It was pretty nippy this morning, with the temperatures dropped down to -26C/-15F. Thankfully, with no wind chill! That’s the coldest we’ve had this winter so far (and yes, I know; technically, we’re still fall), and the coldest we will be for the next few weeks, at least. As I write this, my desktop tells me we are at -22C/-8F with a wind chill of -30C/-22F, but my phone’s app tells me we are at -20C/-4F with a wind chill of -23C/-9F. My phone app seems to be the more accurate one.
With the cold, I did a short version of my rounds, mostly just making sure the critters had fresh food and warm water. My older daughter assisted with giving Tuxedo Mask his eye drops, then stayed with him to make sure he didn’t get out, as I had to go in and out of the sun room. It got cold enough that his water bowl actually froze! My daughter put some pieces of rigid insulation on the concrete floor in a few strategic places.
We also decided to allow Agnoos into the sun room to keep Tuxedo Mask company. They are brothers from the same litter and get along, and Agnoos already allows us to pick him up and cuddle him, so he was the least disruptive choice.
I just spotted this, outside our bathroom window.
They are just smooshed together, on top of the board the ceramic heater bulb is mounted to! Something out there sure has their attention!
Oh, I am extra glad we don’t need to go anywhere, tomorrow!
The -21C is not too big of a deal.
The wind chill at -35C is a whole different story!!
That’s -6F with a wind chill of -31F, for those of you in the US.
On the plus side, tomorrow’s predicted high is now -17C/1F tomorrow, which is a few degrees warmer than previously forecast. Looks like the cold swept in faster than expected.
By Thursday, we are supposed to warm up to -1C/30F.
Tuxedo Mask is doing just fine. His eye is looking good, and he’s been more active. The girls treat his eye in the evenings, then top up the kibble for the outside cats. He hasn’t been trying to dash outside, but he has tried to get into the old kitchen! He has also, I’m happy to say, started to use the litter box a bit. Hopefully, he’ll start using it all the time, so we’ll have less of a mess to clean up when things start to thaw!
Chadicous, meanwhile, has taken on the job of trying to kill me, by flinging himself tragically in front of my feet while I am walking! :-D
The other cats, meanwhile, mill about so much, I can’t get a head count! The most I got was 17, including Tuxedo Mask.
After I was finished my rounds, I was in a bit of a quandary. We haven’t done the rest of our big shopping yet, and while I would have preferred to go tomorrow, temperatures are supposed to drop dramatically. I really don’t like driving this time of year. I am just too paranoid about our older, fragile van with way too many miles on it. It’s actually done really well by us, but we’ve had too many unexpected vehicle problems too many times over the years, and it’s a whole lot different to have those problems in the city, compared to having them on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere.
I procrastinated enough that I got the phone call from the ranch we’re getting our quarter beef from. The final hanging weight turned out to be 125 pounds, and she wanted to go over what cuts I wanted. The lower weight meant we over paid by about $50, too.
Apparently, I made things really easy for her. She’d emailed me a list of available cuts, and I just said “I’m good with a little of everything; feel free to surprise me.” LOL So that’s what we’ll be getting; a little of everything! We’ll have ground beef, stewing meat, several types of steak, several types of roasts, and even soup bones. I’ve never made bone broth before, and I’d like to try it. I also went with having the cuts wrapped in paper, rather than the Styrofoam and plastic; paper wrapped last longer in the freezer. It was a little bit extra per pound, which worked out to $10 for the whole order, but I had that credit, so that didn’t matter. At the end of the call, she asked me if I wanted her to etransfer the credit back today, and I was all, nope! I’d rather get more meat! They are low in inventory this time of year, and will be for a few more weeks, but when I asked about sausages, I had several types to choose from. The family really liked their breakfast sausages, so she said that, for the $50 credit, that would about 5 packages of sausages. I said, you mean for $40, right? She had forgotten about the extra charge for the butcher paper wrapping! Once she remembered, she said that’s okay. We’ll squeeze in 5 packages for you! :-D
So she will pass on the list of cuts to the butcher and, at this point, they are expecting to get the cuts around the 20th or 21st. She’ll contact me again to arrange how we will get the meat.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been talking to our neighbour about getting a half pig. They take orders in the spring, so they know how many extra animals they need to rear for fall butchering. A half pig would get us about 70-80 pounds of butchered meat.
