I decided to try doing a short video showing my little seed haul that came in the mail today.
The free seeds that came with the order were Bushy Cucumbers, so I went to look them up.
From the website:
A Russian heirloom that was introduced by Seed Savers Exchange and grown in Dacha gardens near Moscow, Russia. Productive and early tolerating cooler nights better than others! Great for pickles! Vines grow to 5 feet long. (45-50 days to maturity)
So, a pickling cucumber and, looking at the days to maturity, these can be direct sown, rather than started indoors.
I will make decisions on what we will be direct sowing after I get an idea of how the winter sowing experiment turned out, and see what growing space we end up having. If the winter sowing experiment failed, we’ll have lots of room!
Last year, I did my first “garden tour” video on the first day of spring. I knew I wouldn’t have time to do it today, so I did the tour on the last day of winter, instead.
This morning, once I was done my morning rounds, I headed out to the nearest Walmart to do a bit of shopping.
My list was short. I needed seed starting mix, cat food, and a bit of groceries.
The Walmart did not have any seed starting mix.
This is what $238.76 looks like, which includes a small donation.
I got three 9.1kg bags of dry cat food, and one 32 count case of wet cat food. Last month, the dry cat food in this size cost $29.97 This month, they were back up to $34.97
Well, crud. I was just looking at the receipt and realized I was charged for an extra bag. I went through self checkout, so it’s my own fault. I now realize what happened. I was trying to scan the case of Coke Zero through the bottom of the cart, but it didn’t work. I thought I heard a beep and went scrolling through the items on the screen, but there was no Coke Zero, so I pulled it out from under the cart and got it scanned. I now realize there must have been a bar code on the side of the kibble bag that got scanned instead of the case below. No wonder my mental tally was off the final total by so much!
Well, we got to this location often enough that I can get it fixed.
So… this is NOT was $238 really looks like. 🤣
Anyhow.
On my list was peppercorns and eggs. They did have flats of medium eggs for just over $10, but I wanted large eggs, so I got two 18’s, instead. Those were $7.07 each. The Coke was not on my list, but they had a sale price for the case of 24 that was lower than buying two 12 packs – $11.97 instead of $14.97. The toilet paper was also on sale, so I grabbed a package for our emergency stash. 😉
I still needed to get seed starting mix, so after I loaded the truck, I decided to try the nearby Dollarama, since I was also wanting to see if their summer stock included those 6′ stakes that have been working out so well. They didn’t have the stakes, but I did end up getting three packs of “tomato stakes”. Each pack had three 3′ stakes with rigid connectors that can be popped on and off the stakes. I am actually thinking of using them around my corn, to help hold them up when we get high winds. I’ll slowly get more of these kits over the next few months until I think there is enough to support the corn stalks. I also spotted more of the half-bowls in the pattern I like so much, so I picked up four more of them. In the next couple of months, I’ll pick up four more side places and four more dinner plates, so we’ll have an 8 place setting. We can then pack away some of the dishes we never use, because they’re just too heavy. Plus, some are starting to get chipped. All of this together cost $28 and change, and I didn’t bother getting a photo.
They didn’t have seed starting mix, though.
So I went across the street to the Canadian Tire.
That is a very dangerous place for me to be!
This is what $69.54 looks like.
The seed starting mix was on sale, so I got the larger bags at $14.99 each. There was only one brand choice; Miracle Gro.
Then I started looking around the store.
I same SO close to buying a new compound miter saw that was on clearance! I have enough Canadian Tire dollars saved up that I could have gotten it for free. I’m hanging on to the CT dollars, though, to save up for something big, but it was really, really hard for me to talk away from that! We do have a compound miter saw that I got for $10 at a garage sale. It got a lot of use while I was building the cat isolation shelter. If I’m going to upgrade, it’s going to be a dual bevel sliding miter saw.
Which they also had on clearance. The clearance price was more than the CT dollars I have, but…
Oh, was it hard to walk away from that!
What I did end up finding and getting were a couple of 5 gallon buckets to replace the ones we’re using for doing the litter, so we don’t have to make multiple trips to dump the litter onto the compost pile (for those new to this blog, we use stove pellets for litter, which breaks up into sawdust as it is used). They were under $5 each.
I also got another S shaped cat scratcher. We got one not long ago, and the cats really like it a lot. More than any other set up we’ve tried. This is going to replace the scratching post I have in my bedroom that was donated to us. The post itself is still in great shape, but the shag carpet used to cover it has been shedding bits like crazy.
Last of all was an energy drink for the drive home.
Once home, I set the new cat scratched up in my room. The cats were all over it, immediately. It has a little dangling feather toy under the upward curve. That got ripped off within minutes. 😄 The scratching post it replaced has been set aside for now. I plan to remove the crappy shag carpet and recover it with some hemp craft rope that I have. It’s the same stuff I used on the inside ramp of the isolation shelter, and it holds up really well.
So that is our mid month top up shop, most of which was stuff for the cats!
On top of this, I also put in $50 in gas. The price was $1.479, which is down quite a bit. Likely because our new Prime Dictator has deigned to bring a carbon tax down to 0% in a pathetic bait and switch. Marx Carnage made a big show of it, too. With Trump’s public signings of executive orders being so popular, they basically made a set where he sat at a table in front of the media and signed an ” executive order”, to bring the carbon tax down to 0%. The thing is, Canada doesn’t have executive orders. Our version is something called an Order of Council, like they have in the UK. Because the carbon tax is a law, it can’t be removed, so bringing it down to 0% doesn’t actually get rid of the tax. Like I said, a bait an switch. What he signed was basically a fake document for show. An Order of Council has to go through Parliament, which is still shut down. Not that our new Prime Dictator could even be part of any debates in Parliament. He is not an elected Member of Parliament. At best, he can attend on the sidelines as a guest, and watch the proceedings from the gallery. We continue to be a de facto first world dictatorship, and the new guy is even worse than the old guy.
