With today already being so much warmer, my morning rounds ended with extra outside activities, like doing a burn, and then some shovelling.
I was going to do the vehicle turn around space and leave the paths to the girls, but since I was going through the paths while doing my rounds, I just grabbed a shovel and started clearing a path to the garage, while on my way to the gate camera.
Then I cleared a path to the burn barrel and the electricity meter.
Then I started to clear the path around the house before going to the sign trail cam way out in the corner across the old garden area, and ended up clearing a path to the sign cam.
Then I finished making a path around the house, and since I was on that side anyhow, I went ahead and did the the fire pit area.
I was going to leave the turn around space for the girls, but it was a balmy -7C/19F, with no wind, and lovely sunshine.
Yeah. I cleared that, too.
What can I say? I like shovelling.
The kittens were very excited when I was done. Well… these ones, anyhow.
From left to right, we have Princess, Judgement, Plushy trying to climb my legs, and Gooby.
Who isn’t gooby anymore. That lysine really worked! There’s a few kittens with eyes that look a bit leaky, but that could just as easily be from the cold winds. I didn’t notice any leaky eyes today.
I did notice a little, bitty ball of fluff, though.
The bitty baby was out and about, running around, stalking its bigger cousins, and generally having a blast in the snow. When I came close, he ran off and I was only able to pet him while we was under a step to the storage house, where I could just barely reach. He most definitely did not want me around, though.
He’s doing great, which makes me happy. We’ll still keep an eye on him (along with the others, of course) but with the warmer temperatures we’re supposed to be getting, he should be just fine out there.
Oh, my goodness! I just went looking at the AccuWeather website for our area. The app that came with my desktop is now saying that we will hit 3C/37F on Friday, instead of Saturday, but AccuWeather is saying we should reach a high of 5C/41F on Friday! That’ll feel downright tropical!
We’ll see how things work out, but if the long range forecasts I’m looking at are in any way accurate, we’re going to have that mild winter I’m hoping for. Here’s hoping!
As much as I wish Nosencrantz would leave my room, and I could leave my door open without worrying about other cats going after her, there is something really nice about waking up in the morning and discovering her cuddled up against me.
We did eventually warm up to our predicted high of -12C/10F, though it came with wind chills colder than -20C/-4F at times.
When I fed the yard cats in the morning, I counted “only” 24 or 25, including the bitty baby – who never came outside!
You can just make him out through the frost, near the bottom of the window.
Thankfully, the south yard is pretty sheltered from the winds coming mostly from the north. Though we had blowing snow all night, there wasn’t anywhere near as much on the ground as it had looked like there should be. I started shovelling the more sheltered walkways, then got a bit carried away.
I used the tire tracks from when I lasted back up to the house as a guide for where to clear away the snow. You can even see the packed down snow under the tire tracks. I didn’t feel like bringing out the ice chipper to break those up, and the shovel I was using already has a crack in it, so I wasn’t going to bash around with it any more than I had to.
As we warm up over the next week, things should actually start melting a bit, and I want these high traffic areas to clear away completely. I think tomorrow, I’ll keep working to clear the space we use to drive into the yard and turn the vehicle around. I’ll leave the paths around the house, and the fire pit, for the girls to do. They’re planning on getting the fire pit going, just because they can, in the near future.
Meanwhile…
Not too long ago, I was outside again and did the evening feeding.
I counted 30 this time, including the bitty baby. He was in the larger window by himself, and even tried to play with me through it, before going to the entry where the food tray is. He never came out, but he’ll have to if he wants the water. If he had come out, I probably would have snagged him and brought him inside. To be honest, though, the next youngest litter of kittens, being all short haired, are probably colder than he is! It isn’t stopping them from playing in the snow, so their undercoats must be well developed for the winter already.
As I write this, it’s -13C/9F, and that’s as cold as we’re supposed to get, including overnight lows, for at least the next 10 days. In fact, the forecast has changed to predict even milder temperatures than before!
Not only are they now predicting three days with highs of 0C/32F, but we’re looking at 3C/37F a week from now! The last time I saw temperatures that high was in the long range forecast, in December.