In the future, we would like to buy in larger quantities, but for that, we’ll either need a second freezer or do a lot of meat canning!
Or both. I’m good with both. :-D
Once the call about the meat order was done, I headed out to do the shopping. It’s mostly the larger, heavier stuff we couldn’t set enough of, like the big dry cat food bags. It doesn’t take long to fill a shopping cart with those!
When I first headed out, things were looking fine, though the closer I got to the smaller, nearer city I chose to go to, the less visibility there was. By the time I was driving home, we had blowing snow. The roads, for the most part, were still good, but there were a couple of places where it was starting to accumulate. I was quite glad I’d left when I did!
I got a message from my brother while I was driving home, and it turned out to be some video. He had gone out to visit my mother and go to church with her (he does that often enough that he’s considered a member of the church, but with the way the restrictions still are, I probably wouldn’t be allowed in the door anymore). He convinced her to practice driving the motorized chair they got for her, and it was pretty cool to see video of her zipping around the lobby in her building.
Hopefully, the roads were still good for his drive home! We’re now seeing news stories about blizzard like conditions expected to the south of us, and my brother’s place is in the region.
I left just in time!
The temperatures are supposed to be quite bitter tomorrow, then whip right back up to just below freezing a couple of days later! My mother had asked me to pick up some honey from my cousin, which I was able to do yesterday (while picking up some creamed honey for ourselves). She said I could bring it over the next time I came to help her with shopping. My brother did take her to the grocery store today, so we decided to wait until Thursday, when it’s supposed to be much warmer, and I’ll come over. By then, she might be running short of a few things again. I brought up that she might want to stock up more than usual, since prices are expected to go up, and shortages are expected. When I explained about shipping and transportation problems, she dismissed the concerns. We have enough in our province and will be fine, she said. She just can’t understand that what we have in our stores are brought in almost completely from the port in Vancouver, which has been devastated by recent flooding, and the US, which has its own transportation and supply issues. This is all far away, so it can’t affect us, right?
*sigh*
Well, if necessary, between my siblings and I, we will be able to give her stuff if the local stores run out. We did find, when shortages happened last year, that the cities were harder hit than smaller communities, so hopefully, it won’t be an issue.
Meanwhile, I am more than happy to hunker down for a few days, and not go anywhere!
For now, I will enjoy warming up with a big mug of Rooiboos, and an arm full of cat making it difficult to type, and have a nice, quiet evening!
I’m happy to say that Tuxedo Mask is looking so much better!
This has become his favourite spot, under the ceramic heat bulb.
Unfortunately, he’s still not using the litter. My daughter took a look this morning, and it seems he’s just going on the concrete beside the litter box.
*sigh*
At least the room is cold enough that it’ll be pretty much frozen, and will freeze completely once we are no longer using the heat bulb, until we can clean it up.
Somehow, I never thought I’d be using the mini-greenhouse frame like this. :-D Now we’ve used it to help convalescing critters a couple of times. It works great!
When putting in the eye drops this morning, his eye was looking really great. Just a bit of dry crustiness around his eyelid, and that’s it. If things keep up like this, we’ll be able to let him out in about five days.
Interestingly, he hasn’t been making a dash for the door when I go outside. He seems to quite like his warm spot! Until my daughter comes in, at which point he revels in cuddles.
Some of the outside cats are looking like they could use some eye drops, too, but none of them are cats we can catch. The ones that do let us pet them are all clear eyed.
Potato Beetle is looking pretty battle worn! At least, with the cold, he’s been less aggressive towards the other cats, but clearly he hasn’t stopped completely.
The temperatures outside are still relatively mild. We’ll have a couple of colder days coming up, but so far, we still don’t even need to plug in the block heater on the van.
When I do my morning rounds, I’m in and out of the sun room quite a bit. We didn’t want to take a chance of Tuxedo Mask dashing outside. Every time one of us used the bathroom, we could hear him through the window, crying to get outside! So my younger daughter took on Tuxedo Mask duty. I did have to stop my husband, though. He was about to do the outside cats’ food and water, forgetting that we have a patient in the sun room that would be eager to dash outside!
