I’m just not feeling it today.

My daughters pulled an all nighter last night. Aside from my older daughter working on her commissions, they did the usual cooking and cleaning, and my younger daughter baked an amazing zucchini cake with cream cheese icing. She’d baked one while house sitting, using zucchini from my brother’s garden, but we had to buy zucchini for this one, since our summer squash barely survived the slugs and didn’t produce much this year. Oh, she also did laundry and ended up spending two HOURS taking care if this…

This happened while I was clearing bush to access the tree I needed to debranch and cut to size. These are tiny burrs from a weed that has the prettiest, daintiest flowers that become these horrible things. I’ve been pulling them up every time I see them, but once the flowers are done blooming, they’re really hard to see.

Turns out I missed quite a lot of them.

I’d tried to rub out as many as I could before putting them through the wash. Once through the drier, the tiny burrs are a bit easier to rub out, but I ended up putting them back in the washing machine, to be included in the next load. Which turned out to be my daughter’s bedding. She didn’t realize what was on them until she moved things to the drier. Rather than risk burs ending up all over her bedding, she instead started picking them out, mostly one burr at a time!!

I would never have had that patience!

They’ll need to be washed again to hopefully remove the last little bits.

Then, since they were both up anyhow, they let me sleep in a bit and took care of feeding the outside cats for me, and I could do my rounds a bit later. I had to change the batteries on the trail cams today, including the solar powered one. I’ve had to change batteries on that one only once since we got it, and that was because I accidentally left it on “setting”, which meant it spent and entire day and night draining power while waiting for buttons to be pushed. The solar panel would have kept it going during the day, but once it was dark and the batteries were being used, they were completely drained.

As for me, I was glad to have that extra sleep and, to be honest, I’m fighting the urge to go back to bed. It’s gorgeous out there and there is lots of work to do, but I’m feeling quite drained.

With yesterday’s chill, I was planning on getting some crochet done after having a late lunch. I was just settling in to eat in the cat free zone (the living room) when the phone rang. Of course, the living room handset wasn’t in the living room at the time, and I didn’t get to it before it went to machine. It was my mother, and telling me to call her back, and she did not sound good at all.

So I called her back right away and found out why.

Our vandal had just showed up at her place, out of the blue, and he was in a full rage, apparently, He was yelling at her at her door, so the entire building could hear, going on about how she “gave” me the farm. Where he got that notion, I have no idea, because the property was signed over to my brother, not me. This was directly because of our vandal harassing her to change the will and give it to him. With the farm off the will entirely, he would not be able to contest it. In some messages he’d more recently left on her machine, he went on about “squatters rights” and how the property now belongs to me, but Canadian law no longer recognizes squatter’s rights, and hasn’t for a very long time. Not that we’re squatters in the first place. We have an informal arrangement, but an arrangement nonetheless. I don’t know who got it in his head that the property now belongs to me (and just me; apparently, the rest of my family doesn’t exist), but that’s his current thing.

To my mother’s credit, she told him outright, it’s none of his business. He already managed to get what would have been his inheritance more than 20 years ago, but he wants more. He started going on about how he worked on the farm, too (as if my siblings and I didn’t??). He is absolutely convinced he’s somehow entitled to the property, and seems to believe my mother can somehow still give it to him? It makes no sense, but we’re not dealing with a rational person, here.

Also to my mother’s credit, she finally told him to never come back. Previously, she’s sabotaged our efforts to protect her from him by actually phoning him and inviting him for tea or to go out for lunch or something. There seems to be a huge guilt factor motivating her efforts to make peace with someone who used to be so close, but has become completely irrational. I think feelings of guilt are behind his behaviour as well. My late brother’s death really destroyed him. I think a part of him recognises how much he’d taken advantage of my late brother, and that they weren’t anywhere near as close as he’s invented in his mind since the accident. He’s been taking it out on my mother, in particular, and since my father passed, has been using both of their deaths to cruelly abuse and manipulate my mother. That he has failed just seems to eat at him and is causing him to double down. A newer manipulation he’s using on her is that he’s apparently dying of cancer one day, or can’t walk anymore on another (as he stands at the door, having walked into her building…). He likely does need hip surgery again, but how is that my mother’s fault? Oh, right. He’s blaming his hip damage on all the work he supposedly did at the farm. Back when we were still close, I was the one that advised him to keep at the doctors about how much pain he was in, after working aircraft maintenance, on concrete floors and crawling around inside the craziest of places, looking for hairline cracks. The doctors didn’t want to do it because he was “too young” and it would need to be redone every 10 years. Well, it’s been a lot more than 10 years, so he’s likely in a lot of pain right now. And now he’s rewritten his own memory as to the cause and using it against my mother for… what? What does he expect her to do for him? Probably give him what’s left of her money, instead of the land. Though he has vowed to use every penny, even to the point of homelessness, to sue my brother and I. For what, I’m not entirely sure.

My mother is the weak link and the soft target. He hasn’t been going after me anymore. Our restraining order is expired, but he knows that I am willing to go to such efforts to stop him, which seems to be enough to keep him from going back to his past behaviour. Mind you, we did have a trail cam stolen, as well as the old sign with my father’s name on it, while the restraining order was in effect, but he technically did not have to go onto the property to do it, and we have no actual evidence that it was him. Still, when I mentioned it in court during mediation while trying to get the restraining order (he was not present for that), his lawyer and the judge were both nodding along going, “yeah, it would have been him.” There’s simply no one else that would have done it. So far, I’ve only seen him on the trail cams driving by. He no longer gives the finger to the cameras, nor comes up to the gate to shout down our driveway, while clearly drunk again.

Anyhow.

My mother hadn’t actually wanted to talk to me about it. She wanted to talk to my sister about it, as my sister still has some civil contact with our vandal. Well. Her husband does, anyhow. She couldn’t get through to my sister by phone, so I promised I’d send her an email, which I did immediately after getting off the phone.

Then I messaged my brother to update him, and we ended up chatting for quite some time. There isn’t a lot we can do about it, but we need to be aware, in case this is a sign that our vandal is losing it again and might decide to cause us problems here on the farm again. As for my sister, she did get through to my mother, then sent our vandal a message that probably didn’t do any good at all, but I guess it was worth a shot.

By the time all that was done, my food was cold and my tea was tepid. I also had to move on to other things and never got to my crochet at all.

I still feel completely drained and have no desire to go outside and get work done. The chances of him harassing me from the road are next to nil, so that’s not the issue. I’m just tired. Mentally and psychologically tired.

Of all the struggles we have found ourselves dealing with since the move, our vandal turning from friend to foe is the one that is the most unfortunate and difficult. That he goes after my mother like that… Ugh. My mother may be pretty abusive and cruel herself, but that doesn’t justify his abusive behaviour towards her. Especially over something that is none of his business. Blaming the actions from both of them on mental illness – as accurate as that may be – cannot be an excuse to accept the behaviour.

So… that’s where I’m at now. I really need to get outside and get some work done, while the weather is good, but I have zero motivation and zero energy. I’m simply out of spoons.

The Re-Farmer