Earlier today, I noticed our piano bench still had the sticker from the movers on it. So I got the number and looked it up on the sheets.
It was number 082: Char . Taibls
Or is it Chav . Taihls?
(hav . Taihls?
I remember looking at that and wondering what on earth it could be. I would never have guessed it meant the piano bench.
The Re-Farmer
We got another lone visitor at the feed today. Not the same one as yesterday, as this one has the dark patch on its chest.
And it is definitely the aggressive one that usually comes with another deer. The other deer did show up later on. The only reason I saw it was because this one suddenly dashed off to chase it away. :-(
In going through the photos I took today – especially the ones where the deer was eating at the feed closest to the house – I realized that I could see our house reflected in his eyes.
In all my years growing up in this house, while we certainly saw deer, we never had anything that encouraged them to come so close to the house like this. This is the closest I have ever been to a live, wild deer. Just a few feet away, with nothing but glass between us.
On the wish list, I would love to build a long, narrow deck on that side of the house, with a ramp on one end. This way, we could use the actual “front” door, and my husband would have a ramp for his walker, and not have to lift it up and down those two steps at the door that we use now.
I can see us, some day in the future, sitting outside on the deck and having the deer used to our presence enough to come right up to us.
The Re-Farmer
We’re still figuring out our internet out here. Back when we had unlimited data, we averaged about 300-350 gigs a month, between the 4 of us. This is not surprising, since we not only had our desktops online all the time, but our phones were using WiFi, as well as other devices occasionally. Between actual productive stuff, there was also gaming and whatnot.
With our satellite internet, the maximum data package available is 100 gigs. I figured, since doing things like World of Warcraft and watching videos is pretty much out, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. If we reached our data limit, we still had internet. It would be extremely slow, but we could do things like check our email, and we wouldn’t be charged more.
Except that didn’t work out very well, so my husband talked to our provider about being able to keep our speed and pay extra for the data overage. At a rate of $2 a gig.
That should also have been fine, but it quickly added up and we ended up with an almost $300 bill. Almost 3 times what the basic package costs, and almost double what we were paying for our internet/cable bundle before the move.
Next month in, we quickly hit our data limit again. Which is where we ended up getting a second account. It was cheaper to have a second satellite dish installed with a second account. There are other advantages to that option that will be of benefit in the future, too.
Well, 50% of that got used up real fast, too.
Now, part of that can be explained away by various downloads that were done. It took my husband 3 days to download his Star Wars game. It’s not that big of a file, but it’s just how it is with satellite. Once installed, playing that game uses almost no data at all, but with his desktop dead, he installed it on his laptop. It took some doing for various other technical issues.
I just had a conversation with my daughter about our data usage. She and her sister had gone into their settings to look at their own data usage for the past 30 days. She only used 25 gigs, and her sister’s use was almost non-existent. And yes, they have been playing the Star Wars game, too. The biggest drain my older daughter was seeing in her computer was labelled “system”.
So I looked at my own settings.
I found this.
What in the heck is going on here??? Why is my system using more than 80 gigs in the past 30 days? I don’t even have my desktop ON as much as I used to.
There’s nothing that lets you break down into more detail.
My other usage is negligible. Even my WiFi usage on my phone is barely more than 10 gigs over the last 30 days.
WTF?
I went through some other areas in the the settings and found one thing I could turn off; all notifications. I’ve got the metered thing set, but that only applies to WiFi, and I’m hard wired into the router.
So I’ve got some sort of data vampire in my system.
I am curious, now, what my husband’s laptop’s data usage is. If my desktop system alone is using over 80 gigs in 30 days, if his is going the same thing, no wonder we’re screaming through our limited data so quickly.
One of the things we will be doing is resetting the usage stats at the end of the month, when our data plan rolls over. Then we can start monitoring both and compare.
If you have any thoughts, suggestions, feedback or personal experiences on this, please feel free to comment.
