Having some fun

As I mentioned in my previous post, today’s snowfall was perfect snowman snow!

My daughters agreed.

They called me upstairs without telling me why, to see if I would notice their new friend.

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His name is Nail.

Rusty Nail.

For some reason, there was a rusty nail on the roof, so they incorporated it into their little snow dude.

Yes, they made a snowman on the roof, outside their window.

Then used ink to make a face.

As we were talking about it and how the snow is perfect for making snowmen, they started commenting on how they should make a big one in the yard.

Then they promptly headed out to do exactly that.

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Here is my older daughter, adding the final touches.

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Meet Eunice.

I wonder how the deer will handle seeing it there?  It’s right near the feeding station.

When they were done, my older daughter came in, but my younger daughter stayed out to pet the outside cats.

Then she made this, facing my office window.

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I’m told it’s not finished yet, so it doesn’t have a name.

Apparently, it needs abs.

I love my daughters.

The Re-Farmer

Digging Ourselves Out – before and after

I took a ridiculous number of photos today.

It was gorgeous out there.

Here are just a couple from my phone, this morning, as I went out to do the cats’ food and water.

First things first, though…

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I would have to dig out their feeding area!

It was still quite warm – hovering around freezing temperatures – which makes for a lot of wet, sticky snow.

Perfect for building snowmen, I thought, as I shoveled my way across.

I then found a mystery.

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One of the food bowls is missing.

I dug around more, in case it got knocked aside before being buried by the snow (how, I have no idea).

Nothing.  No sign of it anywhere.

I imagine we’ll find it when the snow melts away, but I’m awfully curious as to what happened to it.

No sign of the cats, either, until I was done, and even then, I only saw three of them, hopping their way through the snow, out by the old pump shack.  It was some time before they made their way through the snow to the food!

Though it was quite mild and gentle out here, things were a lot wilder to the south of us.  Enough that our internet provider set up an automatic response at their number to tell people that the weather had disrupted service.

By the time the service was back, though, we had to get snow off the satellite dishes to be able to get a decent signal.  It was so wet and sticky, it did NOT want to come off!

Later on – likely not until tomorrow – the girls will shovel the roof.  This is the first snowfall we’ve had this winter big enough to warrant it.

The Re-Farmer

In the snow

The predicted snow finally arrived last night. While other parts of the province is storming, we have had a gentle snowfall.

The feed I left out this morning has been buried, but that is not stopping the critters from finding it. Like this squirrel.

Also, our satellite internet is having troubles due to the weather. My husband has been able to get enough signal for a wifi hotspot. Let’s see how long before I can upload and post this video! It’s already failed to upload twice as I’ve tapped this out on my phone.

The Re-Farmer

Catching Up With Old Friends

Today was one of those weird days.

I woke up this morning, feeling like I was coming down with something – sore throat, stuffy nose, and my entire body aching.  Even all the knuckles in my fingers hurt.  So I took some pain killers and went back to bed.

I didn’t wake up again until 11!!

I was feeling better after that second sleep, but now I’m feeling exhausted, while having done nothing to warrant such fatigue.

My old daughter was a sweetheart and took care of the feeding of critters this morning.  She posted photos of a couple of cats on her tumblr, which are just too funny.   She even got photos on the big camera for me.

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Rolando Moon was on her favorite spot on the old barrel.

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Beep Beep settled herself in one of her favorite spots.

And yes, that is most definitely grass growing through the snow!

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I’m guessing this is Nasty Crime Boy, up at the top of the dead spruce tree.

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All those cats make the deer nervous! :-D

I was out for much of the day, heading into town to visit with an old friend from high school.  We’ve been trying to connect for a couple of months, now, and finally have!

It was so good to see her again, and there was so much to catch up on!  Too much for just one visit.

We’ll just have to get together again.  :-D

When it comes to playing catch up with old friends after so long, I have been finding it difficult to maintain any sense of order or time.  We start talking about one thing, which leads us to jumping ahead a few years, or back even more years.  Or saying one thing would remind us of something else, only tangentially related.  One big change in playing catch up these days is something I appreciate about or technology.  We were both digging out our phones, able to share photos and video about so many things!  When we left this province, the first smart phones were still just coming out, and texting hadn’t even become that big of a thing, yet.  Very few phones had cameras, and none could take video, yet.  It’s much easier to share things with each other, now!  It’s pretty awesome!

