Okay, let’s start with the good stuff!
I’ve been feeding the outside cats a bit later every day, simply because it’s dark for so much longer. Which means getting through the old kitchen door with hungry cats and kittens swirling under my feet can get pretty dangerous! My younger daughter was on cat herding duty this morning. I can get through the door with the kibble bowl and avoid stepping on cats (barely), but I can’t also stop them from running into the old kitchen or close the door behind me at the same time! So I just try to get through as quickly as possible and start dropping food into trays to get their attention, while a daughter herds kittens making a mad dash through the door back out again until she can close at least one of the doors.
Later on, after the cats were fed, I’d done my rounds and I popped into the sun room to get some pruning sheers, I found this.
A great big bowl of kitties! Sir Robin seems content to be snuggled up with seven littles!
After the chat I had with the rescue, where they were trying to get an idea of how many cats we have, I did a head count as best as I could, of all the cats and kittens I could see. Usually, I try to count just the adults, as it’s so hard to spot the running around kittens at times. I think I got a total of 35, but I’m not 100% sure. I am sure that there were some “missing”, but I may also have counted some of the kittens twice.
We’re going to be warm for the next while, so this morning I uncovered the winter squash and watered the few things left to water, including the sunflowers, which are blooming more and more!
The sunflower in the first photo had been chomped by a dear. It sent up two new shoots, which then branched out more, so now it has four or five stems reaching upwards. All the flowers in the first photo are from that one plant.
The second photo is from the one that got flower buds developing at the base of almost all the leaves. I couldn’t fit them all in a photo what would fit on Instagram. “Only” eight blooming seed heads are visible in that photo!
The last photo is of the tallest sunflower. So pretty!
I still have no idea if we’ll get any viable seeds out of these. We have almost no pollinators around these days. At least not the flying types. This past smoky summer, with drought and heat waves, was brutal on everything. There are still other types of pollinators, but I don’t tend to see them on the sunflowers. We shall see how it works out.
I’m happy to finally see some colour on the Cosmos flower buds. There are so few buds at all! Most of the plants don’t seem to be developing any at all, even though they are quite tall and healthy looking, other than a bit of frost damage on a few.
I’m even happier to see so many of the memorial asters blooming. I’m pretty sure the plants are supposed to be much bigger (the nasturtiums were much smaller than normal, too), but they seem to be doing okay. If all goes well, I’ll be able to harvest seeds from them before the hard frosts hit.
Speaking of which, this is why I went back for the pruning shears.
Those are all the onion seed heads in the trellis bed. They were starting to open and I decided to bring them in to finish off indoors, so I don’t lose too many seeds into the bed itself. I found so many tiny onions while working on the bed in the spring, from seeds lost last year!
The other bowl is the driest of the carrot seed heads. There are still more on the plant that were quite green, so I’ve left them for now. We even still have some carrot flowers.
I’ve got quite a collection of seeds “curing” in the living room now. I need to settle in one of these evenings and package them up soon.
Once done outside, I came in for breakfast. I just sat down when I got a notification on my phone that there as a new voice mail. My phone never rang.
Yes, it was home care.
I’ll have to get back to that, though. I’m still shaking my head over the whole thing.
I was booked to drop off the courtesy van and pick up the truck for 1:30. I left early so I could fill the van’s gas tank (as required) and put it through a car wash (not required, but it was getting pretty covered in gravel dust already). I still got to the autobody shop quite early. As I was driving in, I could see a truck that looked like it might be ours, but I wasn’t 100% sure until I spotted my phone holder on the dash.
The truck was so clean, I barely recognized it!!!
I headed in to switch keys, sign what needed to be signed, and pay what needed to be paid. The final damage, including the “betterment” cost, insurance waiver for four days and the deductible, was $720 and change.
If this were not covered by insurance, it would have cost us almost $1500.
I am really happy with the work done!
I’m glad I went with the bed liner stuff instead of regular paint. It looks really good, and I like that it has a texture and won’t be as slippery anymore. The inside of the tail gate was already coated with that, so it even matched that.
Then I got into the truck. Wow!!! They actually cleaned out the whole thing! The truck hasn’t been this clean on the inside since we bought it!
Once I was parked at home, I opened up the tail gate to check out the new cover. The latch to free it is much easer to find than the old one’s was. It rolled up nice and easy, and at the cab end, there are loops. Under the cover are straps with hooks to go into the loops. Waaaaayyyy easier to fasten then the buckles the old cover had!
That was about it for differences between old and new that I could see.
The trip to get the truck was almost enough for me to reduce my blood pressure after this morning.
The voice mail from home care was to let me know that the person scheduled to do my mother’s 9:30am meds today had called in sick.
It was past 9:37 when I was listening to the message.
She scheduler told me that they did find someone to cover it, but he wouldn’t be able to get to my mother’s until 10:30. She was concerned it might be late and wanted to know if I preferred to cover it myself. She wanted me to call back, but said she would schedule the 10:30 visit, just in case.
