It was a remarkably busy day at Costco, for the middle of the week. I didn’t get everything I had on my list, and still broke $800.
This is what $808.34 looks like.
It really doesn’t look like much at all. 😞
I put the cat food on a separate bill again.
It was just cat food, too. I didn’t get their puppy pads again, as we still have more than half a case, though I will be getting more of the larger size when we hit Walmart in a couple of days.
At first, I got eight 9kg bags of the Kirkland brand, because I didn’t see the 11.6kg Whiskas bags. Those turned out to be moved to the end of the aisle. When I saw they were on sale, I put back 4 of the Kirkland bags and replaced them with the Whiskas. At $8 off, I considered replacing all of them, but decided against it, so the cats would have a variety.
I got two cases of the wet cat food, which has gone up in price by a dollar since last month.
Then there was the stuff for us.
When the cashier confirmed my butters, it turned out I’d accidentally got both salted and unsalted. I took them out of the same box, so they should have been all the same! I’m glad he caught that.
For other dairy, we got marble and Old cheddar cheese, plus cream cheese and sour cream.
I didn’t get a double flat of eggs, like I usually do, since we still have lots of eggs we got from my homesteading friend.
We got our usual Kirkland brand of TP, plus a case of facial tissue that was on sale.
Among the things we don’t always get every month was a case of toothpaste, a case of toothbrushes, extra strength ibuprofen, lactase and Vit. B12. I also got a 6 pack of baking soda; we finally got near the end of the last 6 pack I got!
In breads, I just got four packs of tortilla wraps and a 2pk of rye bread.
For meats, I got a bit of a treat; a panini variety pack of sliced meats. I got a package of large breakfast sausages, pork belly, a 3 pack of whole chickens and a chub of ground beef. I also grabbed a 3 pk of Spam for the pantry.
Then there was the mayonnaise and peanut butter, and a bag of potatoes.
That’s it.
I didn’t even finish going through all the aisles, as my budget for this shop was about $800.
Aside from this, I picked up $30 of gas on the way into the city, at $1.389/L That put me back above half a tank. I filled the tank at Costco. At $1.299, it cost me $66.22 to fill the tank.
After the truck was loaded, I swung by a Superstore to get some sort of lunch I could eat while driving. I ended up getting a ham sandwich and a bottle of water, but while looking for something more interesting to drink, I found they had Beaver Buzz in stock, and Citrus – my favorite flavour – was on a “buy three” sale, so I got three of those. I’m not sure what happened to the receipt, but that totaled $17 and change.
I did my Costco shop today, and pretty much as soon as everything was put away, I headed outside to do as much mowing as I could. We were expecting a prescription delivery today, so I had the gate open. I took advantage of that to mow the driveway. Not just the sides of the driveway, but the driveway itself! It’s got so much grass and weeds coming through the gravel.
One of the areas I tried to mow through was behind the garage. This is where we have had water more than ankle deep for so long. There isn’t open water right now, but it’s still very wet. I really should have waited before trying to mow, but I just can’t trust the forecasts about when the next rain will hit us again.
The mowers – both the push mower and the riding mower – are having the hardest time cutting the grass. it’s so wet and slippery, it just bends rather than cuts. I end up having to set the mower blades as low as possible, and with the riding mower, I still even up having to reverse repeatedly.
Which means I was spending quite a bit of time behind the garage.
Which also means, I finally got to see the garage kittens, for the first time!
I just assumed that Adam or Brussel (or both) had a litter in there, because that’s sort of where I see them hang out the most. The kittens were out and about behind the garage, and I saw them dash behind some metal sheets we have leaning against the back, when I came by with the big noisy machine. I never got photos of those ones – but I did see one of the sun room kittens playing with them!
The white and grey mama that I think is mother to the white and grey kittens that have disappeared from the sun room (we have so many white and grey cats, it gets hard to tell them apart at times) has seriously attached herself to Adam. Every time I see Adam walking around, this white and grey is right beside her, pushing against her, rubbing her face against her, and generally being exceedingly affectionate. Adam, on the other hand, seems to just tolerate her. 😄
At one point these two were crossing the yard when I had to shut the riding mower off briefly – followed by a puffy white and black kitten! I had to get the mower started again and continue. The mamas ran for the back of the garage, but the kitten went for the chain link fence and ended up running around the garage.