The Re-Farmer
We’ve made a lot of progress with unpacking. Yes, I still have stacks of boxes behind me as I type this, but just about everything else is unpacked, or at least partly unpacked.
I even managed to repair my dad’s bedside shelf, which I am now using. This allowed me to move the large-ish end table I had on my side of the bed over to my husband’s side, so we could put his tiny fridge on it (for his medication), get his CPAP machine off the floor and have a place to tuck away his bottles of distilled water for the CPAP humidifier.
We still haven’t been able to find some of the girls’ things. There was some stuff in their third floor bathroom that was in a bag we can’t find, and some movies that were on another floor, so they shouldn’t have ended up in the same box. Also, we found other stuff from their bathroom, so those items should have been there, too.
While my brother and I were at our van yesterday, checking on the engine, I remembered to go into the glove compartment and get the paperwork from the movers that was in there. On moving day, I barely had time to skim over them as I signed them, and just shoved them into the glove compartment as we were leaving.
Today, I finally had a chance to sit down and look at them closely, to try and figure out what happened to the girls’ stuff.
I still have no clue. The sheets tell me next to nothing useful.
This is so frustrating.
As near as I can figure out, the above photo is mostly third floor stuff, but also second floor stuff. Maybe.
While this one is of second and third floor stuff. The information I was looking for should have been on these two pages. I can barely decipher it at all.
All over the place I see the word “mettals.” I think it’s supposed to be “metal”. But metal what?
“Matters”, I’ve figured out, means “mattress.” “Pichers” are “pictures,” and likely refers to both pictures from the walls and my daughter’s paintings. Then there are the shalfes, pellows, pillasstic taibls, hendels, wood and even anberallas.
I’m guessing shelves, pillows, plastic tables (I am guessing our collapsible tables, including the folding one they didn’t fold), handles (???), wood (my daughter’s easel?) and umbrella.
The other pages are no better.
There is 4 pages of this, each with two columns. The first page was mostly
marked boxes and bins. According to the sheets, including the piano, we had 234 items. Some of those items were things like a bundle with our mop, broom, window cleaner and snow shovels, taped together. The piano bench had its own number sticker, but I don’t see anything that even remotely looks like it could be “bench”.
When he brought the sheets for me to sign, he’d made a comment about how we had “a lot of stuff.” You wouldn’t know it, from what’s on these sheets! According to them, we just have a lot of mettal and shalfes.
In the end, though, there is no way of knowing what box they packed the girls’ stuff that’s missing into. It looks like they not only marked the boxes and bins we packed ourselves as just “box” or “bin,” but also boxes they packed have no listing of their contents.
Which is something I was told they do, when I was arranging all this.
These sheets are useless.
As part of the contract, the client is supposed to use these sheets to make sure everything gets to its destination. Given the circumstances of the delivery of our stuff, that was impossible. Even if we’d managed to unpack everything with 10 days and could say for sure there was stuff missing, there would have been no way to say which item numbers weren’t accounted for.
What a mess.
Meanwhile, I still haven’t heard back about my claim, when I responded by saying I expected them to repair the damage their driver did, on top of the basic liability for items damaged.
The Re-Farmer
We get lots of critter visitors. Yesterday, we got a people visit!
My oldest brother came by briefly. Being the sweetheart that he is, he brought along his mechanics stethoscope, and we checked out our van. The first thing we did was check the coolant. This was not an easy job, as the radiator cap on our vehicle is off to the side and under a hose.
We also discovered that I am very low on coolant.
I had the vehicle serviced before we drove out here. I should not have been low on coolant. Which means I likely have a leak somewhere. I have never seen signs of a leak under the vehicle, but it’s possible that any leak was happening only while I was driving, after the engine was warm enough for the coolant to expand into the overflow chamber.
He got as much as he could into the tester, and as best as we can make out, our coolant has enough anti-freeze to handle temperatures down to about -22C to -25C. Without being able to fill the tester fully, however, we can’t say that definitively.