Canada is so screwed right now. While you probably aren’t hearing about it in the mainstream news, most of use are angry with our own government for starting this mess and making it worse. What started out as a joke about Canada becoming the 51st state is looking more and more like a solution. Since we still aren’t getting the election we should be, and haven’t been able to oust our corrupt government, a lot of people actually want Canada to join the US, and Alberta has even sent a delegation to discuss it. If Alberta leaves Canada, the rest of the country will fall apart, since Alberta basically funds the rest of the country through “equalization payments”. Especially to Quebec and Ontario. They’d go bankrupt in a heartbeat.
We are definitely in for some… interesting… times.
Today, started bringing seed starting supplies to the basement, and went through some of my seed inventory for potential seed starts.
In past years, I would have had all sorts of seeds already started. Things have changed a lot with our winter sowing experiment. We have quite a variety of seeds already planted, taking up quite a few beds, which I need to plan around. I’m not going to assume we will have any new beds ready to plant in for this year, and will just focus on what we have ready right now.
With that in mind, here is a video I took while going through my bin of seeds that would be started indoors.
I won’t actually start seeds indoors until at least a week from right now, with some things to be started in April. That should give enough time for my seed orders to come in. Aside from a few varieties of winter squash, herbs and tomatoes I want to start, we will have the new varieties of eggplant, mini bell peppers and a honeydew melon I want to try this year. This time, I will not start as many seeds of each for transplanting this year! Last year, I had not expected to have 100% or near 100% germination rates on so many seeds. We had so many things to transplant, there wasn’t much space left for direct sowing.
I have decided I will go to a Walmart tomorrow to pick up a few things, and will pick up some seed starting mix while I am at it.
I forgot that the aquarium light with the timer on it has a bulb that needs to be replaced; this fixture holds two bulbs. For now, I have brought down the fixture with one larger bulb that came with our big tank. Meanwhile, I’ve placed an order from Veseys for a pair of 4 foot T5 bulbs. I’d had a hard time finding the right bulbs elsewhere and, when I did find them, they were shockingly expensive. Veseys had the best price I’d found, even taking into account the extra shipping cost for bulbs, but by the time I was ready to order them, the size I needed was sold out, and then I simply forgot about it. So those are now ordered and should be on their way soon.
The first day of spring is coming soon. I was planning to do our first “garden tour” video on that day, but I will be going to my mother’s. I might just do it tomorrow, before I head out, instead. We are supposed to have a steep temperature drop, from an expected high of 6C/43F on the first day of spring, to -10C/14F the day after. Things are going to be really slippery around the yard after all the melt! It’s already pretty treacherous in places, while I do my morning rounds.
Anyhow. I hope you enjoy the video. I used a new chest harness my husband got for me to hold the phone I was using to record video. While editing, I did find my voice was a LOT louder than typical when I record video, and had to adjust the audio volume down. When I had to sit down to continue recording, I was concerned things were too close to the camera, but I think it worked out okay, in the end. Please feel free to let me know what you think.
I’ve mentioned before that we are still having to run a hose from our washing machine, out the window of our storm door, to drain into the yard. Even though we had the pipe cleared by a plumber, when we set the washing machine back up to drain into the plumbing, it overflowed and started flooding our entry again.
The plumber had made an easier access to the pipe, so now we can clean it out ourselves. Unfortunately, even though we’ve done it a few times, there seems to be one spot where things build up again very quickly. The kitchen sink still drains fine, but we can hear the water in the drain for the washing machine, and it doesn’t take long before it sounds like water is backing up into that pipe again.
In talking to the plumber, he suggested we might have to cut out and replace a section of that pipe, as we can tell it’s always clogging up in the same spot. The pipe runs under my husband’s bedroom, and he can even hear the difference in the sound of the water flowing through.
Replacing a section of pipe would be far from ideal, as it would be difficult to access.
In the past, we had a similar situation and were able to rig up a toilet brush to part of a chimney sweep to clear out a drain pipe to a septic tank. That worked really well but 1) the pipe was larger than what we’re dealing with here and 2) it was easy to get at.
I figured there had to be something similar out there, so after some searching, I found this. (not an affiliate link). A flexible hose cleaning tool – and it arrived today.
I got the longest one I could find in the size needed.
When I opened the package, is seems smaller than I expected. It’s the size needed for the pipe, but my brain keeps saying, the larger bristle end is too small. What really got me, though, was how soft the bristles are. I don’t know that it’s stiff enough to scrub the insides of the pipe.
Well, we’ll find out, later today. I don’t want to open up the pipe until we’re done using the kitchen sink for a while, so we don’t get splashed. I’ll use the plumber’s snake again, first, then see what this brush can do to clean the insides of the pipe.
It will be really good to finally be able to use the actual drain for the washing machine, instead of running the house out the window. My daughters had laundry day yesterday, but some things needed extra time in the drier. By the time my younger daughter was able to switch loads, the hose out the door had frozen in a low spot and clogged. My daughter had used hot water to thaw it out, but by 2 in the morning, she finally gave up and went to bed, after setting the hose out on the sidewalk, in hopes it would thaw out in the sun, today.
Which it did. Once I was sure water could flow through the sump pump hose we’re using as a drainage hose, I ran a tub clean cycle, which uses hot water, to get the loose ice out. Once the tub clean cycle was done, I could finally bring the hose in and close the inner door. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bitterly cold out last night, and today is much warmer, though still below freezing.
I was able to finally get something else done that I’ve been meaning to for a while. I was able to clean the smoke damage off the mementos I got for my mother, from our little local church that was torched some time ago. The church was too damaged to repair, so there was a service to officially close the church, and people were welcome to take what mementos they wanted. The rest will be properly burned or buried.
I’m still hoping to be able to get a bench and or a pew home, but we have nowhere to safely store anything that big until we can clean the smoke damage off.
Anyhow.
I had selected a couple of small items for my mother and, today, I finally was able to clean them.
