Critters

Waiting for the first star

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It’s Christmas Eve today, which is when we have our non-traditional Wigilia dinner. The meal may not be very traditional (we don’t go meatless, for example, and we certainly don’t have 12 dishes!), but we do traditionally wait until the first star is seen before we begin.

Or best guess, considering it’s overcast today. It’s also only -2C/28F! Several degrees warmer than forecast. It’s supposed to drop right down again by tomorrow, but we’ll see. We were also supposed to get a storm last night, and that never happened, so who knows? :-D

Nosencrantz, enjoying yesterday’s sunshine.

Yesterday, we got together to take our annual family photo to make a digital Christmas card. After much fussing with the DSLR under horrible lighting conditions, we did get something useable. ;-) Only one cat in the photo this time, though. :-D

One of the things I pushed to get done was a Christmas gift for my mother. She has been asking for a carved mushroom, sketching out mushrooms that she remembered from her childhood in Poland. I haven’t been able to do any carving lately, though.

So I crocheted some for her!

It’s actually pretty close to her doodles, too! It took a while for me to figure out that she was talking about porcini mushrooms (she knew them by another name, of course), so I spent some time looking them up to get an idea of what they looked like at different stages and angle, and even found some crochet patters on etsy for them. I didn’t use a pattern, though, and just winged it. The challenge was finding a way to have the stem going into the cap. When stuffing it, the whole thing wants to be a big ball, but I found a way. Then, when stitching the cap to the stem/underside pieces, I used the extra sewing yard to try and secure it into shape on this inside.

Which is not easy to do, from the outside!

I had to make do with the colours, though. I would have preferred a darker brown for the cap, and more of a cream colour for the stems, but brown is not a common or popular colour in the yarn department at the best of times. Still, it’s fairly close.

I made two circles for the base, with the top one ever so slightly larger than the bottom one. After sewing the mushrooms together, then sewing to the larger disc, I stitched the base pieces together, lining up the edges, which created a sort of dome shape. Using two strands of yarn and the double layer base, it’s now quite stable.

I hope my mother likes it. I expect I’ll get comments about how she wanted it carved from wood, but who knows. She might be on one of her good days. I hope to be able to swing by and drop it off on Christmas Day.

Since I got the ink we needed and our printer works again, I wanted to print out our digital card for my mother, too. I picked up 4×6 photo paper, and will be able to print out a photo for my PAL application once I get that done (I’ve given up on trying to go somewhere that does passport photos). To print on the smaller size paper, we have to use a rear, manual feed tray in the back. We’ve never used it before.

I should have gotten standard sized paper and just cut it.

I ended up spending hours fighting with the printer! First, the paper loaded from the rear got jammed. The display screen said it was jammed in the front. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I had to stop to do something else, so my husband fiddled with it. He ended up tipping the printer on its side, just so he could see, finally found it tucked above a plastic flap and was able to pull it out.

Once back at it, I tried again, but the printer kept taking the regular paper instead of the paper loaded in the manual try. Or getting jammed again. I finally managed to get a test print right, and was able to print out the photo card for my mother – well past 2am! But that’s done, and I now know how the stars, planets and the moon need to be aligned to get the idiot thing to print on 4×6 paper loaded from the back.

Ugh.

In the middle of all this, the girls and I worked out a plan of action for today, which I started as soon as I was done with my morning rounds.

Laser beams!!!

The longest thing is the turkey, which is in the oven now. I’ve also got mulled wine happening in the slow cooker. Once the turkey is done, the girls will pretty much take over the kitchen. The layout makes it difficult for there to be more than one person working in there at the same time, but they’ve worked out how one of them can stay trapped on one side of the stove, doing the perogies, while the other does the stuff that needs more moving around as she works on garlic braised brussel sprouts. I’ll take on bringing stuff from the old kitchen for them. Not only is that where the freezer is, but this time of year, we can use it as a spare fridge. My younger daughter made coffee panna cotta for today’s desert, and that’s where they are chilling right now, along with the rum eggnog they made last night. Which was really, really good!

So while we’ve got a bit of a lull before the chaos starts, and we have our Wigilia dinner. I wanted to pause and take a moment to say thank you to all of you who take the tame to come visit our little corner of the interwebs, and share your lives with us, too. It’s really appreciated!

I wish you all a wonderful and joyous Christmas, filled with food, family and friends. May you all be blessed as we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the greatest gift of all. <3

From the Re-Farmer family to yours!

Got it done!

