Not a good one.

Photo copyright Aji, 2019; all rights reserved.

The last of the honeybees. I know it's normal with these lows, but still, given their endangered status, finding them like that felt like an omen. Not a good one. 

This time of year is hard. One marker in particular, and there's no getting away from it. Maybe it's my illnesses at the root of it all, but I'm having an even harder time with it this week than usual. Add to that too much bad news just in the last several days alone, too many hits that just keep coming and coming and coming, and I just don't have the resources to engage with anyone or anything. It all winds up coming to the same end anyway.

I don't have a choice on the financial front, though. I have to keep chasing sales, every single day. It's mid-October already, which means we're solidly into holiday commission season. It takes time for Wings to design and create custom pieces, so if you're planning on ordering gifts for the holidays, now is the time to get hold of me, here, to begin the process.

As I said, I also paid out $1,600 in quarterly taxes the other night, and we need to make that up to cover repairs and medical. Absolutely everything is geared around making sales right now. Wings dropped six new works a few days ago, so please share them far and wide (and buy! the holidays are around the corner!). He has more in the works right now. And speaking of now, I also have to get a whole bunch of other things done besides. So again today, ALL the rest is yesterday's cut-and-paste, but it's all still all too terribly relevant, and it all still matters.

My Patreon, albeit [now only] $390 short (thank you to the patron who checked their subscription!), went in its entirety to those quarterly taxes. I had to pull a few hundred from other commitments to make it. Between August and September, our income has been reduced by more than $650 thanks to some Patreon subscribers' cards being declined (apparently mostly an issue of expiration, but folks aren't checking their subscriptions, I guess). That has put me in a huge bind right now, because that income? It usually pays medical stuff, utilities, groceries, gas, and this month, it would have gone to a high electric bill and a $300+ annual propane tank rental, but this month, it goes on taxes, and even putting my entire Patreon earnings for September toward it, it's still $400 short. So folks, please, PLEASE check your cards that are on file with Patreon, even if you think yours was paid, because it may not have been.

And I still have to get to weatherizing the wood (we have to do it ourselves because we can't afford to pay to have it done, health issues or no) before the snow hits. The too much to do mostly involves chasing sales, and as I said above, every single thing I do has to be geared around that goal right now. This should be the start of our busiest season, and it's dead, dead, dead, and I don't know how we make it trough the winter if things don't look up very, very soon. The rest is mostly [but not entirely] cut-and-paste, but no less accurate or urgent for that. 

As always, I'll bump Ona's post (the new one) back to the top in a moment. Yesterday, I announced an anonymous $1,000 match, offered by a very generous and very dear friend. The details about how to donate and have your contribution counted the match appear at the top of the post for Ona, which will once again be at the top of my site in a few minutes. We're currently at $400 in funds toward the $1k (which, when reached, our friend will match with another $1K) if you don't count our own donation yesterday (we're at $700 if you do count it, but I'm not sure whether the donor counts us or not; anyway, it would be better to have an extra $300 on top of the $2K, yes?). This is urgent, and the GFM is not raising funds at anything near the pace of what's needed to keep him on track for recovery. We need y'all to keep sharing while the family tries to get transport issues sorted out and keep his recovery going simultaneously. [The transport stuff will require a lot of logistical finessing on a lot of fronts, not the least of which is the medical one, so it's a long process. I may also have a small fundraising announcement tomorrow; we'll see, but please be on the lookout for that, as well.]

With regard to the other stuff referenced above: For those wondering about my own health issues, see here; with regard to the work being done, some of the details are here. We still have to get the plumber in to finish up, and I regard that as a bigger priority right now in practical terms, so whatever we take in sales-wise will have to go to that. Right now, we can't do even that, much less the weatherization stuff, and it's a big, big problem.

Anyway. Back to the grind; so I need help to get all this done. Folks can help in several ways, and we really need the help now:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Wishlist here;
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi  here . 

On the wishlist, now the cold is here at night, the flies are getting chased out by the cold, so the top priority is the candles, to deal with the residual mildew odor in the utility room (second priority is the kitchen/bath stuff, especially the dispensers/caddies). It's all important, though.  A lot of what's on it now doesn't qualify as necessities, even though most people probably wouldn't exactly call them luxuries, either. But with my various disabling conditions, anything that makes work and getting through the day physically easier for me is significant, and for someone from my background, these kinds of things are luxuries, but they are the small kind that simply help make daily living a lot easier for me. 

We still have to schedule the plumber out here to finish that before real winter (the utility room work, not the mildew, and yeah, I know I said that last week and the week before and the week before that, too, but there's no money for it). Our electric bill for the summer has been sky-high, in relative terms, because of the need to keep the fan running to push it out the window. And the costs on all of this are killing us right now. And as I said above, we're going to have to do our own weatherization, because we just can't afford to hire it done.

And as I said, sales are ideal, of course; one or two of Wings's bigger pieces would cover the whole shot for this round of work. Patreon subscriptions are good, too. Either way, it's a trade for value. But I'm already feeling panicked at what we thought would be our schedule being so suddenly and thoroughly upended, and we'll take it however it comes at this point. 

Please share everything, because I'm suddenly back behind the eight-ball on a whole additional front, and yeah, I'm scared about covering everything and surviving, too. Thanks.

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.