This is a picture of part of the lettering on our new sign that I noticed when I was switching the memory card on the trail cam. The paint on several letters is peeling away!
My guess is that the reflective paint on top of the white affected the ability for the blue paint to adhere properly.
I’ll find a way to tack it back on until we can spray the whole thing with a clear coat. Unfortunately, that won’t happen until spring, since it’s too cold for paint to cure.
When I got back to the house, I spotted something rather concerning. One of Tuxedo Mask’s eyes is blood red!
No, I did not get a picture, and if I did, I would not post it!
It looks really gross. It doesn’t seem to be bothering him a lot, but that doesn’t mean much. Ginger had a shattered joint and it barely slowed him down, even as he had to wait for the surgery. The main thing is that he does still seem to be able to see out of it.
My younger daughter and I did our city shopping trip, and when we got back, it didn’t look any better. We need to get him to a vet, but we just finished paying for our StarLink system, so the larder is bare. At least I thought it was until I read my email. I got word from the ranch we’d ordered our quarter beef from. The finished weight turned out to be less than expected (considering how terrible the drought was on cattle, that does not surprise me), so they actually owe me money. The cuts will be ready around the 20th or 21st.
That frees up part of our budget.
We should be able to take Tuxedo Mask to a vet.
If we can catch him! He does let us pet him once in a while, but that’s very different from trying to get him into a cat carrier!
We’ll figure it out. We can call the vet tomorrow morning and see if we can bring him in right away.
Poor little Tuxedo Mask! His eye looks just awful. :-(
We have a new visitor to the feeding station, today!
I haven’t seen grouse in the yard in quite a while, and whenever we did, they tended to be under some bushes or trees. This is the first time we’ve seen one at the feeding station!
Such a pretty bird, all puffed up to stay warm.
I think there was too much movement in the window, as it started to move away, but it did come back, and actually stayed at the feeding station for quite a long time.
I haven’t done my Critter of the Day pictures in ages. Usually, once we’re spending more time indoors, I start them up again, but they take quite a bit of time. I do very little post processing – maybe some cropping, or fixing the lighting, but that’s it. The main thing is to resize them so they don’t take up so much storage space on my WordPress account. Even after upgrading our account, I post so many photos, it adds up.
So I don’t think I’ll be doing daily critters, but I will post some every now and then. I recently uploaded the files from the DSLR in the living room, and this one made me smile. I just had to share!
I can’t help it. I just love it when we catch tongue blehps!!! They always make me smile. :-)
In the last little while, the deer have started to show up at the feeding station during daylight hours almost every day, and the yards a crisscrossed with their tracks. Though we’re just seeing a few at a time, there are definitely a LOT more that we’re not seeing!
So pretty. :-)
At least they are, now, when there is no garden for them to get into! :-D
It’s been difficult to get a really good picture of the new addition to our outside cats, but my daughter managed to get one with the DSLR outside our living room window a while back.
The Distinguished Guest is such a beauty! Here, just looks like she’s all black, but she has a white blaze on her chest, making her more like a tuxedo.
She is still with us, though I haven’t seen her yet, today. In fact, I haven’t seen any of the outside cats. I had a rough night last night, so my husband was sweet enough to take care of the critter feeding this morning. I’m even postponing the city shopping trip to tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll actually get some sleep tonight. We’ve brought the storage bins of Christmas decorations up, and the inside cats are having a blast exploring the new smalls and knocking things over.
One thing about feeding so many yard cats. Especially in the winter.
Sometimes, they make you feel really, really loved and appreciated!
In between trying to chomp my fingers. :-D
Butterscotch in particular likes to strrreeetttcchhh out for pets. Or stand in her back legs.
She’s so sweet, when she’s not vicious and mean! :-D
I had a small addition to my morning rounds, and that was to check on the van. I have a habit of leaving really, really early for things, and yesterday was one of those days that got me into that habit. I was just about to leave for my course, and the van wouldn’t start.
The battery was dead.
I don’t know why. It was working fine on Friday.
Well, my husband was a sweetheart and put it on the charger while I too my mother’s car to my course.
Having to pay expenses for two vehicles may be hard on the budget. Especially when one of those vehicles isn’t really mine, but out here, having a “spare” is pretty necessary. It’s not like we could just hop on a bus or take a taxi or something!
This morning, I made sure to start the van and check the battery level, and it was just fine.
Which is great, but it’s still a mystery that the battery would suddenly die like that.
Depending on how things go, I’ll be making our city shopping trip in the next day or two. We’re actually supposed go above freezing again, in a couple of days. It’ll be messy, but I prefer that to making these trips during a deep freeze.
Which, thankfully, is not on the horizon. The long range forecast are showing December will start to get colder at about the middle of the month, but even then, it’ll still be pretty mild for this time of year.