/ Re-Farmer / 8 Comments

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

Agnoos, checking out Aunt Rolando Moon, in the tree above. :-)

Bright and sunny, and not much wind chill. My husband was even up to going outside to feed the cats. I didn’t find out until today, that he did it in bare feet and with no coat! Yeah, he’s one of those people that wears shorts in the winter, but bare feet??? Yikes!

He’s been chastised thoroughly on that. He’s diabetic, and doesn’t feel his toes at the best of times!

Yesterday, I made a small shopping trip, giving my mother’s car a run in the process, to do the Walmart part of our shopping. Today, my younger daughter and I made it into the city and did a Costco trip – but not before swinging by the post office and picking up a very large, very light box for my husband. He ordered a whole bunch of plain, medium weight yarn, in bright colours, and plans to get back into knitting. :-)

I haven’t been up to doing Costco in a while, now. With the colder temperatures, we did that part first. No worries about the van baking in the sun. Even with insulated bags and ice packs, anything frozen would be starting to thaw, just from the trip home. This time of year, the insulated bags are as much to keep things from freezing, as they are keep them cold! Then we hit the international foods store where, among other things, I was able to get a free turkey with my points. :-) We’ve already got a turkey thawing out for Christmas, and we’re doing prime rib from our quarter beef pack for New Years, so it’s just there for when we want something other than beef. :-) My daughter had her own shopping list, too.

Which means that we have been able to do the bulk of our monthly shop for January, and without having to buy much meat at all, it meant we had the budget to do things like finally buy a set of pans to replace the ones we’ve got that, after getting the new glass topped oven, we discovered were no longer flat bottomed! :-D

I even was able to swing by a Staples and buy the cyan ink I needed for my printer. The ruddy thing simply stopped working when it ran out, even when I just wanted to print in black and white. In fact, it wouldn’t even do the automatic head cleaning anymore, so once I installed the ink and did a test print, there were all sorts of gaps in the blocks of colour, and there was black in the yellow! I did 5 test prints, and it was still really bad. I couldn’t do a sixth test print, though.

I’m now out of yellow, and almost out of magenta.

I know head cleaning uses up a lot of ink, but not that much!

*sigh*

So we still can’t use our printer. None of the places we usually shop at carries the ink I need, so that means another trip to Staples. It might even be worth it to make the trip tomorrow.

*sigh*

I don’t remember the last time I’ve gone shopping this close to Christmas!

We have always had pretty modest Christmases. For us, it’s about celebrating the birth of Christ together as a family. My husband’s sister was finally able to move back to this province and get a house in the city (she had to back out of buying a house here earlier in the year, when the province she was living in clamped down on their police state and no one was allowed in or out of the province. At least if you were Canadian) and she’s having a Christmas dinner. She knows my husband can’t manage that sort of thing anymore, so we’ll be doing a Skype call with them, instead. With how crazy things have been this year, we aren’t doing gifts at all. Not even hand made ones. Maybe we’ll do some for Three Kings Day, our last day of Christmas, instead.

We got the last things we needed for our Christmas and New Year’s dinners. Since we normally make pretty much everything from scratch, we are all excited about getting boxes of mixed frozen appetizers. Our once a year treat! :-D

It did make things challenging when it came time to unload, though. Most of the stuff was small enough, or flat enough, to fit, but then there was that turkey… :-D It was like playing Tetris with packages of meat to get it in there.

So, aside from a possible trip to get that ink (which might wait until after Christmas, but I’ll need to do it soon), we are DONE!

It feels good.

The Re-Farmer

Can I turtle, yet?

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Oh, man, I did NOT want to go out today!

Yes, we were a lot warmer than yesterday. Technically, it was -10C/14F when I went out to feed the critters.

Stepping outside was like being smacked in the face with ice. We have GOT to do something about that gap in the wind break from the south! I think the wind chill was at around -23C/-10F at the time, but it sure felt a lot colder.

Then it started snowing, and for a while, I considered rescheduling the shopping trip with my mother. However, we were supposed to warm up even more by this afternoon, and it’s supposed to be our last day warmer than -10C/14F for the rest of the year.

By the time I headed out, it wasn’t snowing anymore, but there was so much blowing snow, the highway disappeared for most of the distance. My mother’s car is such a light little thing, I was fighting the wind the whole way. At least the highway was otherwise dry and clear. The gravel roads and the streets in my mother’s town were icy, with drifts forming.

I made a point of putting some gas in her tank and grabbing some of her favourite chicken and wedges, and got there early. She had just come back from church and hadn’t started lunch yet, thinking I might just do that again. :-D So that worked out perfectly.

