Passing the Hat for July

Hey folks,

This isn’t a real post, this is just the monthly reminder that Steel Magnificat, and my family, run almost entirely on gratuities. I get a small paycheck from Patheos for clicks in the United States, sometimes as large as three figures, and the rest of my income is in tips to my online tip jar from satisfied readers. Sometimes readers sign up to tip me a few dollars once a month like a Patreon, and sometimes they just slip me a tip when they can. Think of it as tipping your Uber driver. Somehow, we’ve always gotten by thanks to you guys!

Last month I was shocked and extremely grateful at how everyone helped us get through the disaster with the garden vandalism and pay off June’s astronomical electric bill as well. And now things have tapered off again which they always do, and we’re looking at June rent due on the fifteenth and June’s astronomical electric bill. To make things more interesting, there’s a heat wave going on in LaBelle, and this house doesn’t have central air, and extreme heat is one of the things that triggers my fibromyalgia badly. I can’t write very well when I’m severely groggy from a fibro flare. The window box air conditioners are keeping most of the rooms in my house inhabitable, hence the high electric bills, but the kitchen is still badly overheated, making it hard to make any meals in the daytime– in fact it’s gotten so hot in there that our refrigerator keeps having spasms and I’m afraid we’ll lose a week’s groceries if it finally dies. So we are praying to get a new AC while they’re on sale and maybe even replace the fridge if the worst comes to the worst.

To make it a little more interesting, even though the economy is opening back up after the COVID shutdown, people are understandably having a lot of financial hardship in America and I’ve lost several monthly tippers.

So, as always, I humbly ask, if you like what you read, give me a tip when you can! Just go to our donate page here, click on the bright yellow button, and Paypal will walk you through the rest. The button says “donate” but I didn’t make it say that; they’re not charitable donations, just tips that I report to the IRS every year and pay taxes on (or would if I ever made enough to owe tax).

And now back to blog posts worth reading!