had refused delivery, saying that we hadn't ordered it and instructing them to return it. And if that sounds unlikely to you, well, you're no more astonished than I am.

And UPS has been absolutely useless, offering me nothing more than a coupon code for 40% off future shipments. Which, I might add, are tax-deductible anyway, so they're offering us nothing for depriving me of two days' worth of work, all the agita of chasing them and the stupid package around, and a severe asthma attack chasing Chinook down because we had to keep the gate open for the delivery that never came, and some idiot was screwing around on the road up there. I guess we won't be using UPS anymore; I wish I could force vendors shipping to us to use FedEx for things that have to come to the house.

Anyway. The box was so badly damaged that we have no confidence that the contents aren't also damaged, so we wound up telling them to proceed with the return anyway. The part can be ordered through a local dealer who carries a different line, but it's a lot more expensive locally, so we thought we'd save money and get it in the same amount of time. Apparently not.

And I find, today, that I am so mad I cannot see straight. It's not even this UPS bullshit, though bullshit it most certainly is. It's the fucking plumbing disaster and the damage done to our house and to us, and the knowledge that we have no recourse. I have to get rid of this rage at some point, but since our house is still torn apart and we're going to be dealing with the fallout for months, to say nothing of the costs, I'm nowhere near there yet.

In the meantime, everything has to keep moving. Ivan will be here this evening to drop the hay; assuming the forecast is accurate, I'm guessing he'll bale Sunday or Monday. This will be the second year in a row that I will not be able to help with getting it in; in the past, I was always right out there beside Wings loading and stacking bales, but my body's been too damaged these last two years for me to do that kind of lifting. Another loss, and I feel it acutely; there is so much I can no longer do, and it has real-world consequences for us. All the stuff we used to do together that requires two sets of hands, things like the hay and repairing (or even building) fences and so forth? I can't do any of it now, which means that we have to pay someone to help out with it. So many, many years of work, and suddenly, I'm cut off from all of it.

So there's a lot of expense, now and coming down the pike both. There's a lot that we have no choice but to shell out for, and we have to make some sales to do it — in a local economy where sales are nonexistent, and an online one in which they're way, way down for this time of year. So please share the links to our site; please send me testimonials to post (no full names, of course). I confess to being really disheartened by the lack of response to this simple request; so many of you have really, really phenomenal work by him, and so many of you have accordingly sent me personal notes over the last decade and a half about how life-changing it has been for you, lots of effusive words in private, but you haven't offered a public testimonial that will help increase sales despite my repeated pleas for them.

I'm discouraged on all fronts right now. Just getting through each day is difficult on its own when you can't breathe and you're in constant all-over pain. And I have two additional days' worth of work to get through now, so I best get on it, and forget about testimonials and everything else.



All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.