After putting kibble out for the outside cats, I was about to leave the sun room with bird seed, when I startled something small and white.
I stayed in the sun room long enough for the brave baby to return!
I could see no sign of the other two of Junk Pile’s babies. They hang out in the spirea by the storage house, where we now have bowls of food and water set up for them, but this little one decided to check out where all the other cats are going!
Rosencrantz has been coming over for food in the mornings pretty regularly, but I don’t think her kittens are in the pump shack anymore.
So there are at least 6 kittens from 2 litters, about the size of this little cutie, plus however many Butterscotch ended up having. If any survived. I haven’t been able to see if she’s still nursing, as she has become somewhat unfriendly. I think she really didn’t like being indoors and doesn’t want to take the chance of us doing that again.
Over the nest few weeks/months, I expect to see more yard kitties showing up by the house!
Yesterday evening, I happened to glance out my window facing the garden and saw a deer making its way into the yard. Something startled it and it ran off, but I figured that would be a good time to do my evening rounds – and check the sunflowers!
I headed out through the sun room and found another visitor.
The cheeky little bugger completely ignored me and the noise I was making as I came out the sun room doors.
He seems to have some odd matting in his fur. Or maybe something it caught in it?
It wasn’t until I started moving further from the doorway that he started paying attention to me.
(Yes, I was zooming in to take photos, and then I cropped the photos. I was staying well away from Stinky!)
He was not a happy Stinky! I just kept moving away, and he eventually ran off through the old kitchen garden.
So I made sure to go around the other side of the house, to check the garden! :-D
After checking the sunflowers and making my way back to the house, I saw Stinky again – with a friend! – running through the back yard towards the old garden shed. Of course, that was the direction I needed to go! I was able to skirt around them, then use the garden hose to discourage them from coming closer.
Alas, we did lose one of the smaller sunflowers.
I took this picture this morning. This is one of the third variety of giant sunflowers that we planted much later, to replace the ones we lost in the original planting.
The survivors of our first planting are doing pretty good, I think!
Most of them are approaching 5 feet in height, now. Once they got higher than a couple of feet, the deer seemed to ignore them. One of the last ones that got its top chomped off is surviving quite well, and is growing a new “head” from the side of the main stalk. I have high hopes that the most recently decapitated sunflower will do fine and grow a new head, though being one of the variety planted the latest, chances are it won’t have long enough of a growing season to fully mature. We shall see.
I’m just really impressed with how big the pattypan squash plants are getting! They are also filled with buds and blossoms, and little baby squashes. None of the others are even close. There’s a good possibility these will be the only squash that actually produce this year. Which is okay. This year is our experimental year. Anything we get is bonus, and we’re learning a lot.
I keep forgetting to take pictures of the potatoes. They actually look rather sparse, as far as foliage goes, but some have started to bloom, so we can definitely look forward to having our own potatoes this year. Whether or not we use the same method to grow them will be decided when we harvest them.
I also found a rather dramatic surprise this morning, when checking on the carrot and beet beds.
This is a chokecherry tree growing among the sour cherries that are doing so poorly. When I went past it last night, the berries were all still green!
This one is mostly by the cherry trees and a lot of other stuff that we will be taking out (the cherry tree by the house has ripening berries on it, but none of the ones in this other location). I want to make sure to keep the chokecherry tree, since it seems to be doing so well, now. Our first two summers here, this tree didn’t even bloom, so we didn’t realize what it was!
There is another chokecherry tree, in behind where the sad little Saskatoon bushes are, that also decided to bloom and produce this year. It is in an area still filled with spirea that we need to clear out.
Another surprise this year is that we have more, stronger and healthier Saskatoon bushes, hiding behind the stack of boards and junk that have Junk Pile kitten her name. (No kittens in there, this year!) They are still producing big, juicy berries. There is another chokecherry tree growing with them. It’s berries are still very green. In this location, this tree is in shade most of the time, whereas the other two get a lot of sun.
Which had me curious about the other trees we’d gathered chokecherries from, over the past two summers.
It was pretty windy when I tried to take this photo, so it’s not very clear, but you can see there are no red berries on here, yet. A few of the berries are starting to show just a bit of a blush on them. This tree has more shade, being planted so close to the maple grove and rows of spruce trees my parents added on the North side over the years. The berries on this tree ripened later than the other two I checked next, but the berries it produced were larger and juicier.
This chokecherry tree is being choked – by lilacs! It is tipped way over and hanging down. My daughters and I have been talking about what to do with this one. I’ve been thinking of cutting away the lilacs surrounding it, then adding some sort of support I can use to train the tree to start growing upright.
