Explanation:
I sincerely apologize for the enormous delay in completing this filing. After spinning off 3 former projects as independent 501(c)(3)s in 2000-2001 we no longer had employees. We operated principally on volunteer time, except for modest contractor efforts, mostly to publish our free bi-monthly newspaper Hellbender Press. ... By 2010, much of our advertising income from small local businesses had shifted to the Web, and we could no longer afford rising printing costs. For the next 10 years, we did no fundraising campaigns, running on shoestring budgets and cooperating with other local and regional nonprofits in hands-on citizen environmental cleanup, watchdog and educational activities. ... In autumn 2020 we received a major grant for our Earth Solidarity project which focuses on promoting citizen engagement and cooperative actions to strengthen community resilience and reduce human impacts on Mother Earth's natural life support systems. The project plan included the revival of Hellbender Press as an online-only journal. With COVID-19 in full swing, the time was inopportune to hire a community organizer to congregate and coordinate citizen efforts. Availability and spare time of the members of our board of directors had also changed drastically. We succeeded in reviving Hellbender Press by contracting with our peer 501(c)(3) -- Southern Alliance for Clean Energy -- for the professional editorial services of Thomas Fraser, one of the original founders of Hellbender Press in 1999, and by accomplishing the online systems design, integration and management on volunteer time. ... As mentioned in the AMENDED 2020 Form 990-EZ (filed immediately before this return), when preparing the original 2020 return, I experienced how difficult and unsatisfactory it was to compile a 990 from spreadsheets. Therefore, we purchased QuickBooks Mac Plus last year. I wanted to make sure we had a solid accounting system in place before starting a fundraising campaign that will have to distinguish between large numbers of small donations with donor restrictions chosen from among half a dozen or more very specific purposes. However, it took a much greater effort than I expected to make this new version of QuickBooks functional; for it was incapable of importing the setup we had on QuickBooks Pro Windows when I served as the treasurer of Foundation for Global Sustainability during its most active years. ... I was spending most of my time to keep the IT infrastructure of Hellbender Press up to date and highly reliable, while also performing the scientific review of the journal's content, when Knox County Mayor Glen Jacobs appointed me to the Advisory Board of Advance Knox, the effort to develop a new General Plan for Knox County, TN to replace the plan for which I had served in a similar role 20 years ago. Then, in May, cancer was found in a polyp removed during my wife's colonoscopy. Because no distinct boundary of the cancerous tissue was present in the polyp and she had been unable to digest solid food for several months prior, it was suspected cancer cells might have propagated to the colon wall and proximate lymph nodes. That assessment triggered even more doctor appointments, research and decision-making demands. ... Because progress with QuickBooks was slow and I had to steal wee hours to work on it, I applied for extension of the 2021 990-EZ's filing date, believing I could get it completed between Christmas and New Year (we have no family on this side of the world). ... On December 6, things really started to unravel when our heat pump quit working. The next day, the HVAC technician confirmed my suspicion that the electronic control module of the blower motor was at fault. I assumed a new ECM would cost us a couple hundred dollars, but when they called us later they said those ECMs were unavailable separately and a new blower motor would cost some $2,600 plus labor and, because they did not have one, it may be next week before they could get one. We'd be better off any way to get a new system, they said. Later they told me those blowers were not in production anymore, and when I asked about a second-hand blower they claimed, they could not find one. After spending days researching the issue non-stop, I found a compatible blower at eBay for less than $200 and installed it myself. Everything worked fine again. ... On Christmas Eve temperatures went down to 2 degrees F. The outdoor unit of our heat pump froze over. It took me half a day to get it thawed out again. After Christmas I got a technician from another HVAC company to recharge the refrigerant, but he said he had no time to do anything more and promised to send someone the next day to check for refrigerant leaks. Because R-410A refrigerant is a bad greenhouse gas (despite not posing the treat to the ozone layer that Freon did) and of its high cost, we didn't turn on the heat pump again. We survived with a fireplace insert and a couple of small electric room heaters. I had to call the company three times before they sent another technician 2 weeks later to check for leaks. He told me to turn the heat pump on for several minutes and checked the pressure, finding the refrigerant level was still OK. He then checked the indoor unit. He said he saw oil in the condensation drip channels; that told him the coils are hosed. Unrepairable! It would make no sense to replace them due to the age of the system. ... Because we have a very non-standard log home, offering vendors had very different opinions what kind of new system would be best for us. We were told the HVAC market was in turmoil as 2023 brought new Federal requirements for heat pumps. Offers in the low $20K to over $30K (for a small ~1500 sq.ft. home!) seemed outrageous. We even sought independent paid advice as this consumed much of my time for many weeks. One day it got so hot that we turned the system on despite the risk of refrigerant loss. It worked well. I then hired another technician with expertise in leak detection, who didn't find any and said the system was in great working order! zCpouldn't detect any oil at the coils either. It's suspected, the first technician who came Dec. 7 failed to check for proper valve closure on the service tap after using it. He had not mentioned insufficient refrigerant. ... Meanwhile it was March. It had been most frustrating we couldn't celebrate the 2nd anniversary of Hellbender Press with a fundraising appeal. I had managed to put dozens of hours into revamping our accounting; many of them in vain. QuickBooks had crashed on me several times -- several annihilating an hour or more of work performed -- but despite sending in the crash reports, I got no useful response from Intuit technical support. But one day, QB displayed a message that prompted me to run an installer to bring it up to the latest release. That did not seem to make much of an improvement, except perhaps that fewer of the crashes required tedious restoring from a backup or even re-installation of the entire application. A couple of weeks later, when I restarted QB, it showed a message saying only 15 uses left before needing to pay for a QuickBooks 2023 subscription. When I tried to purchase a subscription, I was told the Macintosh product had been discontinued. I tried to reinstall our original 2022 app, but that was unable to open the files containing over 100 hours of work spent with QB 2023. Intuit would not give us any technical support unless we upgraded to an online version of QuickBooks, but that's quite different from its Desktop apps and horrendously expensive for a nonprofit because the professional version is required to track functional expenses. After extensive internet searches, I found a tedious hint: Completely erase QB from a computer and install it again from scratch to get another 15 uses. Needless to say, all of these complications ate up a large proportion of my scarce time? ... I've been working on this from 3 to 7 nights every week since April but was stymied, too, for days by a mysterious hardware problem of my trackball pointer, which appeared to be an untractable software bug. Last but not least, three weeks ago, I found my wife on the floor with a broken hip. Fortunately she had a very good surgeon, and is recovering reasonably well. She needs much help. The surgeon ordered physical therapy ongoing from the second day after surgery, but disconnect and red tape between the hospital, primary care provider, insurance, and the home care service took 16 days more and many long phone calls befor the first therapist showed up. ... By working through our records and the returns for the last 3 tax years forward and backward several times, I believe I now got a good handle on it and can complete the 2022 Form 990-EZ in a few more hours -- well before the regular due date. I hope that will make it easy for you to review the Amendment together with the two new filings. Thank you for your consideration.