My daughter and I made a dump run today, and as we were unloading the back of the van, she noticed one of the access panels in the side of the van had fallen off. This is where the jack is stored. She popped the panel back on, and off we went.
As we were turning into our driveway, however, we heard a noise in the back that was rather alarming. At least for us, after having so many things go wrong on the van. So while my daughter unlocked the gate, I took a quick look in the back, thinking maybe something got knocked loose behind that access panel.
Once in the garage, I just had to get a picture of what I found.
The jack had been visible before, and we had seen part of the back with the pieces to use the jack. I think one of the plastic pieces I found was originally a bracket to hold the jack in place, so it wouldn’t get knocked about, but I have no real idea what it’s for. Then there was the pliers. And odd find, but I can go with that.
The child’s shoe, on the other hand, is a bit harder to explain! :-D I know the previous owners had kids – when I test drove it before buying it, and before it was detailed, there was still ample evidence to be found! :-D I do find myself curious how the shoe ended up tucked under the jack and the tools! :-D
First up, many thanks to Fyreglass and her hubby for all the help with my technical difficulties! So far, the problem hasn’t been solved, but my goodness, my computer is working much more efficiently! :-D
In fact, as I type this, the text is showing up as a combination of black and magenta. I am also still getting things like this.
Which isn’t too bad, compared to the neon green I usually get.
I spent hours last night, trying different things. This is what I’ve been able to figure out.
It’s definitely a Firefox issue, more than anything else. I did sometimes see it in Chrome, while in my email, for example, but getting the new monitor somehow solved that. Things actually appear on the screen faster than before, which is not something I expected to see a difference in. That’s usually an internet connectivity issue, but apparently, my old monitor – which was much older than my current computer – didn’t process as quickly.
Re-installing Firefox did not fix the issue. I’ve noticed that Firefox is a data hog, compared to other browsers. I use it for this blog and under my Re-Farmer profile simply because I don’t like having to log in and out repeatedly in the same browser, and I use Chrome for my personal stuff. I’ve also used Explorer in the past, and tried several other browsers. They all have their issues, and I keep finding myself going back to Firefox and Chrome, because the issues they have are easier to work around than the others I’ve tried.
I’ve used Glary and cleaned up all sorts of things. By this morning, when I double checked with my husband before deleting a couple of games he’d installed on this computer, before he was able to replace his own that died during the move, I’d freed up about 100 gigs of space.
I checked my drivers, and they are up to date. My video card is working fine.
Anything on WordPress – especially the editor – is the most affected, but it also affects things like Facebook and Pinterest. I’ve gone back and forth between browsers to test things out and, while there are definitely loading issues in general, which would be an internet issue, it is only on Firefox that the weird colours and text issues are showing up.
In fact, I’m going to pause and take a screen capture, just to show you what it looks like right now, as I work on this post.
WordPress is one of the platforms that I have the most loading issues with. Especially the editor, but just about every WordPress blog I try to visit has major issues, from the “like” button never loading, to the formatting going completely haywire, to simply timing out and not loading at all. Over and over and over again. Anything embedded in a post (like a video, or a reblog) generally fails to load, and trying to leave a comment is almost impossible. While using Chrome, the loading issue seems more limited to the editor and admin pages, than while visiting blog pages. The stats in particular reeeeaaaallllyyy don’t like to load, even though everything else around it (side bars, headers, etc.) will load just fine.
It’s not just WP, though. I get it in Facebook and Pinterest as well, though not as bad, nor as often. Since doing some PC maintenance, and my computer is working faster, I no longer have the problem in my gmail, as in the screen capture I’d posted yesterday. I might even be able to catch up on my emails now! :-D
And, just to make things even more confusing, it will often change, right before my eyes. For example, if you click on the above image to see it larger, check out the text in the bottom left corner. Before I took the screen capture, that’s what the text in my side bar on the right looked like. After capturing the image, then resizing it before uploading it, that text went wonky again. As I am writing this right now, the text in my side bar is messed up, not clear and legible, as it is in the image I screen captured just a little while ago.
Oh! Now it’s blinking back and forth!!
So now I’m thinking the problem is a combination of two things.
One: it’s a loading issue. Even though I have a WiFi booster (which I even moved to a different location, in hopes it’ll get the signal better), something about the corner my “office” is in does not connect with the internet as efficiently as other parts of the house.
The other is Firefox: while I have problems loading things on other browsers, it is only on Firefox that the weird colours and disappearing text is happening the most. Where other browsers just take longer to load, Firefox does the weird text and colours.