I didn’t finish the mowing I hoped to do; the riding mower just couldn’t handle it anymore, and I was getting too tired to continue with the push mower. Plus, I’ll been going to town to get more gas, tomorrow. As I was putting things away, I saw Adam again, heading towards the house – being followed by one of the sun room greys! This one has a distinctive dark grey coloring, with white around “eyeliner”, so there was no mistaking it.
When everything was put away, I was going to go into the house through the sun room.
One of the greys was loafed in front of the door, while Adam nursed her babies, just inside.
It looks like she has four babies.
Meanwhile, I’d seen at least three more when I checked behind the garage before heading to the house!
I have no idea how many different kittens I actually saw today, but I’m glad that Adam was willing to bring hers to the sun room. Hopefully, the others will be brought over, too. Especially Broccoli’s two, from the old garden hedge, and Caramel’s two, from under the tarp covered pile of boards beside the house.
It will probably be a few more weeks before we have an idea of just how many kittens there are.
It would be awesome if we could actually socialize them, and adopt them out!
Today, I finally opened the box with our new drain auger. Given the weight of it, I just went ahead and cut the box apart at a couple of corners. The box was made of very heavy duty carboard, yet it was pretty beat up during shipping!
The auger, however, was well padded and protected, and completely unharmed.
Pretty much as soon as I lowered the sides of the box, Ghosty was inside it, checking things out!
In pulling out the various items packed with the auger, included a pair of work gloves, I found the instruction manual and paused to take a look.
The manual was for a different model. One with a different frame supporting the auger, and two large wheels at the back, so it could be pushed around like a hand truck. This one has a frame that’s more compact, and four wheels that need to be attached. Two of them have brakes on them, so those would go onto the back. There are no instructions on how to attach them. I assume that’s what the Allen key is for.
I didn’t have time to fuss with it right then, so it’s been left for now. Once the wheels are on, we need to figure out how to get it safely into the old basement. My husband suggested using a rope, which might actually work out and allow us to take it down the old basement stairs securely, instead of taking it to the new basement stairs and going down that way. The old basement stairs are oddly narrow and steep, to fit in the space, and I don’t have a lot of confidence in how strong they are. The new basement stairs, however, have a door that swings over the stairs, blocking access to the hand rail, instead of into the entry. You wouldn’t believe how unsafe that makes it. When I was a kid, I never saw a problem, but now that I’m old and broken, and have a problem with stairs, it’s really noticeable.
Ah, well. We’ll figure it out, one way or the other!
I was very happy for a pleasant breeze to cool me down while I was working. I got the last of the bed turned and weeded, the boards laid out to mark where the log frame will go, and the soil evened out and leveled off as best I could.
Since I was wanting to finish off the onions and shallots, I decided to work in a grid instead of rows. I marked off 5 rows lengthwise first,, about 3 or 4 inches apart, then made cross rows, also every 3 or 4 inches apart.
Once the lines were marked out, I used the jet setting on the hose to drive water into all the marked lines. It makes it messier to transplant into, but it evens out the soil and gives deeper moisture for the roots to reach for.
After that, I just laid out the transplants where the lines crossed, starting with the yellow bulb onions at one end. I got to about half way down the bed, maybe a little more, before I finished them. Then I planted the shallots at the opposite end. Last of all, I used the grass clipping mulch I’d removed earlier today, to scatter a light mulch around the transplants.
I was very happy to see that this left me an open space where something can be direct sown. I’ll go through my seeds to see what I’ve got that will mature in less than 2 months, since we basically just have July and August left for a growing season.
This is really late for onion transplants. My intention had been to interplant them with other things, but that doesn’t really work out with the winter squash and melons, since those will get bigger and overshadow the onions. At least I got some in with the tomatoes.
We shall see if the weather holds long enough for all these onions to fully mature!
I’m now going to let my self breathe for a bit. I have some direct sowing to do, including where the spinach was planted, and that’s about it. After a break, I’ll get back to working on the trellis beds. Hopefully, we’ll dry out a bit and the winds will die down, and we’ll be able to harvest more logs for the raised bed frames. The forecast of rain to start this evening and continue for about 4 hours has changed. Now it’s saying we’ll get some rain for about an hour, around 10pm. On Friday, though (today is Tuesday), they’re still saying rain all day, starting about 5am Friday morning, through to 1am on Saturday morning. Aside from the brief rain we’re supposed to get tonight, though, we’re not supposed to get any rain at all until Friday.
