We're still about $300 short of this month's goal. And we got hit with an unexpected expense for almost that much, just last night. So, we're pretty much broke.

We have about $180. We owe about $1375 on Friday, though we can put a lot of that off. Shortfalls are made up by me, Erin.

So, if you can help, please do. The link for a onetime gift is: Hatbox and the link for a subscription is: Subscribe.

I just added "2016 February - The Crush Mini-Contest" to the "Contest" list which can be chosen when creating Fiction. This way, it will be easy to look at all the entries and check to see which ones you have read or haven't and vote on them.

Note though that Melanie and I have entries on the list but we aren't eligible for prizes. :)

Hugs,
Erin

Piper and I are back from our vacation in Florida. For me this means going from 65°F damp days to 65°F dry days but Piper has been dropped into the deep freeze of New Jersey. :(

We had fun. We're tired and we probably all have colds. I expect to do very little today and maybe not much more than that tomorrow. And Piper still has some personal stuff on her plate to take care of. So, please, continue to cut us some slack. :)

Just an FYI, I spent most the day doing a cleanout of bogus forums. It was a lot of tedious work to delete each one. There is no streamlined way to maintain them.

Thank you to everyone that's been reminding us it needed to get done, and sorry it took us so long to do it (we try and do it every couple months). We're trying to work out a way to stop it from getting so bad in the future, so please bear with us.

N-E-Ways, visit, post, enjoy! http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/forum

-Piper, Cat, Erin and the BigCloset Band.

Just an FYI to anybody out there. There is a large remote code execution exploit that affects all versions of Joomla since 1.5 that has been in the wild for about 3 days now. There are hotfixes/patches for old/outdated/non-supported versions of joomla, and a proper update for the latest version.

More detail here: https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/12/remote-command-execution-vul...

-Piper

I'm about thirty miles from the shooting in San Bernardino and all is calm and quiet here in Calimesa.

Please send your good thoughts to those affected by this tragedy.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/02/us/san-bernardino-shooting/

Hugs,
Erin

Updated 10/30: The monthly Hatbox fund is short $560 actually. Most October bills are paid but money for staff is a bit lacking. If you can help, it would be very much appreciated.

You can send us a One-Time Gift or Subscribe or even send a check or money order to:

Janglewood LLC
602 Higgins Ave
Suite 1 #283
Brielle, NJ 08730
USA

Update 9/10 - about $2100 in bills and payments due over the next week. We've got about 1/3 of that in the bank after paying this week's amounts.
=========================

It's a new month and thanks to everyone who contributed money last month, we paid our bills and are now in the position of asking again for gifts and subscriptions to keep us going for another month.

We spent money this week on a new hard drive, new VPS, and a new SSL certificate. We also owe $528 for our major colocation fees. And at the end of the week, we will have $790 in other bills due. We don't have that much in the bank, so we do need contributions.

You can send us a gift via the Janglewood link: http://janglewood.com/

Or you can subscribe to the Hatbox via this link: http://bigclosetr.us/hatbox

It's that time again. We have bills.

If you can, please use the Janglewood link to send us a gift.

Or you can use the Hatbox subscription link to subscribe to Hatbox.

Since Amazon discontinued their service via Amazon Payments, both of the above links will lead to PayPal. We hope to have direct credit card acceptance working sometime in the future but that isn't that easy to set up.

Sorry these didn't get up yesterday as planned, stuff happened. :)

If you've won, let me know what you want done with your prize money. If you got prize money in the earlier version of this contest, I'm sorry but that was it. :)

Oh, and all entrants get a free 3 month subscription to Hatbox. That's probably going to be a feature of ongoing contests.

Hugs,
Erin

On July 1, Amazon will turn off their Payments gateway and the links that BC has been collecting gifts for the Hatbox will go away. Any ongoing subscriptions will be canceled as far as collecting future payments. All such subscriptions will, however, continue to be honored for at least two years.

So this is the last chance for anyone who wishes to contribute money to BC through the existing version of the Amazon gateway. We may have another Amazon gateway up in future weeks but the software and interface to be used are not clear.

Due to various confluences of need and happenstance, we are short of money this month. We have about $1800 in bank accounts and outstanding checks and debit charges totaling about the same. Other bills are coming due, too. I have not taken a draw yet this month but I can wait. ISPs and hosting companies cannot.

We will have about $3500 in bills due before the end of the month. Some of that will be taken care of by advertising money coming in and by the revenue from Doppler Press which is beginning to make a difference.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed, seriously, we could not do this without you.

We still have close to $1200 in bills to pay in the next week or so and about $400 in the bank. We had an unexpected bill for close to $700 show up and caught us short.

As usual the links to the Hatbox page and the Janglewood page can also be found in the right hand column under the picture of the kitty.

Hugs,
Erin

We have about $3000 in bills due before the end of the month and the HatBox has only about $600 in it, including the $300 or so received so far this month. So anything that anyone can send will help us pay our bills on time.

Next month, Amazon changes the way things work with their Payments interface and we hope to have our new version of the Hatbox up and running well before that. We think you are going to like it and it should make helping us pay our bills more pleasant and maybe even more fun. :)

A number of people stepped up in the last week and contributed almost $1000. Thank you all, thank you very much.

Because of gifts from our readers we are able to continue to maintain this site and support other sites in the community. It costs money. This last week, we have paid out in excess of $2000 in co-location fees, software license fees, purchase of hardware for upgrades, payments on loans and miscellaneous little charges. Almost half of that comes from our advertisers and sales of books but the other half came from readers and contributors to the site.

The new database server is up and running and will help BC keep up with our ever-increasing traffic and expanding archive of stories.

There should not be anymore outages today, though the risk is higher than ordinary until a shakedown period with the database is done. If the new server fails, it should just drop out of the local net and not cause an outage and changes have been made to the config to allow future three-wheeled and two-wheeled operation of the local net when necessary without outages.

Ben Norwood noted this on the BigCloset facebook page:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irQClUTaWJA&feature=iv&src_v...

I thought it was worth noting here.

Hugs,
Erin

We still need the money to keep providing a friendly place to read, write and discuss TG Fiction.

I've updated the numbers in the The Hatbox heads up, again. Thanks to those who have donated. We're still a bit short and we've spent something close to $2400 bucks in the last few days so we will still be needing some soon to pay more bills and keep our internet connection and stuff like that. April is here and we are still working on March.

In the US, it's pi day: 3.14!

In the UK, I guess it isn't but have some pie anyway. :)

And in France... let them eat cake.

Hugs,
Erin

This weekend has been a case in point for what can go wrong.

There's been a snag in Piper's plans to move this weekend. The deal has been hung up by a glitch in the space being ready to rent and she can't move in as planned. The move had been pretty much financed but the snag is going to cost a few days in a motel, and boarding for Penny, the Labrador, an unexpected expense. I can loan her the money but it would be a lot less stress on me if I know that we have met our contribution goals in the Hatbox for the month.