My daughter suggested we leave the lilacs, and get rid of this chokecherry! The lilac hedge serves as both a privacy and dust screen from the main road that goes by on this side of the property. It has quite a lot of traffic, for a gravel road. The reason my mother spent so many years planting and extending this hedge was partly because of just how much dust drifts in, every time a vehicle drove by. Plus, every now and then, vehicles going by would slow down to peer into our yard and garden. And not just the year we grew “konopie” from seeds my mother got from Poland, after regaling us with stories from her childhood. It turned out that konopie is Polish for hemp, but someone thought it was marijuana and stole a row and a half of it.
Anyone who tried to smoke that would probably have gotten rather ill rather than high!
Anyhow. The lilacs serve a purpose, and in that location, privacy and dust screening is more important than having chokecherries. Especially since it turns out we have so many more, elsewhere.
This chokecherry tree is also among the lilacs.
Unlike the other one, this one is growing from the inside of the hedge, instead of out from the middle of it somewhere. So it is growing straight and tall, rather than falling over. In the last couple of summers, I found that of the two among the lilacs, this one also produced better berries, and ripened sooner, than the one that’s falling over.
There is also a small chokecherry tree growing in the middle of the area I move, near where the falling over chokecherry is. It likely sowed itself, but over the years, it has been allowed to grow, rather than getting mowed over. We will likely leave that one be. In the open as it it, it will have lots of light and space to grow straight and tall, and eventually produce lots of berries.
It’s a good thing we like chokecherries. I like to eat them straight off the tree, even though they are very … astringent, I believe the word used is. Given how many trees we’ll have producing berries this year, we can expect to have lots to make things with!
We normally try to keep Sunday as a day of rest, and today, it seemed I really needed it. It’s as if the heat from the past couple of days have sucked the energy right out of me! :-( Thankfully, today has been a much “cooler” 24C/75F. Higher winds made it feel even nicer, though it is a bit disconcerting when I do my rounds, and I can hear branches cracking! This morning, I found a rather large branch that had come down and almost missed it, since it had landed almost right on one of the piles of branches in the maple grove. :-D
One of the things I was doing to take advantage of the quiet time was think ahead of what we’d like to try growing, based on how things have been going so far. I still want to try gourds again, though I now know to start them indoors much earlier, and that it might be worth investing in one of the warming pads available for under seed trays.
I found a couple of very interesting seed sites that I look forward to trying out. I will certainly be ordering more seeds from Vesey’s – I’ve been happy with what we got from them, and their customer service. Any problems we’ve been having have been at our end, and not a problem with the product themselves. Even with the rough start, the sunburst squash are doing remarkably well! They certainly handled things like the seed trays being dumped onto the ground by cats much better than other varieties. Even in the bed that got frost damaged, I am seeing sunburst squash recovering and getting much bigger.
Here are a couple of seed sources I’ve found.
One is Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. They are a US based company and specialize in rare varieties. I am not seeing a lot of information about what can or can’t be grown here in Canada; especially in our zone three, but their site does allow for customer reviews that have been pretty interesting, and useful, to read. Just as one example, I was looking at varieties of carrots. The Kyoto Red carrot caught my eye. The description talks about it being a late summer, fall or winter carrot. Obviously, not something we can grow here, right? In the reviews, there were people complaining about how the carrots would bolt into seed or otherwise fail – they’d planted in the spring. Then I found one reviewer saying, yeah, I planted in the spring, in Canada, zone 3, and they’re doing great!
I think we’ll be trying out that variety! :-D
There is just so much to go through, and so much I’d love to try! If we can create the right growing environment. A long term goal is to be able to grow food plants for at least 3 seasons, and some of the stuff in here would definitely provide incentive!
It was in searching for seed sources for different types of gourds that led me to this site; Seedman – Seeds from Around the World
Sadly, they no longer ship to Canada, nor anywhere else outside the US. They’ve got a huge variety of unusual seeds. One of the things I like is the list they have, right on their main page, that go beyond “vegetables”, “herbs”, etc. Do you have only a patio available to garden in? There’s a list for that. Do you want to grow flowers for crafting purposes? You can find them here. Moon garden? Rainforest? Hanging baskets? There’s even a list for tropical plants, zone 9 or higher.
Alas, I won’t be able to get anything from there, and will have to find a source that is in, or will ship to, Canada.
If you happen to know of any, please do let me know!
I guess it’s a good thing our washing machine didn’t come in. It means we are NOT driving to the city today. Right now, I’m glad to not have to make the trip. For some reason, I had a sleepless night, and am running on empty. I did finally get a few hours of sleep, but not until after 6am!
Thank God my “job” is to take care of this place, where we can be flexible in how and when we take care of things, depending on schedules, health issues and the weather.
Speaking of weather, today is going to be a good day to have no energy and stay inside.
We’re looking at a high of 32C/90F this afternoon, with the humidex bringing it to 42C/107F.
