All gone.

Photo copyright Aji, 2024; all rights reserved.

A couple more inches of snow overnight — all gone by mid-morning, natch. No rain of the other sort, and I am losing my mind. It has been another day of enormous stresses from multiple quarters, and I'm doing literally everything I can to cope with all of them, but I cannot do everything myself.

At a minimum, I need to bring in $6K this week. I can't force people to buy. Even that won't cover everything, but it'll give us breathing room, and given my stress levels right now, we need that badly. 

Wings has five Warrior Woman pins done and one new pair of earrings. I would love to be able to say that they'll all be up on the site tonight, but that's hours of work ahead yet for me, and the rest of the day and night are already crammed to overflowing with obligations.  I'll do my best, but I make no promises. [If anyone's wondering, the stones in the pins are, respectively, jade, Kingman turquoise, amethyst, garnet, and hematite; the earrings are long, all-silver, no stones, simple stampwork.]

Still don't know whether PayPal's fixed their nonsense or not, because they're spectacularly uncommunicative except when telling you their taking your money and keeping it from you and you can't do anything about it. So, 1) do NOT donate to my Ko-Fi account or anything else, do not pay us via PayPal, in any way before checking with me.  And 2), if you're in the market to buy Wing's work using plastic, let me know and I can put it through our VISA/MC payment processor and bypass these cannibals entirely.

Because I am profoundly sick of their shit.

This comes on top of the realization that last year damaged us more badly than I knew. Our practice has long been to give something [what folks now call paying forward] out of every sale. That's going to have to stop for a while. So many people came to us for help last year. We didn't turn any of them away, even when it meant tighter belts for us. Now? Now, the tax bill is due, and we don't have nearly enough to pay it. Why? In part because people have come to us this year already at even higher rates. The amount that we've given away/spent on folks in more immediate need . . . it's a lot. And they keep coming. This year has been one damn thing after another from so very many different requests, and we can't afford to do that for people anymore. Not right now. [The last one has gone out today, and it absolutely has to be the last until the taxes paid in full and I can catch up on other things. Sorry; there's no choice.]

In part, too, because we had to pay out nearly $10K [cash] since the leachfield failed on Christmas Day to deal with the septic disaster. And in part because my Patreon, our steadiest source of income, is down more than $700 a month since this time last year. Do you what that kind of hit does to folks like us?

I don't know what to do. I can't force people to buy. Somehow, I have to bring in sales. If you're in the market, now would be a really, REALLY good time. There's lots of new work on the site. And as always, all the regular links are listed below, with sales, as always, being the most important:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here ( we'll always need the dog treats for the monsters, and Amazon and Lowe's cards [the Lowe's cards are probably going to have to go on a new fridge, so I'm hoarding them]); 
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

After such a grim 2023, and with this year starting off MUCH worse, we really need to get 2024 moving onto a better footing, so please share all of the links. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.