After I finished with the potatoes, I did some other stuff outside, then headed in through the sun room, where I found these guys.
That white and grey kitten Beep Bop is nursing is not one of hers!
It took a while for me to even see the grey tabby beside her!
The second picture is of a pair of kittens I found in Baby Jail. I’m glad they’re comfortable going in there, because if we ever need to hang onto some kittens until the cat lady can pick them up, it will make things much easier!
Though I suppose we’ll need to buy another litter pan. 😄
The black and white one has been socialized enough that I can usually walk up to it and pet it, and even pick it up for a cuddle.
The white and grey one is among those I’ve never been able to get close to before. Today, however, I was able to reach in, and it stayed. I got hissed at, then my fingers got sniffed. After that, I was able to do ear skritches, and they were accepted! Yay!!! I couldn’t reach very far through the “door”, but it was far enough. 😊
One of the things I got done was to finally clean the eavestroughs on the garage. I was planning to do it after we pick up the small scaffolding we’re looking to buy second hand after next pay period. Far more stable and safe than the ladders we’ve been using. However, I could see all sorts of green leaves growing out of them, and on one side of the garage, it was starting to fall away from the eaves.
So, I got out the step ladder and managed to get it done. On the far side, where the trough was starting to fall away, I actually found worms in there! As for all those green leaves I was seeing, no surprise that it was almost all Chinese elm seeds that had germinated. There was a veritable forest starting in there!
We haven’t cleaned those eavestroughs since we moved here, which is almost 6 years now. I didn’t realized until today, just how long it’s been since they’ve been cleaned. As I was scraping the bottoms of the troughs, I realized the granular material on the bottom was from the original roof shingles. When I was a kid, the garage and the house had the same colour shingles. I used to play up on the house roof, so I remember the mix of grey, with a bit of blue and green, granules quite well. I even found the remains of a package of spare shingles, some of which we could even use on the kibble house roof.
The garage has a metal roof now. I don’t know when it was installed, but I know it was well before the youngest of my brothers passed away, so I’d say it has been around 20 years. Maybe 25.
I’m having a really hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that no one cleaned those eavestroughs out since before the metal roof was put on! My three brothers were all doing what they could to help my parents maintain the place. Surely at least one of them thought to clean the eavestroughs on the garage at least once since the metal roof was done! But there was no mistaking what I was seeing, or how much of it was there.
As for the sagging part of the trough, in one area the wood it’s attached to is so rotten, it can’t hold anything, but that’s not where it was sagging the most. I was able to just hammer things back in again. It was the sheer weight of all the composted material in there that was dragging them down. It should be just fine, now.
Now we just have to make sure we don’t let them sit for another… 20? 25??? … years before cleaning them again!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 