I might actually be able to do some mowing! How exciting!
In starting on the last bed that needs to be shifted, I broke up and somewhat leveled the ends and one side, so I could lay out the first boards. The bed that is being shifted had quite a lot of grass clipping mulch around the edges to try and keep the weeds at bay – or at least easier to pull. In the previous bed I’d done, I worked the grass clippings into the soil as it was shifted, but this one had enough that I removed most of it, instead.
Then it was time to start loosening the soil that needs to be shifted, weeding as I went along. It has been taking longer than I expected. I’m shocked by how far from the trees I’m fining elm roots. They have reached pretty much all the way to the end of the bed! I’m not trying to pull them all out, since the bed it going to be raised higher than before, but I could get some of it. Particularly the roots that would get caught up in my garden fork as I loosened the soil!
I suppose it would have been better if the soil in this bed got sifted, but it’s still too wet for that and would just clog up the hardware cloth.
I got maybe a third of the bed weeded and partially shifted before I had to stop for breakfast and hydration. I’m not looking forward to going back out. It’s about 9:30am, and we’ve already reached our expected high of 19C/66F. While my weather app says the humidex is also 19C, when I’m out in the full sun, it sure feels hotter, even though the morning sun is just barely reaching above the spruces while I’m out there! The winds are picking up again, too, and I swear I heard thunder in the distance. There are no storms in our forecast. We’re expecting showers starting around 7pm. It’s actually supposed to start cooling down a few degrees from now on. I think I’ll actually give myself a couple of hours before heading outside again. Now that I’ve got the big stuff done around the bed, the rest shouldn’t take long, and I should be able to get most, if not all, of those onions transplanted when it’s cooler, and before the showers start.
The rest of the garden seems to be holding out well. I’ve removed the mosquito netting that was over most of the melons in the first trellis bed. They are starting to get big enough that they need the extra room. All the other transplants seem to have gotten over any transplant shock and are starting to grow noticeably bigger and stronger. That zucca melon that I found looking smushed, however did not survive, so we’re down to just two of those, and they both look strong and healthy.
I still feel like I’m behind on everything in the garden, but things do seem to be managing all right so far.
The sugar snap peas are starting to bud and bloom. I’m a bit surprised, because the plants are not very big, but there it is!
I also spotted the first summer squash show up; a green zucchini. I was planning to sow more after I finished with the low raised beds in the main garden area. We shall see if any others germinated over the next while. I may not need to re-sow all of them, after all.
The mock orange at the laundry platform now has a few flowers blooming. There are so many buds, it’s going to be a mass of white flowers soon, but for now, it’s just a few scattered around. It’s a shame this was planted where it was. It’s gotten big enough that it gets in the way when we want to use the clothes line. That and the platform needs maintenance and a paint job. We need to transplant it, and I want to find a nice sunny location that will really showcase it, because it’s so gorgeous once it starts blooming.
I like that there always seems to be something starting to bloom, right around when other things are finishing their blooming season.
I’m happy to say the grey babies are still happily in the sun room, with mama frequently coming over to nurse them right in the middle of the floor. Even with having to chase racoons and skunks out, they remain.
They are also starting to find favourite spots to nap.
One of them has finally discovered the cat bed next to the carrier that I brought over from the old garden shed. Broccoli’s babies weren’t using it, but there is still the self warming mat bed set up for them, if things get chilly. The kittens had been running and playing around it for a while, but this is the first time I saw one actually in it. Another kitten prefers the bed inside the cat cage. The other two kittens seem to be just find dropping for a nap pretty much anywhere! 😁 I have a floor mat laid upside down over a bin in there, after cleaning it. It’s been dry for a while, but I’ve noticed the kittens like to lie on it, mashed together in a squished group, so I’ve left it there for them to use.
It should get interesting in there, when more kittens start showing up!
Today was forecast to be a hot one, before things cool down a little bit for the next while. We surpassed our predicted high and reached 30C/86F.