One thing I definitely noticed, as we went through photos, a photo album and even an old high school year book (I could barely recognize our own faces!), is how many people we are now talking about in the past tense.  We’ve both lost siblings and parents, and an amazing number of people we went to school with are no longer with us.

I always knew we’d be reaching that point in our lives, but somehow I didn’t think we’d reach it quite so quickly.

After a wonderful visit, I took advantage of being in town and played a bit of Pokemon Go.  One of the new things about the game is that it reflects the local weather.

Or at least what the forecasters say should be the current weather.

We’ve had all sorts of storm warnings for the Southern half of the province.  We are just on the Northern edge of the forecasted storm area.  I figured we’d at least gets some snow, but we didn’t even get that.  Yet, according to the game, we should have been in the middle of the storm, and the game opened with an extreme conditions warning, where you have to tap a button that confirms, “yes, I’m safe” to continue to play the game!  It was rather funny.

While I was gone, the girls decided to bake some sourdough bread, and make some sourdough “piggies in blankets” – sourdough bread wrapped around wieners and baked.  They even kneaded some shredded cheese into the dough for the piggies.  Hmm.  They were made with all beef wieners.  Maybe they should be called beefies in a blanket? LOL  One of these days, I’ll get some good pictures of them to share.  They’re a nice supper treat. :-)

I have a wonderful family.

The Re-Farmer

Do I See What I Think I See?

I just finished going through my photos of the feeding station today.

Mama and the twins came by nice and early, and even stood together in a lovely grouping that allowed me to get photos of all three of them, at once.

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How considerate of them. :-D

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“Hey!  Hey, Mom!  Look at me!  My nose is all tickley.”

I got a couple of good ones with a blue jay.  I really liked this one.

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Something about that tilt of the head makes me smile.

Then the sun started shining on the feeding station, and Wow! did those feathers start to shine!

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The camera just does not do justice to how must those brighter blues gleamed and glittered.  It was amazing to see!

Then a squirrel posed nicely for me.

It wasn’t until I was cropping the photo that I spotted something…

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Is that green grass growing in there?!?!  There are so many little spruce tips on the ground, that’s what I thought it was at first, but no…

I think that really is new grass!

It’s only March.  We’re nowhere near done winter yet.  There’s a storm predicted for tomorrow evening, though we’re at the very northern edge of the expected path.  We should get a few centimeters of snow, at least.  While the long term forecasts are for warmer weather, there’s almost always at least one last blizzard in April that hits, before spring finally arrives.

Seeing that green right now is very interesting.  What it likely shows is how much warmer the darker areas are, even with snow under the dust and debris.  Little patches of micro-climates.

Cool!

The Re-Farmer

 

A Musical Problem

I have discovered a problem with the postcard records.

I can only listen to a track and a half, or so.

These are fascinating, by the way. I would love to hear all the songs in completion. I’ve lost much of my Polish, so the words are just on the edge of my understanding, but I have identified love sings, drinking songs and humorous songs.

Sometimes, all in one song.

I think.

The Re-Farmer

So. This Happened

Last night, the girls alerted me to a leak that started in one of the rooms upstairs.

Right near an outlet, too.  So they shut down their computers and unplugged the power bar as soon as they could.

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The water was coming in between the window box and the moulding.  It was leaking out the bottom, too, for a while.

These windows were installed just this past summer.  Wherever the water is coming from, it’s going into the wall, first.  The girls crawled out to clear things a bit, and they found the wall itself was quite dry on the outside.

I emailed my brother about it and he thinks this has been an annual leak; we just happen to be here to see it.  Even when my dad was still living here, the upstairs was hardly used and, in the winter, blocked off completely at the stop of the steps, to conserve heat.

It stopped leaking during the night, but now there is water damage to the nice, new window frames.

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There is a similar water stain on the bottom of the frame.

20180303_120750.25%So today, the girls crawled through the window to try and clear the roof as much as they could.  This is what they found.

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This moss is over the north window (it’s the south window that’s leaking).  After speaking with my brother, he tells me that moss has been there for many, many years.  They had replaced the rotten wood all along the outside wall this past summer, too.  He also cleared the eaves (I believe they are called gutters in other parts of the world) several times over the summer.

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This is the ice dam they found under the snow; my daughter included her thumb for perspective on how thick the ice is.  Unfortunately, the ice was going under the shingles in some places, so they couldn’t get it off without damaging the shingles.

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Check out the beautifully clear – and empty – eavestrough!