Tuxedo Mask was not a happy camper when we came in. He had settled at the bottom of the door to the old kitchen, then ran and hid when we opened it. It took a while for my daughter to get him out while I topped up the food and water bowls. Which did not need topping up. If he ate or drank during the night, it wasn’t enough that I could tell the different. The litter wasn’t used, either, which means we’ll likely find a mess to clean up in the spring.
Gotta love concrete floors.
My daughter then stayed with Tuxedo Mask, holding him in her arms while she sat on her dad’s walker, while I went in and out. As unhappy as he was about being stuck in the sun room, he had discovered the joys of being cuddled, and didn’t even try to get out of my daughter’s arms!
His eye is looking pretty much normal already! It wasn’t even very leaky. When giving him his eye drops, it was a bit more closed than the other, but the redness seems all gone. A huge improvement from when I first saw it, and it looked like blood.
Which means, unless something changes for the worse, he’ll be in the sun room for only a week.
Hopefully, he’ll have learned to use the litter box before then!
The other outside cats, meanwhile, were in fine form. Even Broccoli’s eye has no visible redness, and any signs of leaking doesn’t appear fresh. I couldn’t see Caramel’s eyes, though. Too much running around!
Rolando Moon joined me for a while.
Ah, Rolando! One moment, it’s CHOMP!!!
The next moment, it’s KISS!!
She’s so mean and loving. :-D
Meanwhile, the fix on the door is holding out wonderfully. Tightening that hinge plate seems to be making the biggest difference. All this time we fought with the door, and never thought to look at the hinge! There was one spot on the floor where the door would jam. If I could push it past that one spot, it would swing free again. The floors in this house are uneven, and it’s been doing this for longer than we’ve lived here. It never even occurred to me that it was anything other than the uneven floor being the problem. Tightening the hinge plate adjusted the door a tiny bit, but it’s enough that we can now open the door all the way, without it jamming on that bump on the floor!
The door latches much better now, too, and we no longer have to fight to get it to stay closed. Which means where will be less wear and tear on the knob mechanism. It opens and closes so smoothly now, I didn’t even notice the bit of give on the handles, because of the too-long bar!
To think we put up with this for 4 years, and never thought to look at that hinge the entire time. Even my dad would have been putting up with it for who knows how many years; as his mobility declined, he went in and out through the sun room, too, because there are no stairs that way.
Funny how easy it is to miss these little things, yet they can make such a big difference!
In my last post, I commented that it sounded like my daughter was finished cleaning the knobs that we found to fix the door to the old kitchen.
I was wrong.
She was down in the basement, using the buffer in my Dremel kit on the knobs!
She just took this project right over, and I’m happy she did. She did a much better job than I would have! :-D
This is how the knobs looked when I dragged them into the light.
Even as filthy as they were, they were still kinda pretty!
Oh, did they ever clean up good!
These two were out of the running. We were never able to get that screw out, and the bar was very wobbly. Also, there was no screw to fit the black knob.
We had these two bars to work with. They were both the same size as the damaged one, except for the length. These are shorter than the damaged one.
These are the knobs that came off the door, with crud and paint removed, revealing some of the copper.
These fit on the threaded bar, and had their own screws, but we didn’t want to use these again. Not when we had such pretty alternatives!
Aren’t these pretty? Uncovering the gold colour on the one was a very pleasant surprise.
These are threaded, so we could use them on the threaded bar. They are a bit smaller, though. Plus, we liked these ones, better.
We did not expect one of them to turn out to be brass! And that decorative one… wow, did my daughter do a great job cleaning that up! Especially where the paint had gotten right into the design. Their large sizes are more comfortable in the hand, too.
These fit on the non-threaded bar.
Sort of.
There was only one screw between them. Though we had screws from the other knobs, this one was longer, to fit into the holes in the bar, and the threads were different, too.
The screw went into the silver knob, which is where it came from originally. The bar fit very tightly into the brass knob, but without something running through the knob and into the bar, it could still get pulled off.
If we didn’t have a screw, we could still use a peg, right?
My daughter ended up using a piece of bamboo chopstick and trimmed it to fit. Then she installed the knobs into the door.
