I needed some garden therapy today, so I got some onion seeds started.
We have seeds for 3 types of bulb onions, 1 of shallots and 1 of bunching onions. Today, I focused on the bulb onions.
Last year, we planted our alliums in Jiffy Pellets, repurposed K-cups and cardboard flats from eggs (don’t use those. They suck. Literally. The cardboard sucked all the moisture out of the growing medium!) before finally using doubled Red Solo cups to try and make up for losses.
This year, we’re doing things very differently. I’m going to try bulk sowing. Here are a couple of videos about that.
This next video shows the transplanting.
Obviously, we are in a much colder zone than he is, so I’m adjusting accordingly.
We already had our small aquarium greenhouse prepped. The first thing I needed to do was see how many seeds we had of each type.
The Red of Florence had the most seeds in its packet. The grey seeds from Veseys are Oneida, a yellow onion. The fewest are the rarer Tropeana Lunga which, like the Red of Florence, are an elongated red onion.
We are using re-purposed trays from the grocery store this year. The smaller ones were from mushrooms. I think the big one was from ground beef. We’ve had it for a while, so I can’t quite remember.
They got a good cleaning, and drainage holes were punched into the bottoms, then they were set into a baking pan.
They were filled with pre-moistened seed starting mix; I just dumped the remains of a bag into my largest mixing bowl and mixed in warmish water until it was evenly damp. Onions don’t need things as warm as other seeds, so no heat mat needed, but our house is on the cold side. I figured slightly warmer water would not go amiss.
The seed starting mix was pressed down just enough to make sure there would be no air pockets.
Then it was time to scatter the seeds.
Gosh, it feels so weird to sow them this densely!
I like that the grey seeds of the Oneida are so nice and visible. :-)
The seeds got a very fine misting at this point.
Then they were topped with about a quarter inch of seed starting mix, again gently pressing to get rid of air gaps. The tops got another misting, and water was added to the baking tray and left to be absorbed, while I cleaned up.
Finally, they went into the small aquarium greenhouse. The three trays fit perfectly in the oven liner tray folded into the bottom. More water was added to the oven liner tray, to water from below.
This tank has aluminum foil around the sides because the light we have for the tank is not as bright as on the big tank, and all that reflective light will help keep them from getting leggy. At least, that’s the theory!
This leaves the shallots to start next. Their days to maturity is a bit shorter than for the bulb onions. The Red Baron bunching onions need only 60-65 days to maturity, so they can be started much later.
I’m not sure how we’re going to be able to work it with the shallots, as far as space in the aquarium greenhouses goes. We’ve got some time to figure it out before they need to be started, but not much.
As for the other seeds we have in the big aquarium greenhouse, they seem to be doing fine, so far. Nothing has germinated yet, of course, so it’s too early to tell if the heat mat is making a difference. We just keep checking and adding water to the tray and misting the tops, as needed. The tray over the mat has been needing refills regularly, but today is the first time I added more water to the outer cups of the Wonderberry.
We need to get the rest of those Cup of Moldova tomato seeds started, since we want to grow a lot more of the paste tomatoes. I’ll likely start those using the doubled Red Solo cups, though we’d have to find a cat safe place to move the aloe vera pots, to make room for more seed starts. Which is a shame, because they are doing so well under the lights of the tank! So are my daughter’s orchids, one of which is blooming very enthusiastically right now, but we should be able to leave those in the tank until it gets warm enough to safely hand them in front of a window again. The aloe, however… the cats just love digging them up! :-(
Ah, well. We’ll figure it out. The main thing is that the bulb onions are started.
Plus, garden therapy was done its job. I’m feeling much more positive, now. :-)
I’m just so disgusted. Our lying Prime Dictator is bad enough, but I just got a response email from my own MP (Member of Parliament) – a Conservative. It was a form letter, due to the overwhelming number of emails they’ve been getting. Fair enough, but the email was just mouthing platitudes, with the requisite disavowing of … negative elements, shall we say … none of which have anything to do with the actual Freedom Convoy participants. He was basically talking out of both sides of his mouth, and it’s pretty much exactly what I expected from him, though I hoped that for what’s going on now, he’d finally stop playing games.
Then there is stuff like this.
Remember that fuel the police were ordered to return to the truckers?
They sabotaged it.
Yup. Almost all the cans returned were tested as half water. Sick.
But not as sick and their next threat. They are talking about going after the kids.
For their “safety”. I’ve heard it from a number of sources.
This is not the first time Children’s Services has been used as a weapon, and my own personal experiences with them has shown me just how bad they can be.
As for the children’s safety, crime rates in the area are down 90%. Crime has all but ended, since the truckers showed up in Ottawa. Any danger to the kids is from the police themselves, if they continue to ramp up their actions. And we know the powers that be want violence, to justify extreme measures.
The other “safety” issues I’ve seen brought up is the supposedly high CO levels in the truck cabs some families are living in. This from the people who have been forcing children to wear masks, which test at toxic levels of CO and CO2. If they really cared about health related safety, no child would be wearing a mask, at any age.
Going after the kids, if they do it, is sick beyond belief.
I leave you with just one more video. In this one, a woman challenges CBC staff, and … well… just watch it.
Meanwhile, more protests are happening across the country, more are planned for this weekend, and more are happening around the world. It is a tsunami, sweeping the world. People are fighting for their freedoms, and the powers that be are flailing, and they don’t care how many lives they destroy in the process.
I was about to ask, how did we get to this point? But I know the answer. Little by little, demands were made of us, and people complied. They kept moving the goal posts, further and further, and people complied. The more people complied, the longer they complied, the deeper the hole we dug ourselves into.
Now, people are standing up, and it’s a beautiful sight. They are doing it with love for each other, with peace, unity, enthusiasm, passion, and joy.
Things went south before I even woke up this morning. Or, should I say, things going south was what woke me up!