The storms I’d been tracking on the weather radar over the past couple of days not only passed us by, but even the rain we were expecting didn’t materialize. With 88% humidity, it was decidedly muggy when I did my rounds this morning! It does look like we got some sort of drizzle this morning, at least.
Unfortunately, it also meant I didn’t have the energy to clean up the mess the skunk made this morning. After cleaning up in the old kitchen and sun room, we had two large garbage bags set aside on the patio blocks by the main entry, waiting for our next dump run. For some reason, the skunk tore one of them apart. We found him in there this morning, still burrowing. These bags have no food garbage in them. What was the skunk after in there?
We really need to build a box to hold our garbage bags until we can get to the dump.
Then, when I went to check on the squash beds, I discovered a little gourd plant dug up. It was one of the ones that finally came up in the seed tray, long after the others had been transplanted, so I wasn’t expecting anything from it. Yet, it also seems to have been the only surviving gourd plant. Birdhouse gourds are a climbing vine, and it had enough tendrils that I gave it its own bamboo pole to climb and was starting to train it upwards. I doubt it will survive, but I put it back. Whatever the skunk was digging for was under the vine, and once it was aside the skunk left it be. The plant itself is undamaged, but the damage to the roots might be too much.
There had never been a lot of gourd seeds that germinated, but I know there had been several among the transplants. I was pretty sure I’d been able to put mostly gourds along the back row in the squash bed, but none of what’s growing there have tendrils. Now that I know which ones are the sunburst squash, that means all the others are from the Summer Surprise mix of different zucchini.
I’m kinda disappointed. I had really hoped to have some birdhouse gourds for future crafting! They require a year to dry out before they can be used, so this was already a long term plan.
Ah, well. I’ve since found a website that specializes in different types of gourds. The next time I try to grow them, I will order some different varieties from there. There is bound to be something that will grow in our region, and hopefully, we will be better able to protect them from the elements – and digging skunks! – too.
With Junk Pile’s babies starting to use the spirea to hide in, I moved a food dish near the area. This morning, while Junk Pile was by the house, waiting for me to refill the kibble, I saw her mostly white kitten, sitting on the mulch by the grapes.
It’s not the white kitten in the photo above!
Can you see the little white nose peaking out from under the grapes?
The grey baby eventually came out to eat with mom, but I didn’t see the white one again.
While checking on the garden beds and doing a bit of weeding, I pulled a few baby carrots.
Breakfast of champions! :-D
I’ve got the three varieties in here; purple, white and rainbow mix.
They were very tasty! :-D
Today, we’re going to have to really push to finish the old kitchen and sun room. The weather forecast has changed.
The heat warnings are back, with a predicted high of 30C/86F, and the humidex making it feel like 36C/96F. The thunderstorms that had been predicted for tomorrow are now expected this afternoon. Even if the storms miss us again, we’ll likely catch some rain, and among the stuff we have sitting outside are power tools.
Yesterday, things were a bit cooler and finally nice enough to start a fire in the fire pit!
I’ve been putting small branches and the invasive vines I’ve pulled up into there since last summer, so it felt good to finally burn that stuff away!
While I was at it, I decided to clean up the bricks around the fire pit that the skunks revealed while digging for grubs.
Knowing that these were the glazed bricks we’ve got all over the place under there, I decided to use the sidewalk ice scraping tool. Just a flat blade that would slide across the surface, and cut away the root mats at the same time.
It worked remarkably well!
In the above photo, I’d finished uncovering the bricks all the way around.
There was some seriously thick root mats covering some of them!
The next step was to hose them down with water, including using the jet to pressure wash some of the dirt out from between the bricks, and between the bricks and the fire pit ring.
Where the water pooled showed me the most uneven areas of the brick ring.
What I will eventually be doing is taking them out completely, leveling the base off as best I can, then putting them back.
Ideally, I’d be adding a layer of gravel under there, first.
I am seriously considering taking the wagon and a shovel out to the old gravel pit to see what I can salvage out of there!
Until then, we make do.
My next step was to use break up the ridge of soil and root mats around the ring some more.
Every now and then, I’d find a small rock, but then I hit was seemed to be a much larger rock.
A strangely flat and smooth rock.
I found another brick!
For a moment, I thought maybe there was a second ring of bricks, but the angle of it was too random for that.
Somehow, a single brick got left to one side, and got buried with the others.
The ones around the fire pit getting buried makes sense, but how does a lone brick on the side get left there long enough to be buried, too? Did no one try to mow there, before it got covered? Did people using the fire pit (and I know it did get used) simply walk around it until it disappeared, along with the other bricks?
So very strange!