Of course, it depends on which app I look at. Another app I have shows the first two of those 0C days as reaching 1C/34F, while another shows two days at 0C, then lower temperatures than in the image, though the Saturday is still supposed to be above freezing. All of them are predicting conditions well within average, though.
There is a saying, that a man with two watches, never knows the time. It’s much the same having multiple weather apps! Each company is linked to different data sources, so while one of them might be linked to data from the weather station at the nearest town to the west of us (one that is much closer to the lake, where conditions can be very different from where we are) another might be linked with a station to the north of us (which would probably be the one with conditions closest to what we get here, even though that station would be further away than the others), and yet another might be linked to a station to the south of us.
Well, at least between them all, it gives us a general idea of what to expect. I had been hoping that we might have the roofers coming out during that warm spell we’re supposed to get, but now I’m not so sure. My brother wanted to be here while they are here, and he’s the one that has Power of Attorney for our mother, to make sure they get paid – something my mother would have difficulty understanding how to do anymore. However, he and his wife are currently out of province due to a medical emergency. I got a call from them while they were still on the road, but they should have arrived by now. Hopefully, all will go well, and they will be coming home soon, but I know that they will want to stay there as long as possible, to be able to help. There is going to be a long road to recovery involved. My SIL might be able to stay longer, at least, as she is now officially retired, but not my brother. We are definitely keeping them all in our prayers right now! At least the roads should be good and they should have safe driving.
With my husband’s health, we are well aware of how suddenly everything can be turned upside down. All it takes is a moment. A car accident. A trip and fall. A heart attack or stroke. A bad reaction to medication. One moment, you’re able bodied and doing fine. The next… you’re not. A friend of mine in the disabled community has a term she uses for those who aren’t disabled: TABs. Temporarily Able Bodied. She says it tongue in cheek, but really, she’s right. At some point, we’re all going to start having issues, even if is just from getting old and the body wearing out. Not something we tend to think about while in our prime. For us, after all we’ve been through, we now work on the assumption at, at some point, we’re going to be dealing with stuff like this even more than we are now. So when we plan things like garden beds, or chicken coops, or repairing/replacing sidewalks and doorways, accessibility and mobility needs are part of the plan. I mean, yeah, I can slap together a perfectly functional chicken coop rather quickly, but what good is that, if we don’t have the mobility to get in and clean it? It takes longer to get things done, but at least when they do get done, it’ll be with “age in place” and future mobility needs in mind.
This house will never be fully accessible, though, which is why our long term plans include the possibility of building a smaller, fully accessible, house for my husband and I, while also acknowledging that at some point, we might simply not be able to live here anymore. We may have to move into a place like where my mother lives – but even her building is not fully accessible! They dropped the ball when designing that place, that’s for sure.
I’m digressing, to be sure, and yet this is all very much a part of things we have to think about. What we do with this place now is setting up for the future, for when our daughters will take over and, eventually, my nephew’s sons inherit the property. But even that isn’t written in stone.
Butterscotch is really enjoying her retirement years!
She is okay with Nosencrantz and Cheddar. She puts up with Leyendecker. She wants nothing to do with any of the other cats. If I open the door and they start coming in, she’ll hide in her favourite shelf and watch them, suspiciously. If they come too close, she will hiss and snarl at them.
She has zero interest in leaving my office/craft room/bedroom. Grandma is more than happy to just lounge around on my bed, snoozing. Sometimes, she’ll play with Nosencrantz. Maybe even cuddle with Cheddar. When a human comes around and sits on my bed, she’s all over them, demanding attention, but is quite content to have little to no attention from other cats.
After surviving all those years as a yard cat and having who knows how many litters of kittens, I think she’s earned it!
Look at the itty bitty fruit I found in the mock orange this morning!
He was not impressed with my shoveling the paths after doing the food and water!
Also, it is confirmed that he’s a he. I was able to pluck him out of the tree and cuddle him for a bit, and finally got a chance to check.
We are all sort of dancing around when we will be bringing him inside. He is so tiny, it’s actually startling to come out with the kibble in the mornings and see him there in the snow, so small he looks like something one of the older kittens coughed up rather than another kitten!
We want to leave him with his mother as long as possible, or at least with whichever of the mamas is nursing him. So far, I’ve only seen Junk Pile nursing him with her own kittens, once – and I haven’t seen her nursing even her own kittens since! So it’s entirely possible that he’s on his own, weaned early, and getting only the food and water we’re providing. However, we can’t be sure of that.