The church had the fourteen Stations of the Cross along both sides, and the Twelfth Station in the photo was taken from the wall near where our family pew used to be. The back of it can be seen in the second photo. It was almost completely black with soot from smoke, but did not have any actual fire damage. I used baking soda and water to clean it, gently scrubbing with a nail brush and an old tooth brush. I will later be using mineral oil on the wood, once I’m sure it’s good and dry. It looks dry in the photo, but there’s a possibility water got under the ceramic part while soot was being scrubbed off the sides.
The votive holder is one of many from a stand where people could light a candle and say a prayer. The ones that weren’t taken as mementos were going to be taken to the still active Catholic church in town, where they have a similar, larger set up. The holder had quite a bit of wax in and on it, though very little soot. I set it on parchment paper in the toaster oven on the warm setting until the wax was fully melted, poured off what pooled on the bottom into the garbage, then used paper towel to wipe up the rest, while it was still hot.
I still have other items that need to be cleaned of smoke damage, but as these are for my mother, they had priority!
I was going to be taking my mother to the city on Thursday (today is Monday) for her appointment at the eye clinic, but she called me today about it. She was really unsure about going, but couldn’t make a decision either way. The appointment is not for treatment, but to monitor her macular degeneration, and we already postponed it once. She says she’s not noticing any change in her vision. I ended up calling the clinic and talking to someone about her situation. The receptionist passed it on to the doctor and his assistant, and the assistant called me back later. After explaining the situation some more, she went ahead and cancelled the appointment, making sure to tell me that, if my mother notices any changes, to make another appointment.
I will still be going to my mother’s on Thursday, though. I will probably do some grocery shopping for her, but she also needs help filling out the paperwork for her Life Line set up. I also have some stuff from my brother to drop off – he’d mistakenly left them with me instead of our mother – so I can bring those along with these mementos.
What I haven’t done today was work on the basement some more. I was hoping to set up a temporary table to hold seed starts, but what I was thinking to use is just too big. I might simply use the work station, instead. I didn’t want to set up on top of the new self healing cutting mat, but I’ll figure something out.
For now, I think I’m going to go treat the wood on that cross with a first coat of mineral oil. I expect to do that a few times before it’s in decent shape again.
Okay, a bit of a refresher on this one, regarding our septic pump emergency diverter set up, outside.
The end of the diverter pipe sticks through a hole in the wall by about a foot; maybe a bit more. I never really looked closely before it was covered. The hole itself is less than foot above the ground.
My brother found a couple of 10′ lengths of white, 4″ PVC pipe that fit together. This was set over the diverter pipe to direct the flow away from the house. We set a brick under the 4″, to raise it and hold it up against the diverter, with the edge right up against the wall of the house. We used what we could find to put under the 20′ of pipe so that it wouldn’t bow along its length, while maintaining a downward slope. The very end of the pipe was on a brick to keep it off the ground, so there would be no chance of it freezing closed. Later, I wrapped insulating material around the pipe at the house end, and where it had contact with supports, to further protect the pipe and ensure nothing could freeze in there.
This set up had the effluent drain away from the house, but not that far. With the lay of the land, the water would drain over the frozen ground, towards the corner of the old kitchen garden and pool there.
In the fall, my brother had brought a 6″ black flexible pipe that’s about 50′ long. This was to use on the diverter to direct the flow into the trees, while the ejector was being replaced. We ended up never needing to use it, and I eventually took it to the barn for storage, along with the rest of my brother’s stuff.
When the ejector froze and we set up the rigid PVC pipe for the emergency diverter, I brought out the flexible pipe again, just in case. There was too much snow on the ground to do anything with it, yet. Eventually, I dug a trench in the snow, brought a wide board that had been found and was being stored in the garage to use as a supportive ramp, and set the flexible pipe (I supposed I should be calling it a hose, not a pipe, but whatever…) over more than a foot of the rigid pipe’s end. This is what the end result was like.
I pushed the insulating material back quite a bit to fit the hose on. The ramp is on the brick that had been supporting the end of the pipe, so the top of the ramp is just a bit past the end of the rigid pipe. I’d brought another brick along, expecting to need it to keep the board from bowing, but ended up not needing it. Instead, I set it hear the hose/pipe connection, on the side where it looked most likely to be pushed off the ramp by a cat or racoon or something.
In the second picture, you can see the rest of the hose snaking its way down the snow trench. The effluent could now drain well away from the house.
There were a couple of problems with this.
The main one is that, while it slopes away from the house AT the house, the ground is not level.
At all.
What I would regularly do during my morning rounds was check on the pipe, to make sure it was still tight against the house. I would then check along the hose a few feet with my foot until I could feel the weight of water inside. From just above there, I would use my foot and drag it along, under the hose, to slowly work the fluid to the end. I could sometimes hear ice breaking up and moving along inside, too, and much of the ice would come out the end, too. I usually did this at least twice, sometimes three times. Some mornings, however, were too cold. The warmth of water flowing through the hose, as well as the black plastic heating up in the sun, melted the snow in the trench down to the ground. When it got cold enough, the hose would be frozen to the ground. I didn’t want to mess with it and risk cracking the plastic, so on those days, I’d just leave it. With the hose being 6″ in diameter, I really didn’t need to drain it at all, as there was no way the ice could build up enough in there to block it completely.
Using my foot to drain the hose, however, allowed me to identify two lower spots where more water, slush and ice would collect. After hunting around, I ended up bringing over the covers for a couple of crane crates my brother gave me. The crates have been converted to wall shelves in the garage, and I meant to attach the lids with hinges in such a way that they would swing down and could be used as surfaces. Instead, I have put them under the hose over these low spots. They will get too damaged to use as I intended by the time we’re done using this set up, but this is needed more.
The other issue I realized is a combination of two problems.
One, by the end of the hose, the ground starts to slop upwards again. Enough that some of the effluent would actually flow back down the outside of the hose, rather than all of it flowing away.
Two, the very end of the hose has a curl to it, and it was curling upwards. Water could still flow through, but once the pump stopped, the hose could never fully drain, so there was always a layer of water in the bottom of the hose, even on the more level ground.