*sigh* I’ve even saved my draft and reloaded this several times while working on it, but that magenta text just won’t go away – and it’s only happening here, in my editor, as I write this. It’s not happening when I load a published post.
It’s getting very hard on the eyes, so I’ll go ahead and post this. I might have to just stop using Firefox and find another browser to use for my Re-Farmer profile. Trying to use the WordPress editor has been even worse in other ways, in the various browsers I’ve tried, which is why I kept coming back to Firefox.
*sigh*
The Re-Farmer
(ps: I just edited this post to fix a typo I missed, and the magenta text is gone, as is the weird blocky, unreadable text in the side bars. No consistency at all!)
I remembered to get a photo of our onions in their new location in the sun room.
I ended up removing the plastic on the mini-greenhouse frame, so it wouldn’t get too warm, and so there would be air circulation from the ceiling fan.
This is early enough in the morning that the room is still “dark”, but once the sun comes around, it gets many hours of sunlight. The ceramic heater is just enough to keep the seedlings from getting chilled overnight. We’re supposed to get snow starting tomorrow night, at with point I might put the plastic cover back on.
There should have been trays for three types of onions in here by now, but the shallots died off and I had no seeds left to try again, and the reseeded bunching onions are still in the aquarium greenhouses inside, for a while longer. By the time those are ready to be moved over, we’ll be bringing the tomatoes and gourds into here, too.
I have a question for those who grow onions from seed.
Should I trim these?
I’d read that onion seedlings should be trimmed when they reach about 6 inches, to about 3 inches, while they await transplanting. I would have done it by now, however, I’ve since heard from people who say to NOT trim them, because then you get smaller bulbs. They were pretty adamant about it, while others were just as adamant about the opposite.
I’m inclined to trim them, but I wanted to hear from anyone with more experience than me with growing onions from seed. I am more than eager to listen to the advice of others!
Last night, we decided to close the other cats out for the night. Not because there were any issues with cats not getting along, the night before, though. The other cats are really liking access to Ginger’s food and water bowls (as well as his litter box). With the other cats around, he spent most of the night in his bed at the bottom of the closet, and by the time he came out in the morning, all the food and water was gone. He does the stairs to the basement really well, but I’d rather he didn’t have to do that because the other cats were too lazy to! :-D
The bonus was, morning cuddles with Ginger!
As soon as he realized all the other cats were out of the room and the door was closed, he jumped upon the bed and started roll and stretch and squirm, while demanding face skritches. :-D He did eventually go back to his “cave” in the closet for the rest of the night, but by morning, he was back for more cuddles.
After a leisurely breakfast from his still-full food and water bowls. :-D
I think he enjoyed the break from the other cats! He is certainly enjoying people time, too.
I was talking to my daughter about one of the things I noticed about him. He and his sister, Cabbages, are the youngest cats in the house. Yet he is bigger and burlier than her, and even his older sister (half-sister, I suppose), Nicco. The spice girls are both downright tiny compared to him, and even Tissue, who is about the same age as the older kittens, is smaller than he is. Our Ginger is a beefy boy! He’s about as big as his Aunt Beep Beep, who has been filling out since coming indoors. He hasn’t caught up to Big Rig, but then, Big Rig got her name because she was so much bigger than the other kittens. I don’t think he’ll get as big as Cheddar or Leyendecker, but I’m sure he’ll be at least as big as David and Keith, soon.
He was always a bit bigger than his brother, Nutmeg, but Nutmeg is definitely filling out, too.
So is their mother, Butterscotch (on the left).
Who is looking decidedly round in the belly.
*sigh*
Rosencrantz is another beefy one. If she’s pregnant, we might not even be able to tell until we start seeing kittens running around again.
Thankyou to Wolfsong for passing on the name of a vet that does a barn-cat spay day. It’s a long drive for the cats, but we’d be able to do 4 females for about the same price as the local vet doing only one, so it would be worth it. We will definitely be contacting them to find out when their next spay-day is. The only challenge will be to catch yard cats like Junk Pile (I haven’t actually seen her in a little while), and I’m sort of assuming Rosencrantz’s baby, the sort-of calico, is female. It’s not like we’ve been able to see her well enough to confirm, either way. Just like Junk Pile; we didn’t know for sure that she was female until she showed up with kittens following behind. In fact, because she never looked pregnant, I had thought she was a he!