This section of the roof was raised to make more room in the second floor, so the slope is not as steep as it should be.  Now that the upstairs is being used and heated, even though there has been very little snow this year, it would be melting from underneath and not draining as well as it should.

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They also got a picture of this for me.  I asked my brother about it, and apparently it has always been like this (I was very young when I was clambering on the roof as a child, so I did not remember it).  So the water is draining directly onto the shingles, rather than down the side of the building.

Not that there is much water to drain right now, since it’s not melting into the eavestrough.

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This is not the only area with potential problems.  These are new icicles outside our living room window.  Formed between the eavestrough and the eave.

Apparently, my dad did not believe in soffits.

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This ice jam has formed at the corner between the master bedroom and the old kitchen.  I’m told it’s an annual thing.

You can see the pruning saw leaning against the wall in the corner.  It’s on a very long pole.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to do the actual pruning, before the sap flows, as we wanted to.

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This section of tree is the one that’s causing the most problems for the shingles.  Despite my brother cutting it back over the years, branches are touching the roof again.

I wasn’t able to unhook the broken branch that’s stuck on the TV antennae support wire.

The only way to make it not be a problem anymore is to cut that whole “branch” (it looks like a trunk!) back to the main trunk.  To do that, though, it has to be cut back in sections, so as not to cause damage to the house as the pieces fall.

Theoretically, it can be done with a ladder, but the safest way to do it is with a lift bucket.  Because a chainsaw would be the best tool for the job, and using a chain saw while on a ladder is just not ideal!

No one has lift buckets around here.  We’d have to hire someone.

We do have chain saws here.  There are three of them in the garage. I’m pretty sure one of them used to be ours; we’d given our chainsaw to my late brother before we moved out of province.  No need for a chainsaw when living in a city apartment!  It’s unlikely any of them work.  We’ll have to get some maintenance done on them.

It is not the only tree that needs to be cut back severely back there; there is another huge maple with a large trunk leaning towards the house.

Then there is the tree in front of the kitchen window.

Let’s look at this photo again.

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Ideally, we’d get rid of it completely.  It’s the reason the eavestroughs needed to be cleared so often.  I was thinking we might be able to, say, turn the stump into the support for a table top, so we’d have a sort of picnic table out there, but this is a Chinese Elm.  It has been cut back severely in the past, but it just grows back.  Apparently, these trees are very hard to get rid of.  It was a mistake to plant such a large tree so close to the house, but I think my mother had wanted the shade, and this is a variety that grows very quickly.

Little by little, we will figure out what needs to be done, and do it.  The challenge will be to prioritize things!

The Re-Farmer

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?

Before I get into the bureaucratic battle of the day, I will start with the pleasant things.

Critters.

Mama and the twins came out first, today, but at one point, we had all 5 deer hanging around.

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Then Mama and the twins chased off Hungry Girl and Barbecue, who hung out in the spruces for a while.  Barbecue tried to come back, but one of the twins chased him off.  Then Mama and the twins left, and Hungry Girl and Barbecue had a chance to eat.

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I had to include this one.  It looks like he’s shouting!

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Mama and the twins hadn’t gone far, though, and hung out in the garden area for a while.  When the twins started to come back, it was Hungry Girl’s turn to chase them off.  Back and forth it went, until they were done eating.  Then the birds got their turn!

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The grosbeaks really like the black oil seeds.  There aren’t as many in the deer feed, and we didn’t get one of the big sacks of just that type of birdseed this time around, so we’re seeing less of them, already.

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Quite the drama! :-D

That redpoll looks like it’s trying to figure out just what those crazy deer are doing!

In the middle of all this, I finally got a call back from Vital Statistics.  We’ve been playing telephone tag for a while.  The main question she had for me involved our address, of all things.  I included both our postal address and our physical address.  She went with just the PO Box. Then there was all the confirming of names and spellings; my husband’s name became the issue, because she wanted to put in his first name, as it is on his birth certificate, but that’s not the name he uses, nor is it what he would have put on the form when we got married, nor anywhere else.  Then there is the whole “birth name” and “name before marriage” part.  I told her about the problems I was having because of the names, so she ended up deciding to drop my husband’s first name completely.  That done, she said she would finish processing it today, and it’d be done!  Yay!

Then I got a phone call on my cell phone.  Yeah.  It was my old doctor’s office, once again calling the wrong number.  At least it rang, this time, though she couldn’t hear me and I had to call back on the land line.

Turns out that they can’t do debit Visa, after all.

They also don’t take electronic transfers.

