Half a day.

Photo copyright Aji, 2023; all rights reserved.

A little snow; a little smoke. You probably have to enlarge the photo to see the latter; it's down at the very base, at the center. I didn't even notice until I downloaded the shot. 

Not an encouraging sight, but at least there's not much wind today. Yesterday was an absolute horror. Today's all bitter cold and too-bright sun, but the wind, at least, is moderate. [Not moderate enough to be burning something, but whatever.] No snow down here; it's all on the peaks today, such as it is.

This whole week has been just one damn thing after another, and today is no exception. I had planned to set aside every afternoon for catch-up work, and of course, every single day has been hijacked by something else. On the plus side, for the first time in months, I can make a fist [of sorts] with my right hand; for the first time in at least two years, I can [barely] snap my fingers with both hands. Which means that the first chemo dose has already drastically reduced a lot of my joint swelling in certain specific joints [nowhere close to all, by any means]. The bone on one foot is less swelling; I could bend my right knee very slightly. Of course, a lack of swelling means increased pain, because the swelling is a buffer between the bones when you have no cartilage. 

That's in half a day. It would be so easy to lose sight of my usual patterns when it comes to new meds, which is one day of wow-style effects, two more days of decreasing effectiveness, and then nothing at all from then on. This is a once-a-week medication, so the pattern would be slightly different, but the principle risks being the same, so I'm trying very hard not to get my hopes up too much. But it's hard not to, when twelve hours produces this kind of result. Anyway. hope is a stubborn, stupid thing, as I should know better than most.

Through it all, I still have to make sales, of course. We've had a couple of them over last weekend and now a couple more this week, but we'll need to sell a lot more between now and year's end, obviously. My Patreon for the month is down ~$250 at the moment [that's how much it was short on the December 1st payout for subscriptions for the month of November, and so far, all of those still haven't been paid]. My guess is that those won't materialize later in the month; that will be the penalty [or one of them anyway] for taking a vocal stand about the genocide being perpetrated against Palestine and its people now. Of course, we haven't brought in anywhere nearly enough sales all year across the board, even before recent developments that require a moral stand of us. It's grim.

And aside from all of that, I also need to bring in at least $6K in sales between now and year's end to cover tax prepayments, and we haven't hit the $1K mark on that yet. Normally, I would've been paying them quarterly, but not this year; we haven't had enough sales to do that, and I'm behind on everything else, too, all while my illness worsens seemingly by the day. Until those prepayments are off my desk, I can't relax, can't do anything other than push to get them covered. I really need help. As always, all the links are listed below, and sales are the most important:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (the liquid soaps I had on the list are now refusing to ship to us, so I've replaced them with two others, at the top of the list, for now, and they're the current priority [or Amazon cards, and I can order them myself]); 
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

There's lots of fabulous work on the site, and there will be much more in the days to come [some possibly as early as tonight!]. The way this year has gone, things will still be grim for a good while and the holidays are already here, so please share all of the links. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.