So this day turned out completely different than planned!

The morning was pretty routine. While doing my usual morning rounds, I did a harvest. We are dropping close to freezing tonight – every time I check the forecast, it keeps changing, but not enough to make a difference. Even if we don’t get frost tonight, the few things that are not cold hardy out there are unlikely to continue to ripen, with a few possible exceptions.

One thing I was hoping to do was get one of our few friendly female cats, probably Beep Boop, into the carrier. If I’d managed that, I would have taken her straight to our egg lady for adoption. Of course, this would be the morning when she didn’t show up! In fact, “only” 17 cats showed up this morning, which is a little unusual these days. Caramel showed up and was being friendly, but when I tried to pick her up to put her into the carrier, she would have none of that!

So I let her be and did the rest of my rounds and the harvesting.

I harvested all the remaining melons. Most of them are probably not ripe, but we won’t know for sure until we cut them open. There’s also the last couple of patty pans that were large enough to be worth harvesting.

We had only three of the purple Dragonfly peppers, and I grabbed them all. All the other peppers in the grow bags, I left. The Sweet Chocolates in the old kitchen garden had a fair number of ripe peppers, but I also harvested most of the green ones, too. There are still a few on the plants that I didn’t bother with.

I didn’t harvest the eggplant, and I hoped to be able to put up the one hot pepper in the wattle weave bed, as it seems to have the most mature peppers on it.

I also picked through the last of the ripening tomatoes and brought them in, along with the yellow onions that were curing beside them.

Once inside, I had breakfast, then started on some dishes. With the hot water tank dead, we’ve been heating up kettles of water to use for everything. I was starting to heat more water for another batch of dishes when my mother called.

I’d mentioned to her that I was taking her car in to the garage, so her first question was, how was the car? Turns out, she thought it was still at the garage. Why, I’m not sure, since we only have her car now, so I’d have no way to get home if I left it at the garage!

Once she knew it was running find, she asked what my plans for the day were…

*sigh*

Yup. Even though I ask her repeatedly if she’d need a shopping trip, every time we talk, she always tells me no, she’s fine, she doesn’t need anything – even when I try to preplan a shopping date. She refuses to, because she still has food, so she doesn’t need to. And she doesn’t want to shop before she runs out of things, because then it’ll all go bad unless she eats it all right away…

*sigh*

Honestly, I think she just likes the idea that she’s messing with my day when she does this. It’s a control thing. Of course, part of the reason we’re living here is so that I’m available to help her with this stuff, and she’s not making my brother book time off work to come over (with my sister, she goes out of her way to only call on the days she knows my sister isn’t working).

So I was soon on the road to her place, earlier than usual, as she also needed help with some household chores that are getting too hard for her to manage on her own.

I don’t know that my mother was all that happy with me today, to be honest. I helped her with her household stuff, then we sat for a bit to chat. She started going into her usual manipulative rants, and I was having none of it. At one point, she started off on how everything is so expensive, and it’s because all the stores are cheating people. I tried to explain inflation to her, but nope. It’s because all the stores are cheating people. She knows this because, years ago, someone at the grocery store helped her with her shopping, and when she checked her receipt at home, she found she had been charged for a watermelon she didn’t buy. This happened probably 10 years ago and frankly, I don’t think it happened the way she claims. The grocery store by her place prints receipts that include featured specials. One time that she went through her receipt while I was there, she thought she was charged for a pie she didn’t get, but when I looked at the receipt, I found she was looking at the featured sale on pie and thought it was part of her purchases. Or, the maybe guy made a mistake about the watermelon, and punched in the wrong code. She got mad at me for not agreeing with her, then tried to blame me for her being cheated “last week”. I’d helped her with shopping and she wanted to get a case of mushroom soup. They’d been on sale the week before, but they’d run out. There were no cases, but I found a staff member and asked. She found one for my mother in their stock room. The cheat? My mother looked at the receipt and the price was not the sale price she wanted it to be – a sale that was over already. I’d even told her it was over, but in her memory, she now thinks I told her the price was the sale price from the previous week. I never told her a price, because I never saw a price for cases, only singles. This also happened more like 2 or 3 weeks ago, not last week, as she claimed, because my brother had visited and helped her with shopping last week, not me.

Then, after going on about how this guy had cheated her over a watermelon she never bought, she turned around and tried to make excuses for our vandal, of all people. She still tells me how we all need to get along and forgive each other, yet still allows him to talk to her in spite of all he’s done, and his open expression of hatred for me in particular, not to mention blatant lies to her about me. Somehow, my siblings and I are at fault that we all don’t get along like we used to.

Things even went sideways when I made the mistake of telling her about the truck we have been trying to get financing for. This was her cue to say that my FIL, who lives on a pension in an assisted living building, should be “helping us”. She’s got it in her head that he’s got a “good pension” (whatever she things that is; I don’t care to find out), and if she can help us out, he can, too. He does help us in other ways, but when I said that, she demanded to know in what ways. I told her it was none of her business, just like his finances are none of her business. Oh, and she even tried to use the fact that she paid for the new roof as ammunition against me! We’ll be getting that one rubbed into us for the rest of her life, I’m sure. She never does anything good, without finding some way to use it as a weapon. She and our vandal are very much alike in that regard.