There were two possible solutions to this. The easiest was to just rotate the entire hose, so that the end would curl downwards instead of upwards. So I tried that.
I call attention back to that second picture. You see how the hose snakes slightly from side to side?
Well, those bends in the hose stay, even after being rotated. So instead of side to side wiggles, there were up and down humps.
I rotated it back and left it. The side to side wiggles are at least flat on the ground!
The other possible solution was to use something to straighten that curled end. The easiest thing would be to put something long inside, heavy enough to hold the curl down. That was not really an option, though, as anything inside the hose would obstruct the flow of effluent and create a surface for it to freeze around, among other things.
The other way to do it would be to weight it down on the outside. Being a round hose, though, it’s not like I could just put something on top of it; it would just fall off. I needed something that was large enough and shaped so it could fit around the hose, heavy enough to hold it in place and stable enough to not be easily knocked over.
I had yet to find anything that fit the bill, but I wasn’t too concerned about it. Water was flowing through well, and there was no change that enough water would be stuck in the pipe as to freeze and block it completely.
What I hadn’t thought to do was tell my brother these details. It seemed inconsequential.
Yesterday, before we tested the new bypass valve, my brother had gone out to make sure the pipe was still tight against the house. When he came back, he told me he added more support to it, so that the diverter pipe was against the bottom of the larger pipe, not the top.
He then mentioned that the end of the hose was curled upwards. I told him, yes, I had noticed it was.
Then he told me he “fixed” it by carefully rotating the entire pipe.
I told him I’d tried that, but it left me with raised sections of hose where it bends. He concurred with that and said that it was warm enough for that not to be a problem.
Which lead me to believe that the “humps” created by the side to side wiggles in the hose had flattened themselves out. I was surprised by this, because it was still pretty chilly out there, but that black plastic does still heat up in the sun quite a bit. Especially when it’s protected from the wind, like the hose is protected by the walls of the snow trench it runs through.
Then I forgot about it, as we got busy testing the new bypass valve.
Until this morning.
I’d heard the septic pump go off during the night, so when I was doing my morning rounds, I knew it would be a while before it went off again. Still, I made sure to check at various key points, and everything seemed fine.
There was a “hump” in the hose near the end, though.
When I went to try and drag my foot under the hose to see if it needed to be drained (with the temperatures last night, I expected anything in there to be frozen), it wouldn’t move…
… and not because it was frozen to the ground.
It was heavy with ice inside.
I checked around and, as far as I could tell, the last time the pump drained the tank, it did flow out the end, like it is supposed to.
Sort of.
Once the pump stopped, any water that couldn’t make it over that hump just pooled in the hose and froze during the night.
The question was, how full was it? Was that hump high enough that the backed up water filled it completely? I honestly couldn’t tell.
I did have to flatten that hump, though.
After doing some digging around, I eventually found something in the side of the garage we store our lawn mowers and snow blowers in. It was a piece of metal that used to be part of a fluorescent light fixture. It was about 3′ long and shaped to fit around fluorescent bulbs, in angles, not a curve.
It was the best I could find.
I took it over to the end of the hose and, after flattening it a bit, could set it over the humped part. I’d brought a brick over to weight it down, and there was another brick my brother had brought over to set under and support the hose, but the two together were not heavy enough to flatten the hump, so I went and got a flattish rock from by the house that we’ve been using to weigh things down, as needed. While I had flattened the metal piece enough to fit over the hose, it still took some doing to get the weights on it and stay there.
I knew the set up would fall off easily, but as long as it held while water was flowing through, that would be fine.
I then had to wait inside until I heard the pump go off again.
When I did hear it go off, I went to my window to check but, while I can see the far end of the hose, I can’t see if anything is coming out of it. So I opened my window to listen.
I heard splashing sounds, near the house.
Dang.
Of course, the pump shut itself off before I could even get my boots on, but I was soon outside to see what I could see.
Thankfully, the splashing was NOT coming from the pipe where it butts up against the house.
It WAS coming from where I thought was most likely. Where the hose goes over the pipe. Effluent had backed up the ramp until it was coming out the space between the 4″ pipe and the inside of the 6″ hose.
I checked the other end, and it was completely dry. Nothing made it out the other end.
The first thing to do was to get as much water out of the hose as I could. For that, I lifted the hose at the end of the ramp and work my way up, so it could flow out where the water had been draining while the pipe was running. I had to do that a few times before I was satisfied I’d got most of it out.
I then had to do the same thing, in the other direction. No dragging my foot under the hose this time, either. I had to physically lift the hose with my hands and slowly work my way to the end.
Of course, the weights on the hump fell off long before I reached it.
On the plus side, water started flowing out the end well before I reached it, too, which means it wasn’t completely frozen closed.
All the way along the hose, I could feel ice and slush moving around. If that hump had been just a touch lower, water would have been able to get through to the end, I’m sure.
Once I got to the end, I made sure to lift it enough to get a good amount of ice out.
Then I went back and did it again.
It could probably have used a third time, but lifting that slush filled hose while bent over and trying to walk was NOT good for my back. I wasn’t going to risk injuring myself, when I could tell that water would flow through.
The first photo above shows where the water was coming out from the top of the black hose, then draining down towards the corner of the old kitchen garden. You can even see that the water is still flowing over the frozen ground.
I did make a slight attempt to rotate the hose back again, but it’s still too full of slush to bother. Instead, I put the metal piece back and weighed it down again. I have up trying to put the bricks right on top, as they just kept falling off again, so I set them on the sides. The rock was staying on top well enough, at least. The main thing is that the hump is flattened.
You can also see the larger ice chunks I got out of the hose.
Now that it’s weighted down, when the pump turns on again, the relatively warm water should actually help melt and clear away some of the slush inside the hose, opening it up more. It should not back up the ramp to the top of the hose again.
It’ll take a few showers, much washing of dishes and flushing of toilets before the pump is triggered again, though!
