My regular readers might remember a strange situation we had with my mother’s car.

Then, not very long ago, before going to my mother’s, I checked the tires and found all four of them low. This time, it was the rear left tire that was almost flat. I pumped them all up and they were still fine when I checked them again before taking my mother to the hospital for her follow up, just a few days ago.

Now that we’ve got the truck, we’ve got a vehicle with brand new tires. The onboard computer, however, started giving us low tire warnings, right from the start – even though a pressure check showed they were fine. We’re also getting a “service tire monitoring system” warning. After talking to the mechanic, he thinks it’s just a low battery in the monitor. That’s a repair by replacement. The part is not expensive, but replacing the battery was the priority for our budget this month.

The problem with having these warning lights on all the time, though, is not knowing if they’re actually legitimate or not. So when my daughter and I headed to the city today, we paused at a gas station to check the tires.

Three out of four tires were low. One, very low!

???

Then, on the trip home, I saw the oil pressure gauge was low. I am not sure if it was low as we were driving out, but I know for sure it was where it was supposed to be, the last time I drove it. I do normally keep an eye on all the gauges when I drive.

Once we were done driving around and the truck was in the garage, I popped the hood and checked the oil. Which was rather amusing, since I can barely reach the dip stick.

The oil was very low, too!

Yet, there was no evidence of a leak anywhere.

Also, I know the oil had been changed as the truck was prepped for sale, so we are the only ones to have been driving it since then. Same with the tires.

I was going to add oil to the truck, but it uses 5W30, and what we have on hand is 5W40, so I’ll use my mother’s car, tomorrow, and pick up some 5W30 and top up the truck.

And maybe find a stool of some kind that we can keep with the truck, so I can reach further into the engine compartment. I might be able to just reach the dip stick, but I can’t reach the cap to add more oil!

If it weren’t for the fact that there is zero evidence for it, I would think that “someone” has been letting the air out of our tires, but… the oil, too? No. If that was what happened, there have been tracks in the snow (for when it happened with my mother’s car), or scuffs in the dirt floor of the garage around the truck. Plus, the only person I can think of that would do something like this is our vandal, and he’s got too many mobility issues for him to have been able to reach all the tires on my mother’s car (it barely fits into the side of the garage it’s parked in, and can only be accessed from one side). Or slither under the truck to drain the oil into a pan, which is what would have had to have been done for there to be no oil on the ground under the truck.

I am perplexed!!

Aside from that, the day went well.

My daughter and I went to several places. One was a liquidation place I wanted to check out, as I’d heard they got a huge shipment of name brand pet food. It turned out to be mostly dog food, but what cat food we found… well, it may have been a deal from the regular prices for these brands, but they cost more, for less kibble, than what we have been getting at Walmart and Costco. We didn’t get any kibble, but we did get a few other things that were a good price, including a little Christmas tree. Since we will be limiting our Christmas decorating and celebrating to the cat free zone in the living room, I’d been wondering how we would find space for any of our trees. Certainly not the 6′ one, but even the one we’ve been using against the door in the dining room, well above the floor, would have been too big. My daughters have a smaller one they would set up, upstairs, but not with the kittens this year. I think it’s a 4′ tree, which would still be a bit large for what we want to do with the space.

What I got was a red sparkly cone shaped tree with baubles already on it that’s only about 2′ tall. It’ll fit on top of the piano. I later found some plain white string lights for it at Dollarama, and we already have small tree toppers that would work.

An almost instant Christmas tree!

Before we went to the Dollarama, we swung by the international grocery store for some dim sum for “breakfast” – neither of us had eaten yet! Along with the string lights we found at Dollarama, we remembered to get a small garbage can for the truck – my daughter chose one with flowers all over it. 😊 They also had more of the little puppy beds in stock, so we got another one of those, since the cats love the first one I got so much. They are thrilled with the new one, too!

One of the places I wanted to try for our shopping was Fresh Co. I keep hearing how they have such good prices. My daughter had their shopping list, so I just needed some basics. I didn’t find their prices to be all that much better, except for a couple of sales. They had bags of 4 avocados selling for under $2 a bag! These days, you can’t even get a single avocado for under $2! So I got two bags. They also had a brand of butter for under $5 a pound. They had a limit of 4 pounds, but I only got 2, since we still have plenty from the last Costco shopping trip in the freezer. Costco’s price is over $5, but in most places, a pound of butter costs almost $7 a pound – and that’s the cheap house brand or no-name ones. The other brand name butters are much more expensive.

My daughter had a longer list than me, and she wasn’t able to find everything at the Fresh Co, so we went back to the international grocery store, after I filled the gas tank. Today is Thursday, and Domo has 5¢ off per litre on Mondays and Thursdays. The gas prices had also dropped and were 138.9¢/L, so we were paying 133.9¢/L. While my daughter was at the international grocery store, I popped over to a Dollar Tree I hadn’t been to in years, just to check it out.

That done, we were going to head home, when I remembered I needed memory cards for the older trail cam, so we swung by a Staples. I only needed 8gig cards, and two of them, so I can switch cards when I do my morning rounds. The lowest they had in stock was 16gig – and they were almost $20 each! The 32gig cards were cheaper than the 16gig cards, and the sales person that tried to help me said 8gig cards would be even more expensive. I guess nobody buys such low memory cards anymore. I could have gotten even better prices if I were getting micro disks, instead, but those don’t work on the camera. If they did, I could have used the ones I already have on hand.

So now I have a pair of 32gig cards to replace the old 8gig cards for the older trail cam. Here’s hoping they’ll work! I know the cameras generally can’t handle the large memory cards, but that usually starts at 128gigs, if I remember correctly.

Once we have the spare funds, I’ve got my eyes on some solar powered trail cams. They don’t make the model we have now, but I’ve been able to find others where the solar panel powers the camera directly, rather than charging rechargeable batteries, and has regular batteries for when it’s too dark for the solar panel to do the job. There are other features I want, too, but I think that one is the deal breaker for me, when looking at the different models out there. That will mean needing more memory cards. I think I’ll buy them online, along with the camera, when the time comes!

But I digress!

We had ourselves a productive day in the city; my daughter found everything they had on their shopping list, and I got a few extra things as well.

And we have a vehicle mystery on our hands!

The Re-Farmer