My mother was not actually feeling very well and had seriously considered skipping church this morning. It is right across the street from her place, though, so she did attend. By the time we were finished lunch, though, she decided to just give me her list and some cash, and I did her shopping for her. My mom is doing very well for 90, but she is definitely having a harder time of things. Especially in the winter! I’m extra glad I didn’t reschedule.

When I got home, I had quite the crowd, ignoring me as much as they could. :-D One of my daughters had just topped up the kibble trays. There are 13 cats in that picture, and I’m sure I saw at least 2 more at the window in their house. I must say, the outside cats are doing really well right now. There was a while when a lot of them were coughing and sneezing and had runny eyes, though none that had eyes that went blood red like Tuxedo Mask’s. Now, they are all hale and hearty. I think only Creamsicle Baby has a leaky eye still, and it’s been like that since he reappeared a couple of months ago. Some of the inside cats are still struggling with stuffy noses and sneezing, but they are getting better. Including Keith, which is a huge relief. I’ve been setting up the heated pad that we used while Ginger was isolated in the sun room, before and after his amputation. I think he remembered it, because he’s been using it fairly regularly. The others take their turns on it, and it’s not unusual for me to glance over and find three cats, with only their chests on the heating pad, enjoying the warmth. :-)

As much as I’d like to turtle, disappear into my shell and not go out again until next year, we’re going to have a few trips to make over the next few days. I even remembered to plug in the van and my mother’s car, just in case things turn colder than predicted.

We’ll have the quarter beef to pick up tomorrow, then I expect to go into the city the next day. I plan to do some gift shopping, so I intend to head out on my own, which means likely another trip before Christmas for the girls to do any last shopping they need to do. Hopefully, we will then, finally, not have to do any more long trips until after New Year’s.

I look forward to turtling.

The Re-Farmer

Feelin’ the chill!

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Though our high of the day is expected to be a relatively mild -17C/-2F, when I headed out to do my morning rounds, it was -22C/-8F.

The cats actually didn’t seem to mind it too much!

I counted only 15 this morning, though. I also got to pet the Distinguished Guest a bit.

Thankfully, there wasn’t much of a wind child, but even so, changing the batteries on one of the trail cams this morning was not fun! I had fingerless gloves, at least, but my goodness, the tips of my fingers were feeling the chill by the time I was done!

Tomorrow (Sunday)_, we’re supposed to warm up to -7C/19F, then it’ll drop right back down again. Monday is supposed to be -18C/0F, but the wind chill is supposed to reach -27C/-17F.

I’ve got word from where we ordered our quarter beef, that they will be getting cuts from the butcher that morning, so we are now scheduled to pick ours up at 5pm. We will be doing a bi city shopping trip next week. This is intended to be our January shopping trip, so we don’t have to try and do it at New Year’s. Thankfully, CPP Disability always comes in early in December, so we can do that. When it was arranged to pick up the meat at 5pm, I considered heading into the city in the morning, but it’ll be much colder that early in the day, so I think I’ll put that off until Tuesday. It’s much closer to Christmas than I would like. I dislike shopping at the best of times, but around Christmas and New Year’s is the worst. However, it needs to be done. Our van does not like the cold, so if I can save the trip for when it’s a few degrees warmer, I’ll wait. Yes, we do have my mother’s car as a back up, but it’s not big enough for our city shopping trips. Especially with all the bags of cat food! :-D

I look forward to a time when we are so well stocked, we can skip the city shopping trips more most, if not all, of the winter!

The Re-Farmer

Window kitties!

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I made a quick trip into town this morning and this is what I found when I came back.

Six cats, all crowded together in the window!

Yes, six. Can you see the last one?

I think all four of Junk Pile’s kittens are in there, plus Butterscotch’s Bradicous and Chadicous. We’ve never been able to quite single out Junk Pile’s grayer kitten from the other ‘icouses, plus there is one we think is Ghost Baby’s. We’ve never actually seen her with a kitten. Her hideout is somewhere in the outer yard, possibly under the storage shed. We just had an extra gray tabby kitten show up at some point. :-D

The terrarium heat bulb is just above and behind them. The timer is set from dawn to dusk, with the light sensor facing this window, which means there is probably too much light for it to be on at the moment. Which is likely why they are all piled together like that!

I am so thankful my brother and his wife gave us their old dog house. The cats just love it, and it’s so fabulous that it’s wired for electricity, too!