Meanwhile, the day continues to warm up, which will also help. Right now, we are up to -9C/16F, but the “real feel” is -3C/27F. Our high of the day is supposed to be -6C/21F. The 10 day forecast shows we’ll have a couple more days – not consecutive – with highs below freezing, then we’ll be going above freezing and staying there. Looking at the monthly forecast, we are expecting to get as warm as 8C/46F before the end of the month. There are supposed to be a couple daytime highs just dipping below freezing in the first couple of days of April, and then that’s it. Daytime highs are supposed to remain above freezing from then on. We’re even seeing highs of 17C/63F predicted for the middle of April, but of course, that far ahead, the forecast will change many times.
I’ve updated my brother about the situation with the hose outside, of course. As we were talking, he told me he’d been thinking about that ejector situation. His thought is that, with how saturated the ground became, because of the leaking old ejector, the ground froze far deeper than normal. Which is certainly possible in an area what was freshly excavated. There’s no way to know until it thaws, though. For that to happen, though, our overnight lows need to stay consistently above freezing for quite a while, for it to thaw out that far down. Unless we get an unusually warm spring, we’re looking at the end of May or into June.
Today, he worked on our septic plumbing again. This after already spending a couple of hours outside, doing things among their stored items, and being sick, too!
A few days ago, they’d gone out for dinner and he’d ordered a “Canadian burger”. Yeah, one of those virtue signaling things so many places have been doing, suddenly pretending to be patriotic because our government and media have told us to hate the US right now. Just a few years ago, the same people were calling Canadians who flew the flag and displayed patriotism racists and Nazis and white supremacists, just like Americans – or at least the Americans they tell use to hate. People were arrested for flying Canadian flags, banned from businesses, their property vandalized and even physically assaulted. Now, suddenly “American style patriotism” is no longer bad. Funny how easily people can spin on a dime and not see their own double standards.
Ironically, the restaurant was a US franchise.
Anyhow, the burger made him incredibly ill. He thinks the beef wasn’t fully cooked and he was hit with e. coli. He said he was still operating at only about 80%.
His 80% is more than a lot of people’s 100%, though! The guy is amazing. I don’t know how he does it!
I had other things to get done before I went back to working on the basement, so I didn’t get to help or watch while he figured out how to install the new bypass. I cleared another section in the new basement enough to mop it, then joined him after I set the blower up to dry the concrete floor. By that, he was pretty much done and ready to start testing. He was quite happy that it worked out much easier than he expected.
The pipe to the ejector now has the T insert in it. Under normal circumstances, effluent would just go straight through this pipe and to the ejector, out by the barn.
In the next photo, you can see the ball valve in the emergency diverter pipe, in the open position.
I was really curious how he would work with that diverter pipe. It had a very strong curve to it, in the wrong direction! What he ended up doing was first, rotating it so that the curve was in the other direction. Then he used his heat gun on a substantial section of it, until he could straighten it out enough that it could be attached to the T. He had to stand there and hold it straight until the pipe cooled enough to hold its new shape.
Of course, he had to cut sections out of both pipes to install the T and the ball valve.
While this was being worked on, the family was concerned about using the water. The septic pump was turned off while he worked, of course, but it had gone off not very long before he started, so there wouldn’t have been very much water in the greywater side of the tank. Any time I got a message, asking if it was okay to flush or shower or whatever, I encouraged them to use plenty of water, so we could have something to test with!
Before testing it, my brother went outside to check the diverter at the house end to make sure nothing got knocked askew while he was manipulating the pipe around. Once that was done and he was back inside, he turned the pump on manually – an easy thing to do, thanks to the second switch he installed for that! – and checked for leaks. There was a tiny leak at the elbow before it goes out of the house, so he tightened the screw clamp and added a second one, just to be safe. There was no leak when he turned the pump on again.
So we knew that effluent was flowing through the open ball valve in the diverter. We could see in the filter that water was flowing, and we could hear it, too.
We didn’t test for long, though, as we didn’t want to actually empty the tank.
The next test was with the valve closed. We were both watching that filter closely and, while there was movement, it didn’t look like it was flowing. The only way to know for sure, though, was for one of us to go to the ejector, while the other turned the pump back on.
My brother went to the ejector, then video called me on Facebook messenger, so we could see and show each other what was going on. Once he gave the go ahead, I closed the ball valve again and turned the pump on.
Nothing happened.
No flow out the ejector.
We waited a while to be sure, before I shut off the pump, then opened the ball valve again.
Which is just awesome. Without the valve, the only way to test if the ejector is working would require switching pipes – then switching back again when the test failed. Not only is that messy, but every time that is done, there is a risk of breaking something.
What this means is that the emergency diverter is now a permanent set up. Once the ejector is working again, we can close the valve, but can be ready to simply open it again, if we have more problems in the future.
We won’t be able to do anything with the ejector until things warm up a lot more. My brother thinks it’s most likely still frozen at the bottom. I think there’s something blocking the venturi valve. Worst case scenario, the pipe from the house itself is clogged, somewhere. That’s more than 300 feet of pipe, and a clog could be anywhere in there!
Either way, we won’t be able to find out until spring thaw.
Until then, the emergency diverter is our life saver!
Once the bypass valve was installed and tested, my brother headed out for home, with plans to visit our mother along the way – and bring her a hot supper to share. No meals on wheels on the weekend, so I’m sure she would appreciate it. I just hope she treats my brother well this visit. She’s really been on about how he was “keeping secrets” from her because they were so quiet about selling their acreage and moving, even though she knew that was why they brought their equipment here to the farm. I think she even forgot that they’d done that. Ah, well. I’ll find out later tonight!