At least we’ve been able to get the indoor males snipped for now, including Ginger. Can you imagine the poor boy being intact, recovering from an amputation, and surrounded by a house full of female cats in heat? LOL
Okay, so I thought my monitor was the problem, we got a new one, and…
The problem hasn’t gone away.
This is what my gmail looked like a little while ago.
I use the past tense, because when I go to another tab, then come back to it, I see the text, only to have all the text disappear when I try to click on an unread email.
It’s not just gmail. I went to another tab after embedding that image, came back, and now I’m seeing nothing but a neon green block instead of the image. Oh, and the text in all my tabs have disappeared (all WordPress blog posts I’m trying to catch up on), but the icons are still there.
So it’s not the monitor (though I do now have a bigger, better monitor out of it…). It does seem to have improved since I got it, though, which is odd.
I at first thought it was our crappy internet, but I’m the only one in the household having this problem, and it’s only on my desktop.
My husband thinks my computer might be the problem. While I think it’s possible, I don’t think it’s likely.
Is it WordPress not loading properly? WordPress always has more trouble loading than anywhere else, it seems. It does seem to happen almost exclusively on pages hosted by WordPress… except it also happens when I open my gmail.
Is it my browser? I use Firefox for this blog, and Chrome for my personal stuff (I’ve tried others but end up going back to these to, for various reasons). In fact, I just went to my other browser, logged into WP, and browsed around. Images still take forever to load, or sometimes don’t load at all, but I’m not getting that neon green thing happening. Nor am I getting the magenta text that sometimes happens. I also have no problems with my gmail.
Okay. So Firefox is definitely part of the equation. When things don’t want to load in Chrome, they just don’t load. If they don’t want to load in Firefox, I get weird colours or missing text.
Maybe I should try using Tor again. It had issues with WP’s block editor, but WP has updated since I last tried it. I’ll have to test it again.
So… It could be Firefox, plus our crappy internet, just messing me up with blinding green and magenta, and disappearing text that can only be read if I highlight it with my mouse.
They tend to show up near the end of the day, when the light makes is hard to get good photos! You can still see, at least a little, the growing antler nubbins on the deer on the right.
If all goes well, this will be the last bag of feed for the deer that we buy until the fall. Looking at the long range forecast, we’re expected to dip below freezing again, with snow on Monday (three days from now). They’re predicting 3-6cm. After a couple more days, the temperatures will be back above freezing during the day, though we’ll have below freezing temperatures overnight for a while longer.
I’m hoping we actually get that snow, and that it slowly melts. The deer should have fresh growing things to eat after that. We were supposed to have rain over the past couple of days, but once again I watched on the weather radar, as the system moved right past us. We didn’t even get a sprinkle.
Yesterday was a very lazy day for me. There is something about it being overcast that leaves me feeling like I’m ready to fall asleep, all day. Plus, with the cooler temperatures and hopes of rain, I didn’t want to be working outside with power tools. ;-) I did make a trip into town, though. Our darling daughter treated us to pizza for our anniversary. My husband and I celebrated 33 years together this month. :-) While driving into town to pick it up, there actually was a bit of rain, but it was nothing but a tease!
Today, I finally made the trip to the smaller city to pick up the last few things I wasn’t able to get during my Costco trip. They were actually sold out of cat litter, of all things! While there, I started chatting with another customer, who is also feeding a lot of cats. Mostly outside cats. He estimates he spends about $3000 a year on cat food – and spent another $5000 to get 40 cats fixed. !! That’s through some sort of program, where getting a female done is only about $80-$100, instead of the $350 we’re paying. I’ve had all sorts of organizations recommended to us, but either we can’t get through to them, or they don’t operate as far out as we are. :-(
(Oh, just got a phone call. The people who are adopting Two Face are on their way to pick her up. :-) )
While talking to the other customer, he mentioned using wood pellets instead of litter. I’ve heard of people using them, and talking about how much better it is, so I asked him more about it. It turns out that these are just the wood pellets sold as fuel for pellet stoves. He told me that when the cats use the pellets, they absorb all the moisture and break apart into sawdust. They also absorb the odor, so the only thing you smell is wood. When cleaning the litter pans, you simply dump out all the pellets in the pan and replace it with fresh – and the old pellets can still be burned. !! I don’t know that I’d want to do that. At least not in the fire pit (or a pellet stove, if we had one!), but we do still have a burn barrel. Or compost them, while burn bans are in effect. That would save us from having to haul those heavy bags to the dump. He told me the pellets are a lot cheaper, too, and they come in 40 pound bags, so they last a long time, too.