I still had a litter box in my office/bedroom, so our post surgical kitties wouldn’t have far to go, if they needed to.
I was awakened by the sound of Beep Beep vigorously trying to spread the litter all over my carpet.
And we still don’t have the replacement belts for our new vacuum, yet.
*sigh*
Then I went into the sun room to start my morning rounds, and found water on the floor.
Under the spare cat food bag.
Despite things cooling down, yesterday’s warmth has lead to water leaking in the sun room again, and it’s making its way through now.
And we still don’t know where the water is getting in, so we couldn’t patch it.
So I had to spend some time taking care of the bag of cat food which, thankfully, has an inner lining that kept the kibble from getting wet, and setting out a bucket to catch the drips.
Butterscotch and Nosencrantz were doing very well, and enjoyed their wet cat food treat. They are getting so spoiled these days! :-D
The kibble bowls outside had been picked clean of even the kibble from the brands they don’t like. I am pretty sure I know who ate it. Last night, on the security camera live feed, I saw a very large skunk, running back and forth on the driveway, and too and from one of the sheds. Skunks don’t fully hibernate in winter, and it can be pretty safe to assume a very hungry skunk visited the kibble house last night.
When I came outside, I “caught” a deer in the path to the compost pile, half way between the pile and the house. It froze and stared at me for a while, before walking away, then into the spruces. Even as I brought out the seeds to the feeding station, it stayed and watched me until I was almost clear of the lilac bushes. By the time I was heading to the garage, to take the van to the mechanic, two deer were at the feeding station. They watched me, but didn’t run away.
The van started well enough, and no warning light or message from the onboard computer about the brakes. I left it running to warm up while I went to unlock the gate.
The lock was frozen.
We don’t have lock de-icer.
It took me about 10 minutes to finally be able to get the key in and open the lock.
Which is when I discovered the slide bar that holds the two sides of the gate together, was also frozen.
This thing is about 2 feet long, and the ice had formed between the metal of the bar, and the metal of the gate it slides on.
After fighting with it for a while, I went to the garage, shut off the van, and grabbed a tool kit. I ended up having to remove one of the bolts that holds it in place, but also stops it from sliding too far over the other half of the gate. It allowed me to pull the slider upwards, pivoting on the opposite bolt, enough to break free of the ice. Much sliding back and forth was required to scrape the ice off. The ice had filled almost the entire length where the two pieces of metal where in contact.
That took another 20 minutes or so.
The gate is being left open, now.
Then it was back to the van and off to town, with a brief stop at the post office, along the way.
We’ve got high winds from the north right now, blowing across the road the entire trip. It wasn’t too bad at first, but the closer I drove towards the lake, the more snow there was, the more drifting, and worse visibility. When I reached the stop sign to cross the next highway, it was sheer ice and hadn’t been sanded!
Which is when a new warning light came on. The battery light, while my onboard computer flashed with “charging system failure.”
Seriously???
Thankfully, I was less than 5 minutes from the garage.
When I got there, his parking lot was full, so I pulled in behind his own vehicle and went in.
But not until after I shut off the van, then restarted it. The warning light did not come back on.
Once inside, I saw that not only did he have all three lifts full, but he managed to squeeze in another car in the middle, and a utility vehicle between a vehicle on a lift, and the bay door behind it.
At least he had another mechanic with him this time!
Clearly, he wasn’t going to be able to check the van, anytime soon. I did bring in the printout to show him and we talked about what was going on, as well as the road conditions. He thought I was going to be dropping the van off and coming back later, but that wasn’t an option. My daughter still has a limited license, so someone with a full license has to be with her, and my husband no longer has a valid licence, since they wanted him to do a legal name change when he tried to switch to this province’s license. And she can’t take the road test to get her full license, because of all the restrictions and mandates against organic humans.
I would have been willing to wait, or he could have called me later in the afternoon, when he could fit the van in, but with the road conditions, I didn’t want to chance it.
I’m now booked to come back at 10am on Friday.
It’s a good thing we did that, as conditions had worsened even in the short time I was in with him. It was slow going in places, and more than a few spots were down to almost zero visibility.
About half way home, that “charging system failure” warning came back on.
I was just coming up on the turn towards our driveway when the van kicked into battery saving mode and shutting things off.
After pulling into the garage, I checked, and the battery was down to 8.4 volts. It is normally at 14 volts.
Thankfully, we have a good charger.
Unfortunately, the battery is really hard to get at. The fuse box and a piece of frame support is basically on top of it.
But, it is charging, and I should at least be able to get it to the mechanic in a couple of days.
One of the things on the list of stuff to check that I got after changing the oil, was corrosion on the battery connectors. It was something I’d noticed myself. But would that be enough to prevent the batter from charging? The mechanic suggested it might be the alternator, but until he actually gets under the hood to check, it’s just guesswork.
So, there’s something wonky with the brakes. The battery is losing its charge. We have a loose wire in our manual headlights knob, so that if I want to turn them on manually (auto still works fine), I sometimes have to wiggle it just right for it to work. The ABS needs to be fixed, and on and on.
This van has done well by us, considering the problems we had when we first bought it, but it’s mileage is right up there; I’m actually hoping to catch the odometer at 456,789.0 km, but I might have missed it on the way home. It’s old and little things are giving out, all over. We’re keeping up on them as much as we can, but the budget is just not there to get it all done.
Meanwhile, there is basic maintenance needed on my mother’s car, we have other equipment that needs to be fixed, the roof is leaking, we’re on borrowed time for our well, and the whole house needs a top to bottom renovation.
A lottery win would really come in handy right now. Not even a particularly big win. Just enough to replace and fix the things that need to be done!
Well, from the feedback and traffic we’re getting, clearly people are wanting to hear more Freedom Convoy talk! Thank you to those who are visiting and responding. It is much appreciated.
