Oops

I forgot to take any pictures so this is an emergency blip. There has been a nest under my deck for years. This year I discovered that someone lives there! 

Today we successfully put together a team for our next proposal! I think they’ll be an awesome combination. One of them lost his job when USAID contracts were cancelled. He is an HR specialist. Now he is job hunting. His biggest issue is not the demoralization that is job hunting or getting emails saying he is great but not the one they picked, it is not having an identity. What does he do? He doesn’t work. He didn’t even put on his LinkedIn page that he is no longer with his last employer. 

He now is part of The A Energy Company, with an email, and he’ll work with me to write this proposal. 

One of the things I’ve been telling people is that as an individual consultant you have x amount of credibility. You go in to the same people as part of a company and you immediately have much more credibility. Most of the people joining me are individual consultants who worked for a company that worked for USAID, so they KNOW how much more credibility they have as part of a company. 

The proposal is due soon, so I’ll be working on it this weekend. 

BUT I will at least go out walking and taking pictures tomorrow before I start. 

Today was the day many of the people who are citizens of other countries working for USAID were officially fired. 

Ukrainian Defense Forces are reducing Russian revenue by $74 billion according to Ukraine. Almost 80% of the air targets were related to oil and gas. The rest are logistics for transporting and exporting petroleum products. This amounts to 4% of Russia’s GDP.

Russia is having a record budget deficit. Now Russian authorities are cutting the bonuses for army contracts in a number of regions and increasing them in others. In Russia, some lives are worth more than others. In Bashkiria the bonus fell from 1.6 million to 1 million rubles. In Tatarstan the bonus was raised to 3.1 million rubles. 

In Russia overdue mortgage payments increased by 97% compared to the same period in 2024. 

Ukraine hit a large Russian oil refinery and key port, getting a ship that had been transporting drone parts and ammunition from Iran. 

There was a hostage exchange. Ukraine got back defenders of Mariupol and civilians. Many had been imprisoned by Russia before the invasion. 


Putin went to Alaska. In Anchorage Barbara Hood, 70,  Colleen Ray, 73, and Linda Jamidlo, 72 smoothed spent two days sewing a Ukrainian flag so big they hoped Trump and Putin would see it when flying in. 


Stand Up Alaska was a group that protested along the side of the road today in Alaska. They held Ukrainian flags. They oppose the presence of an international war criminal in their state.