In other things, I made my trip to town early to pick up a few things, expecting to go to my mother’s this afternoon. I got a call from my brother last night and found out she was expecting me to come over soon to help her with shopping, but she was also almost out of milk. The grocery store near her no longer carries milk in 2L plastic jugs; just cartons. The cartons are more difficult for her to handle, so she’s been buying only 1L cartons. I picked up a 2L plastic jug for her, along with our own stuff, then called her when I got home. Well, it turns out she hadn’t even opened the milk she’d bought the last time I was there until this morning, so she was fine. We worked out for me to come on Sunday, instead. Looks like my daughter will be making lots of panna cotta over the next while! :-D

Of course, we talked about quite a few other things, including our vandal and the upcoming court case. She apparently thinks he’s going to have 10 witnesses against me? For what, I have no idea. He told the court he’d have 4, but who knows what he’s telling other people. Anyhow, there was something he’d said the last time he called her, several weeks ago, that she forgot to tell me. Apparently, he’s dying of cancer, and it’s because we’re trying to put him in jail. ??? He’s left phone messages with her in the past, saying things along the lines of how us “trying to put him in jail” was somehow killing him and destroying his health. Of course, he has no thought about the effect the stress of what he’s doing has on my mother and her health. Her comment was, if he’s dying of cancer, why does he want more farm? Good point, Mom! Still, claiming to have cancer is a new one he’s trying to blame us, that’s for sure.

Well, I guess we’ll find out in court at the end of January.

At least we have adorable cats to help with the stress reduction!

The Re-Farmer

Enjoy it while it lasts!

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We are having another mild and foggy day, and the kitties were out in full force!

I think I counted 19 in total, out of the 20 that are now regulars. I even got to pet the Distinguished Guest again. Earlier, before I headed outside, I spotted her by the bird feeder. The suet cage had fallen to the ground, and she was trying to get at the suet!

Tuxedo Mask is looking great. In fact, all of the outside cats seem to be doing very well right now.

Butterscotch followed me around while I was doing my rounds, really wanting to be picked up!

They had better enjoy the mild temperatures while they can. Today is supposed to be the last really mild day. At 0C/32F, we’re already warmer than forecast, but starting tomorrow, we are supposed to drop and stay between -10C/13F and -20C/-4F for as far as the long range forecast shows.

As for the inside cats, we still have a few sick ones that are learning to enjoy being in the steamy bathroom while we take our showers. Except Beep Beep. She does not like being closed up in such a small space at all! The rest tend to stay, long after the door is open again.

Keith seems to be doing well. Still not much appetite, but he’s been pretty quiet. No more throwing up, and except for a few spells, his breathing is quiet. We can tell he’s still not feeling too good, though, because he hides away. Currently, he’s under the couch. It took my daughters a while to find him! Usually, he’s in the bed we set up in the corner of my closet. I’m hoping this means the anti-biotics are working, and that he does NOT have heart worms!

We shall see.

The Re-Farmer

So many critters!

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We’re getting another warm day today. The forecast was for 1C/34F as the high, hte we were already at that temperature before it was fully light out! Now I’m seeing a high of 2C/36F for this afternoon, but I would not be surprised if we passed it.

The critters do seem to be enjoying the mild tempertures!

Chadicous, of course, was determined to be stepped on.

The heated water bowl was completely empty again. My suspicions that deer have found it were semi-confirmed last night, when I glanced out the kitchen window and saw one at the small gate in the chain link fence. No tracks that I could see around the water bowls, though.

While putting kibble into the trays in the kibble house, I had more cats coming for pets than for food. Including *drumroll please*

The Distinguished Guest!

Yes, I got to give our new addition a thorough petting and ear skritching. :-D I still can’t walk up to her, but at least she’s willing to walk up to me, now.

I even got to pet my brother’s dog, who came for a visit this morning, though the cats were not happy to see him! :-D

This pair of deer are morning regulars, enjoying the bird seed. It’s not the best photo I got of them with my phone, through the living room window, but when I saw the chickadee caught in mid flight, I just had to post it!

Later on, my husband looked out the kitchen window and spotted a big cat going by the barn, to the old hay yard.

And by “big cat”, he actually meant a *big* cat. Most likely a bobcat. I know they are around, but have never seen one, yet.

As for the inside critters…

… here is Keith, getting some major cuddles from Beep Beep.

Keith didn’t seem to have many issues last night. He was noisier while Beep Beep was lying across him than he was before. :-D My daughter has brought him into the bathroom with her so he could get a steam treatment while she showered. :-)

I don’t know if he’s any better. I can only say for sure that he’s not worse. Still not much appetite, but he seems to be moving around more. I think it will be a while before we can say for sure whether the anti-biotics are helping or not.