I am quite pleased with how things have gone today. While I don’t have my seed starting set up in the basement yet – quite a bit more work will need to be done down there, still – I did get good progress down there, and was able to reclaim my work station. My brother got the bypass valve installed and, while we were doing that, my daughter was spring cleaning in the kitchen and dining room. She was able to get all the cat hair off the walls, ceiling, cupboard doors, the ceiling fan, pictures on the walls, curtain rods, etc. That alone was a HUGE job. With so many cats, of course there’s cat fur everywhere, but when it sticks to the walls and anything on them, it doesn’t want to come off! It won’t even vacuum off. She had to get right in there and scrub. She did an amazing job, though by the end of it, she was really needing painkillers!
So was I, by the end of it all. I haven’t gone up and down the stairs so many times in one day since we cleared and cleaned out the basements. Yes, I took my prescription painkillers in the morning, but even those can only deal with so much, and I can’t take more during the day, since I save my second allowable dose before bed. Pain is more of a problem when I’m lying down and trying to sleep than during the day. I can put up with it more when I’m up and about. Once I’m in bed, it keeps me from getting sleep. I did take some acetaminophen, though, to help take the edge off, at least.
I have a few last things to do in the basement before I call it for the day. Tomorrow is Sunday, which I try to keep as a day of rest. This will make sure I don’t over do it and put myself out of commission for days. As long as we get something set up for seed starts within the next week, it should be good. Most, if not all, of the seeds I ordered should be in by then.
From there, it’s the fun part: going through all the seeds and choosing which ones to start and when!
Today, I started on cleaning and organizing the basement.
Again.
A few years back, we were able to clear out all sorts of things from the “new” basement – the part that’s under the addition added in the 70’s. Lots of stuff went into the barn for storage until we could figure out what to do with them. Lots went to the dump. Eventually, we got it to the point that we could scrub and sanitize the concrete floor, and set it up into a useable space. We were even able to turn a table down there into a work station that I was able to use for wood carving and other general small building projects.
Then we used it as a maternity ward when Butterscotch and Beep Beep were both pregnant at the same time again.
Then we blocked off access to the old part basement so we could let the case into the new part basement. It became where we kept most of the litter boxes and and food bowls.
The cats, being cats, ended up using pretty much the entire space, as litter boxes. Sadly, that included my work station, causing damage to some of my tools, including some of my carving tools.
Then we had some wet springs and discovered the weeping tile was no longer doing its job. As water seeped through and fans needed to be set up, we had to start moving things wherever we could find the space, to get them out of the water, even though they were already on top of things like floor tiles that we found, to keep them from having direct contact with the concrete.
Eventually, we had to stop allowing the cats in the basement at all, and it’s been quite a disaster ever since.
Which meant we could move the barrier between the basements (there is no door; just a vaguely door shaped hole in the old basement wall), so we no longer have to go upstairs and around to the other door to go from one basement to the other.
It also means we have a large, cat free space.
Right now, my goal is to set up a space where I can start seeds in the last week of March. My original thought was to reclaim the work station and use that.
Well, that didn’t quite work out.
Because of how disorganized things have become, I need to work in stages, and that table was the first stage.
The table itself is a bit rickety, and has a larger sheet of not-plywood on top. After clearing the surface, I decided to take it off completely to see why the the table was so unstable.
It turned out that the surface was two wide boards nailed to the frame. The frame itself has extra cross pieces that allow for long items to be stored underneath – something I’ve found quite handy. There were still a few things under there, so that got taken out, too.
In moving the table around, I found the corners of one board were lifting, so I decided to secure both boards with screws. I used the old nails as guides on where to drill the pilot holes, since the frame they were on hid the supports they were nailed to. On one side, while drilling the pilot holes, I discovered gaps and had to drill new ones about an inch over. Then I had to add a couple more screws at each corner to secure it to the outer part of the frame as well as the supports I couldn’t actually see, underneath.
Securing it with screws did improve the ricketiness, but one corner still seemed to be lifting somehow. I finally tipped it on its side to see what was under there.
Which is when I could see just where these boards came from and, to be honest, it broke my heart a little.
Years ago, my parents bought some property as an investment. The building used to be a general store in the front, with living quarters in the back. The general store itself closed some time in the 60’s. There was a semi-detached storage building (which is now here at the farm), and I remember finding old inventory lists from 1963.
Most of the wall shelves were removed. I have a large section of one against the wall in my bedroom right now. Smaller sections were turned into dividers between the living and dining rooms. Other parts and pieces of them have been turning up in various places around the property.
The wood that was used to make these shelves is really excellent – and very distinctive in their size and colour.
The underside of the table had that distinctive colour. I couldn’t see it on the top, because it had been so scoured and damaged.
Even the larger board I moved looks like it came from this old store. Once I saw the underside of it, there were “shadows” showing it was part of something else. I even remember what it was. There was a multi-tiered display shelf in the old store, and this was the top of it.
Which also explains the cut off corners.
There is another sheet of this same wood that’s even larger that we found while cleaning the basement, and I now realize it would have been a lower level of this display shelf.
It’s such a shame that someone took apart these shelves and used this excellent wood to basically make a scrap material work table, and the surface got so damaged.
I never did find why it still seemed rickety, though. In fact, it handled being moved around quite well.
Once I had it upright again, I realized the narrower size of the table was much easier to reach around, and I considered not putting the sheet of not-plywood back on. However, my husband had picked up a huge self healing cutting mat for the work station, and it was finally going to be used – and it was wider than the table!
So, the top sheet went back on, and it turned out to be just a fraction wider than the cutting mat.
Then I put stuff back on the table, and I now have a work station again.
There is an outlet on a pillar opposite this wall and I’ve got a power bar running from there, across a floor joist in the ceiling, and a number of hooks to hold power cords up and out of the way. This allowed me to use my Dremel and wood burning tool, and now the charger for my drill and driver batteries. The power bar has USB ports, so I can set up a charger cable for my phone, too.
That top board is not attached in any way, so when it was time to put the vice back, I didn’t want it over the cutting mat. It is now on one end and holding the top piece to the table surface together. The top piece is almost exactly the same length as the table.