After hours spent scrubbing, cleaning and buffing, it took about a minute to install! :-D
The only problem is, the bar is too long. Even taking into account the different holes at each ind of the bar that would allow for some adjustment. With the original bar, the knobs could screw in as far as necessary to fit. The non-threaded bar isn’t that flexible. There are only so many holes that could be used to set the knobs.
Which means the whole thing gets pulled in and out while being used. The knobs actually fit into the openings in the plates perfectly, though.
Man, that door looks so battered and gross, now that it has these shiny, pretty knobs!
You can see the peg on this knob, left long to make it easy to remove, if necessary.
As we tested the door, there were still some problems opening and closing it that left us concerned that we’d be breaking the bar or something. This has long been an issue with the door, completely aside from the troubles with the knobs. It reminded me to take a closer look.
Sure enough, the top hinge plate was coming loose from the frame.
The hinge plate – and the screws – was painted over, of course.
*sigh*
My daughter was able to get it tightened, though, and that solved the problem. The door latches open and closed much more smoothly now.
Looking at the door while it was closed showed something very odd. I’d never looked closely before. I’d noticed the gap between door and frame at the top before; that’s easy enough to see. This is a very dark spot, so I used a flashlight to examine the rest of the door and frame and discovered that, by the middle, the door was flush against the frame. At the bottom, however, there was a very small gap that had opened up after the top hinge plate was tightened against the frame.
Normally, I would say that this was because of the house shifting, but the size of the gap at the top of the door, where it ends up snug against the frame in the middle, only to pen up again at the bottom, suggests to me that the door itself isn’t straight at that edge. Chances are pretty good it has been like this since the door was first hung!
Anyhow.
Now that the door is secured and the knobs replaced, we’ll just need to add something to keep the knobs from sliding back and forth as the door is used. I’m not sure what to use, yet. Need to think about what we’ve got, lying about!
I think, in the future, I’m going to be keeping an eye out for any other old doors lying around. If we’ve got another similar door in a shed somewhere, we might be able to salvage the parts and pieces and replace the current bar with a shorter one.
The important thing, though, is that it’s fixed. That means, when I go out to do my rounds in the morning, I won’t have to get someone to let me into the house when I’m done!
The delay we had as we prepared to take Tuxedo Mask to the vet requires a bit of background explanation.
For the past while, we have been going in and out of the house through the sun room. While I did a repair on the door of the main entry, where it was falling off its hinges, it didn’t last. The wood continued to split, and the door frame itself is splitting. Basically, we need to replace the entire door and frame set, which I hoped would have been done by now, but other things laid claim to our budget. We avoid using that door, so as not to damage it even worse. We do have another door in the dining room, but that one doesn’t have a key lock, and has troubles closing. Yeah, that door and frame needs to be replaced, too, but at least nothing is splitting apart. Anymore. The storm door on the outside was badly rotted at the bottom, and my brother repaired that before we moved in, sweetheart that he is.
Going outside through the sun room, however, means first going through a door to the old kitchen. That room isn’t heated and has little insulation, so we use it for storage and the chest freezer, and it’s a critter safe place to store our garbage bags until we can get to the dump. The cats are not allowed in there, but they sometimes slip through.
The good thing is, it is a buffer zone. The old kitchen goes out into the sun room. There is the original (?) wooden door on the inside, and a storm door on the sun room side. When the sun room was added on, the storm door stayed, and comes in quite handy.
The sun room acts as another buffer. There have been times where inside cats have made it as far as the sun room, or outside cats as far as the old kitchen, but not at the same time, thankfully! :-D
Then there are the sun room doors to outside; an inner door and a storm door, both salvaged. My late brother worked in demolitions, and most of the sun room was built with material he was able to salvage from who knows where!
It’s the old kitchen door that has been increasingly a problem.
From the inside, the knob worked only in one direction. If you turned the other direction, it would just spin in place. The door itself didn’t want to stay closed, and sometimes I would think I closed it behind me, only to come back later and discover cats milling around the old kitchen! Both knobs were also loose and rattled, but the outside knob (the old kitchen side) seemed to work better.
Until today. When it suddenly just didn’t.
While getting Tuxedo Mask into the cat carrier, my daughter needed to go back into the house, and couldn’t open the door. The knob just spun in place, doing nothing. My husband had to open the door from the inside to let us in!