So I’m going to have to find a check.  *sigh*

My younger daughter and I went into town again, to pick up some things we forgot yesterday.  We took the opportunity to play Pokemon Go, and it was actually warm enough that we walked over to a couple of gyms.  One of them is right along the lakeside that, in the summer, you can walk to rather easily, but in the winter, there is no path.  When we walked over, though, we would see a trampled path in the snow from the other players that have made their way to it, too.  With things half melted, it was a little rough and hard on the ankles, but we managed not to slip and twist anything. :-D

Among our errands, she picked up some birthday beer for her sister; a splurge on some Innis and Gunn.  Not sure how I ended up with daughters who like beer.  I could never acquire a taste for it, myself.  Same with wine.  Maybe it’s because I got traumatized by the cheap swill I drank back when I was a teen pretending to be cool at bush parties. LOL

When I got home, there was a message waiting for me.  From Vital Statistics.  She wanted me to call back.

Telephone tag it is, once again!

So the two things I thought were finally done…

Aren’t.

*sigh*

The Re-Farmer

 

 

Thinking Ahead

As we are settling in to our new home and going over the immediate property to see what needs to be done, we’ve been having discussions about what we want to do over the next few years.

Gardening isn’t likely to happen this year, unless my daughters do some planting.  At least not any deliberate gardening on our part.  Come spring, we’ll see what my mother has planted that will come up.

I’m really hoping the asparagus is still there.  And the rhubarb and horseradish.

We’ve talked about making raised bed gardens for accessibility, and what sort of vegetables we’d plant.  We’ll have to see what the status is of the raspberry bushes, how the apples do this year, and any other fruit trees that might still be productive around the yard.

We’ve also talked about getting chickens, and how many we would need to provide an adequate amount of eggs.  There’s the possibility of getting goats, though more about getting angora goats for their fibre.  A couple of goats for their milk would not be a bad idea.  I’m the only person in the family that isn’t lactose intolerant, and goat milk is something they can drink.  It’s just too flippin’ expensive to buy.  They love milk, so they put up with the discomfort of drinking it.  It would be nice for that not to be a thing.  Plus, I’d like to try making cheeses.  The friend I ran into at the clinic with my husband raises goats for meat, plus milk for their own use.  She told me that you can raise 10 goats on the resources of one cow, plus they give birth in twins and triplets, so they are a good return on investment for food production.  I’ve never actually eaten goat, though, so I don’t know if I’d like it.

Looking just at the size of our yard, I’m realizing that we could do most, if not all, of what we want to do, just in our fenced yard/garden area, and not even need to beyond the yard itself, once we’ve taken care of the overgrowth.

Along with those ideas, I’ve also started looking at other options.  Specifically, I was looking into fruit and nut trees.

It’s surprising, how many food trees will actually grow in our planting zone.  Here is a map from the federal government.

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We fall solidly into the 3a zone, so any fruit or nut trees we plant have to be quite hardy, and able to withstand some pretty chill temperatures.

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Unlike a vegetable garden, any trees or shrubs we plant have to be able to survive lows into the -40C range in the winter and survive, even if we do work out micro-climates to facilitate their growth and production.  It’d be nice to actually have some of that global warming that’s supposed to be happening.

Here is a wish list I’ve started.

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Kiwi.  Yes, kiwi!  Turns out they can handle zone 3 quite well.  We would need at least 3 plants, including 1 male pollinator.

Seedless grapes.  Yes, grapes grow on the prairies, and there are native varieties, but I am interested in red and green seedless hybrids.

Saskatoon.  These actually grow wild in the bush, though I no longer remember where.  It would be nice to have some in the yard.  The fruit looks similar to blueberries, but they are related to apples.

Raspberry varieties; I’d like to have three varieties that mature at different times, so we have raspberries available for a much longer season.

Cherry.  We may have some cherry trees in the yard already, but I don’t know that they are a hardy enough variety to provide much fruit.  There are varieties of cherries that can handle our zone 3 quite well.  Later in the year, I want to check out an area where I remember we had pin cherries.  These are very tiny and tart; more seed than berry, but I remember eating them by the handful, anyhow, and my father made wine with them.  It would be cool if they’re still around, too.

Haskap.  This is a hybrid I’ve been learning about that looks a bit like a long, somewhat misshapen blueberry.  They can be used the same as blueberries, too.

Sunberry.  This is another berry that can be used just like blueberries, though they look quite different.