Before I’d put the table back and starting returning things, I made sure to clean the floor underneath as best I could without actually mopping it. I could see that the bottoms of the table legs had water damage. After looking around for something to protect them, I found my stash of old sour cream containers. I’ve been cutting those up to make plant markers, and had a bunch of them waiting to be used for that. It turns out the table legs fit in them, so we now have protection from water, if we get another wet spring.
Once that was done, I was happy to have a work station again.
However, I still don’t have a place to start seeds!
So I started working on the next section of the basement, at one end, clearing it out and mopping it. We have a low-to-the-ground twin size bed frame one of my nephews made that we painted and have been using for all sorts of things, inside and out. Once the end was mopped, I set it up under the counter was what was supposed to be a bar my late brother started building when he was in his teens and never quite finished. It has an outlet on the “outside” of the counter that we have found quite handy.
The bed frame is now set up under the counter, on bricks to keep it out of any water should we have issues again. I will be storing larger stuff on it, but made sure to plug an extension cord for us to use, as we won’t be able to access that outlet once the things are moved onto the bed frame.
The bed frame’s platform needed to be mopped, too.
After that was done, I set up a blower fan facing that end of the basement and am taking a break while it dries.
Oh! Break time is over! My brother is now here and in the old basement, figuring out how to set up the bypass valve so we can switch between the ejector and the emergency septic bypass. as needed – and not have to remove and switch pipes every time!
As a family, we’re not really dedicated to birthdays. As in, the actual date. Before my husband went on disability and he was still working, we would celebrated birthdays on the weekend before or after the actual date, depending on which was after pay day. The entire week, however, tended to be when the birthday person would get little gifts, or extra special treatment. The day itself was recognized, of course, but we liked to spread it out.
Now that my husband is on disability, his payments come in at the end of the month, so we budget accordingly. Which means we tend to have more birthday months than birthday weeks!
Image generated by WP AI
My older daughter’s birthday is this month. She is really hard to get things for! One regular thing we would do is have the birthday person choose a special celebration dinner. When our income was higher, this was a time when we might go to a specific restaurant that we normally wouldn’t, but dining out for four people hasn’t been something we could afford for a long time. Now that we are out in the boonies, we generally don’t bother and will order takeout from somewhere.
I had already done a birthday take home meal earlier this month, but my older daughter wanted Pizza Hut – and she was paying. Yeah. She insists on paying for her own birthday meal!
It’s still early, but today was when we decided to do pizza day. The birthday girl placed the order online with a pick up time late enough that other stuff could be done first. My younger daughter came along to help out. After a quick stop at the post office to pick up one more package, we headed to the town our doctor’s clinic is in. We got there about an hour early, but there’s a grocery store in the same area, so we could just park and go there, first.
The only thing I needed for general groceries was milk and eggs, plus my daughter spotted some dark coffee; they’ve been running out. The rest was birthday related. I ended up choosing two cakes; a tiramisu cake and a Pina Colada angel food cake trifle. We picked up some ranch and blue cheese dressing to use as dips for the pizza. We got drinks, some Cotton Candy Ice Cream, and their last box of mango Melona bars. As an extra, I decided to try some frozen finger foods for later on. Breaded pickle spears, Italian Mozza Bites and Tempura Yams.
I was going to treat my daughter for her birthday, no matter how much she balked! 😄
By the time we were done and the truck loaded up, we still had almost half an hour before the time set for our order. The location is take out only, but I figured they’d have seating for people waiting for their orders, so we made our way over anyhow. Which worked out, as they were almost done with our order!
Good grief, pizza has gotten expensive. Four large pizzas and three chicken bites bowls, and the total was just under $200 – before tip! A few years back, it was almost half that, and we were getting extra large sized pizzas.
Well, we only do this once a year. Plus, it will feed us for a couple of days, at least. Still… *choke*
Since it is a special occasion, I’ve taken a break from my Lenten fast of sugar and simple carbs.
In other things, I had a chance to chat with the Cat Lady earlier today. She sent me a post made by the woman who was able to provide us with so much donated cat food. It was very generous and much appreciated – we still have wet cat food left from that! The Cat Lady did warn me, though, not to share to much. As the Cat Lady put it, her heart is in the right place, but she causes problems. A few months back, she was “helping” someone caring for a colony, got the province involved, and most of the cats ended up being euthanized. Sadly, it seems to be happening again. There’s a call out for various supplies, fosters, donations for spays and neuters, and so on, for a colony that sounds about the same size as ours, though the number of cats we have showing up can change considerably from day to day, and even feeding to feeding. All great stuff being called for, except for on thing.
She got the province involved again.
The post had mentioned that the cats have winter suitable shelters, but not much else. Well, the Cat Lady knows of this colony. She says the cats are well cared for, and they have lots of excellent shelters. While help would certainly be appreciated – especially with spays and neuters – with the province involved, the person that’s been caring for them is going to get pressured a lot before the province finally steps in and simply wipes them out.
I know that in our municipality, their procedure to “help” people caring for colonies is to simply shoot the cats. It’s pretty much the main reason we don’t try to do any local fundraising drives for spays and neuters. We don’t want it to be generally known, how many cats have been showing up (I’ve seen another tabby that looks like a stranger recently. He has a distinctive Nicky the Nose face; that old tom hasn’t been around for years, but this cat looks like it could be one of his decedents). I want to adopt them out. Not kill them off.
Speaking of spays and neuters, the Cat Lady hopes to book us for three cats, as soon as she gets a chance to call the clinic we’ve been going to. She’s been spending a lot of time at another clinic in the city. The vet that saved Cabbages sold his clinic and went back to India for a while. He has since returned and opened a new clinic, and she’s happily been going to him again. She’s currently dealing with a rescue case that is quite severe. I was quite surprised when she said for three cats. The last we talked about it, she was hoping to be able to get two done. Hopefully, that means donations to her rescue have started to go back up again. Otherwise, it means she’s paying for it out of pocket, which they have done before. They are so amazing!
