This week is a mess.

Photo copyright Aji, 2024; all rights reserved.

That's what the sky looked like in the west this morning, and we thought we might get some rain out of it. Alas, it was not to be; all we got was rising heat. And this has been a day, with other time-sensitive tasks having to take precedence during business hours, which is why everything's so late tonight. 

I expect the rest of the week to be more of the same.

Still, what we did have this morning that doesn't show in the photo was a special series of gifts: confirmation of what I thought was the case, which is that we have two baby red-tails, not one; and the knowledge that mom is bringing them to us here to teach them how to hunt and fly and survive. You can't tell, but she's in the far left willow, completely out of the frame, while there's one baby each in the willow on the left and the one on the right. They have spent pretty much the whole day here, in school, essentially, and it's a beautiful sight.

But this week is a mess.

I've got a lot of work and a lot of bureaucratic and other tasks ahead of me this week, and I'm trying to fit everything around the pain and fatigue and around the desperate need to bring in immediate high-volume sales now. We have come to the point where the IRS is openly hassling us, threatening us, demanding money we don't have on a timetable we can't meet. That leachfield/septic failure early in the year, coupled with the complete lack of sales for months on end, set the stage for this mess, and our expenses have only gone up since then. I have to hold out at least a grand for my imaging later this month [because if something truly is wrong, catching it now could be the difference between living or dying, and I'm not cavalier enough to ignore that], and at least another grand on the truck, when ever that stupid part comes in. But I was only able to send them a token payment in April [see $10K leachfield failure], and now I have to give them a much bigger chunk.

I'm going to need to bring in at least $4K-$5K in sales this week alone, and that feels like such an impossibility that I don't even know where to begin. I mean, other than cry, which I did yesterday, but now it's time to get to work. One thing I do know is that, barring a miracle, the roof repair is out of the question. And that's horrible, but here we are.

I HAVE GOT TO BRING IN SALES NOW, NO MATTER WHAT.

There is a ton of new work on the site from just the last couple of weeks: 

• Three new cuffs, two set with incredible turquoise focals, one solid silver; go here, here, and here.
• Six pairs of new concha floral earrings in the Earrings Gallery here [larger are garnet, golden rutilated quartz, and malachite; smaller are amber, carnelian, and iolite];
• Art Deco Labradorite cuff here;  
• triangle wire youth bangle here; 
• Art Nouveau vine pattern-wire youth bangle here; 
• small Art Nouveau pattern-wire bangle pair here; 
• malachite butterfly/leaf-wing earrings here; 
• a big solid silver classic cuff here; 
• ten new pairs of the gemstone-bead earrings are also up in the Earrings Gallery;
• and another new cuff is also here. 

And I need to sell them all, because I still need to make sales at a rate of at least two per week for the rest of the year for us to catch up [and that's just breaking even; I'm already behind on that, which means I need to make FOUR sales this week just to catch up]. So: GO BUY! PLEASE! Links are here:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (Amazon cards are probably most useful at this point); 
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

After such a grim year, this one already far worse than the last, we really need to get 2024 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.