So when do we bring him in? We have one cold day coming up, with a high of -11C/12F, in a couple of days, then it’s going to warm up quite a bit after that. We definitely want to bring him in before the winter temperatures really kick in. So far he doesn’t seem to be having any trouble with the temperatures we have now, and seems quite happy to run around and play in the snow. If I look at the long range forecasts, including those that extent to January, we are looking at a very mild December but, of course, the further ahead the forecast, the less accurate it is, so who knows right now.
Do we assume his mother has weaned him and bring him in now? Or do we give him a couple more weeks, to be sure?
Well, we’ll probably made that decision in the next couple of days, before we get that one day cold snap that’s been forecast.
In other things, my younger daughter and I headed out today. I was originally planning to go to the nearest Walmart, but my daughters had their own shopping list for the international grocery store, so we hit the city, instead, where we could do both very handily. Mostly, I needed to pick up more kibble. The difference in price on that alone makes it worth the cost of gas to go into the city. I was able to get 10kg bags for just over $25 each. Locally, the biggest bags they carry are 7.5kg or 8kg bags, and they cost almost $35 each – if they even have them in stock.
Of course, we picked up a few other things while we were there, then headed to the international grocery store for my daughter’s shopping. They have take out food, too, so we picked up some steamed dumplings in a dim sum combo for the drive home. I was leery of doing that, as the last time I got dim sum there, not only was the service terrible, but the dim sum was way over cooked and tasted horrible. I’m happy to say, I had no problems at all this time. Service was immediate and, oh my goodness, did those dumplings ever hit the spot!
Things like this are the treats we allow ourselves to make up for creeping out of our hermitage, making the drive to the city, and putting up with other humans. 😉
Once at home, I backed into the yard to unload. We used my mother’s car today, and one of the snow piles I made from clearing around the cat shelters was almost too deep for it! 😂 I think maybe tomorrow, I’ll shovel out a lane for driving into the yard and backing up to the house. May as well do that while the snow is light!
Once everything was unloaded, we gave the cats their evening feeding as much to get them away from the car, and out of the sun room, as anything else. After I finished parking the car in the garage, my daughter was still trying to get one last kitten out of the sun room! I never saw the bitty baby while we were doing all this, though. Which may be a good thing. Now that we’re all pretty much in agreement about bringing the bitty in (which will bring the number of indoor cats up to 15), it’s hard not to just up and grab him! But more time with the mamas is better for him right now.
I’m happy to say that when I came out to do the cat stuff this morning (bringing 2 gallons of warm water, since we now have such a large heated water bowl), there was still liquid water left in BOTH heated water bowls!
The smaller metal ones were, of course, frozen. At this point, I think maybe we don’t even need them anymore, other than it allows for more cats to drink at the same time. It’s less of an issue with the water than the kibble. They don’t usually all try to drink at the same time, so having the four water bowls so close together works out. When the kibble comes out, though, they are all after the food at once. Not only do they not all fit in the kibble house (I counted “only” 25 this morning), but some of them don’t get along with the others. To avoid aggressive behaviour, along with the trays in the kibble house, I put a couple of handfuls of kibble into two of the shelf shelter shelves, a long line of kibble on the cat house roof – sometimes two, if I can reach – handfuls at three openings to under the cat house, the two trays under the water shelter, a tray just inside the entry into the cat house, a tray just under the eaves of the water shelter (the same spot it was in when the kibble house was there), and finally into a bowl under the shrine across the yard. Rosencrantz in particular prefers to eat at under the shrine, well away from any other cats. She’s gotten meaner to the other cats this year!
It sounds like a lot, but it’s still just a gallon sized container of kibble that’s spread out. This way, even the littlest, shiest and most picked on cats still get some food.
When I was finishing up my rounds, I found the bitty baby and Broccoli in the water shelter. Those ramps are being well used.
Broccoli got her name because she looked so much like Cabbages. This year, Broccoli had two calico kittens. (I think they’re both hers, plus a tortie. I’ve lost track!) I’m thinking we should call the new calicos Brussel and Sprout.
But I digress!
