The one bright spot in the day.

Photo copyright Aji, 2022; all rights reserved.

It's a gray and eerie day, part of it due to high thin clouds but mostly a mix of suspended dust and dirt driven on the winds, combined with the haze of a recklessly started prescribed-burn-turned-runaway-wildfire a little to the southeast of here. Lots of lip service by colonial actors given to "Indigenous wisdom" on fire management, but they don't actually CONSULT Indigenous people or records; they think they know it all, and they think the weather forecast and forces don't apply to them, and here we are.

And the winds are HOWLING. I can hear it nonstop, even as solid as our home is. The flowers are the one bright spot in the day right now. We're gonna need it; it's going to be a terrible week, both on the wind (and therefore on the pain) front and in terms of what it's going to cost us.

We have to send the Tax Man a big chunk this week (and that will only be a down payment, with several payments yet to come), plus another big chunk for quarterly taxes for '22. The last three months of last year gave us the best sales year we have ever had. I've never seen anything like it, even at the height of our business when we had a brick-and-mortar gallery. But it also means our worst tax year ever now, and in part because (unlike every colonizer government here) we are still behaving as though we're in the middle of a deadly pandemic, which we in point of fact are, we had fewer deductions than usual.

We've made a couple of sales and the bank has indicated we may have access to our funds by mid-week anyway, but it's still going to be A LOT. I'm not going to feel confident until I've made at least a couple more good sales before this weekend is out. Add to that the fact that my Patreon is down by almost $100 this month, probably because folks are having to use that money to pay their own taxes, and it's a lot tighter than I expected it to be, enough so that I'm contemplating canceling my appointment at the end of the month to start ketamine therapy for pain (it's hellishly expensive, and we have to pay cash, up front and in full). My pain levels are completely out of control right now, and they're crippling me in very literal terms, but I'm not sure we can afford this after all. After the tax nonsense is done, then we can worry about how we're going to save the land (and ourselves). Links are here:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (priorities are first and foremost, the other ladder and the Thermacell lanterns; the flies are already out, so the mosquitoes won't be far behind);
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

We're still hoping to put aside enough for a new well when the ground thaws enough to drill in the spring, too, Nah, we've given up on the well. No one's available to drill before the latter half of summer, and the tax burden means we would never be able to afford it anyway. But it's perhaps even more of a good time to make a purchase, because Uncle Sam is a vindictive colonizer, and my current stress levels about paying it all are off the charts. And there's lots of fabulous work, so please share all of the links. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.