Still holding out hope that The Farmer’s Almanac will the the accurate one in predicting a mild wet winter for our area, and not the other long range forecasts I saw that predicted another severely cold winter. Either way, though, we plan to be prepared!
Including prepared to keep the outside cats warm and well fed. <3
I don’t tend to post pictures of the inside cats very often.
To be honest, it’s only partly because of how hard it is to get them sitting still long enough for a photo. It’s also partly because I’m a terrible housekeeper and the backgrounds are always a disaster! LOL
Every now and then, though…
… I can get some wonderful shots.
This old plant stand has become a favourite spot for the cats to sit and watch the activity at the feeding station outside.
Rolando Moon followed me around while I did my rounds.
She even let me pet her a bit, before trying to chomp my hand.
She is so mean. :-D
It’s a good thing we were doing a shop today, because we ran out of bird seed yesterday, and used the last of our dry kibble for the outside cats this morning!
Normally we would have gone to the city to do our Costco shopping today, but our budget got a bit switched, so it was a smaller Walmart trip at the smaller, nearer, city. The electric company changed the dates to report our meter reading, which meant the due date changed, too. Normally, we can pay all our utilities when my husband’s disability payment comes in on the last business day of the month; that would be the one with his private health insurance that we live on. He also gets CPP Disability from the government, which is a top up of sorts, on the third last business day of the month. That allows us to do the bulk of our shopping a few days before the end of the month. This time, however, we had to make our electric payment out of it, and it was a few days late. We haven’t had a late payment on any bill since we’ve moved here! Thankfully, though, I was able to get explain our situation to the electric company and they were able to change it for us, so this will be the only month where it is an issue. Still, it left us with only about a third of our budget for this trip.
Which is okay. We’ll just do the big trip next week.
We had another change to our budget this month. We signed up for StarLink quite a few months ago. The initial down payment was made and we were just waiting for the service to go live in our area. Once that happened, they would send us an email to let us know before taking the rest of the funds out of the account. That would give us time to transfer the funds from our savings account to cover the bill.
Last night, my husband showed me an email from them, saying they’d tried and failed to make the payment.
!!!
It took a while, but my husband eventually found several emails from them, in his spam folder. Not only did they send as an email in advance, but they had tried to take the payment out a couple of times already!
Thankfully, today my husband was able to make the payment manually. Which means the equipment will soon be mailed out to us. He did have to update our address to our driveway marker number, because they didn’t consider a box number a valid address. Which is silly. There are plenty of people in rural communities that don’t get mail delivery. Considering rural internet is the whole point of what StarLink is doing here, you’d think they’d clue in.
No matter. With the shortage of computer chips delaying their roll out by months, if not years, we weren’t sure when we’d get our system. Thankfully, we signed up long enough ago that we are still high on the list.
The only down side is, even once the equipment gets here, we may not be able to install it. There is an app that will help us locate the strongest signal from our roof, and that’s where the dish will be installed.
There isn’t a massive amount of snow on the roof – the girls would have gone out to shovel it, if there was – but there is enough snow to make it dangerous to go out there, while lugging around the parts and pieces of a satellite dish and tools!
No matter. It’ll get here when it gets here. It’s still in beta, so once we do have it set up and running, we will close the larger of our two satellite accounts but leave the second one as a back up, just in case something goes wrong. After about a month, we’ll see about closing the second account. Just closing the one account, while paying for the new StarLink account, will save us about a hundred dollars a month. If it works as promised, we should have more reliable internet, with no data limits. Our current service keeps going up in price, but connectivity has been getting worse. Meanwhile, if we go over our data limit, the cost per gig is double. The StarLink satellite signals shouldn’t be affected by weather to the south of us, the way our current service is.
Once we get to the point where we have just the one, new account running, it should save us at least a couple hundred dollars per month, and with the way the price of basics, like food and fuel, are rising, that will be a big help. Plus, with more reliable service and no data limits, I’ll be able to do things like participate in Zoom calls and meetings that I’ve had to skip. I tried doing a Zoom call with my brother once, and it was barely functional!
So that is good news. :-)
My husband was able to take care of that while I was doing the shopping. We haven’t been able to clear enough or the yard to drive up to the house, though, so I had to pull up as close to the gate as I could. Thankfully, it all fit in the wagon we’ve found so handy, though it was heavy enough that the wheels were sinking in the packed snow of the driveway!
As soon as everything was unloaded, I fed the outside cats again while the girls put stuff away. You’d think they hadn’t been fed this morning at all, the way the little buggers were begging! After taking a couple of kibble bags into the house for the inside cats, I came out to get the last two bags for the outside cats, and found a cat in the wagon, looking ready to tear one of the bags open, right then and there!