We’ve been hitting temperatures of lower than -30C. Wind chills brought us to the -40C, but we didn’t drive in that, and the van was in the garage, so it was protected from the elements, at least.
Then we fired it up and waited until the noise started, which took about a minute. Using his stethoscope, we were able to pinpoint the source as the water pump. Likely a bearing. And yes, the cold could have caused this damage, with our coolant as low as it was.
On the plus side, if the water pump needs to be replaced, the part itself is not that expensive. Labour, on the other hand, could easily be much more. It all depends on how hard it is to get into there. It could cost anywhere from $300-$400 to fix.
Also on the plus side, when funds come in, we should actually have room in the budget for that. It’s do-able. As long as it doesn’t end up costing more. :-( Meanwhile, we will continue to NOT use our van, because driving it would likely cause more damage.
It’s a good thing we don’t need to go anywhere. And my other brother has told us to just leave his van at our place for now.
That done, my older brother’s next task was to salvage the parts he’d put into the old hot water tank. He’d spent quite a bit of money on that thing, and the parts are still good, so anything that can be salvaged will be useful.
The first thing he did was take out the bottom thermostat and remove the new heating band he’d installed at the bottom.
This photo shows that heating band. It had been in pristine condition when he put it in, but in the short time it was there, it got this corroded!
You can see an the bottom of the photo, what he’d used to McGyver the band in place, when it turned out to be too short.
That was one heck of a job. And it did work, for a short time. It was the last thing to try. Once that failed, there was nothing left to do.
In the next picture, you can see the top thermometer he’s about to remove.
The tank itself got dented up (you can see that a bit at the top left of the second photo) when the plumber dropped it down to drain into the sump pump reservoir. There were more dents all in a line. The bottom of the tank had started to rust quite a bit in one patch. It was weakened enough that the entire bottom had started to come loose!
That thing was way overdue for replacement.
Getting it out of the basement is going to be one heck of a job!
The visit also gave us the opportunity to talk about the house in general, and some of the work he’d done over the years, from what he had to do to get the pump to the septic tank working a few years back (you can see part of it in the background of the top photo), to fixing doors and the like. He even brought printouts of the historical data for the electric bills for this place! This will help me with budgeting a bit. Our usage is, of course, going to be higher, since the house was empty during the time period in the printouts. However, this was before the new windows were installed, so it would have been bleeding heat in the winter like crazy. I’d hate to think how much our current bill would have been if the old windows were still in! Hopefully, over the next while, we’ll be able to continue improvements to make the house more energy efficient.
Little by little, we’ll figure it out.
The Re-Farmer
One of the things that did not come along for the move were cat scratchers. Our cats loved the cheap cardboard ones and totally destroy them, so we just tossed the last one we had with plans to get a new one.
Except we never managed to get another one.
Meanwhile, the cats discovered the padded cloth seats on the chairs here, and we’re constantly having to stop them from scratching them. I mean, they COULD scratch at the rolled up piece of carpet leaning against the wall – a scrap piece of what we have in the living room that was being used as a rug upstairs. But no. They ignore that and go for the chairs. Or the couch.
So far, we’ve managed to keep them from damaging things.
Then we got a very odd shaped parcel in the mail.
It was addressed to our cats, from the cat of a dear friend. A dear friend I had regaled about our adventures out here, including how the cats have been handling things.
When I brought the package home and laid it on the floor, the cats were immediately interested. I let them push it around for a while.
Then I had to use a knife to cut it open, because it was completely wrapped in packing tape. LOL!
It was a cat scratcher, with catnip infused cardboard. There was an extra baggie of catnip, too.
No wonder they were so interested!
The scratcher has an opening with something dangling inside, but while the cats have looked in, they haven’t tried to get at it.
The cardboard scratch pad, however, was magic. The practically fought each other for it. They pushed it around, knocked it over, and scratched, scratched, scratched.
Then they stopped.
Da Boy is broken.
Funny thing is, he’s not the one that’s big on catnip. His mama is.