The truth is, I’d rather talk about something else. This sort of thing is not what this blog is supposed to be for and about. In fact, one of the reasons I’m so happy to be back here on my family farm, even though we are having so many unexpected issues (tools and equipment “disappeared”, our vandal, the house turning out to be in worse shape than I thought, and so on), is that it allowed use to get away from all sorts of drama and other issues. Things had gotten so bad, it was not only affecting my husband’s health but mine, as well, and the girls were certainly happy to put it behind them as well. Unfortunately, the things going on outside our little “cave” in the woods are so far ranging, they effect us, no matter what. That, and I have this terrible habit of standing up to bulling, abuse and injustice, even though doing the right thing has sometimes cost me – and my family – a great deal. There are a lot of reasons why this is an anonymous blog, and some of those include safety and security.
I suppose it’s a good thing, then, that I simply cannot get too involved in what’s going on, or I’d probably be out in Ottawa, too. The most I can do to support the Freedom Convoy is keep in touch with a variety of sources, and write these posts, in hopes that it gives people a chance to see something other than the propaganda that’s out there.
Most of my resources, however, aren’t things I can share directly here, either because they simply can’t be embedded are shared on this platform for technical reasons, or due to privacy and anonymity concerns. So I try to find the next best things, which can take hours of searching. While I manage to post a lot of YouTube videos, if you do a search there for Freedom Convoy 2022 or even just convoy, you’ll get a lot of legacy media results, but almost no independent channels. If I didn’t follow so many channels already, I wouldn’t be finding most of what I do. Platforms such as Rumble, Odyssey and BitChute don’t mess with their search algorithms, but Rumble is pretty much the only one that I use right now.
With that said, here is what I have for today.
First up, remember the incident of police taking fuel that I posted about yesterday? The officers in riot gear coming in during the dead of night to take away fuel was bad enough, but to have rooftop snipers was absolutely insane.
One of the things I’d heard was that they only took illegal fuel, known as purple. This is cheaper, purple dyed fuel that is used for farm vehicles only. Now, that “farm vehicle” could be anything from tractors to pickup trucks to quads and utility vehicles. As long as they are just driven on the farm, not on public roads, purple can be used. So it doesn’t make sense to me that there would even be a stock of purple among the Ottawa supply areas.
Well, today, a judge ordered the police to return the fuel. Not just to dump it nearby, either, but to actually return it to exactly where they took it from. But do you think I can find something about that outside of individuals posting about it on their personal accounts? So far, nope.
Then there was the crackdown on people donating fuel to the truckers. Those people arrested for carrying jerry cans? Or people driving pickup trucks with empty slip tanks?
All released, without charges.
Going after the fuel backfired pretty royally.
That ban against honking?
The honking was already voluntarily limited, and is not done at night, so the attempt to restrict even that, backfired as well.
GoFundMe continues to be in trouble for their attempt to take the remaining $9million + from the truckers.
I don’t watch Fox News, nor any of the mainstream media channels, other than the occasional clips posted online. One thing I can say to their credit, though; they sent a reporter to Ottawa to cover the Freedom Convoy on site. Not even Canadian media has been doing that, other than to cover counter protestors, or to get their 30 second propaganda pieces.
GoFundMe is now the butt of jokes for what they have done.
Meanwhile, the GiveSendGo fundraiser has just broken US$7million, at the time of this writing. Clearly, a lot of people are putting their money where their mouths are, when it comes to showing support for the Freedom Convoy, and if you read some of the comments, what GoFundMe did was something that inspired them to donate even more than they had originally, or to donate at all.
That doesn’t even count the other methods people are using to contribute financially, on top of directly donating food and fuel to not only the convoy protest in Ottawa, but all the others as well.
The Coutts border crossing in Alberta is getting most of the attention, outside the Ottawa protest, largely because of the RCMP’s heavy handed and duplicitous response to it.
Interestingly, it is the police blockades that are causing more disruption than the trucks and tractors.
A new on-site video has just been posted, as I was writing this.
Just amazing!!
Meanwhile, there continue to be things like “false flag” incidents that are being used to slander the truckers and their supporters as violent, racist, white supremacist, etc. All those knee jerk accusations that have become meaningless, they are used to often.
This is next video is one of the most comprehensive I’ve found that covers these incidents.
True North is another of the independent media that has done a good job of covering the story honestly.
Police abuse of power is still going on. Yesterday, I posted about the old guy that was stopped after honking in support of the protesters, then arrested for supposedly refusing to show his ID. Here is another disturbing incident.
As you can see in the video, the police vehicle backed into the guy’s truck, even as he was trying to avoid the collision, only to be arrested for hitting the police vehicle!
Then there is crazy stuff like this; one of the things about these protesters is that they’ve been doing a fabulous job of keeping the area clean, but even picking up garbage is now being targeted by the police.
Now, the first reason given was that they weren’t wearing helmets. !!! Then, after they got helmets, the reason was that the vehicle they were using didn’t have a licence plate.
That’s a utility vehicle. I just double checked. They are classified as non-regulated vehicles, and do not need to be licensed and registered.
Our Prime Dictator did finally speak out, but in his usual disgusting and divisive manner. Oh, he uses pretty language, talking about how Canadians have all been all kumbaya together for the past two years, and the only way out of this is if everyone gets the injection. Never mind that no, Canadians have not been together for the past two years. The restrictions and mandates have torn us apart, pitted us against each other, and destroyed lives. We have never been so unified as now, with the truckers, and against our Prime Dictator.
Who, by the way, was pretty open about ending our fundamental rights.
He is getting slammed in Parliament, though.
The Liberals are, if nothing else, excellent at gaslighting and psychological manipulation, as they lie through their teeth.
Not all of them, though. Some Liberals actually still are… well… liberal.
Is the Freedom Convoy having an affect, though?