Tomorrow’s predicted high is supposed to be either 18C/64F or 20C/68F, depending on which app I look at. Also depending on which app I look at, we are now supposed to get rain starting tomorrow evening until about midnight – or it’s supposed to rain both day and night!
*sigh*
This afternoon, my older daughter and I finally messed around with the portable AC unit. It would start, then immediately shut itself down again. So we wrestled it out of the living room (that 70’s shag carpet is not helpful for the wheels! 😄), fighting cats away from the divider door into the living room, then to the steps between the new and old parts of the house. I had a bucket ready and we set it to drain.
It didn’t sound like there was any water in it, though I could hear some minor splashing as we were moving it, and nothing but a few drops of water came out.
So… the water reservoir being full was not the issue.
We had this happen to use last year, and we never found out why it kept stopping then, either. However, after we went through the process of draining it, it started working again. Would that happen now?
Yes.
Once we got the AC back in the living room and set up, it turned on and stayed on.
It did stop cooling faster than expected, but the louvers were still open. When I checked it, I lowered the temperature setting and it turned on again. It seems the default setting for the AC to stop cooling is 23C/73F, which is ridiculously warm for indoors. I dropped it to 16C. It’s been running pretty much ever since.
We already have an oscillating fan set up on the piano, aimed to blow cool air from the living room into the dining room, so that helps a lot.
My daughter and I then set up the hardware cloth “door” to the old basement – though we went down and swept water into the floor drain or sump pump reservoir, first. With the most recent rain, there’s quite a lot of water down there again, even with two blower fans, and and oscillating fan in the old basement, a box fan set up in the old basement window, and another oscillating fan running in the new basement. That floor is starting to show more damp seeping through the concrete. Not a good sign for the weeping tile! I might wet up the old blower fan in there, but with so many fans already running, I really don’t want to set up another one. The amount of electricity we’re using right now must be insane. I’ve got a box fan in my office/bedroom, my husband has two box fans in his bedroom, and my daughters have several fans upstairs, which is the worst area for overheating. With the humidity, it’s just brutal on my daughter’s computer. She actually sets up ice packs wrapped in towels near her computer while she’s working.
With how hot things are, the last thing we wanted to do was heat up the house with cooking, and my daughter offered to order in. We ended up going to a pizza place in town and getting a jumbo (18″) size pizza for each of us, to feed us for the next couple of days!
The pizza place didn’t open until 4, so I had some time to wait and checked to see if we had any parcels in. I wasn’t actually expecting any. There were two.
Once of them was the drain auger my husband ordered! It wasn’t supposed to come in for another four days!
What I was really looking for was our 4 pound bucket of lysine. This time, in the orders list, it said “your order may be lost”. I checked the tracking and that was unchanged – it said it was picked up by the delivery company and that’s it.
There was a “contact seller” option, so I started that process.
Which is when I discovered the seller had cancelled the order, and that the refund would be processed in 3-5 business days.
The seller cancelled the order on May 31st.
No explanation was given.
We still need lysine. We’re almost completely out.
I mentioned it to my husband, so he could check his Amazon credit card and see if the refund went through. I guess it did, because he ordered it again. We now have a delivery date of July 2-4.
Interestingly, the cost was lower than the first time we tried to order it.
When 4:00 rolled around, we called in our pizza order, making sure to tell them where we were driving in from. It takes us a bit longer to get there than for them to make the pizzas. With a stop at the post office having to be done along the way, since it was closing at 5, I have gave them a rough idea of how long it would take us to get there.
It ended up taking a bit longer than usual for me to just get out the door! When I got to the store the post office is in, I saw a box next to a counter by the door. The owner saw me and just said, that’s the one! 😄
I even made sure to back the truck up to the door, because I knew it would be larger and heavier. I got the other package and loaded that first, then tried to figure out how to get the auger loaded. The box wasn’t particularly big, but it was pretty beat up looking. The delivery folks clearly had problems with it. I finally just picked it up was as good a grip as I could – which wasn’t very good. I’m so glad I backed the truck up to the door, because having that slip out of my hands while trying to go further would have really sucked! The owner was a sweetheart and already holding the door open for me. It was definitely heavier than I expected. Later on, I looked up the specs and the actual weight. It’s 36.2kg – just ounces under 80 pounds. That’s just the auger. Not the other stuff shipped with it (bits, hoses, etc.) or the packaging.