Later on, I found her asleep beside it (after I straightened it back up again), using the cardboard pad as a pillow.
I have the best friends!
I finished off our first bag of deer feed this morning. I’m glad I picked up a second one, already.
We got a visit from a lone deer this morning. A different one; it did not have the larger darker patch of fur on its chest.
I should go back over our older photos and see if I can tell if this is that first doe that started visiting us.
I just love those eyes, and the long, long eyelashes.
Did you know that white tail deer have horizontal, slot shaped pupils? Their eyes are so dark, I’ve never really noticed it before.
Of course, we had bird visitors. I’ve been leaving some piles of feed closer to the house, and that has allowed me to get some better photos.
For a while, this nuthatch was watching me take photos of it. How much it could see of me through the reflections, I don’t know, but clearly, it could at least see me moving around.
It’s a real challenge to get decent photos of the birds. They just don’t stay still very long! I’ve got the camera on a tripod with a head that is easily moved around, but it still takes a moment or two to adjust, and by the time I’ve done that, they’re usually gone. Still, I’ve managed a few good ones. :-)
More deer showed up in the early evening.
This is the one with the darker patch on its chest that comes with another deer that it drives away from the feed. The other deer did show up with it, and was chased off by this one here. Striking with hooves and all. Eventually, the other did make it to the feed, but barely got any at all before it ran off, then this one came back.
Interestingly, as it was coming to the feed and looking around, it kept looking up over the roof. I wonder if one of the cats was up there?
The Re-Farmer
These are the hotcakes I made yesterday.
This is what I did with Sir Sour Alot last night.
Today, I made more hotcakes, using the transformed Sir Sour Alot. These are the results. Continue reading
It has been just past 2 months since all of us have been living here, in my childhood home. Three months for my husband and younger daughter.
It’s been rather tumultuous, all things considered. Hopefully, this will all have been worth it in the long run. We shall see.
There are, as always, a number of things that we couldn’t know until we actually lived here a while. Some of those things were budget related.
Living on my husband’s long term disability has changed a lot. Thankfully, 60% of his previous income left us doing much better than others I know in a similar position. Still, living in the city kept getting more and more expensive, while the income can’t change. Our daughters had gotten themselves part time jobs, and my older daughter has been working on turning her art into an income, but they both gave that up to come with us, so that they could help their father and I as much as possible. They gave up quite a lot of other things to come out here, too. And with our van making noises it shouldn’t be making, and no money to get it looked at, all our options are severely limited.
So it’s 4 of us living on one fixed income, still playing catch up on the costs of the move and the bills we had to let slide a bit.
But we’ve been here long enough to get an idea of what some of those unknowns are going to be.
One of them was the electricity costs. We knew, from living in the area before and heating with electricity, we would be looking at Hydro bills in the winter of about $400 or more. Previously, our winter bills were in the $80-$90 range, while in the summer, it was closer to $150-$180. We had to use an air conditioner all summer, for my husband’s health. We won’t need an air conditioner here, but winters are another story.
Our very first electric bill came out to over $400. I had actually expected it to be a bit higher, because of all the troubles we were having with the hot water tank, and needing to use the stove to heat so much water every day. I knew the next bill would be even higher, partly because it covered the time period were we were heating the most water, but also because of the polar vortex that sent temperatures plunging and the furnace running.
We send in our meter readings in the middle of the month, and now have the new bill. It’s just under $600. And there was absolutely nothing we could have done to make it lower.
Ouch.
At least we can be sure that this is going to be the highest electric bill of the winter. After this, it should start doing down.
Still. Ouch.
The next unknown was the internet. Our satellite package is only about $100 a month; less than the cable/internet package we had before the move. Unfortunately, the maximum data available for non-commercial packages is 100 gigs. Before coming out here, we averaged about 350 gigs a month usage. Still, we can control that to a certain extent. No more watching lots of Youtube videos, and no more World of Warcraft. We take advantage of free WiFi elsewhere, as much as we can.