Meanwhile, I also got a note from my brother. He plans to come out here tomorrow morning. Along with needing to do some stuff among their stored items, he plans to set up “that bypass valve” on the septic diverter. He must have thought he had already talked to me about it, but I had no idea about this. He said that we’ll be able to test out the ejector to see if it’s frozen and, if it is, can switch back to the emergency bypass. Which is an awesome idea! I don’t think the ejector is frozen, though. I think there’s something stuck in the venturi valve. Either that, or there’s a clog somewhere in the pipe to the house. To be able to switch from the ejector to the emergency by pass through a bypass valve instead of having to attach and detach hoses is a brilliant idea! I look forward to seeing what he’s come up with to do this. With all the issues we’ve had with the septic in the 7+ years we’ve been living here, having that bypass is a godsend.
Aside from that, I’m planning to make a dump run tomorrow. Time to finally get rid of that broken microwave! I’m glad we replaced it with the multi-function toaster oven. The girls have been using it more than they’ve been using the oven! Very handy! Tomorrow we’re expecting to have a high of only -8C/18F. Not bad, but quite a drop from today, where we ended up hitting 4C/39F, which was higher than was forecast. Things were melting all over the place! It’s expected to be almost a week before we see highs above freezing again. Nothing to complain about, though.
It seems so very strange to be sitting here and realizing it’s almost 6pm right now, and we’ve got bright sunshine outside. I’ve gotten so used to the sun setting between 4:40 and 5pm, it feels almost wrong for the sun to still be up. Of course, we just had daylight saving time a few days, which would account for some of that, but I was getting this sense even before the switch.
Before I go on, though, we must have the cuteness!
Would you look at those adorable faces! Clarence and Cheddar.
You’d never know from the photo that Clarence is quite the troublemaker. 😁😄 One of his favourite things to do is run and jump onto my office chair before I can reach it to sit down. He will then roll onto his back and look at me, like he’s all innocent. 😄
Anyhow…
Today has been a pretty quiet day, though I made a discovery this morning, while I was outside feeding the cats this morning.
For some time now, I’ve been finding frozen throw up on the ground here and there, with roundworms in it. Surprisingly large and distinctive looking things! On learning that Button needed to be treated for worms 3 times before he was clear of them – and then he suddenly grew to the size he should have been for his age – I just sort of figured it was from one of the tiny cats. There are three small ones, plus one more that’s a bit bigger, but not by much. My bets were on The Grink, a black and white, but the other three white and greys were candidates, too.
While going to the isolation shelter with kibble, I just happened to be in time to see a cat that had finished throwing up, and yes, the throw up had worms in it. The cat, however, was not any of the ones I thought it would be! It was a tabby that’s about the same age as my suspects. It’s the one that was all sick and stuffy, and allowed us to treat him, last fall. He is now somewhat socialized. He’s quite a bit larger than the suspects, which is why I hadn’t considered it might be him.
In a way, I’m glad it’s this one, since he is socialized enough that the chances of treating him are much higher. The Cat Lady was going to try and get some medication for us, but 1) we weren’t sure which cat needed to be treated and 2) if it turned out to be one of the more feral ones, we wouldn’t be able to use it anyhow. Of course, it’s also possible more than one cat has been leaving evidence of roundworms frozen in the snow, so that may still be true.
We had a Colorado Low making its way up today which, for our area, meant we did get a pretty good snowfall shortly after I’d gone back inside, but nothing major. The south part of the province got a lot more than we did. My husband’s bubble packs were delivered late this morning, and it had been snowing a while by then. The current pharmacy delivery driver is also a school bus driver; I see him go back and forth past our place, every weekday, on the trail cam files. He starts his deliveries after he’s parked his bus in the morning, and told me about the different areas he’d already been to, and still had to go to. By the time his deliveries were done, he would be going straight back to the bus for more driving! Deliveries are only one day a week, but it does make for a long day of driving for him! Thankfully, the road conditions were still pretty good, and the snow stopped not long after.
I did end up going out later this afternoon. Several packages had arrived earlier than tracking said they would, including a large one for my husband, so I got a daughter to come along and help load it into the truck. It was not at all heavy, but awkward – and fragile! My husband was able to get himself a larger monitor for his computer. It’s a gaming monitor, with a curved screen, but he got it mostly for reading electronic books. With his disability, he spends a lot of time on his computer, and he was having a very hard time being able to see on his old monitor. This one is much, much easier on his eyes. The other monitor is still good, though. My daughters both have dual monitors for their desktops; an essential for my older daughter as she works on commissions. One of her monitors is quite old and starting to die, so she will have a much newer monitor to replace it.
Speaking of which, my older daughter has a birthday this month. She has chosen Pizza Hut take out for her birthday dinner. It’s a bit early, but we will probably be doing that tomorrow. While I’ve given up sugar and simple carbs for Lent, exceptions are made for special occasions – like birthdays!
As I write this, we are at -4C/25F and haven’t reached our high of the day yet – and it will not get any colder through the night. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to have a high of 2C/36F, then it’s supposed to drop below freezing again. So tomorrow will be a good day for the drive to pick up birthday pizza! We’re trying a different location this time, and will be going to the town our new doctor is in. In fact, the Pizza Hut is right near the clinic – and a grocery store. So I’ll be taking advantage of that to pick up a few things, including a birthday cake. Or a cream pie. Or cheesecake. My younger daughter will be with me, so she will help me choose. 😊
All in all, I’ve been quite enjoying another nice, quiet day! I admit, though, I’ve been procrastinating terribly. I want to set up an area in the basement to start seeds, but I just haven’t been able to get to it. There isn’t a lot my daughters can do to help me, since I haven’t quite decided how I’ll be setting up – I need to consider that, if we have a wet spring, water is going to seep through the concrete even in the new part of the basement, which has weeping tile, which isn’t doing its job anymore. That means setting up pedestal fans, box fans and blower fans all over, again.
The main issue, though, is the stairs. Stairs and my knees are not a good combination. Especially if I’m going to be carrying anything.
The Re-Farmer 