Before we left, I quickly took a couple of photos of the door knob, with plans to go to the hardware store while my daughter took Tuxedo Mask to the vet.
Yes, this is a very, very old door. It’s the original, I believe, which would mean it’s been there since about the 1930’s. I don’t think that’s the original knob, though.
Once at the hardware store, I asked for help, so I could be sure I got the right kind of replacement knob. The first two staff weren’t sure, so they got the manager to help me.
He took one look at the photos and said, “no.”
He had no door knobs that would work. If we tried with a modern door knob, we’d have to drill a new hole.
That would mean removing the plates, of course.
You’ll notice how thoroughly painted over it is on this side. Even if I manged to get the screws out, getting it free of the door, without damaging it, would be difficult.
Of course, the other side is painted over, too.
He suggested that I try a second hand store. Sometimes, people donate their old door knobs.
Which is when I remembered finding door knobs when we cleaned out the new part basement. Some downright pretty ones, in fact.
Once we got home, got Tuxedo Mask set up in the sun room and my other daughter let us into the house, I headed straight for the basement. The knobs were easy to find, as I’d put them all in the same drawer.
Rifling through, I found three potential pairs of knobs. There was one more, but it was a more modern knob with its own plate that couldn’t work.
I started off by trying to clean them first. My younger daughter came along to help and, from the sounds of things as I write this, she finally finished. She was absolutely determined to clean all the recesses in that one more elaborate knob. A couple of them had paint on them, and all of them were incredibly filthy.
I’m going to have to take a photo of how they look after cleaning. They are gorgeous!!!
The screw on the white enamel one, however, is damaged and we can’t do anything with it, so that one’s not an option. My daughter worked out which two fit knobs together best while cleaning them.
After a while, I went to take off the old knobs.
*sigh*
One of these days, I’d like to get the paint off this door and refinish it. Maybe with a nice stain or something. It’s not a standard size door, so if we were to ever replace it, we’d be resizing the entire door frame. It’s in a log wall, so that’s probably not an option.
It took a while to get the knobs off, as the bar was deeply threaded into each of them.
Can you tell which one is the one I took off the door?
Yeah, the bottom one.
No wonder the knobs wouldn’t work right.
My daughter and I were just starting to clean the knobs I found in the basement when my mother phoned. Eventually, I mentioned to her what happened to the door. As I described it, she started telling me that I could get my brother to fix it. You know, the brother that lives an hour and a half away. :-/ I told her that we couldn’t do that. Then I had to explain – again – that we don’t use the main doors anymore, and why, so these doors are the ones we use all the time, now.
As I was adding in why we couldn’t use the dining room doors either, my mother started asking, why is everything breaking down all of a sudden? I told her it isn’t “all of a sudden.” These things were breaking down for many years. It’s just that nobody noticed it happening. Even my dad, while he was still living here, would no longer have seen a lot of it and, even if he did, was in no position to do anything about it. Now we’re here, and very active, so things that have been slowly breaking down over the years are finally just giving out.
Aren’t we the lucky ones? :-D
I think she even got it a bit, because she started talking about how she had relied so much on the boys taking care of things, she didn’t know anything about it all.
Which is a huge step forward from her usual, “you need a man in the house” lecture! :-D
So, hopefully, we’ll get the door working again tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning. The knobs have been scrubbed with vinegar and water and I want to make sure they are completely dry before we put the ones we’ve settled on, into the door. Once I got them off, I realized the knobs themselves are just fine. They even look a lot nicer, once the paint and scunge was removed! We much prefer the pretty ones, though. Hopefully, it’ll work.
If not, we’ll have to start digging through some of the sheds and the barn, and see if there are some really old doors we can steal the knobs from.
We had some maintenance related issues that prevented me from posting an update as soon as we got home, so I figured I’d just cut to the chase with the title!
We were not able to catch Broccoli, though.
She and Caramel just did not want to leave the cat’s house, even when I started scraping ice and snow off the roof – a noise that usually sends them running.
She did eventually come out just as we were heading to the van with Tuxedo Mask (with a delay I will write about in my next post). We tried again to get her, but she just would not let it happen.
On the plus side, her eye looked much, much improved since this morning, so that’s encouraging.