If you were to listen to the legacy media, you would still be thinking it’s just a small group of white racist homophobes afraid of needles, with little support and having no positive effects. The federal government has been refusing to even talk to them, though I’ve heard that someone is finally going to come out to negotiate with them. What there is to negotiate, I don’t understand. The solution is simple. If the government really wants the protesters to go home, they need to end all the mandates and restrictions, and let people make their own medical decisions.
The protesters have been mocked for gathering in Ottawa, when the restrictions supposedly fall under provincial jurisdiction, but these criticisms seem to be coming from people who think there’s just one small group of noisy protesters in Ottawa, and not more of them at the provincial legislative buildings across the country.
This screen cap literally just pupped up in one of my notifications.
Yup. Alberta is killing their Vaxx passports, as of midnight tonight. It’s not all the restrictions, but it’s a start. Saskatchewan is lifting restrictions by the end of the week. I don’t know as much about Quebec, but Manitoba has also announced they are “relaxing” restrictions now, with the (conditional) promise of all restrictions lifted by spring.
It’s a start, but we’ve had our “leaders” flip back and forth so many times, no one really trusts them to keep their word anymore. Alberta, for example, said they would not shut down, but suddenly did. Same with Saskatchewan. After our Prime Dictator offered millions in “covid aid” money to the provinces, but only if they shut down, but that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it, right? /sarcasm Manitoba’s Premier, meanwhile, botched things so badly, he finally got turfed, but his replacement is even worse than he was. When an MLA met with and and show support for the truckers, she turfed him and slandered the truckers, sounding an awful lot like like our Prime Dictator. Liberal, Conservative or NDP, provincial or federal; there’s no real difference between them right now. Frankly, I think all the major party leaders need to be turfed for botching things so badly, and causing such incredible damage. Damage that will last decades, if not generations.
Thanks to the Freedom Convoy, and a whole lot of truckers and farmers, we finally have hope.
Today’s forecast for our area was 1C/34F with less than 1cm/0.4in of snow.
The plan was to head into the city with one of my daughters for their own separate grocery shopping trip. We weren’t planning to leave until noon, so I had plenty of time to do the morning rounds and check the trail cam files.
The outside cats were almost completely out of water in their heated water bowl again – and that thing holds a lot of water!
Also, they have a definite preference for Costco’s Kirkland brand of kibble. :-D
The deer have really dug up our compost heap! Not sure what they’re after under there, that they haven’t already eaten.
Nosencrantz and Butterscotch are absolutely luxuriating in their convalescence. We could bring Nosencrantz indoors right now, but Butterscotch has another few days, at least, before we can let her outside.
She hasn’t shown any interest in going outside since the surgery! What a complete reversal!
Beep Beep and Fenrir, meanwhile, spent the night isolated with me and seem to be doing very well, so they are no longer being kept apart from the other cats.
Beep Beep, unlike Butterscotch, did no go through a “catonality” change, and is still a bully towards the other cats. :-D Nothing bad enough to be a concern, but she does keep herself right up there on the pecking order!
By the time I was done my rounds and heading in, it had started to snow. After a while, it got heavy enough that we were reconsidering our trip to the city.
I’ve gotten to be a wuss in my old age. If I can avoid driving in inclement conditions, I usually will. Back in the day, I had no issues driving through blizzards severe enough that highways were closed, while we were on them. Not anymore!
Meanwhile, as I watched the visibility drop on the security camera’s live feed, the weather app was telling me, “rain will continue for 104 minutes.”
Rain??
Not where we were!
We did decide to head out, and the conditions were much better than I feared. About half way to the town my mother lives in, where we stopped for gas, it switched from snow and snow covered highway, to rain and mostly clear.
The rain continued all the way to the city, and we didn’t hit snow again until we passed back though my mother’s town, though by then the snow had moved further south and was a lot heavier than when we were heading out.
The wet road conditions made for some very messy driving; especially when crossing paths with oncoming semi’s. Thankfully, it’s been warm enough that the windshield washer fluid in my mother’s car was thawed! It had frozen before I had a chance to put winter fluid in. I had still topped it up with winter fluid, so that would have helped, too.
Once home and unloading the car, I paused to top up the windshield fluid again (rated to -35C/-31F!), which is when my husband popped out to ask me to unlock the gate again. We’d just received a call that a delivery was on its way, but the driver couldn’t find our physical address. Neither the name nor the numerical designation for our road comes up on GPS. So I took care of the gate, then topped up the washer fluid before putting my mom’s car in the garage (it barely fits in the addition it’s parked in) when the delivery van pulled in. The driver was very cheerful and we chatted a bit about our issue with road names. Then he had to back his way out of the driveway, because with my mother’s car out, he didn’t have room to turn around in the snow.
Which was fine, right up until he had to stop at the end of the driveway to make sure the road was clear.
With how warm it was today, the rear tires sank right into the plow ridge and he got stuck!
Of course, we had snow shovels handy, but I ended up having to dig out the steel garden shovel again. The plastic snow shovel just couldn’t do the job there! Thankfully, he got out very quickly, though he joked about how common this actually is, with rural deliveries!
The delivery was the 14’x200′ (4.3mx30.5m) netting we ordered, to use as temporary critter fencing around our garden areas this year. We will be ordering a second one, probably next month, since we have so much area to cover. Plus, we’ll be cutting pieces to size to create covers for individual beds, too.
I’m quite happy to have our first roll in. Even if, for some reason, we can’t order a second one right away, it’s enough for us to put a perimeter around most areas we will be planting in. The only real concern is that, being just plastic netting, if the raccoons decide they want in, they can tear right through it.
I look forward to when we can build permanent protection for our garden beds!
I’m glad we did make the trip today, instead of putting it off again. Tomorrow, I’ll be dropping the van off to get the brakes tested, and to see what needs to be done next. With the rain today, it’s going to make roads slippery, but our area got snow (no matter what the weather apps said!), so the road to town should not be too bad. The day after tomorrow, we’re supposed to get even warmer, and get 10-15cm/4-6in of snow – or 5-10cm/2-4in, depending on which app I look at! Either way, it’s not a day I’d want to be driving to the city again. The less such trips, the happier I will be!
