First, the cuteness!

PBC has settled in so quickly – and very quickly discovered the cats’ window shelf on my craft table! What a cutie. Some human will be very lucky to have her. 🩷

I made it out today to do a bit of shopping. It was absolutely gorgeous today. We even reached -2C/28F! That’s warm enough for snow to be melting off the roof of the house and the garage. When I was in the sun room to feed the yard cats for the evening, I actually found it too warm, so I checked the thermometer on the wall. It was at about 16C/61F!!!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We were running low on kibble and, for the price difference, it was worth the cost of gas to go to the nearest Walmart. Since I was there anyhow, I looked for other things as well. My first stop was a Canadian Tire, where I found some replacement trays for under my next seed starts. The ones I have in the house are cracked and, with the platform set up in the sun room, I can’t get at the ones stored in there. They also had a variety of grow lights, including a smaller one that would fit over our small aquarium greenhouse perfectly, but I didn’t have the budget for it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pick it up next month. There were some affordable standard bulb sized grow lights available, but we don’t have lamps suitable to use them.

After getting some kibble and a few other items at the Walmart, I decided to also check out a Dollarama nearby. They’re just starting to get their gardening and Easter supplies, so it was filled with unpacked boxes. The few gardening items on the shelf were not the sorts of things I could use. I did, however, spot a toy/scratch pad in the pet section I decided to get two of. It’s one of those round rings with a ball trapped in it for the cats to play with, but the middle has one of those corrugated cardboard scratch pads. The scratching posts we have now are pretty much destroyed, so I figured it was worth a try! One of them went upstairs, since the girls have no cat toys or scratching posts at all up there. Hopefully, it will help reduce some of the damage!

The stores were very busy, and rather loud, so it wasn’t until I got my phone to send a message home, letting them know I’d be on my way, that I saw a message from the Cat Lady. She was asking when I’d be in this city next – our usual half-way meeting spot is next to the Dollarama. I told her I was already there, and was just finishing up. Unfortunately, the timing wasn’t right, and we weren’t able to connect. Which is unfortunate, because she’s got a kibble donation for us! Four 7k bags. I don’t expect to be there again until next month, since the next time we’ll be doing any major shopping, it’ll be our stock up shopping in the larger city. However, I told her to let me know when’s good for her. My schedule is flexible, and for that much donated cat food, it’s more than worth the drive to meet her!

But not tomorrow.

While I was out, my mother called. I called her back, and we now have an arrangement for me to go over tomorrow afternoon and do her grocery shopping and run some errands in the afternoon. I might come over earlier and bring a lunch, though by the end of the conversation, I don’t know if it’s worth the hassle. As we were talking, she mentioned that she was about to cook up a package of ground beef I brought for her, from our quarter beef. She started saying how that amount of meat should last her for about a week, because she’s avoiding eating meat, so she doesn’t get fat.

My mother is already fat, and has been for as long as I can remember. It’s never slowed her down. It still doesn’t slow her down, even with her knees wrecked from a car accident!

I told her that, at 92 years, that’s not something she should be worried about. Just eat well, and beef is some of the healthiest meat out there. To which she responded that she could see how “healthy” it is just by looking at me and my daughters. Then she started laughing like she’d made the best joke, ever.

I told her, there was nothing funny about what she’d said (my daughters both have PCOS, which is something she couldn’t begin to understand), and pointed out that she was using our conversation to insult us for no reason. She started to justify by saying, well, we eat lots of meat, so that must be why we’re so fat. I told her no, we don’t eat lots of meat. We eat too much bread and pasta and rice (who can afford to eat lots of meat these days, when you’re not in a position to raise it yourself??). I wasn’t going to bother telling her that the girls eat almost no meat at all, though they do eat seafood when they can. She wouldn’t believe me, anyhow. I called her out, again, on her going out of her way to insult us. She back tracked and started to say how she shouldn’t worry about what we do; we’re all adults now.

This from the person who would justify trying to run every aspect of our lives by saying, “I’m still the mama” so that gives her the right to try to control us. Not hust my own family, but my older brother’s as well. Strangely, she doesn’t do it with my sister, but she sure does try to play us against each other!

Ugh. I need to stop that train of thought. I’m starting to dread going over there now. Honestly, she’s been pretty good lately. Either that, or I’ve gotten better at redirecting her.

But then, I haven’t told her that I’ve given up sugar and simple carbs for Lent again this year. Last year, she mocked me about it, every time we were together, when I kept refusing all the high carb food she kept insisting I eat. She was even offering me sugar for my tea, which she never did any other time. She makes a big deal about staying away from sugar because of her diabetes (she’s not diabetic), so she never takes sugar in her tea, therefore she doesn’t think that anyone else might want it. Which is fine. I have no problem drinking most teas without sugar. It’s when she starts offering the bland cookies, carrot muffins or whatever crackers she has on hand at the time, to go with that tea. Things that, to her, don’t taste very sweet, therefore they don’t have much sugar in them. Except they do. She also doesn’t get that her whole wheat bread is still “sugar” – and she eats a LOT of bread!

Which is fine. It’s only irritating because she insisting things like eating meat makes her feel bad, so it must be bad for her – while continuing to eat foods that contribute to her acid reflux, and when she gets heartburn, she thinks she’s having a heart attack. I’ve printed out a whole list of foods, colour coded and everything, to help her remember which ones can contribute to these pains, and which ones won’t, but she just ignores it, keeps on complaining and blaming whatever other foods that the TV or magazines, or people in her building, told her are “bad”.

*sigh*

It’s really hard to help my mother, when she sabotages our efforts. She does that as much with her health issues as she does with our vandal! I can’t even say this is part of her ageing, though we are definitely seeing increased cognition issues. She’s been like this for as long as my brother can remember, and he’s almost 10 years older than me!

Ah, well. It is what it is. Hopefully, tomorrow, she will be having one of her good days, and things will go smoothly.

The Re-Farmer