I think this is the first time in 9 years blogging here, that I outright forgot to make my daily post!

So here I am, at past 2am, making up for it. 😄

Actually, it’s past 3am.

Our province no longer does daylight savings time, but not all our devices are connected to services that have figured that out. I have an old tablet that’s used only to display the weather, time and date. It, and my desktop, think we’ve changed time. Our phones, however, didn’t change. In theory, we should be able to manually change the time. The old tablet was my husband’s and we both tried to change it. It didn’t stick. I haven’t even tried on my desktop.

The funny thing was when I went online to confirm the time for our province – and got two different official answers!

Too funny!

Anyhow…

It was a lovely day outside tod… er… yesterday, and today is supposed to be even warmer. It’s also started to rain in the evening and it supposed to continue all day today. Most of the prairies right now is also under a fog advisory, with near 0 visibility in places.

I had a nice surprise yesterday, in the early afternoon. I got a message from my brother letting me know he’d just visited our mother and would be coming out here. I had a chance to go out and talk to him for a while. My mother, he told me, was once again complaining about the internet radio he got for her, because it’s all just one station.

Yup. She reprogrammed the buttons again.

He went over it with her again, explaining to just push the buttons, don’t push and hold. She isn’t even holding for long. He told me he’d actually contacted the company he got the radio from (again; he’d needed to talk to them quite a bit while trying to get it to connect to her favorite radio station), recommending a firmware update. He suggested that they make it so you have to hold the button for 5 seconds to program it, rather than the 1 second or so it is now.

He’d also spent some time working on her wheelchair. She says the staff is saying that it’s hard to push her in it. This is the same folding wheelchair that was my late father’s when he spend his final months in this same nursing home. The front wheels, my brother told me, were very wobbly. He thought they had always been like this, but I remembered cleaning the wheelchair before taking it to my mother, and oiling all the moving parts because they had become stiff and, in some places, starting to rust. So there was probably some play in the wheels, but nothing like what he was finding. He ended up McGyvering it for now, but he thinks it’s the bushings that need replacing. My mother has been asking for a new wheelchair, though, so he had showed her some pictures and I think she picked one.

Of course, she gave my brother a hard time about a lot of things, and he’s very worried that she’s going to do something stupid that he’s going to have to fix. I tried to reassure him by reminding him of our conversations with doctors while she was still at the hospital, then later with the nurses at what should be an annual meeting at the personal care home. It is officially noted that my mother no longer has the cognitive ability to make legal decisions or sign any legal papers. If she does, nothing is legally binding. I think the reminder helped him relax a bit. She had already stabbed him in the back so badly a few years ago, and there is nothing he can legally do to fix it. She still doesn’t understand how badly she screwed herself up at the same time. As her PoA, all he can do is try and hold the pieces together, while she remains oblivious to how much he does for her.

One of the things he did as we were talking was clear the maple suckers that had regrown behind the pump shack. Power to their caravan is sourced through that back wall, and he wanted to make sure it was all clear. He was going to clear the stump at the other end, but I asked him not to. I had “harvested” those in the spring, so they were a lot smaller, and I told him that is my coppice and I’ll take care of it in the spring and use them. So he left them for me.

After a while, I had to head inside, though I did get out again to do my walkabout before the rain started. At one point, I started getting all sorts of gate camera notifications and discovered my brother, sweetheart that he is, added some new fence posts to replace a couple of rotted ones that wouldn’t stay up anymore. When they brought their stuff out here after selling their property, it included a whole bunch of fence posts. He has a post pounder, too, which we don’t, and that made the job a lot faster. Even with an injured arm! He told me he got an MRI recently, and I got the story behind it. He had torn his bicep – three years ago!!!! – and only now was able to get to a doctor to have it checked. Not sure what his next steps are, but he’s been using that arm in pain all this time. To see him moving around, you’d never know the arm was injured.

My family is notorious for that. It’s partly why the girls are so severe with making sure I stick to my recovery restrictions. 😄

My brother was able to finish what he’d come to do and head out before the rain started up in the evening, though we’d had light rain on and off before then. We’re not getting anything heavy, but it should be enough that we won’t need to water the haskaps and the little spruces still in pots. It also means we’ll continue to have much warmer temperatures, including overnight. As I write this, we’ve been at our high for today of 11C/52F, and it’s supposed to stay like this all day. Overnight temperatures are supposed to stay above freezing for a couple more nights, and even after that, in the 10 day forecast, we’re expected to just barely dip below freezing overnight.

Which means we don’t need to put the hoses away yet. We just need to make sure the water is shut off and the spray nozzles are open for the night.

I am so appreciating our very mild fall, and holding out for an equally mild winter. I don’t mind the snow so much – we need that winter moisture for the spring – but I could really do without the sub-arctic temperatures!

Thank you, Super El Nińo!

The Re-Farmer