Well, it seems we blew away the high that was forecast for today. My app says we are at 31C/88F out there, and it sure feels like it!
We kept an eye on the sunroom to see if Broccoli would find her kittens. They slept peacefully the entire time, so she had no reason to go in there, though she did show up briefly at the kibble house.
In this heat, the cats don’t have much appetite! They sure appreciated having the water bowls refilled with nice, cold well water!
After a few hours, though, I decided to give them a light feeding, making sure to make lots of noise when the kibble hit the metal food trays in the kibble house. The kibble house provides some shade, so those trays were empty, while there was still food out in other, more exposed, spots.
Broccoli did show up, but wouldn’t go to the kibble with us there. She ended up running behind the storage house, instead, and just sitting under a tree. Eventually, she came around the front again. We even brought the carrier with the kittens out, and made sure she could see them.
She behaved indifferent to them.
We left the top open on the carrier and put it in the shade by the kibble and water bowl shelters, then watched from the sunroom. She did eventually go for the tray under the water bowl house and eat for a while. While other cats were curious about the cat carrier and peaked inside, she did not, and eventually left for the back of the house, where the old garden shed is.
We tried moving the carrier into a shady spot there but, again, she ignored it. She then disappeared behind the garden shed, where I know the hole in the wall is, hidden by junk that needs to be hauled away.
In the end, we finally decided to put the kittens back, though we did lay out the self warming mat, first, so they couldn’t roll in between the grow bags and tarp that she had made a nest onto. I’ve got a timer on, and we’ll check them later. If they are still there, but look like they have not been tended to, we’ll probably bring them inside, get some kitten formula and start bottle feeding them. Unfortunately, at this point “good news” would be to find them gone. That would mean she has taken them to a new nest somewhere, and it caring for them. If she’s not there and they’re just peacefully sleeping, that hopefully means she nursed them and left them after they fell asleep.
*sigh*
It was worth a try, I guess. Broccoli is one of the cats that does sometimes let us pet her, while she is eating. We hoped that would make her easier to lure with her babies to where we can fully socialize her and care for her and her babies.
We shall see how it turns out.
In other things, we had ourselves a strange mystery that was solved late last night. A mystery that had us worried about plumbing issues again!
My daughter went into the kitchen, and discovered a large puddle of water on the floor between the sink and the fridge. Our floors are not level, so that is where any spilled liquid pools. We had no idea where it came from, and thought maybe a pot that was soaking in the sink, but was not on the side counter, had been knocked over. My husband was the last person in the kitchen. He had emptied the pot and set it aside so he had room to use the tap, but there had been no water on the floor. This was maybe 20 minutes before my daughter found the puddle.
We cleaned it up with a towel and my daughter checked under the sink, but it was all dry.
Not long after, I went into the kitchen, and there was another puddle. So I cleaned that up, too.
While going to the washing machine with the wet towel, however, I walked past our big bottle of drinking water. It has one of those syphon pumps to get at the water. When we took the old dishwasher out of the kitchen, we set it in front of the counter that is a divider between the kitchen and the dining room, intending to add it to the junk pile. We put shelves under the counter on the dining room side, and the dishwasher covered the one that had storage cubes filled with winter hats, scarves, gloves, etc. The cats were determined to tear the cubes apart and dig into them, and the old dishwasher blocked it almost perfectly. Some more determined cats still managed to claw in behind it, but for the most part, it does the job. This dishwasher it the kind that you attach to a kitchen tap when in use, then unhook and store to the side when not in use, so it has a fake butcher block top. That turned out to be perfect to hold our jug of drinking water.
As I walked past it, I found a big splash of water on the floor, under the spout. It was as if someone – or something – had pushed down on the pump, with nothing under the spout. We try to make it inaccessible, but it’s possible a cat had decided to get onto the counter and then jumped on it? Another mystery!
So I cleaned that mess up, too.
Some time later, I went into the kitchen again, and sure enough, another puddle was forming. This time, however, I could see that the water was leaking out from under the counter. This counter, like the ones on either side of the oven, can be moved – at least it could be moved, if it didn’t have a sink and water pipes running through the bottom, and a drain pipe that goes to one side, before going down to the basement.
I checked the pipes in the basement.
Everything there was dry. If there were a leak in the pipes between the bottom of the cupboards and the floor, there would be water dripping through at the pipes. There was nothing.
So where was the water coming from?
The only way to know for sure would be to look under the floor of the cupboard. The only way we could think of was to cut a hole through the floor of the cupboard, and we sure didn’t want to do that.
I cleaned up the new mess and this time, left a towel on the floor.
With there being a solar storm and the expectation of incredible Northern Lights, I decided to take a couple of hours nap, then get up around 11 or so to go out and see the lights. By the time I got up, my younger daughter had gone to bed, but her sister was just gearing up for a night of working on commissions. She wanted to go out with me to see the Northern Lights, first.
As we were getting ready to go out is when we discovered a cat had gotten onto the dining table and knocked my bowl of pea seeds over. We found as many as we could and those got tucked away. My daughter checked on the wet area in the kitchen floor. The towel I’d left was quite wet, but it kept another puddle from forming.
I was getting a tripod ready at the dining table when I happened to look towards the entry…
… and spotted another big splash of water on the floor.
I told my daughter that I’d already cleaned a similar mess up earlier, and couldn’t figure out how the water was splashing like that.
She asked if it was possible this was where the water in the kitchen was from.
There was nowhere near enough water on the floor for that.
What if we move the dishwasher?
As I was fussing around the water bottle to see, I checked the mat under it. We have it resting on one of those microfiber absorbent dish drying mats.
It was soaking wet!
We moved the dishwasher and, sure enough, there was water under it.
The water jug had a leak. I’m guessing a split in the seam from the mold that formed it, but we couldn’t actually see a hole. I guess once the mat was saturated, it started dripping onto the floor, creating the splash I was finding. Then, because the floors on this old house are so uneven, the water drained under the counter until it pooled in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Which was honestly the best possible reason for the water we were finding! Not a plumbing issue at all.
There was an empty water jug set aside to dry, so my daughter and I emptied the leaking jug into it and cleaned things up.
We also put another towel behind the dishwasher and pushed it back in place. We can’t not have it there, without finding some way to protect the things in the shelve it’s covering. I’m seriously considering getting storage bins for the stuff, then leaving the shelf empty for the cats to climb in!
Once that was all taken care of, my daughter and I finally went out to see the Northern Lights.
We didn’t even try to bring out the old DSLR, and just used my phone, on “pro”, and played around with the settings. To the naked eye, the Northern Lights basically just looked like whitish light to us. My daughter could see hints of pinks and green. The camera, with different ISOs, shutter speed, etc., could pick up the colours we couldn’t see – all sorts of greens and purples and pinks. It was very dramatic! I’m glad we did it. The last time we had a major light show like this, I slept through it.
I’m glad I was out to see them, but it meant for a very short night, since my younger daughter and I were set to be outside early to get work done. It’s coming up on 6pm as I write this, and I’m trying very hard not to fall asleep at my computer! We’ve cooled down to 29C/84F and could that be thunder I’m hearing out my window? Why yes! Yes it is!
Oh, darn. I just checked the weather radar. There are lots of scattered little storms out there, and they are all missing us.
I’m sure hearing some nice, loud, thunder right now, though!
Meanwhile, as I was working on this, my timer went off and my daughter and I went to check on the kittens. They are still in the garden shed, sprawled all over the blanket we left with them. I spotted Broccoli some distance away, loafed on a pile of logs, watching us. So she does seem to know they are there. I’ve reset my timer, and we will check on them again.
We shall see how it goes.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 