I think it’ll be worth trying it out. Maybe start with just a few litter pans, first, and see how the cats like it.
The conversation got me thinking about just how much we spend on critters. With the cats, it’s about $350-$400 a month in wet and dry cat food, plus litter. So, about $4,800 a year, on the high end. Plus the deer, which we do only for about 6 months, which works out to about $300 a year. Then there’s the bird seed, which we do all year, and works out to about $1000 a year.
Which we’re doing my husband’s disability payments.
Thank God for private health insurance!!
There are a lot of things we are doing without, to keep the critters fed. We include it all in our grocery budget. If, however, we were just setting that money aside, we’d have been able to save enough to replace the roof in only 2 years.
Now, we’re not going to stop feeding the animals, but we really need to find a way to address that expense. This is not sustainable. The problem goes back to my not simply being able to go out and get a job, since any income I would make would get deducted from my husband’s disability payments. If I ever made enough to bring that replace my husband’s disability payments, he would lose his insurance entirely (since he would no longer “need” it) – and he’d no longer have coverage for his prescriptions. So it’s a lose-lose situation. That’s why we had to be so careful when fund raising for Ginger’s vet care. We can accept gifts. We can’t have additional income.
*sigh*
Reducing the costs will help, which is why I want to try the wood pellets instead of cat litter. Cat food isn’t going to get any cheaper, though. It’s another reason why we want to grow and preserve as much food for ourselves, as well.
Slight interruption in writing this, as the people adopting Two Face arrived. As a thank you for Two Face, we were gifted with a bag full of brand new, still in their wrappers, Tupperware! Looks like the lady is a distributor. :-)
I hope Two Face is happy in her new home. We’re going to miss her!
Well, with the weather getting colder again for the next while, we’ll be slowing things down as well. At least, outside. Not so much, inside. The tray of bulb onions are now in the sun room. It’s warmer in there, but with the cooler temperatures coming, we’ve got them heated from below. By the time things warm up again, we should be ready to move more seedlings from the aquarium greenhouses to the sun room, then use the aquariums to start the summer and winter squash.
If all goes to plan, we should be ready to start direct sowing some things near the end of May, then do the final direct sowing and transplanting after our last frost date of June 2.
After what he’s been through, I think he deserves it! :-D
I only saw four members of his outside family this morning.
Nutmeg has a habit of body slamming the kibble container as I’m filling the bowls, sending kibble flying everywhere! :-D Such a silly boy! I even got to pet him and Rosencrantz this morning.
Now if we could just get Creamsicle Baby and his cousin to let us come close. :-)
Oh, we got a call from the people who came to look at Two Face and Susan a while back. They’ll be coming over this evening to pick up Two Face and bring her home. They were originally going to pick her up on the way to an appointment for their dog, but had plans to do some visiting after and didn’t think she would like being in the vehicle for so long. So they’ll get her on the way home, and take her to a vet in a town closer to where they live.
Which means that, tonight, we’ll be back down to 16 cats in the house.
Time to update the posters to adopt some of the others. We still have another seven available for adoption.
Ginger, of course, is staying with us, and we’ve decided to keep his sister, Cabbages, and Beep Beep. Beep Beep was my dad’s cat, and I just can’t bring myself to adopt her out! :-)
Ginger was playful this morning, and I was able to get a lot of pictures.
Some of them even turned out okay. ;-)
Last night was the first night we did not close the outer cats out, and I’m happy to say there were no issues. I think he spent the night in his favorite spot in my closet. :-D
In the morning, though, he came out and demanded attention!
I was not the only source of that attention.
Turmeric decided to check out her cousin, and yes – grooming happened! Yay!
Turmeric is a couple of months older than him, yet he is so much bigger! Her sister, Saffron, is even smaller. At only about 9 or 10 months old, he’s already looking like he’s going to be a big, burly boy! Maybe not the big slab of meat Cheddar grew up to be, but certainly as big as Keith. We’ve already had times when we’ll look over to see an orange cat curled up and thinking, “Aw, Keith is so cute! … Hold on. That’s not Keith!”
His aunt came over to give him a sniff, but he was far more interested in tackling my hand and chewing on my thumb.
He’s actually quite good at “chewing” without actually biting.
He was quite enjoying the comfort of a bed for humans, rolling around all over the place while his Aunt Beep Beep watched over him. He’s already heavier than she is, but Beep Beep has always been a tiny one.