I’ve been wondering how our political overlords would handle the peaceful, legal convoy protestors in Ottawa (and other parts of the country).
It seems like they are digging in their heels.
The federal government and their media lackeys continue to repeat their lies about the convoy, though there is some shift to try and say the mandates and restrictions are a provincial matter. Which is only partially true. When the federal government offers the provinces billions of dollars in covid aid – but only on the condition that the provinces lock down – you can’t turn around and say it’s not the federal government’s responsibility. Plus, of course, the federal government has brought in its own restrictions in areas of their jurisdictions. This is an intertwined situation.
Well, last night, the city of Ottawa declared a “state of emergency”. Then send in the police to steal fuel, as well as threatening to ticket and arrest anyone who brings food or fuel to the protesters.
This was actually very clearly a staged event, intending to intimidate. They came in, they took fuel, they left.
Which, as some are pointing out, is illegal.
We don’t even need to look at the Geneva convention. In Canada, if someone doesn’t pay their heat or electric bills, it’s illegal to shut the utilities off in winter. It’s even illegal to evict people in winter. The reason is simple: doing so can (and has; that’s why the laws were brought in), kill people. Such is life in the Great White North.
A lot of the truckers are living in there trucks with their families, including children. They need to keep the rigs doing, to keep warm. No fuel, no heat. No heat, and people die. Such is life in the Great White North.
Organizers quickly put out their own press release about it.
Police were also going to start arresting anyone carrying jerry cans of fuel to the truckers, and were even arresting farmers with empty slip tanks in their pick up trucks.
The result?
People started showing up, carrying jerry cans. Full, empty, whatever. They were everywhere.
I thought this one was hilarious.
If you want to know why that’s hilarious, this is why…
The police have also started handing out tickets and arresting people for minor infractions that they had to hunt for. Sometimes, just for driving by and honking a horn in support.
If you watch the video, the old guy was arrested for not showing his ID – except you saw him earlier, taking his ID out of his wallet and holding it out to the officer, who didn’t take it.
Now, I’ve been in a situation where the place we lived in was invaded – occupied, you might say – by noisy protestors. They literally used noise as a weapon. This was a residential community, and we spent most of a year, constantly being harassed and abused. They went after the elderly, the disabled and even children. They held a huge, illegal block party, with non-stop drumming that left people with brain injuries and PTSD in the hospital, and even dogs were throwing up from the noise.
The police did nothing. Politicians did nothing. In fact, we had federal politicians come in from Ottawa, taking part in one of those illegal parties (there were several of them), and promoted our tormentors as heroes, while we were the villains. Constant calls and complaints accomplished nothing. Video evidence ignored. The media twisted the narrative against us. We even had police liaison officers who, when I asked directly, admitted that yes, there were two laws; one for regular people like us, and one for the people who spent most of a year tormenting us. Why? Because it was a public employee union doing the harm, and we…, well, it was just our personal, private homes, so we didn’t matter. In the long term, they lost their war against us, but the damage they caused was permanent.
So I have little tolerance for the police or politicians when they suddenly decide that a peaceful, legal protest, held in a legal location, are being given a hard time for doing things in a controlled manner. The honking, for example, is at certain times, and there is no honking at night, so anyone claiming they haven’t been able to sleep because of the honking at night is flat out lying.
Speaking of lying…
There is no evidence that any of the protestors stole food from the homeless. The incident at a soup kitchen still has nothing to show that it was actual protesters or their supporters that did it. There is so much donated food, there is more than enough for everyone, including the homeless.
In fact, the only violence has been against the convoy of protesters – but that certainly isn’t fitting the narrative!
Yeah; the guy that deliberately ran into 4 people on the side of the road was a far left extremist. And the police are classifying it as merely a “hit and run”. The protesters are slandered as racist, homophobe, nazi, Putin operatives for having a party, keeping everything clean, and making sure everyone is fed, but a guy that deliberately runs over them is just a hit and run accident.
Right.
Our Prime Dictator is still in hiding, leaving his lackeys to continue lying on his behalf. They are actually getting some push back about it all, now that the opposition Conservative party has an interim leader with balls bigger than the guy she replaced.
The Liberal mouthpiece just keeps repeating the same old lies that justify keeping the restrictions, even though we’ve known for a long time, that the evidence does not back any of it up.
The thing is, while we can – and should – argue the efficacy of things like mask mandates and specific vaccines, that’s not what the protest is about. The convoy is there so that people can have a real choice, and not be punished for making the “wrong” choice. A coerced choice is no choice at all.
Our political overlords tried to get the trucks towed away, but the tow companies have refused. Now, it’s even being said towing couldn’t possibly be done. The only way for those trucks to move, is if they are driven away – and that would take days.
Our political overlords have tried to stop the flow of money from supporters. If failed. GoFundMe allowed themselves to be bullied into taking the money, and now they have several states opening investigations into them, and facing massive losses from all the people filing to get their money back through their banks, every one of which results in a bill of about US$15, and it’s devastating them. Meanwhile, the GiveSendGo account is, as of this writing, almost US$5.5 million. This amount has been raised even though the site keeps having issues from the sheer volume of traffic, on top of DDoS attacks.
Our political overlords have tried to make the police have their “surge” and threaten to ticket and arrest everyone. At some point, people were even told they had 5 minutes to leave, or they would all be arrested. As if it were even possible for anyone to leave in only 5 minutes. Well, that failed, too, if only because they couldn’t possibly have enough manpower. They are still threatening arrests, but they the sheer number of people they would be arresting would overwhelm any facilities they have.
They’ve tried intimidation. Threats. Lies. Slander. The legacy media reports only on the counter protesters, trying to sow even more division and hate.
