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| Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. |
Actual spring. That was the view yesterday from near the driveway, looking north: almost no clouds in a cornflower sky, green everywhere (and all the pollen with it). Today, notsomuch; there's a wide-banded webwork of pale gray clouds everywhere, as though applied by some spirit's paintbrush, barely dipped in the paint and skipping here and there to reveal the blue canvas beneath.
The pollen, though? Oh, that's here in a big way. Fortunately, at least it's warm, near 80 the past two or three days and again today.
The tax bill wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Not that it was good, you understand, but I'll take what we can get. The $3,300 I'd set as a goal? Will cover the balance of 2019 and the first two quarters of 2020. If I can just sell one or two of Wings's big pieces, we've got it handled until October's payment comes due. None of that allows, of course, for all the costs coming shortly. We need sales badly now, so please share the links, and if you've been thinking about buying something for a while? Now would be the time.
Several days ago (over a week now?), my laptop blew an A/C port, which means 1) I can no longer cool it while running it, and 2) if I need to plug any kind of USB thing into it, I have to take it to battery power. In the process, it borked both my sleep mode AND my e-mail, so if you've sent me a message and haven't heard from me, that's why; I can get incoming, but can't send outgoing. I tried to fix that the other day, got it to work briefly, but now? Who knows? It seems to be hosed all over again. Tonight will be spent trying to get it to work again. It's all complicated by the fact that, without that extra port, I have to stop using the laptop after short periods of time to let it cool, which is really disruptive to any kind of real work. And today, it suddenly blew up the post I was working on half-way through it, and despite autosave and a supposed one-button restore function, I had to restore two hours' worth of work manually. [No, I did not touch anything. The screen suddenly jumped, it refreshed itself to to very first version with no text, and would not let me restore a thing. I'm at the end of my rope on it, and I cannot be without a computer. It's our whole livelihood, wrapped up in this little metal envelope-type thing.]
On top of all of that, my camera is on its last legs, there's no such thing as a bread machine anywhere (the one I really want, and cheaper, too, is this one, but out of stock until mid-June everywhere, apparently) and barely any paper towels to be had. We can't get the scrip for Miika unless and until the vet can come out and see her in person, and that may not even be on the 4th. The mower repair Thursday was just shy of $500, cash on the barrelhead. We still have to pay Ivan to till and disc and plant the fields. And we still don't know what our taxes are going to be (and no, we have NOT gotten any stimulus check, natch). Add onto all of that my current wild autoimmune flare (thanks for nothing, cottonwoods; you really didn't need to do this a month early), and the excruciating pain that is its inevitable result, already here in my joints in full force, and, yeah, I feel like flipping off the world, too.
Anyway, the upshot is that we need to make sales. I think the fields are getting disced next week for planting; that's going to cost. So are the horses' vaxes and spring check-ups, which is tentatively scheduled for May 4th. Farrier's coming out again next month to do the work on Miika that she wouldn't let him do the other day, because the weather had her laminitis flaring and she was in too much pain to put full weight on that hoof to let him do her hind feet (she has to be done in stages, and yes, there will be masking and social distancing via the end of a lead). At some point, the dogs have to go in for their vaxes and so forth. And we both have doctor's appointments, which will be telemedicine via my laptop, assuming it holds, the first week of May. That's a hell of a lot of expense, over and above all the usual monthly expenses, monsoonal patterns of another sort, and I need to cover it somehow, hence the next graf:
Two weeks ago I featured, on Wings's site, some of his most valuable (and highest-priced) works (concha belts, necklace, earrings, etc.). If we could sell them all, we could sock 90% of it into savings and be assured of making it through the rest of the year and into the next, barring disaster. I don't actually have any real hope of doing that, but if you're one of the folks who's been looking at these works and thinking that someday you might want to invest the money in one or more? Now would be the time; it would help ensure our survival through this pandemic and likely to the first of next year, and help us to be able to help other folks in our community here who are going to need it badly. So please, this week especially, share all of our links, because while we're all in isolation? Income is already at virtually nothing, and we can survive the isolation, but not the inability to feed the maw of all the bills. The links are here:
Note: For now, please don't buy anything off the Amazon wishlist; to do so would be crossing a picket line, and some of their workers have struck this morning to fight for safer working conditions because their lives are being put at even greater risk during this pandemic. If you find one of the items elsewhere, wonderful (there's even a wishlist function where you can note that it's been purchased somewhere else).
Other than that, please share everything. Thanks.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
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