Reaching the limit on our package didn’t mean we would lose our internet for the rest of the month. It would just be reduced in speed. It would be enough to check our email or whatever. Or, we could have the bottleneck removed and pay $2 a gig on top of our regular package. There would be no slowdown that way.
That resulted in a bill of almost $300, even with reducing our online usage.
At the start of the month, there was a lot of downloading of updates and patches, which resulted in us reaching our limit before even half way through the month. So options were looked at on how to get around that.
In the end, we got a second account, with a second satellite dish. It was installed yesterday. By doing it that way, we’ll be paying around $200 + a month for internet, instead of $300 +.
We still haven’t received our first phone bill in our name, so that one is still an unknown.
Then there’s the fact that we’re feeding so many extra animals, including the deer. We will probably be spending another $150 a month, just on that. That wasn’t in our projected calculations at all.
The fact that we are no longer paying a housing charge of just over $1400 a month does give us the room to handle these extra expenses. Or at least it would, if we didn’t still have to catch up on old bills, plus deal with additional expenses related to the move, plus we had to buy that new hot water tank, plus we have to get the van looked at, plus we’re going to have to put money into this house to make up for years of neglect…
It’ll probably be another 2-4 months before we get to a point were we can actually know if living here will be a financial improvement.
The next question becomes one of quality of life. Did moving here improve that situation?
Well, for my husband, we’re not there yet. First, there were the problems with not being able to get certain prescriptions, and the screw up with his insurance coverage. So he’s been in massive amounts of pain. Big drop in quality of life, there. Then there is finding a new medical team to replace the specialists he left behind. That will take time. Still, there is the advantage of stress reduction in other areas, and stress = pain. There’s also the fact that this house, for all its issues, is more accessible that the townhouse we left. He’s no longer essentially trapped on the second floor. Something as simple as getting up and going into the kitchen is something he can do now, without too much difficulty. The biggest plus is that we are close to his family again, but without reliable transportation, we may as well still be two provinces away.
For myself, there is a definite huge reduction in stress. I’m still in contact with friends living in the co-op we’d been in, and I am so glad we’re not there anymore. I honestly cannot recommend co-op housing anymore. The concept is good, but human nature being what it is, it just doesn’t work unless the members are aware enough to get a good property management company in. Otherwise, it’s just not worth the stress.
That stress was having quite a negative effect on my health, but since being here, for all the hassles we’ve had, there has been a huge improvement. The pressure headaches are gone. My sleep has improved. I hardly ever need to take pain killers anymore. My body’s aches and pains have reduced substantially, though I know they will never go away completely. And I do still have my mystery pain in my side, and that chronic cough that no amount of testing could find the source of. Unfortunately, while I’ve been able to set up the office part of things, I haven’t been able to set up my crafting side of things quite yet; not enough that I can get back to working on things or writing patterns, and I have not been able to get my photography area set up yet. That should come in time, though I will have to evict the cats from what will be my work and photography area on my work table, which they have claimed for naps. :-D
And for our daughters? They once again have an upper floor as their own space. Sometimes, as I work in my office, I can hear them upstairs, singing together, and they sound so wonderful. I know it’s been hard on them, but I do hope that, long term, this will be good for them, too.
We knew coming out here would be a mixed bag of positives and negatives. We’re still figuring out what those are. Plus, once we’re past those first few months of settling in, there will be new options ahead of us that we could not have done without coming here.
In the end, I do feel that we made the right choice.
The Re-Farmer
This morning, I started working on making an Alaska Sourdough starter, based on the book. The recipe calls for “rich potato water”, flour and sugar, with optional yeast. After making hotcakes this morning, I didn’t feed the starter, as I normally would. The container needed to be cleaned out (the lid was becoming glued to the top!), so I decided to use the remaining starter as the “yeast” portion.
“Rich potato water” is made up of potatos, boiled in their peels, until they begin to fall apart. Continue reading
The Re-Farmer 