Once all that was taken care of, I headed out again to the post office, where I also picked up a bag of deer feed this time, instead of the black oil seed I get in the summer. I was also able to refill the suet feeder. I’ll have to pick up more deer feed next time; for the past couple of winters, we went through about a bag of deer feed a week, but with the extended fall we had, and the current mild temperatures, the deer aren’t in as much need for supplemental feeding just yet.
While going back and forth, I usually have several of the adult cats following me around. Among the kittens, it’s been Nosencrantz and Agnoos – until now! This handsome boy has joined the party of cats determined to get stepped on and tripped over! :-D
More importantly, he lets me pet him regularly now! He even lets me pet his belly while he’s rolling around on the ground, though he does look awfully confused when I do! :-D
I just love those golden eyes!
I’m settling on this one being Chadicous. Aside from Bradicous, with his distinctive white tail tip, we’ll have to settle on which is which for the other ‘icsouses. :-D One has a distinctive black mark on its nose, while another has a lot more white on his hind legs. There’s still a third one that doesn’t stay still long enough for us to spot any distinguishing features.
I’m happy to say we are now good for the next while; it was mostly critter food we were running low on or out off, but we’ll be good until we can do the rest of the shopping next week. After that, we will be avoiding shopping as much as possible! I expect one last trip to the city in the middle of the month, then not again until after Christmas and New Years, at the earliest. Hopefully, the weather will remain mild, but if we end up in a deep freeze or snowed in again, we should be stocked up for a couple of months by then, if necessary. Especially once that quarter beef we ordered is ready!
I really look forward to when we are at the point of self-sufficiency where these trips to the city are just for topping up, not a major necessity as they are now.
Potato Beetle is looking downright malevolent! :-D
It was a very chilly morning today, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed down the cats, any! I tried to do a head count, but never got the same number twice, as they milled about, so I gave up. :-D
We had a first, yesterday evening, though I was not able to get a photo. While it was clear that deer have been visiting our feeding station for a while, yesterday was the first time I actually saw any.
I saw one out the window, but it saw me moving about through the glass and soon left. A moment later, I saw another – and a second one beside it! I’d hung a sunflower stem, with about 5 little seed heads, off the hook that should be holding a bird feeder (we never did find the missing pieces). One of the deer discovered it and started reaching up to nibble on a tiny seed head, breaking off the branch. The other deer promptly went after a leaf on the branch, breaking the stem from out of the deer’s mouth! The first deer went after the rest of the sunflower branch and pulled the whole thing down.
There was no trace of it, this morning.
Meanwhile, a third deer showed up and hovered nearby. I think I even saw a fourth one coming through the trees. About then, the phone rang. It was the pharmacy delivery guy letting me know he was in the area, so I quickly started to bundle up to meet him at the gate – which is when I saw another deer come in through the little gate, walking up the sidewalk, towards the side of the house!
Of course, my going disturbed the deer. I saw the delivery car reaching the gate and, as I started up the driveway, a deer suddenly came FLYING over the south fence of the spruce grove, across the driveway, and over the fence into the old hay yard. It touched ground twice, maybe three times, over the distance. My goodness, when deer go all out, it’s like they have wings!
The delivery driver missed it entirely. He had been rummaging for our package in his back seat by then.
The delivery was a bit of a surprise. My husband had ordered more insulin, but he got a refill on is bubble packs, too. He still have at least a week’s worth, left. It used to be that, because some of his meds are restricted, he couldn’t order refills until he was within 3 days of running out. That restriction went away when the government started shutting things down, and now he’s able to get his medications refilled even when he hadn’t asked for them yet! They don’t even make the bubble packs locally, anymore. He’s the only one on those meds out here, so they had to special order them from the city. Now, his bubble packs are made in the city, and shipped to the pharmacy. I have no idea how they decided to do a refill for him so soon, when they hadn’t been asked for.
What fun. We can’t go into the pharmacy because they don’t recognise medical mask exemptions, but we can sure get our opiates in advance, whether we ordered a refill or not!
Looking at the bill was a head shaker. His bubble packs, with a 4 week supply of about 10 different medications in it, including some pretty rare ones, cost less than half what his one box of 4 slow-release insulin pens cost, and the box of insulin lasts for less than a month. I know this type of insulin is more expensive, but sheesh!!!
On a completely different topic, I got an email from our vandal’s lawyer yesterday. It seems our vandal is agreeable to the conditions we came up with during Case Management, and will be stating this in court tomorrow. Of course, it’s entirely possible he’ll change his mind at the last minute, but assuming he doesn’t, that means we will have a Peace Bond against him. For one year, we will have no contact with him, and he will not be allowed to be under the influence while off his own property (I don’t care if he gets drunk at home. I just don’t want him getting drunk, then coming over here to set fire to the house or something). I’m supposed to get a copy of the court order, so I’ll get the precise wording of it, then.
It’s just a piece of paper, but it’s a tool the RCMP will have, if our vandal ever does decide to do something stupid again.
