It’s a running joke about how cold it gets in Canada. The thing is, in much of the country, we get as hot in the spring/summer as we do cold in the fall/winter.
Today being a prime example. In the winter, we hit temperatures colder than -30C/-22F/ Now, we’re hitting temperatures above 30C/86F. The forecast was for a high of 31C/88F, but we easily hit 33C/92F.
I did the evening cat feeding and round not too long ago.
The temperature in the portable greenhouse was off the scale – and then some!
I did not know the needle could keep going like that. This would be what? 70C/158F? 80C/176?
I started off misting to cool things down, but that wasn’t going to be enough. All the bins and trays of seedlings got taken out and set in the shade next to the portable greenhouse. The new bags of seed potatoes were at the bottom, where it would have been cooler, but I moved them out and into the shade, too.
Cats were splayed all over the place. Inside the cat house would have been very hot, but those kittens are big enough to leave on their own and move to cooler places with the creche mamas.
There’s some video if you scroll through to the next file above.
It was the littles that were the problem. In fact, it was downright scary!
Poirot put her babies into a cat carrier in a shelf that’s supporting the platform that runs across that side of the sun room. For that time, it was a nice, cozy and protected spot with a soft blanket on the bottom.
Not good at all for today.
When I first stepped into the sun room to start gathering the bowls we use for wet cat food for the kittens, I saw that Poirot was not with the kittens. Nothing unusual there.
What was unusual was that all three kittens were panting.
Cats do not pant unless something is very wrong.
After moving things around for access, I took the carrier off the shelf and into the old kitchen. There, my daughter and I took the top of the carrier off completely. She had already brought out a frozen water bottle from the freezer, but we needed to cover it with something, and the knit blanket in the carrier had to go. I got a puppy pad and laid it on the bottom of the carrier, and the frozen water bottle was tucked under it at one end. While I held the carrier, with the distressed kittens inside, my daughter dug around in the freezer and found another frozen water bottle. That got tucked under the other end of the puppy pad.
I had moved out the plant stands the cats used to jump up the shelves, and I tried putting the carrier on the concrete floor there. When Poirot came in for her babies, though, she went right past them and up to the now empty shelf where she was looking for her babies. She ran off when I came close. I ended up putting the carrier back there, and she went right in to her babies.
Unfortunately, not only was it still hot there (the wall thermometer was reading almost 40C/104F, but the sun was hitting that spot, too. In the second file is some video I took. Poirot was trying to nurse her babies and just panting from the heat! I ended up getting a small plastic bowl with some water with ice cubes in it for her, but she wouldn’t let me get close. I didn’t want to chase her away from her babies, so I put it beside her food bowl.
She didn’t stay long. Not only was she too hot being there, but her own body heat would have made it worse for her babies.
While giving her time to be with her babies and figuring things out, I got the hose going, letting it run for quite a while to get rid of the scalding hot water from the hose sitting in the sun. I refreshed water bowls with cold water (our well water gets very cold, even in summer), misted plants, watered garden beds, and hosed down sidewalk blocks and concrete steps to cool them down. Which gave me the idea to wet the floor in the sun room. There are indoor/outdoor mats on the concrete floor and I went those down, so that the evaporation would help cool the room.
With Poirot away from her babies again, I moved the carrier to the floor, then set her special food and water bowls beside it. At first, the kittens were splayed out on the bottom of the carrier. When I came back later, they were as you can see them in the last image in the slideshow above. All together, with their heads against where the frozen water bottle is on one side of the carrier.
Looking at my desktop’s weather app, apparently we hit 35C/95F at about 4pm today. We are slowly starting to drop, but our overnight high is still expected to be around 19C/66F. Tomorrow – Tuesday – we’re still supposed to get even hotter then today, yet by Friday, we’re still expecting a high of only 4C/39F, with an overnight low of -1C/30F or -2C/28F, and a mix of rain and snow. After that is supposed to be another week of highs barely above 10C/50F, and overnight lows above freezing, but not by much.
On the plus side, there are now more days were we can expect rain (or snow), which will be helpful with all the wildfires going on right now. Most of them are now listed as under control.
Oh, dear.
I just checked the critter cam in the sun room.
Poirot’s babies are no longer in the carrier.
I hope she at least put them into the cat cage or something!
Time to go look!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 