From there I started for town to pick up our order, only to realize it was almost the time I told them I’d be there, so I pulled over and gave them a call. I didn’t want them to think it was a bogus order.
When I got home, I pulled into the yard so I could back up to the house. I tried to be careful about it and avoid the area I usually turn around in, since it is still basically a pond.
I got stuck.
I could go forward a bit, but when I tried to reverse again, the tires just spun. I had to set the truck to 4 wheel drive to be able back out without completely tearing apart the grass. We’ll have a bit of repair to do once things dry out a bit – if they get a chance to try out a bit! – but not too much.
Getting through our own door, with the arm bar in the door jab, was going to be awkward, so my daughters were already waiting for me to get the door open (and keep cats away) and angle the box through the doorway.
So it’s in – and it’s still in its box! It’ll be easier, once it’s unpacked, since it’s on wheels and had a handle, but I am not looking forward to getting that thing down the old basement stairs. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think we should take it down the new basement stairs, then rolls it through to the old basement, where it will be used the most.
We’ll figure it out.
Needless to say, I didn’t get any more work done in the garden, with this heat. Tomorrow should be better for that sort of work, and I should be able to get it done before the rain reaches us.
So much for the 5 day break in the rain that was forecast yesterday. Even the rain expected on Friday has changed to being all day, instead of just the evening.
So we’ve been catching up on inside stuff, like doing laundry.
Extra laundry, thanks to cat messes. 🙄
I’ve also been keeping an eye on the critter cam, which has been a delight.
Junk Pile showed up regularly and would nurse her babies on the floor mat in the middle of the room. At one point, she got up and left behind a fan of kittens that fell asleep as they nursed! I’m really glad to see her going in there to take care of her kittens, rather than her kittens having to leave the sun room.
I’m not so glad to see the skunks show up, though only because they eat the cat’s food.
I’m super not glad to see the racoon show up.
It does seem to be leaving the bigger kittens alone, probably because they can run away and hide under the counter shelf. Eating kibble is less effort, but that doesn’t mean it won’t try something, now that it’s done it once.
The image I was able to get of the kittens was a screen cap of the critter cam on my phone, cropped down to just the kittens. The image quality really sucks. We’re starting to look at possibly betting an indoor monitor – the kind sold as baby or pet monitors. They can pan and zoom, which is something this camera can’t do. The biggest selling point for me is that we wouldn’t have to buy an Amazon subscription to be able to have the live feed running continuously. We’d also have the option of using a micro SD to record things. So we’re looking at different versions, some of which come with their own display device, so we wouldn’t be having to use our phones. Some come with multiple cameras, which has me thinking… it would save me some anxiety to have one set up in the basement to monitor the septic pump!
We shall see. Not a thing we can get soon, but they can be surprisingly inexpensive.
Aww… I’m watching the critter cam right now. Syndol, who still has a limp, is eating in the sun room, and there’s a kitten rolling around on the floor beside him.
Anyhow. Time to get to bed! I want to get working in the garden early tomorrow morning, and take advantage of the cool!
I should probably prune it off for now, so that more energy should go into the plant itself getting bigger, but it’s just one of three plants blooming, and it looks so pretty.
We do still have a lot of standing water all over, but the area around the garden bed I needed to work on was much improved. Still very wet, to be sure, but at least workable.
The weather forecast predicted a quick thunderstorm and rain at about 8am, so I was out there by about 7. There was a good chance the tiny storm on the radar would miss our location entirely, so I wasn’t too concerned. Mostly, I wanted to get things done before it got too hot – and things were getting hot pretty fast!
The main thing I wanted to get done was to break and turn the sod in the new area. That ended up taking a bit longer than expected. The wet ground did make it a bit easier to remove some of the bigger tap roots and rhizomes. This area, however, turned out to have a lot more tree roots under it – most of which were deep enough to leave alone, but shallow enough for the garden fork to get hung up on them. It also has a lot more, and bigger, rocks. Again, a lot were deep enough to leave after the sod was turned, but in many places I couldn’t push the fork into the ground without having to fight to get around rocks.
But that part is now done, and I left it to go in for breakfast. It’s supposed to be very hot today, so I don’t mind leaving the exposed roots to bake in the sun. The stalks from corn that was grown here last year were still around, so those are going to be buried when the soil that needs to be moved, gets shifted over.