Now we just have to deal with his civil suit against us. The court date for that is at the end of January. Hopefully, the judge will see just how stupid it is, and throw it out. Even if our vandal did have some sort of claim on the junk he thinks is his, it makes no sense for him to go after me for money, when I don’t own anything here!
We shall see how it goes.
Until then, I will enjoy caring for the yard cats, as my late father did. :-)
What a contented expression, as Rolando Moon enjoys her spot in the sun after breakfast!
I was able to do a head count this morning, and all 20 are accounted for! I even got to pet a few of them, as they rushed into the kibble house, including the Distinguished Guest.
The heated water bowl was almost completely empty when I got to it. A bit of frost on the inside showed that it is functioning properly, and shutting itself off when it’s not needed. This time, I filled it completely, rather than dividing the water between all the containers, so they will have liquid water for longer. Later today, I’ll come back out with more warm water and knock the ice out of the other containers, and maybe switch to using a couple for kibble, instead. There is more need to spread out the kibble than the water.
We got a fairly steep drop in the temperatures today. Yesterday, we actually reached 2C/36F, very briefly, which was a few degrees warmer than forecast. This morning, we are at -14C/7F, with a wind chill of -25C/-13F! Tonight, we are supposed to reach a low of -20C/-4F, but the wind chill is supposed to reach -29C/-20F. Which isn’t too bad for this time of year. The weird part is that on Saturday – just three days from now – we are supposed to reach -1C/30F, or possibly even 3C/37F, depending on which weather service I look at!
The outside cats have plenty of food, water and shelter, including the heated cat house, so they will be fine, either way. The younglings will learn from experienced cats like Rolando Moon, and enjoy their sheltered sun spots while they can!
Yesterday, my daughter and I opened up the cats’ house and set up the extension cord I found that is safe to use in there. The heated water bowl had been knocked over again, by the time we got out there, which meant the cats had no liquid water available. They hovered around us the entire time we worked, then when everything was set up and the bowls refilled, they came running! They were so thirsty. I made sure to put water in all the bowls, so more could get at water at the same time.
Then I topped up the kibble trays and even more cats came running! I counted 19. Only Ghost Baby was unseen.
Not this morning!
I counted 20 furry butts this morning! All are accounted for.
Also, the heated water bowl had just an inch or two of water in it when I came out this morning, and no ice. Awesome!
I decided to leave the chimney insert where it was. The cats like to climb up and sit on it, plus the little ones can even go inside it for extra shelter, if necessary.
While doing the rest of my rounds, I noticed deer tracks all over the yards around the house. In some areas, it seems they are checking out the different crab apple, and even the plum trees. There is no fruit on any of them for the deer to find, this winter.
They are even digging into the compost pile. I would not have expected them to try and eat the potato plants in there! Do deer normally try to eat things in the nightshade family???
You can see from the tracks that they’re walking right through the half-finished low raised bed. That one was left with a trench down the middle, where we will add more compostable scraps before the bed gets finished in the spring. That’s where most of the frost damaged aloe vera plants ended up, though there are kitchen scraps in it, too. The deer are not digging in this bed, though. Just walking through it! The garlic beds, at least, are being left alone.
I had an unfortunate surprise, though. While looking at the deer tracks in the trees at the south fence along the spruce grove, I saw them going past the little cedar tree we’d found, and the remains of the mulberry tree we’d planted in the spring (only for it to get killed by that one cold night in May that is also why we had no crab apples, plums, chokecherries or Saskatoons this year). I’d asked my mother about the cedar tree, and she knew nothing about it, so I don’t know who planted it there or when, but it had clearly been there at least few years longer than we have been living here.
This year, for some reason, the deer decided to eat it. The twigs and branches are completely stripped. Not only that, but it looks like they even ate the remains of the mulberry tree! We had left it alone, so it was still in between support stakes, but the deer still managed to get at it.
Even the pile of bush bean plants in the garden that was waiting to be buried in garden plots next spring has been dug into more. There doesn’t seem to be much left at all.
We’ve had such a long, mild fall and, even with the one blizzard we’ve had, things have still been very mild and there’s not a tremendous amount of snow, by any means. This early in the winter, there is still lots of food available for the deer that is easy for them to get at. We haven’t see the deer in our yard, just their tracks, but we do see them along the roads or the occasional trial cam file, and they are still quite plump and hearty looking.
So why are they acting like they are starving? And going for things like the cedar, which they completely ignored for years?
I suppose it’s possible the cedar will still survive and regrow in the spring, but it seems so strange that they would have gone for it now.
One thing is for sure. When we finally do start planting our fruit and nut trees and berry bushes, we’re going to have to make sure they are well protected from the deer!
Also, it gives us even more incentive to plant forage trees, beyond the outer yard, so the deer will have less reason to come after trees closer to the house.
The Re-Farmer 