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The Evil Dex is becoming eviller. Or perhaps more cunning. As you already know if you obsessively follow every word I write, my doctor recently switched me to a lower dose of dexamethasone. I now take only 12 mg once a week, so my sleeping should be less disrupted. Right?

Well…not so much. The problem is that the effects of dex accumulate over time, so it becomes hard to predict exactly how it’s going to work. In my case, it takes 4-5 hours to kick in and lasts for about 36 hours. But I’m taking a lower dose! So on Friday I decided to try taking it in the morning. On the bad side, that meant it would be at full strength by bedtime. On the good side, it would be worn off completely by Saturday night.

So I took the dex in the morning and then took a double dose of sleep meds at bedtime. Remarkably, this had no effect. None. I was up all night and only barely a little drowsy. This accounts for the late night blogging (remember to subtract three hours when you look at the time stamps on my posts). The silver lining to this is that my experiment had extremely clear results, so next week I’ll go back to taking the dex at night.

So why the headline? You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I promised you pictures of our Canada goose babies. That turned out to be harder than I expected. I found them again once, but the pictures I took were pretty so-so. After that, they just weren’t around. But yesterday, since I was up at 6 am anyway, I figured I’d go out and see if they were active in the morning. And they were! So later this morning I’ll regale you with a photo album of adorable Canada goslings. Never say that this isn’t a full-service blog.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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