Plums.  We might have plum trees, still.  They were little, hard bright red plums, not the soft purple or red ones you buy at the grocery store.  We didn’t really eat them, but like the pin cherries, my dad would make wine with them.  I think my mom might have made jam with them, but I never liked jam, so I don’t remember.

Pine nuts (Korean pine).  Yes!  They can grow here!  Pine nuts are so expensive, it would be awesome to have our own trees.

Buartnut.  This is a hybrid walnut.  They are also fast growing shade trees that get huge, so we’d have to be careful where we plant them.  Black walnut is a native Canadian variety, but after reading up a bit, I think I’d rather try the hybrid.

Butternut.  This is another Canadian native that I’d like to try.

Beaked hazel nut.  This variety, I remember picking with my mother once, as a child.  I don’t know how she found the bush, because I remember having to go deep into the bushes to get to it, well away from any cow paths – and loosing my sandal in some muck we had to cross in the process!  I think this would be a good thing to plant along the edge of our spruce grove or along a fence line.

Gooseberries.  Mostly for sentimental reasons.  I have such fond, delicious memories of the one we had when I was a child.

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So that’s my list so far.  Some of these require a lot more work than others – the grape vines, for example, need to be trained and pruned over several years.

What we actually end up doing over the years, who knows.  I’d be excited even if we manage just a few of them.

If you’ve got any sort of experience or knowledge about some of these – or suggestions to make – I’d be thrilled to hear it!

The Re-Farmer

 

Hello, March!

Ah, what a lovely spring day we are having today!  As I write this, our temperature is at +2C.  That’s right, I’ve had to add a + to the temperature!  We are above freezing temperatures right now, and it’s already evening.

Awesome.

Of course, we’re also getting storm warnings for Sunday – when we’re also supposed to be above freezing for temperatures, so it’s a heavy snowfall that would happen, if it does happen.  From talking to my dad over the years, these snowfalls tend to miss the farm, and hit farther south.  So we’ll see.

The melting snow has left the deer feeding area looking much bigger!  All the detritus of past feedings is being revealed, so the spots where I’ve been leaving little piles of seeds are now looking much bigger.  And blacker.

This morning, Hungry Girl and Barbecue came over before I’d gone out to freshen up the feed.  I tried to take photos, but the camera wouldn’t work.  Checking the display, I saw what looked like CHR.  Or maybe CHA.  Anyhow, I figured the battery needed to be charged.  So I took the one from the camera to charge and popped on the extra.

Which was also almost dead, even though I had fully charged it not long ago.  I still thought there was enough charge to take some photos, but not; I still got the same display.

So I missed getting photos of them while the batteries charged.

It turned out not to be the batteries.

Somehow, the memory card got locked.  The photos I took yesterday are still there.  I copied them, but I can’t remove them, nor can I take more photos on the card.

I have no idea how this happened, or even where.  It could have happened on the camera itself, or on the desktop.

I will have to investigate further.

I did, however, get a nice photo of a blue jay, at least.

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I got a call from my husband’s doctor this morning about a change in his medication.  (I appreciate that they will talk directly to me about it, so I don’t have to interrupt his lie-downs.)  The new medication is covered by insurance, so he gave me information and instructions about it, then sent the prescription to the pharmacy so I could pick it up today.  Rather nice having a prescription that we don’t have to physically pick up at the clinic and take to the pharmacy within a limited time period!

So my younger daughter and I headed into town to pick it up (and get some Pokemon Go in).

While there, I checked to see if my own file was successfully transferred from our previous pharmacy (it was) and if it had been filled (it was).  So I got both at the same time.

One of the pharmacists and a trainee spent some time with me, making sure I had the needed information about the updated medication, the dose, when to take it, etc.  They even opened the package to look at the paperwork to make sure the dose measurements on the injector pen matched the previous version of the medication.  It did, but the dose my husband is supposed to be on is quite high, so the box will only last a few days.  It was decided to leave it as is, for starters, then in the future we can get multiples of boxes, so I’ll have fewer trips into town.

Meanwhile I glanced at my own prescriptions and choked at the price tag.

The insurance coverage wasn’t used.

So I let them know and gave them my insurance card.  Once done with my husband’s prescription, they started fixing my file.

It’s a good thing I brought an insulated bag and asked for ice packs.

I think I spent at least half an hour waiting, as they first tried to get my insurance set up on my file in their system, which failed, and the pharmacist then called the insurance company directly.

Long story short.

They couldn’t get it to work.