She didn’t leave a number.
Since my phone never rang (which means my Wi-Fi calling needs to be reset again), there was no caller display number. I couldn’t call her back. It would have been to give the go ahead for the late visit, anyhow, so I wasn’t too worried about it.
Being past time for her med assist, I was more concerned about calling my mother to let her know they’d be late.
When she answered, she told me she had just finished her breakfast. I don’t think she’d noticed they were late, yet.
I told her what the situation was and that someone would be coming, just at 10:30, instead.
She started making disparaging comments about how they call in sick so often.
Then she started going on about how we need to stop leaving her to strangers to take care of her. We need to take care of her. All weekend, and no one even phoned her.
…
…
I told her, my brother and I were AT HER PLACE on Saturday. It’s like she completely forgot that I came in to do her meds, grocery shopping and some housekeeping, just the day before yesterday, plus the surprise visit from my brother, and our taking her angel statue when we left, at her request.
When I told her that, she paused a moment, but just kept on going.
She was feeling sick. She’s been feeling sick for days. I tried asking her, sick in what way? but she got mad and told me to let her speak.
It turns out she meant her breathing, which makes everything else worse. So she was feeling bad overall, but blaming her breathing.
Then she told me she used the inhaler that I’d left out of the lock box for her, and was feeling SOOO much better, so she’d decided she will keep using the “puffer”.
…
…
I told her, she could finish that one off, but she no longer has a prescription. Because she’s been using it for a long time (more than a year) and it wasn’t helping.
Oh, but this one’s from the hospital, not the other one, and the one from the hospital works so much better.
I told her, they are the same medicine. The only different is how it’s released. Inside, it’s the same medication.
Oh… she says. Well I’ll still take it.
I reminded her that when I got her refill last time, she freaked out at me over how much it cost. I can afford it, she says (she could afford it before, too, but that didn’t stop her from yelling at me because it wasn’t free).
This went on for a while and I was starting to lose my patience. We do all we can to help her, and she keeps sabotaging our efforts. I told her I’d done a lot to get things the way she wanted, talking to the doctor, etc., and now she’s messing with everything again.
Ah, but this is my mother, so she took that to mean that I was complaining about how doing all that I do to take care of her is just too much for me. It really should be my brother doing all this, because he’s got the “biggest piece of the pie” (meaning, he now owns the farm). She has zero understanding that the farm is a burden for him, not a benefit, even with us helping as much as we can by living here, plus she thinks that transferring the ownership to him basically means he should be her slave, at her beck and call at all times.
My brother is on a flight across the country for his work right now. He works in internet security, at an international level. She has no clue how stressful or important his work is. All she wants is for him to be available to her at all times, and obey her every command. She’s been pretty blunt about that expectation, too. All because she transferred ownership of the property so it wouldn’t be part of the will anymore, in hopes our vandal would stop harassing her. Which he hasn’t. He just thinks she gave the property to me, for some reason. At least he can’t contest ownership of the property in the will, because she no longer owns it. Instead, she now thinks she owns my brother.
*sigh*
Then she started begging, pleading, for us to get her into a nursing home. Which we’ve been trying to do for more than a year, now. As she started that, she suddenly started talking about how Canada is turning into an African country, and this is a bad thing. I kept asking her, what does this have to do with being in a nursing home? She just kept repeating about Canada turning into an African country, then shifted to, it’s about her health. She needs to have people around her. She could start screaming.
???
Eventually, she was able to tell me that if she were in a nursing home and having troubles at night, she could start screaming, and someone would come to help her. But where she is now, she could start screaming, and no one would come (which has actually happened). I told her, that’s why you have the Lifeline. If you need help, push the button.
The entire conversation was very confusing and all over the place, with a lot more than what I’m including here – and all I was wanting to do was let her know her morning med assist would be an hour late.
I finally told her, again, I was calling to let her know her morning med assist would be late, adding that my breakfast was getting cold (sometimes, that works), and cut the call off. I just couldn’t handle the call anymore. There was no reasoning with her in any way.
While I was working on this post, I called and left a message with the mental health assessor that had come out this past Tuesday, mentioned that I had just found out the appointment had been interrupted by our vandal. I mentioned I had a phone call of concern just this morning and wanted to talk to her about it.
I do have my medical appointment in the city tomorrow, though, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to connect with her. If she’s able to call before I had to leave, that would be great (I did get a time frame). Otherwise, it might be a few days.
We are very much at a loss with my mother. She really does need to be in a nursing home or supportive living, but we’ve done everything we can to get her in. Unfortunately, she’s sabotaging a lot of our efforts by refusing the home care help she should be getting, like meal assists, dress assists, bathing assists. Not that I blame her for not wanting it, but if she can’t handle home care doing this stuff for her, how is she going to handle nursing home staff doing this stuff for her? Meanwhile, because she is NOT getting all this extra care that she actually needs, she’s viewed by the system as being too able bodied and independent to qualify for a spot in home car.
*sigh*
My brain is tired.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 