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| Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. |
Well, yesterday was a day. I am profoundly glad it's over. I'm slow and sick and in pain today, but still better than yesterday's chaos. Today, at least, I can see light around all the shadows.
The physical symptoms are all due to have had to get my follow-up second injection of the shingles vax yesterday (they administer it in two doses, 8 weeks apart, and I am extremely high risk for developing it, so here we are). I took a dose of prednisone last night in hopes of staving off the worst of the inflammatory response, and despite the fact that the pred jacked my already-terrible headache into the stratosphere, it seems to have worked somewhat , because I'm far more functional today than I was the day after the first dose (and considering how bad I felt last night, it looked like I was on track to be even worse today than the first time). I even managed to sleep some.
I'm also 99.99% sure that Stormy's issue is a UTI, so I have her on antibiotics, and she seems to be responding well to them. So that's one big crisis averted, since her spaying isn't scheduled until January 14th, which was the earliest available slot. All the vets are backed up with spay/neuter services into next year, another effect of the pandemic.
Still, yesterday was ungodly expensive. I had to shell out more than $230 on meds (and my $10 pain scrip quadrupled with no notice and no recourse). On the plus side, it appears that we do not have to worry about paying for firewood tis weekend after all. He and Wings kept trading voice-mails yesterday; our signal here is so crappy that half the time it send calls straight there, and then the connection is so garbled you can only make out about every 5th word. They finally connected up last night, and it appears that the reason he was calling was to tell Wings he wouldn't be down this weekend, because it seems that the 'rona has got him in its grip. So, no. he was telling Wings to do all the things he didn't do, apparently (mask, gloves, stay away from everybody), which of course we've both been doing since January, so . . . . But he's a friend, and he's likely going to need help, so Wings told him that if he needs the money to cover stuff while he's sick, we'd still buy it, and he can bring it down whenever he's well again.
But not today, fortunately. Unfortunately, there is one URGENT new expense, and I can't cover it, because I'm going to have to set aside cash for the wood, and for his test strips, and for other things. It's on our wishlist, and I would be incredibly grateful if someone would take it off there for us: the Epson printer. Our old H/P printer lasted us something close to 5 years, despite all the power surges and other problems when we were in the RV. It finally died earlier this year, and we replaced it with a Canon we bought locally at Wal-Mart, one that was supposed to be highly-rated and supposed to produce good-quality photos. It's been crap from day one. Two days ago, it quit printing entirely. I can't even print two return labels I need, or the labels for Wings's jewelry gift boxes, or a plain-text sheet of paper, never mind anything resembling a photo. The one on the wishlist is expensive, but it will also enable us to return to printing his photos ourselves rather than paying someone else to do it. And we really need that now; the fewer contacts we have to have outside in this place where the pandemic is raging uncontrolled, the better. [And yes, I have specifically asked that it be new, not refurbished, because we need the warranty protections and we have had bad luck with supposedly "refurbished" items in the past. I need this to work, and work long-term.]
I'm beat, sore, and way, way behind now, and I have all my work yet to do, so the rest is cut-and-paste, and the only thing that really matters is that we're running out of time to make holiday sales to get us through the next spring, so please share the links. He's got several new pieces in the works, too; I hope to have the big one up on his site tomorrow.
We were very blessed a few weeks ago to be able to cover November's expenses and get hay for the horses and firewood for the winter. But it's December now, and my Patreon payout yesterday was down by some $400+ (now it's down only $300+). I'm pretty sure a couple of them are folks whose credit cards expired and they just need to update their accounts, so if that's you, please do; this is BIG hit for us. But most of them, I suspect, are folks who simply can't swing it this month, because four years of a Nazi gutting everything and now a raging pandemic have destroyed people's safety nets. If that's you, don't worry about it. Unsubscribe immediately if you need to; things are hard enough without folks worrying about something like this, too. Storm all around, indeed.
Of course, what that means is that I have to make up the difference with sales. As grateful as we are for our current blessings, we also know that real winter hasn't even arrived yet, and it will be a long one. Cases continue to spike state-wide and locally both, and deaths locally, too. If they allow ski season to open on December first and allow tourists in, unquarantined, our local numbers are going to be deadly indeed. Meanwhile, the economy is wrecked already, and the number of people who need help climbs by the day.
This is all by way of saying that, blessings or no, I have still got to make consistent sales somehow, through the end of the year and beyond. In more ordinary years (long since gone now), our holiday sales alone carried us through the winter, the late winter/spring closure, and on toward summer. Those days are gone, and the closure is already here (and if not permanent, it's the next thing to it). We will still need to sell Wings's work regularly to make it. So please share the links, and if/when you're in the market for gorgeous, authentic, Spirit-infused Indigenous wearable art, Wings will have something perfect for you. Check out last Wednesday's brand-new masterwork; it's extraordinary, and it's meant for someone out there. There will be another, very different new masterwork coming possibly today. The links are here:
Oh, and there are some additions to the wishlist: The towels folks took off it last month are the absolute best I've ever used in my life, so I put a few more sets on there; it will mean I don't have to keep running these two through the laundry all the time. Also, there's a hideously expensive chiropractic gun on there, but even at that price, it's only a couple of appointments and it's already paid for itself. It's for both of us, but mostly for Wings, and this is the model that was recommended to him. Thanks.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and 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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