...the first of the season has fallen. It didn’t accumulate, but it gave us a good dusting today. The cover pic of this article is a shot of the evergreen boughs just outside our downstairs porch that I took this morning. Pretty, yes. . .but a very discouraging sight when we still don’t have adequate heat for the rescue.
I posted about this on our rescue’s Facebook page a while back, and the overwhelming response from the community was that if I (myself personally, the Director) could not afford to install heat for the rescued animals, then I should not be caring for any rescued animals. My opinion is that if I (myself personally, the Director) went $40,000 in debt to house the animals thrown away by this community, then members of this community should at least be willing to cough up a few hundred dollars to help us install a better/safer heating system for them.
Needless to say, we never received any help from our community. The most recent idiocy perpetrated by local residents helps prove my point about Hillbilly Hell (although it doesn't get me any warmer.) Read about a local town's witch hunt and rally to ban tarot readings HERE. It's unrelated to my rescue, but does show how the Whorship crowd (their typo, not mine--look for it in the article) manage to contort both the law and the truth to suit their own agendas.
Winter is almost full upon us now, and tonight the temperature will drop as low as 27 degrees, according to the forecast. Last week on one of the cooler nights, I ran a space heater upstairs for a little while. That was a scary experience. We have old cloth wiring in this “fixer-upper,” and it got so hot it scorched the heater plug. So, space heaters are out. Not an option, unless I can get a new circuit and line wired in.
As luck would have it, that actually is an option for us. We have an available breaker with modern Romex wire that was run for an electric wall heater in the basement that no longer exists. An electrician has said he can convert this to a 110 outlet that I could use safely for a space heater. It won’t be terribly expensive, but it will cost more than we currently have.
Above is a photo of the old cloth wiring that we need to replace. Upstairs, all the lights and outlets are on the same circuit. It's a mess. We knew this about the property before buying it, but that was back when we assumed charity meant something to Southwest Virginia, and that our nonprofit status would encourage donations to our cause. Boy were we wrong.
Situations like this are what drove me to Steemit on behalf of the rescue. Attitudes gathered 'round the blockchain are completely different. There’s a philanthropic heartbeat in this platform, and it has been evidenced so clearly by the help and support we’ve already received from fellow Steemians. Here’s hoping for a space heater by this time next week! It would make this winter so much more bearable than last.