But in the end, the protesters and their supporters remain united, and the more our political overlords dig in their heals, the more support THEY are losing, while the convoy protestors being even more united. United in joy, love and enthusiasm.
All of this could be over very quickly. Our political overlords need only call an end to the mandates and restrictions. Let people decide for themselves.
Instead, they seem to be digging in their heels, ramping up the threats. Word is leaking out that they will be staging an all out assault.
Will this actually happen?
Pray it does not. The reality is, our political overlords are just power hungry enough to do something like this. Especially our Prime Dictator, who openly voiced his admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship”.
The problem is, they are just arrogant and narcissistic enough to think they can do that, and get away with it.
I’m happy to say that Beep Beep and Fenrir are now at home, recovering nicely. They did very well at the vet today.
Once I lifted Fenrir onto the bed to remove the bandage on her “wrist”, she settled right in, and is still sitting there as I write this.
Beep Beep, on the other hand, has been constantly in motion! I was told she had a bit of a panic when the IV was removed, and she was pretty vocal for the ride home. They are now isolated in the room with me, and she’s only just now settled down on the bed, though she is sitting and staring at the door with great intensity!
It took a while to get that bandage off of her!
We’ve got different instructions than with the outside cats. Water only for now, then a bit of food to see if they can handle solids yet, this evening. Starting tomorrow morning, we have a pain killer to give them. The dose is based on weight, which they highlighted on the package in different colours. Beep Beep is over 3kg, or about 7 pounds, while Fenrir is just barely over 2kg, or about 5 pounds. I did ask about her small size, and if it should be a concern, and was told no. She is just a small cat. As for the pain killer, we have a syringe to administer it – a much smaller one than was we used to feed Cabbages!
If you would like to contribute to our fundraiser to reimburse the cat lady for Cabbages’ vet bills, click on the button below, or click here. If you would like to read more about it, click here.
We can put the medication on their food, but only if we’re sure they won’t eat each other’s food, which… ha! Not going to happen. So we will dose them directly into their mouths.
Beep Beep is not going to like that!
It should be interesting to see if she has a “catonality” change, like Butterscotch did, after this surgery.
Once I got the call telling me when to pick them up, I left early to run some errands first. One of them was to pick up the soft sided carrier used to transport Cabbages to the cat lady for medical car. This time, it did make it to the donation bin at the shelter – and I was happy to see actual donations in there, too. Last time, it was empty.
I was also able to connect with our mechanic and talk to him about our brakes on the van. I told him about what the garage in the city told me, and then the warning light turning on the next day. He thought there might be some water in the fluid, and asked me to drop it off so he can check it with his tester. Once he does that, he’ll be able to tell me more, and give me an estimate. The estimate will determine if we can get it fixed right away, or if it has to wait until the end of the month. February, at least, is a short month! :-)
I’ll also be able to give him the printout and we can talk about the other things they listed as needing to be checked out, and make any future appointments needed, as the budget allows.
I’ll be dropping the van off the day after tomorrow. He did suggest tomorrow, but the girls have their own shopping list for a city trip, so I’ll be driving in with one of them, using my mother’s car. It’s due for a highway run, anyhow.
Tomorrow, we still have a forecast of 1C/34F. Today, we warmed up to at least -8C/17C. The thermometer in the sun room reached 8C/46F, so that was quite nice for the kitties in there! And now, even my other weather apps are showing a high of 3C/37F, a few days from now. If we do get that warm, it’s going to feel downright tropical out there! :-D
This morning, a daughter and I took Beep Beep and Fenrir to the vet, which meant doing the morning rounds a bit earlier.
At least it’s light out, now.
The heated water bowl was empty again.
Because Beep Beep and Fenrir needed to fast, I had them closed up with me, overnight. Which meant I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I had cats trying to claw the door open from both sides! When I made the mistake of going to the bathroom before going to bed, I had Beep Beep escape, dashing down to the basement. I caught her before she ate anything, though. Then I tried to get her back into the bedroom, only to have Fenrir escape. I caught her, only to have Beep Beep escape again, and she was NOT going to let me catch her! I finally had to snag a daughter to catch her, then hang on to her while I dashed into the bedroom, grabbed Fenrir and held on while my daughter quickly tossed Beep Beep onto the bed before any other cats got in.
I had only one carrier in the room with me, but that was enough for me to be able to get out of the room long enough to grab the second one, this morning. I had both carriers on the bed, with Beep Beep in the hard sided one (where she was trying to claw her way out!) before doing the inside cat morning routine and warming water up for the outside cats. Before heading outside, I went to move the carriers closer to the old kitchen door for later.
When I walked into my room, I found Beep Beep and the carrier gone from the bed.
!!!
I found it on the side of the bed, sitting as if it had been placed there. :-D She had managed to roll the carrier completely off the bed, and it landed right side up!
The plan was to do the critter part of my morning rounds first, then get my mother’s car started and warming up, so I made sure to hang my purse inside the sun room, so I could just grab and go.
It’s a good thing I did.
The old kitchen door into the house hadn’t latched properly behind me. Looking in from the sun room, I found it crawling with exploring cats!
Thankfully, my daughter was able to take care of that, while I went to my mother’s car – after scraping away more ice and snow, just to be able to open one of the doors wide enough – and getting everything ready so we just needed to grab the cats and go.
The drop off went well, with my daughter taking the time to warn them about some of their quirks. We just happen to be bringing two of our “meanest” cats this time. :-D
I still haven’t been able to connect with our mechanic, so we swung by the garage to see if I could talk to him about our van. Unfortunately, though it was supposed to be open, he wasn’t there. He’s on his own, so if he has to get anything, there’s no one to do it for him and he has to lock up. :-/ Hopefully, we’ll get another chance, later.
Once we got home, I was able to spend more time with our recovering kitties.