Ginger has been busy, claiming the house. He’s been going into the basement, where he has discovered the fantasy land of food bowls and litter boxes. :-D He even joined the crowd when the girls gave them their wet cat food. He’d pretty much ignored the wet cat food we gave him when we first brought him into the sun room to await his surgery, but this time, he actually ate it. So far, I think the only place he hasn’t explored yet is the second floor.
The down side of his exploring is that he decided to jump up onto the dining table this morning. My daughter and I were nearby and managed to get him off without startling him too much, only for him to jump out of my daughter’s arms, back onto the table, skittering about, knocking over and breaking a large glass mug, before jumping down to the floor.
*sigh*
Ah, well. He’s still getting used to things.
We’re pretty blown away by how active and mobile he is. He has adjusted very well to the loss of the leg, and is doing pretty well adjusting to the indoor life, and all the new cats around him, too.
Oh, my goodness, but our internet connection has been bad tonight! It’s taken me forever to finally be able to load the editor to start this post! It’s not done giving me grief yet, either!
Still, I wanted to get this posted before calling it a day, since I’m basically using this blog as a journal that I can reference later on, if I need to.
The last 4 varieties of gourds have been started!
The luffa are the three pots together on the right. The one sprout at the top got visibly bigger, just today! You can see a second one coming up at the bottom. The pot inside the red solo cup is the Tennessee Dancing gourd. On the left are the Ozark Nest Egg, Thai Edible and Birdhouse varieties. The light fixture inside the tank is, as before, just there for its warmth.
Next on the list to start indoors are the summer and winter squash.
Today, after being delayed for … two months? … more? … I was able to pick up the replacement hot water tank.
The current hot water tank is still working. There is no longer a puddle under it, though there is a scale build up along the seam of the bottom cap. It must be a small enough leak that leaving the panel off is allowing for evaporation to keep it from actually puddling anymore.
I went to a different town to get it; one we don’t normally go to. In fact, I’d forgotten the franchise the tank is from even had a location there. The location we’d picked up the last tank from has gone full mask nazi and doesn’t even allow the Mingle Mask or shields. I’d heard this town has been more sane. I phoned first, to make sure they had one in stock available for a warranty replacement. It took a while; I got the impression they don’t get warranty replacements very often! :-D
Once that was all figured out and I said I could be there this afternoon, I mentioned that I am medically exempt from wearing a mask. The guy I was talking to said that would be no problem, and that there were quite a few people in town that were also exempt, adding that it wasn’t their job to police people over it. That was very reassuring. When I got there, I walked in, everyone else was masked up, but no one said a thing. It was so nice to not be given a hard time or have to justify myself!
Once the paperwork was done, I drove over to one of their buildings in the back to pick it up. I got to chat with a really nice and interesting young man who loaded it into the van for me. He’d had me back right into the building, so when I got out, I found myself surrounded by stacks of plywood, which reminded me we need a couple of sheets to make a floor for the trailer frame my brother found tires for. I asked how much a sheet of 3/4″ plywood cost, and he got someone on the radio to find a price for me. It turned out to be about $145 for a single sheet! That’s just for the rough stuff. He told me the type that are smooth on both sides is actually a bit cheaper. !! My husband and price checked in the city, at a different franchise, and they were about $85 a sheet.
When my daughters worked for that particular franchise, before we moved, a sheet cost about $35.
Not only have prices gone through the roof, but supply is really low. He told me of people driving across three provinces to get the supplies they needed, because nothing was available closer!
It makes me wonder just how much more it would cost to replace our roof at this point. When we got the estimates, they were both just under $9000. Assuming that they would find damage under certain areas, for which both companies charged by the square foot to repair, we figured $10,000 was a reasonable expectation for the final amount. Of course, we don’t have that, and with so many unexpected bills over the past couple of years, saving up for it has been pretty much impossible. I hope that, by the time we do find the money, the supply issues will be resolved and prices will become more reasonable!
During the drive to and from this town, I noticed something interesting. This town is about a half hour’s drive north of us. Not that far. Yet, I could still see quite a few patches of snow that haven’t melted yet and – most encouraging of all – water! There were several ponds that were almost full, and even standing water in some ditches. It was nice to see that not everywhere is quite as dry as we are!
But I digress.
We have the new tank, and it awaits installation. After having the same thing happen to two new tanks, we’re tempted to keep using the leaking tank for a bit longer. Even if it’s just for the summer. I wouldn’t want to lose hot water in the winter again!
The Re-Farmer 