At the insurance company’s end, the person was going to talk to someone else, but that someone else was on lunch, so she would call the pharmacy back later.

The pharmacist, meanwhile, felt that the problem was at their end, not the insurance company.  I could pay the full price and get reimbursed (nope; we may have just got paid, but reimbursement wouldn’t happen until it got fixed, and who knows how long that would take), or she was willing to transfer the prescription to the competing pharmacy across the street to be filled.

Yeah!  Really!

I decided to not get them for now (it’s a good thing they’re not a vital prescription!!).  She said she would call me if she got a call back from the insurance company.  I mentioned coming back tomorrow, but she suggested I call, first.

So what should have been a quick trip into town, with some leisurely Pokemon-ing ended up being much longer.  At least there is a Pokestop right next to the pharmacy, so my daughter was able to throw on a lure and played on both our phones while she waited for me.

Meanwhile, my phone let me know I had a voice mail.  Which was weird, because I got no phone call.  Turns out I did, but it just never rang.  It was my previous doctor’s office, wanting to talk to me about my file transfer.

So, once I got home, I had lots of phone calls to make.

I called the insurance company and explained what happened.  He could see nothing wrong with my file on the system, so he put me on hold to talk to someone else.

When he came back, I could hear the perplexity in his voice.  It turns out that in one area, my account was active, but in another, I was no longer active.  They don’t know why.  So he was going to contact the carrier my husband’s work is hooked up with to figure things out and get my file fully active again.

Hopefully, it will not take as long as it did to fix up the mess with my husband’s file.

Then I talked to my old clinic.  Turns out there is a $35 fee to transfer a file, and how did I want to pay that?  I don’t have a credit card, but I do have debit Visa, which they take, so we did that.

I also updated my address and phone number, so she wouldn’t call my cell phone, though my cell phone number is still there as a back up.

Then I worked on something else when I got a notification from my phone.

Another voice mail.

Yeah.  She called my cell phone.  And since I had zero signal at the time, it went straight to voice mail.

I called back and found out my card was declined.  Which made no sense.

So I called the bank’s 866 number on my card.

Which got answered with a cheerful recording saying I could help them out by taking a short survey.  As a reward, select customers could win a Caribbean cruise.

Uh huh.

So I went through the three question survey (there was no option not to take it), and at the end, the cheerful recording congratulated me, because I just won the cruise; it would only cost a $65 processing fee.  Did I want to accept the prize?

Uh huh.

So I selected yes.  A live person answered the phone, greeting me with an “are you excited about winning this cruise?”  To which I responded, “Actually, I’m trying to figure out how I got you guys, because I was trying to phone … ”

*click*beepbeepbeep*

She hung up on me.

I called the bank’s number again and got through to where I was supposed to.  After being on hold a while, I made sure to first tell the person who answered what happened.  She took notes to pass on to the back office to see if there was a security breach on their system.

Then I talked to her about my debit Visa being declined.  She checked, but there was nothing wrong with my card.  After getting more details, she put me on hold and went to talk to someone in the back office about it.  When she got back, she informed me that no transaction on my card was attempted, according to their system.

Which means that, somewhere between the clinic and the bank, something went wrong.

So, back on the phone with the clinic I went.  I told her what the bank told me, and she was surprised, because she had tried twice.  I told her the bank confirmed there is nothing wrong with my card, so she said she would try again later, then call me back if it was still a problem.

So far, no call back, but then if she tries to call my cell phone again, it might be a while before I find out.  I forgot to mention that she’d called the wrong number.

Ah, well.

So, more move related hassles to sort out.

Later on, I went and got the memory card from the camera, as well as the one that got locked.  I uploaded the photos I took…

And found pictures of Mama and the Twins.

I didn’t remember taking those.

I uploaded them all, then started trying to figure out what happened with the locked card, and if there was something I could find to unlock it on the desktop.

While I was doing that, my older daughter came by to let me know she’d taken some pictures of deer while we were gone.

I suddenly felt sane again. LOL

Here is one of the photos she took for me.

2018-03-01.whitetail.family

With the melt, it looks like there is so much more feed out there than there really is!  I’d emptied the bag this morning, and picked up 3 more on the way home, so we should be good for the Month.

Now, I am looking forward to a quiet evening.  I’m not used to talking so much.  My throat is sore.  I have a friend I’m hoping to talk to soon, and I don’t want to have to cut conversation short because I’ve spent so much time talking on the phone!

The Re-Farmer