We shall see!

The Re-Farmer

Keith is home!

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The boy is back!

My daughter and I brought Turmeric to the vet for a check up (driving into a wall of fog on the way!), as she was the most recovered of the cats that had gotten sick – all of which started just within the past few days. The vet checked her over, and she’s fine. It was just difficult to listen to her lungs, because of the purring! It did not take her long to settle in at the clinic at all, and she was more than happy to jump at the vet for attention. :-D

As for Keith, it was decided to try him on antibiotics for two weeks, first. He got an injection at the clinic, and we’ll be giving him half a pill, twice a day. If he gets and stays better after those two weeks, then he just got hit with what the other cats got, but harder. If he doesn’t, then it’s heartworms, and we need to take him back and figure out the next course of action. The vet does think it’s heartworms because, when she did an ultrasound of his heart, she thinks she actually saw a worm. It could have been a “heartstring”, but those should not be visible in an ultrasound.

Personally, I am leaning towards respiratory infection. Even this morning, he seemed a bit better than yesterday, and after we brought him home, he actually showed interest in food and water. Not much, but at least enough for a nibble and a lick. As for the other cats, after examining Turmeric and hearing the descriptions, it sounds like a feline herpes flare up. The clinic knows that both the inside cats and outside cats have it – we’ve brought various kitties for treatment over the past few years. What is possible is that the outside cats have a different strain than the inside cats. While treating Tuxedo Mask, as careful as we were about hand washing, etc., we could have exposed the inside cats to a new strain and, as the vet put it, the two were fighting it out, and some cats were being affected by it more than others. Which makes sense to me.

Also, if it does turn out to be heartworms, this will be the first time the vet has personally seen heartworms in a cat. She sees them in dogs fairly regularly, but it’s just so unusual for cats to get them.

So we will be monitoring Keith and medicating him for the next two weeks (unless he takes a turn for the worse and has to be taken back, of course). Thankfully, my older daughter filled all her slots for quick commissions and was able to pay for it. All those tests added up. :-(

As for the couple of other cats that seem to be having a harder time of it, it was recommended to have them in a steamy bathroom. So my younger daughter will be taking a long, hot bath tonight! With feline company :-D

I am hopeful that Keith will recover just fine.

The Re-Farmer

Another Keith update

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Well, this is curious.

We just talked to the vet. She thinks Keith has heartworms, but she can’t say that with complete certainty from the X-rays.

Heartworms are really unusual in cats. Especially indoor cats. And we have 16 indoor cats, and for all the coughing and sneezing, there is no way they all have heartworms.

So this afternoon, we are bringing in Turmeric. She had similar symptoms, but seems to have recovered. This will give us a comparison.

If we treated him for heartworms, it would be a long term thing, and the medication has risks, because there really is no heartworm treatment for cats. Not a risk we want to take for something he might not have. Alternatively, we can go with an antibiotic treatment, because we do know the cats have feline herpes, and that is much more likely to be an issue.

We will talk about it after Tumeric has been checked over.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it.

The Re-Farmer

A quick Keith update

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I was hoping to have more news before now, but I figured I’d better post while we wait.

My daughter and I headed out to the vet first thing, shooting to get there when they opened at 8am. My daughter tried calling shortly before, and on her second try, someone answered. She quickly explained our situation and told them we were on the way.

They had three surgeries booked for this morning. Depending on the timing, there was a possibility the vet could quickly check Keith out before going into her first surgery. If not, we could drop him off and she would try to look at him in between surgeries.

She still hadn’t arrived when we got there, one minute after opening, so my daughter did a drop off. We will get a call when they are ready. They got permission to do various types of tests, if necessary.

As for Keith, he was isolated with me for the night, but one of our other cats joined us, too. It seems the coughing and sneezing has finally affected one of the cats we brought with us during the move. He’d been fine until last night. He’s 10 years old now, so we seriously considered bringing him in, too, but after observing him for a while, decided against it. They both had access to food, water and litter, but touched none of them by morning. Keith did have a coughing fit until he threw up, then did that face grabbing thing, once during the night, but thankfully there was no blood this time. He almost looked a bit better.

Most of the cats are actually fine. Just a few are coughing or sneezing. Beep Beep has her occasional coughing fits, but she’s always had that, even before she became in indoor cat, so that’s not out of the ordinary for her. Susan does the same thing, so they don’t seem to have picked up anything new.

Hopefully, we will have good news soon, but with three surgeries, it might be a while before the vet can even look at him. We shall see.

The Re-Farmer