2025 is clearly determined to end entirely on-brand.

Photo copyright Aji, 2025; all rights reserved.

Three of the piñon jay horde, wondering why the hell I haven't got my ass down there to get the ice out of the birdbath.

And they are a horde; we have about a hundred of them here this year. Literally. I always lose count somewhere around fifty or sixty, but it's clear from the sheer numbers of them that it's got to be at least 100 or so. We've also got more scrub jays than we've ever had, including fledglings, which is a first. The latter are not as numerous as their cousins, but there are still a lot of them.

And they're all eating us out of house and home. I mean that fairly literally, too. We should buy stock in birdseed companies, except I know they've all been vacuumed up by multinationals that have nothing to do with feeding animals, except to the extent they profit from it this way.

Penultimate day of the calendar year, and 2025 is clearly determined to end entirely on-brand. It has been a fucking DAY, and I am beyond beat. To much time on my feet, too much time standing in line and walking on hard surfaces, too much lifting and carrying and other nonsense, and my pain levels are completely out of control. Nothing works. And that's the way it will be until I can recover a little from the last three months, because that;s what this disease does.

But there's still all the sales stress. We were blessed with a really good sale last week, so the pressure to cover immediate things would have been off in a few days when the payment cleared, were it not for the thieves that shoved our account into negatives. But even aside from that bullshit, there's still all the rest, all the stuff we couldn't cover all year because of one catastrophe after another, the taxes that still need to be prepaid, all the January bills that will be here in under four days {!] [which include truck insurance and a whole bunch of business-related expenses that come due once a year, but total well into four figures]. So we still need to make the equivalent of a sale a day now, on average. And he has so much new work!  I'm hoping to get his latest up yet tonight. Yeah, I know, I shouldn't being pushing myself, either, given the precarious state of my health now, but it has to be done, because the last two years have all but killed us financially, and we're very literally almost out of year. To that end, links are here:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here [priorities are the thermos [for me, because I always have water with me, no matter what, and the rugs, to replace those destroyed 2 years ago by the leachfield collapse];
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

And we do still need to make those regular weekly [daily now, really] sales, so please share all of the links. We really do need to end this year on at least a slightly better note.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.