Nosencrantz doesn’t like to leave her favourite spot under the light bulb. It burnt out last night, but I found one last full spectrum bulb in our stash of incandescent bulbs – this light is meant for seedlings, not cats! :-D – but it’s brighter than the old one, so I wasn’t sure if she’s still like it. She clearly has no issues!
Butterscotch, meanwhile, has switched favourite beds! Usually, we find her in an enclosed box bed on the bottom shelf, but now she’s gone up a left and has been hanging out in the open bed. We’ve also been finding her loafed under the ceramic heat bulb more often, too.
She accepted pets, but had no interest in leaving her bed! :-D
Meanwhile, we have already heard back from the vet. They were checking details about our arrangement with the organization that’s helping us with all this, in regards to the shots and deworming and the like, as was arranged when we brought in Butterscotch and Nosencrantz.
Beep Beep had already been done and they were about to start on Fenrir. Since I had her on the phone, I brought up what they had found with Butterscotch, and how far gone her uterus was, and if there was anything similar with Beep Beep. It was quite a bit larger, and looking a bit worn out, just from having to many litters, but it was not so badly damaged as Butterscotch’s was. We don’t know how old either of them are, but I think we can now safely assume that Beep Beep is the younger one. For all we know, Butterscotch is her mother.
So we will get a call back later, to let us know when they can be picked up.
Meanwhile, the cat lady messaged me last night, with a reminder to have Beep Beep and Fenrir start their fast. While I had her, I asked about Cabbages.
Yesterday was her last day on antibiotics. Yay!! She’s eating quite a lot now, and today, she be moved out of the cage, to their “cat room.” In a few days, she will have a buddy joining her. That would be the more recent frozen cat they picked up, that lost its ears.
I’m just amazed by how quickly she’s bouncing back from being at death’s door the way she was!
If you would like to contribute to our fundraiser to reimburse the cat lady for Cabbages’ vet bills, click on the button below, or click here. If you would like to read more about it, click here.
So now we are just waiting for the call from the vet, for when we can bring Beep Beep and Fenrir home. Since they are both inside cats, we won’t have to do any isolating, but we’ll be keeping a litter box, food and water in my office/bedroom for a while, so they don’t have to go far.
The next trip to the vet, in a couple of weeks, we’ll be taking cats in, and they won’t be coming back. The cat lady will be taking them to fosters for recovery, and then they will be adopted into forever homes. As she’s able to book dates with the vet, we’ll keep doing that for the rest of the adoptable cats (the males are already fixed, as is one female) through March and April. By then, we should be able to start snagging outside cats, starting with the ones we can catch easily (which all happen to be male). Then, once it’s warm enough to do so safely, she will lend us traps for the outside cats that we haven’t been able to socialize at all.
It’s going to be weird, to not have so many cats around!
Butterscotch and Nosencrantz were doing very well, this morning. They both seem to be enjoying their recovery period in the sun room! Nosencrantz wants more attention than Butterscotch, but not enough that I can get a good look to see how the ear mite status is. Butterscotch is still so much calmer now. She’ll come over for pets and I was even able to pick her up this morning, but she will not let me check the surgical site. I’m not about to risk injuring it by forcing her; so as long as there aren’t any concerning warning signs, I figure she’s doing fine. Amazingly, she still has shown no interest in trying to escape the sun room, which is so totally different from the past. Granted, when we were trying to keep her in the sun room for lengths of time before, it was because she was about to have kittens. Once she had them, she was more than content to let Beep Beep parent both litters while she tore her way through the screen on the old door.
If this behavioural change keeps up, Butterscotch may actually be willing to become an indoor cat!
We shall see. After all those years outdoors, it would be nice for her final years to be in comfort and safety.
By the time I’m done taking care of the sun room kitties, there’s usually a crowd outside the door, waiting for their kibble! Chadiccus, however, was much more polite about it and wanting attention before food. :-)
The water in the heated bowl was almost completely gone again, and it had been very full. It does make me wonder what other critters are coming around at night, to drink. The snow around the kibble house and water bowls is too hard packed for tracks. One of these days, it would be nice to have a spare camera set up on the area, just to see what’s going on! :-)
I’ve not been seeing quite as many cats, all at once, of late. I haven’t seen Potato Beetle in a while. Since he came back, he had been more aggressive about being the Alpha male – though he was tackling the females as much as the males. That seemed to end after I found him with that injury above one eye. It was pretty minor and healing up nicely, the last I saw, but it seems that battle lost him his status. I think I might have seen him this morning, but he slunk away before I could get a good look and be sure.
While putting the food and water out, I heard a loud yowling from the outer yard. I’ve heard it before, but when I when to check, I couldn’t see where it was coming from. This time, I saw Creamsicle Baby out by the pump shack. I’m still not sure it was him, as he’s developed a very squeaky little meow. I went to check closer and decided the pump shack door needed to be shoveled out.
This is where the cats usually get in and out of the pump shack. When the driveway was cleared, a pile of snow was made near the pump shack. While it does not block the door, there’s a ridge of snow in front that’s pretty high. With the winds we’ve been having, more snow has drifted in front of the door. The cats are still squeezing their way through, as you can see in the photo above, but I wanted to make it easier for them. It took breaking up a lot of snow with the ice chipper before I could dig a path, but I got it clear.
The door opens inward, so I didn’t have to worry about digging it out too much. Once I got it clear enough, I went in and cleared away some snow that had blown through the hole.
I had a bit of a surprise when I opened the door, though. One of the lights was on! I forgot to shut it off, the last time I was in there. It’s a CFL bulb, not very bright, and not near a window facing the house, so we never saw that it was on. :-D Ah, well. No harm done.
When repairing the south facing window of the pump shack a couple of summers ago, I deliberately left an opening that used to have the chimney from a wood burning stove running through it. The stove is long gone, but with a pile of tires on the outside, and various junk on the inside, it’s a way for the cats to get in and out. The shack itself is just a frame with cladding on the outside, and I noticed a new hole in the wall, where some cladding has broken. It’s not visible from the outside, as there are sheets of aluminum against the bottom of the wall on that side.