The bitty seems to be handling the colder temperatures really well, and has no hesitation about going outside and playing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see what the temperature was inside the cat house. The two south facing windows were frosted over on the inside, and the big east facing window…
… was full.
Actually, there was too much reflection in the window that I couldn’t see past, but it was really funny trying to peer in and realizing just how many kittens were crowded at the window! Including both of Broccoli’s calicos. Several had run away when I came close, but I can still see at least seven in the photo.
One of the things I made sure to do this morning was stir around the smoldering ashes from the branch pile, then bank it up again. The pile is slowly getting smaller! What’s interesting is that some of the cats have figured out that they can sit near it and keep warm. When I was first starting the burn, they were a problem, because they were so used to going into the pile and playing. Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep it lit, and had to keep chasing them out of the branches. Once it really got going, though, there was enough heat that they kept away. Now, it’s just a warm, smoldering heap, and every now and then I’ll look over, and see a cat or three, loafed on the snow-free ground around it, enjoying the warmth.
Speaking of warmth, I was just looking at the 10 day forecast on one of my weather apps. Apparently, we’re only going to have one day with the high dropping down to -10C/14F – but 10 days from now, we’re apparently going to get highs above freezing!
That would be a good time for the roofers to show up. So far, no word on when that is going to happen.
We have three black and white kittens right now. There’s Baby, the small one with the black splotch by its nose (I think the girls call it Pointy), and the long haired one that is part of the oldest litter that we sometimes get to pet.
Then there’s this one, from an in between litter. Two of its siblings are friendly. At the moment, I can’t remember which one is its fourth sibling. They are hard to keep track of when there are so many! We don’t see this one much. It’s there, but it runs off and hides behind things when we’re around. So I was pleased to be able to finally get a decent photo of him!
Well, it’s all done. The girls and I got things fixed up, moved around and set up with the cat shelters.
The first job was to open up the cats’ house and get things taken care of in there.
There was a whole bunch of incredibly shocked kittens looking up at us when we lifted that roof!
While one daughter was on safety duty to make sure the roof didn’t fall back, the other crawled in to put the heat shield back, then attach the holder for the thermometer.
Safety duty is extra important with so many cats crawling all over.
Including straight up the open roof to play gargoyle!
While they did that, I plugged in the second extension cord and got it through the entry with the other one, then checked to see if we could plug in the new heated water bowl.
As expected, nope! The bowl’s power cord wasn’t long enough.
Which meant a daughter and I did some shelter shuffling, while the other kept kittens distracted.
We really need to put handles of some kind on the water shelter and kibble house. They are really awkward to pick up and carry!
Here is the new set up.
I’d say they like it!
I’m going to have to get larger hooks to hold the cords up, but the small ones will have to do for now.
Once everything was in place, they were given their evening feeding and the water bowls were filled. The container we use to bring warm water out holds about 1 gallon/4L, and that was enough to fill the new bowl, with room to spare.
The board that was used for a ramp into the water shelter is too long for where it is now, so I found a short piece of scrap wood that I could set up near the entrance to the cats’ house. After I took this picture, I found a slightly longer one that is now set up in the middle and braced against part of the sledge under the cats’ house. The ramps are mostly for the bitty baby, since its the only one so small, it would have difficulty climbing our jumping up into the water shelter. Once the ramps were in place, they immediately had kittens using them.
After everything was done and the girls went inside, I hung around for a while longer, seeing if anything needed to be changed and playing with kittens. I ended up shifting one end of the kibble house closer to the water shelter. I’m debating shifting it more, to close that gap a bit more, but I haven’t decided yet.
When my daughter set up the thermometer in the cats’ house, she angled it so it could be seen from all three windows, so we can read it at different times of the day. This time of day, for example, the light is coming in through the smallest window in the entry, and reflecting on the plastic cover on the thermometer, so I couldn’t read it from the window you can see in the photo, but I could see it from the small entry window just fine. After being in there for a while, the thermometer was at about 5C/41F, which is what the temperature in the sun room was when I came inside. The outside temperature was -4C/25F. It should be interesting to see the temperature in there when things get really cold outside.
I think this new arrangement will work well. Everything is still easy to reach for refilling, and the two heated water bowls should make a big difference in the coming winter.
The Re-Farmer 