HELP NEEDED! C'mon, we need ideas here! :)

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Hey folks... my first post here and my standard beg... but don't fret... I tend to talk about a lot of other things besides this... I'm not QUITE the one trick pony... honest! That said, I toss it to the good folks here to give me some suggestions... First, the background... Not too long ago, I was going through a bout of terminal unemployment... kinda sitting on my butt praying. I'd been a senior IT Desktop guy at a company for almost a decade and the place closed shop and... well... Anyway, it was pretty bleak... thanks to the Dot-Com-Kaboom, my skillsets were not exactly top-drawer anymore and despite a mass campaign of resume sendings and even pounding the pavement until I wore through three pairs of shoes, I got nuthin. During this time, to take my mind off of some serious debt crisis, I was surfing the good ol' news and came across the article about the venerable Routemaster buses in London (the old double-deckers) being hauled off the road because of their age and their poor access for those in wheelchairs. Now, I'm an Anglophile of the first order and have been to London many times in my youth... and Routemasters were a big thing to me... but hearing this wasn't as traumatic as one might assume... in fact, I'd liken it to finding out a favourite restaurant you went to was being torn down... a bummer, but not horrendous. None-the-less, I ended up doing what we all do online... "surfing out of boredom" looking at old bus pictures. That's when I found RLH (Regent Low Height) 3... currently languishing in California. I showed the image to my wife and kid and, for some VERY odd reason, we all kind of adopted it... my kid called her "Chitty-Chitty Wump-Wump" for the sound she figured the engine made... During some REAL crisis times, when things were mighty bleak (up to and including eviction notices), we used the bus as a kind of "group dream"... instead of fixating on the fact that we'd lost our TV cable and phone service was up in the air... and to try and move on from the endless calls of credit agents and even dreaded door-knocks from the building we live in's super, we'd talk about what we'd do with the bus if we had her... where we'd go... what it would be like... ...in essence, it got us through as a family through some very difficult times. The good news is, a job DID finally find me, eviction is no longer an issue, and most of our past dues are better (but not perfect... we're working on them though...) but we're still pretty far from "healthy". The bad news is, we've heard that RLH 3's chances are not as good... she's likely to be scrapped or sold to a restaurateur who intends to carve her up for a "kitch" diner... or otherwise made "unusable" and taken beyond the point of repair and restoration. Currently, she's in a barn being used as a large garbage container. Now, normally the answers would be... #1: Just buy her! Okay... with what? We're okay and not starving, but in essence, we're still poor as church mice. #2: Get a loan to buy her! Not a bad idea... but our credit rating is kaput... in other words, we can't swing it and no wealthy relatives, I'm afraid... #3: Sell something (ANYTHING) and buy her! Double-edged sword that... if we had any decent or even good assets, we wouldn't be in the credit pickle we're in. #4: Save and buy her! With our current output playing catch-up from my two years as a bum and my current salary about 1/2 of my old one, we should have that in our grasps by about 2027. So, what to do? We have... #1: Secured our choice of TWO good storage spaces for the bus... free of charge, thankfully. #2: Cozied up to some mechanics and other "bus enthusiasts" for help restoring/working on her IF we're successful. #3: Wished, dreamed, planned... all the usual stuff. It's all pretty much outlined on my website/blog... Anyway, so we have a blog, we're asking for donations, we're selling merchandise through Cafe Press, we're asking for advertisers, we have a "pixel-ad sales" site... and we've been begging and (when possible) playing lotteries... all the usual stuff. ...I've even tried to contact everyone from Oprah to Golden Palace Casino for help! (Bouncey-Bouncey emails and/or outrightly ignored...) It's a dream... it's not a terribly big one at $20k USD... but it's too big for us right now... too big for many! SO, MyLot folks... give me some ideas... What can we do to raise the funds to make this rather important dream come true... and rescue this old green bus?