Even with the delay, we got to the vet early, which gave me time to pop across the street to a hardware store. My daughter went in with Tuxedo Mask.
It’s basically a herpes infection. He was coughing a bit, too, which would also be from herpes. She prescribed eye drops for him. She legally could not prescribe extra for Broccoli, though. Anyhow, he is to get the eye drops twice a day for a week longer than when his eye clears up. Considering that his eye was looking dramatically better by the time we took him to the vet, that should not be too long. And if we happen to be able to catch Broccoli and be able to hold her, well, it’s up to us if we happen to give her eye drops, too!
Honestly, I don’t see that happening.
Once we got home and were let into the house – more on that later! – we set up a nest for Tuxedo Mask in the sun room, along with the extra ceramic heat bulb, similar to how we set things up for Ginger. He will stay in the sun room, where we can easily catch him to treat his eye, until it’s no longer needed, and then we can let him outside again. We were warned to watch out if the eye starts to get cloudy, though, and if it does, to bring him right back.
Considering he’s already recovering, I think that will not be a concern.
On top of all that, the cost of the visit and the prescription was way less than I feared. I keep wildly overestimating how much things will cost, but he didn’t need any Xrays or anything like that, so there weren’t any add on’s to his exam. Just the prescription. Such a relief!
Getting to and from the sun room to treat his eye might be a challenge over the next while, though, depending on how we manage things tonight.
When heading out this morning, I made extra effort to take a closer look at Tuxedo Mask’s red eye.
He even let me pet him, while he was in the kibble house!
The eye is still really gross and leaky, but looking a lot better than yesterday.
Then I saw Broccoli.
Who also has a red, leaking eye.
*sigh*
I was able to get some decent photos, though. Once back inside, I called up the vet, then later emailed them a couple of photos.
I got a response, and they have an opening for us this afternoon, if we could bring them in. My younger daughter and I went out and we were able to bring Tuxedo Mask into the sun room. He remains there now, with the cat carrier, food, water and litter.
No luck with Broccoli, though.
She was in the cats’ house, watching me through the window, but would NOT come out. Not even for treats. She was bundled up with two other cats.
One of which also had a leaky eye.
*sigh*
It turned out to be Caramel. Her eye wasn’t red, though, so at least there’s that. We have more chance of catching Broccoli than Caramel. We’re going to keep trying, but I really don’t expect we’ll be able to get her.
I have, however, let the vet know we can bring in at least one cat, though.
I suppose this is a good time to promote the donation button! If you would like to donate towards the care and feeding of the kitties, you can buy us a Kofi. All donations are for the cats only, and any amount is greatly appreciated.
I will update on how the vet visit went as soon as I can!
This is a picture of part of the lettering on our new sign that I noticed when I was switching the memory card on the trail cam. The paint on several letters is peeling away!
My guess is that the reflective paint on top of the white affected the ability for the blue paint to adhere properly.
I’ll find a way to tack it back on until we can spray the whole thing with a clear coat. Unfortunately, that won’t happen until spring, since it’s too cold for paint to cure.
When I got back to the house, I spotted something rather concerning. One of Tuxedo Mask’s eyes is blood red!
No, I did not get a picture, and if I did, I would not post it!
It looks really gross. It doesn’t seem to be bothering him a lot, but that doesn’t mean much. Ginger had a shattered joint and it barely slowed him down, even as he had to wait for the surgery. The main thing is that he does still seem to be able to see out of it.
My younger daughter and I did our city shopping trip, and when we got back, it didn’t look any better. We need to get him to a vet, but we just finished paying for our StarLink system, so the larder is bare. At least I thought it was until I read my email. I got word from the ranch we’d ordered our quarter beef from. The finished weight turned out to be less than expected (considering how terrible the drought was on cattle, that does not surprise me), so they actually owe me money. The cuts will be ready around the 20th or 21st.
That frees up part of our budget.
We should be able to take Tuxedo Mask to a vet.
If we can catch him! He does let us pet him once in a while, but that’s very different from trying to get him into a cat carrier!
We’ll figure it out. We can call the vet tomorrow morning and see if we can bring him in right away.
Poor little Tuxedo Mask! His eye looks just awful. :-(
The Re-Farmer 