I had the hardest time falling asleep for some reason, but woke up at 5am, so I’ve only had 2 or 3 hours of sleep. I can barely keep my eyes open right now.
Napping through the hottest part of the day is probably a good idea, anyhow!
We have a first sighting of Caramel’s babies! I thought they might be in the wood pile (which we thought was a junk pile, until we took the junk off the top), since I would sometimes see her disappear under it, but cats in general like to shelter under there.
As I was heading back to the house, I spotted a grey tabby by the opening under the tarp. When it saw me, it ducked under. For the briefest of moments, I saw an orange face peek out, then Caramel stuck her head out and stared at me. She seemed to be okay with my watching from where I was and came out. Her little grey one came out soon after, and then the orange one – which turned out to be orange and white – came out and stayed behind Caramel. I stayed long enough to see if any others would come out, but it looks like there are just the two of them.
As for things outside.
The water has been absorbed in some places, though everything is still very wet. I lifted the mosquito netting cover off the potatoes, since the elms are no longer dropping seeds, and over the chain link fence. I will leave it there for now, as the blowing of the netting should startle the deer away. Not that they’ll eat potato plants, but it might keep them from going into the yard and eating other things. I considered lifting the netting off the chocolate cherry tomatoes, too, but they don’t seem to be hampered by it at all, so I’m leaving it for now.
I took the cover off the bed with the German Butterball potatoes. They’re getting so big, they are starting to crowd against the netting. I set the cover on top of the old dog houses by the outhouse, for now. It’s pretty much the only place with enough for it, while also keeping it off the wet ground.
It looks like I will need to try planting the Seychelle beans again. Only a few have come up in one row, and none at all in the other. The seeds are a few years old and, between that and the weather we’ve been having, it’s no surprise if they don’t come up.
I did plant more of the Royal Burgundy bush beans. In fact, I had enough seeds to plant a row on either side of the original row, which has only one successfully sprouted bean plant coming up. I still have seeds left over, too. For some reason, I remember having only enough seeds to plant one short row, but these are the same brand’s seeds as before. I’ll have to check my seeds bin and see if I still have some left, after all. With only one bean successfully germinating (plus one more that broke ground and that’s about it), I figured planting two more rows on either side of the original row would hopefully ensure we have at least a few bush beans survive!
The water around the bed I was going to work on next has been mostly absorbed into the ground, and I considered working on it – but only for a moment. It’s 22C/72F out there, with a humidex of 28C/83F. I was not about to do that kind of work in full sun with this level of heat and humidity. I did do a bit of weeding, through. With the ground so wet, I could pull some of the weeds out, tap root and all. A bit of that was more than enough to convince me, turning new sod and shifting the remains of that bed over is just not something I should be doing right now! If I get out early enough tomorrow morning, though, I should be able to get it done and, if all goes well, transplant the last of the onions. Since I have so many, and this bed won’t have anything else in it, I should be able to get away with planting them a bit denser, too. It would be great if I could get all the onions, plus the last few shallots, in. It’s getting really late for onions. They really should have been planted in late May, as they prefer the cooler temperatures, but we shall see how they do.
Once that’s done, I can breathe a sigh of relief for a little while. Then I can look into seeing what I can do in the gaps where things that were direct sown didn’t come up, and replant where the spinach was sown. What little spinach came up and actually grew is now bolting in the heat! We never got anything to harvest, even out of those.
Maybe I’ll just plant more of the Uzbek carrots. I intended to plant a lot more carrots, but the beds are all full of winter squash and melons, which grow too big to interplant carrots under. I could have planted them under the tomatoes, but the onions needed to be transplanted – plus, the onions should help deter deer and other pests from the tomatoes.
Well, writing this just got interrupted quite a bit. A racoon was back in the sun room and had to be chased off repeatedly. We’re prepared to deal with it, once the opportunity arises. There is, however, a second one, and I haven’t seen both at the same time since last night.
For now, I’m going to enjoy watching kittens on the critter cam.
Oh!!! Did I just see a white kitten running by past a window??? It would be so great if the white babies came back, too! We were making such good progress in socializing those ones.
Ah, well. What will be, will be.
Oh… that’s a skunk I just saw walking by this time…
The Re-Farmer 