Things went down hill from there, and instead of rising to her bait on so many things, I pointed out that she was being psychologically abusive, and I wasn’t going to accept that. She then tried to gaslight me, and I called her on that, too. Finally, she just stopped talking and sat with her eyes closed for a few minutes, apparently praying. Then she started doing a few other things in preparation for running errands, and wouldn’t answer me when I offered to help or asked her questions.

Then we just went and did the errands, and everything settled down. We even went out for lunch part way through. I made sure to pay, because she never tips.

By the time we were done, my mother was quite tired. I did stay for a little bit of a visit after everything was put away. Since I’d gone to her place to much earlier than usual, though, I decided to do our last stock up shopping trip. I needed to go to Canadian Tire and Walmart, and her place was already half way there.

Before heading out, though, I messaged my family about the change in plans. That’s when my husband updated me on the plumber situation.

He’d called our usual guy again, and it went straight to voice mail. So, he called another company we’ve dealt with and left a message there. That company called back.

I think we know why we haven’t been hearing from the first place.

This is the time of year when everyone is getting their cottages ready for winter. Which includes draining the plumbing, so nothing freezes and bursts pipes over the winter. This second plumber is fully booked draining cottages for the next two weeks. Given how many cottages there are around the lake, every available plumber would be booked solid right now.

We are going to be without hot water for a while! Over Thanksgiving, at the very least.

I have not told my brother we don’t have hot water at the moment. I didn’t want him to worry as they go to visit their son and grandsons for Thanksgiving. If we don’t hear anything after Thanksgiving, though, I’m going to have to ask him if he can come out and install the new tank. The frustrating thing is, it’s really not a difficult thing to do. We just don’t have what we need to do it. Particularly with the electrical part of it.

Ah, well.

On that note, I headed out and did the final shopping I needed to do, and even picked up a couple of treats for Thanksgiving dinner. The only other stop was to get gas on the way home. It doesn’t look like getting the air filter and new sparkplugs done are helping with the poor mileage my mother’s car has been getting, though it does seem to be running noticeably better! Also, that tire with the slow leak they couldn’t find is still holding air, so that’s good. Mind you, it took about 3 weeks before it leaked enough to be noticeable, last time, so it’s really too soon to say, and I need to keep an eye on it.

When I got home and drove up to the house to unload, the yard was just filled with cats! All the ones that didn’t show up for breakfast were very hungry.

Beep Boop was among them.

So after everything was unloaded and the girls were putting them away, I fed the outside cats, which lured at least three of them out from under the car! The carrier was in the sun room, and Beep Boop was among the cats eating kibble in there, so I put some in the carrier, then picked her up and dropped her in through the top (I love that this carrier opens up at the top!). She immediately started eating again, so I closed it up, then messaged the egg lady to see if she was home.

She was, and eager to welcome a new cat!

So, off I went again! Beep Boop was not happy once she realized she couldn’t get out of the carrier, but she did eventually settle in for the ride.

She now has one of the chicken coops, all to herself! It’s roasty toasty in there. Food and water were already waiting for her – and she’ll have all the mice she can catch! Just getting into the coop, which has a small vestibule with some feed storage in it, we saw several mice running around. Beep Boop (who will surely be renamed!) will get to stay here for a while, and arrangements will be made to get her spayed right away. My friend’s mouse problem is so bad, she thinks she might need three more cats! So we will work on trying to get some of the other females, as she doesn’t think her one male would be happy with more males around.

By the time I got back from delivering the cat, it was getting dark. I was just able to get the eggplant and the nearest peppers covered for the night. I had a couple more covers, so I went ahead and covered the peppers in the grow bags, too. As I write this, the forecast says we will stay above freezing, but the “RealFeel” will be below freezing.

We shall see what we get for real!

Oh, and while all this was happening, I started getting messages from the cat lady. One of the last kittens will be going to her new home tomorrow. There were 17 people interested in that one tiny kitten – but none interested in the other that’s not so tiny. That one doesn’t want to leave them, anyhow, it seems. There’s also someone interested in Ghosty, but that person wants a male, and Ghosty is female. I’ll find out tomorrow, if it’s still a go. I passed on a picture of Tiny, Pom Pom and Soot Sprite to pass on – make sure to mention Soot Sprite is not up for adoption, and she’ll put the word out for them, since the tiny ones seem to have more interest.

So not only are we looking at having as many as 3 more female yard cats adopted out soon, we might have some kittens adopted out, too!

She’s also going to let me know when one of the clinics has their neuter discount day, to start getting some of the outside males done.

And now it’s almost 10pm, and I need to see about some supper! I just realized, I haven’t eaten since having lunch with my mother at noon. Nothing involving the oven, though. My daughters prepped the ripe Sweet Chocolate peppers while I was gone and now have them dehydrating in the oven.

Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll get to do the work outside I’d intended to do today!

The Re-Farmer