On our list of things to work on is to fix up the pump shack. The concrete floor is badly cracked up, and the old cladding – which would be quite a bit older than I am – is looking water damaged and has gaps. It would be awesome to turn this building into a little workshop and, of course, we want to get the old well repaired. There is a lot of stuff in there I just don’t know what to do with, including bags of ancient clothing and rolled up awnings stuffed into the rafters, broken furniture, an old fridge that I remember my parents using for cream cans, and even an old, tiny, two burner electric stove sitting in the corner where the wood burning cookstove used to be. That old cookstove was what we used to heat water for baths, before my dad had the well dug next to the house and got running water and an indoor bathroom. If we can fix the well and fix up the pump shack, we could turn it into a summer kitchen for canning.
That would be very handy.
After clearing a cat path to the door, I put feed out for the deer and birds – interrupting two deer that were at the feeding station! I had to interrupt them again, to go switch out the memory cards on the trail cam by the sign.
That location is a real pain to get to in the winter!!! At least I don’t have to switch the cards as often, there. Between the snow and the plow ridges, I’m not at all concerned that our vandal will fight his way over to the sign and try to steal it, like the old one, or damage it.
Not even the deer will go through the area in front of the sign! A nicely plowed road is so much easier. :-D
Coming back to the house, I found these two babies, bellies full and watching the world go by in warmth and comfort!
These cats may be semi-feral, but they do get pampered as much as we can! :-D
Rolando Moon had claimed the prime real estate! She’s such a meany to the other cats, they don’t even try to fight her for this favourite spot.
Gosh, that expression! :-D
While still a bit chilly today, we’re supposed to warm up quite a bit tomorrow – perfect for taking Beep Beep and Fenrir in to the vet. My Weather Network app on my desktop has suddenly gone haywire, so I used the app that came with my computer.
Of course, all the apps are showing something different, since they all seem to be connected to different weather stations, even though they’re all supposed to be for our specific area. This is the only one that is showing us going above freezing, in the long range forecast. Above freezing in the middle of February? Yeah, I’ll take that, thanks. It’ll make things messy, but I’d rather have a nice, slow melt of all this snow, then for things to warm up all at once, later on. With the amount of snow we have this winter, as much as it’s needed, if it melts before the municipalities get a chance to clear the ditches, we’ll get flooding. Where we are doesn’t get too bad anymore. When I was a kid, there were a couple of sections of road that would get washed out every spring. Since then, a network of municipal drainage ditches have been dug through farmers’ fields that have been doing a good job of preventing that, as has taking trees out along the sides of the roads in strategic locations. There are still a couple of spots that are at risk of being washed out, if there is enough snowmelt all at once, but we are able to use alternative routes to avoid them.
If we have a wet enough spring, we might even be able to do a controlled burn in some sections of the outer yard this year. Wouldn’t that be nice!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Seeing those warmer temperatures in the forecast has me looking way too far ahead right now! :-D
The Re-Farmer
If you would like to contribute to our fundraiser to reimburse the cat lady for Cabbages’ vet bills, click on the button below, or click here. If you would like to read more about it, click here.
Since we switched to Starlink, not all that long ago, I’ve been quite happy with the improvement of my internet speed and connectivity. Especially the connectivity. That was the biggest issue with our old satellite provider. We were paying an awful lot for limited data, and the connectivity just kept getting worse and worse.
Now, my “office” is in the corner of my bedroom, where the external walls are log. Even with a wi-fi booster, just being set up where I am is probably the worst part of the house to get wi-fi. Plus, my desktop is rather old and having a harder time keeping up with the newer technology. Still, with a little booster set up, and the improved connectivity with Starlink, I was quite content with my desktop’s internet speeds.
My husband was not.
He also wasn’t satisfied with the bare bones router that came with the Starlink system. They actually upgraded while we were in line for it, so it’s not what people are getting now. One issue was that the router had only one port in it. My husband likes to have his computer wired directly, but we also need to connect our security camera.
So he ended up getting a NETGEAR Orbi Whole Home Tri-Band Mesh Wi-Fi 6 System (RBK852) – Router with 1 Satellite Extender (not an affiliate link). The extender is set up in the living room; another wi-fi semi-dead zone.
Also, you can set up a payment plan. There was no way we could have afforded it, otherwise!
He got that set up, and was seeing huge increases in speed on his desktop. Plus, he could be directly wired in with his computer, and the security camera could be, too, though still with the original Starlink router. It won’t work with wi-fi 6. Too old. So we’ve got both running at the same time.
Me?
Meh.
In fact, when I first tried to log onto the new network, I lost all ability to do anything online. It turns out that I just needed to give it more time to set up in the background. Whatever. I wasn’t unhappy with my wi-fi, so I honestly didn’t care. I was good with what I had.
My husband was not.
The other thing he picked up was for my desktop. A new wi-fi card to enable me to get wi-fi 6. (also, not an affiliate link).
He just finished setting it up for m. I now have antennae sticking out the back of my tower. :-D He also set me up with the new network.
So, of course, I did a speed test once I settled at my computer.
The results always fluctuate, of course, but right now, not only am I able to use the new router’s signal, but my speed is dramatically improved.
This is the history of speed tests I did today. Can you tell when the new card was installed? :-D
It turns out my computer is so old, it couldn’t read the installation mini-disk that came with the card. My husband had to read it on his own computer, download it onto a thumb drive, then use that to install the wi-fi card on my desktop.
What would I do without my awesome, techy husband? :-D
My phone consistently got better speeds than my desktop. While my desktop saw an improvement because of the new wi-fi card, this is what my phone got, just with the new router.
The download speed is about 50-60% improved from what I would typically get using my phone.
Yes, I was quite content with what I had, but I’m going to quite appreciate this upgrade!
The Re-Farmer 