I set it aside with another brick like it, that I’d found under some nearby maple trees. :-D
(These glazed bricks have been around for as long as I can remember. I have no idea where they came from, but they would be at least 50 years old, and probably quite a few years older. While I intend to take them out of the various areas they are in now, to replace them with what should be there instead (like infill around the house!), these are going to be kept and repurposed. They’re too slippery to use as a “floor” for anything (which is probably what they were salvaged from originally), but I think they would be great on walls or something, at some point.)
Once I broke up the ridge, I used the metal blade on the scraper to push the soil away, to try and level things a bit more.
The grills in the fire pit, btw, are the racks from our old oven. After burning away what was already in the pit, I started working on the pile of branches by the collapsing log cabin. When a solid bed of coals was formed, I put the oven racks in it, then built the fire up again on top, to burn away any grease or whatever that got on them while being used. We basically didn’t bother to clean the oven when we knew we needed to replace it fairly soon. It did have a self-cleaning function, but we didn’t feel it was safe to use. With elements on the stove sparking, we didn’t want to find out if anything electrical would give out in the oven, too!
So I used the fire pit to get the cruddy bits off.
Shortly after this, my daughter joined me, and we built the fire up once again, to get rid of more of the branch pile.
I also used a metal rake to spread the soil out more, then took the hose to it, to break up the clumps. The water no longer pools at the bricks. :-)
After a while, my daughter took out the oven racks and set them aside to be hosed off, later.
The next thing I want to do is empty the fire pit of ashes, which will be spread over a garden area or two.
Once it is cleaned out, I want to add some cinder blocks or bricks into the pit. They will be there to hold one or both oven racks. This way, if we wanted to, we could use pots and pans for cooking over the coals. I do have a campfire rack, but it’s meant to put food on directly to cook, not hold the weight of cooking utensils. The oven racks and bricks will open up more possibilities for what we can do on our fire pit. :-)
While I was working on uncovering the fire pit ring, I had help.
Not the most useful kind of help!
More like the “pay attention to me or I’ll trip you” kind of help! :-D
Eventually, he got tired of trying to make me pick him up and went for a nap. :-)
Such a cutie!
He would make such a loving indoor cat, but we’ve had no luck in adopting him or Creamsicle out. :-(
Lately, Potato Beetle and Creamsicle have perfected the art of rubbing against our legs WHILE we are walking, somehow managing to maintain contact and pressure even as we pull our legs away.
Such determined creatures!
Also, Potato seems to like my new shoes. Maybe that’s it. He’s happy I no longer have these.
My left shoe had actually blown out like the one on the right, but I’d used Gorilla Super Glue on it. Amazingly, it is still holding! The other shoe was only coming loose at the toe tip, so I glued that – only to have the sides blow out, soon after! The tip managed to hold on for days longer.
I’m not a shoe person. It’s so hard for me to find shoes that accommodate my feet, I don’t bother. I have one pair of regular shoes. Maybe a pair of sandals, too, if I can find them. Not this time of year, apparently. :-/
Women’s shoes don’t fit me, at all. I can wear extra wide men’s shoes, but to get the right width, I go with a size that’s a fair bit longer than my feet. Which is why I keep catching the toes of my shoes on things. :-D It means my shoes wear out on the sides faster, as my feet bend in a different area than the shoes are designed for. It doesn’t matter if they are cheapies, or if I spring for a higher end shoe. By the end of a year, all my shoes end up looking like this!
As I catch up with things I wasn’t able to post while our internet was down, I figured I’d start with some fun stuff!
(Also, whatever technical problems killed off our secondary account is also affecting our primary account – but at least that one still gets a signal! We will get a call in a day or two about when someone can come by to check the hardware.)
This first photo shows some impressive progress.
That’s Keith, reaching out to touch a napping Leyendecker.
Keith.
Keith, the ball of stress and anxiety that would hiss and run away anytime a kitten came near him.
Now, he will actually curl up with Leyendecker for a nap.
He still doesn’t do much with the kittens overall, but at least he isn’t freaking out anymore.
Which leaves Fenrir as the remaining problem cat. She is more aggressive than Keith was, and will hiss and bat at them. But then, she’ll hiss and bat at some of the adult cats, too.
Then there’s Cheddar. This is him in his usual state.
He has managed to take up half of my king sized bed, with his stretching and splaying!
When he came indoors, almost a year ago, I never imagined he would grow into this big beast!
He used to be so tiny! :-D I’m so glad we were able to get his eyes all healed up.
And now some bonus critter pictures!
Much, much bigger critters.
Our renter’s cows came by the barn for a visit. :-D
In the middle foreground, walking away, is the bull. What a massive, meaty beast he is!
It won’t take long for them to eat up all that grass, and it’ll be shorter than our lawn, after being freshly mowed!
I just love hearing the cows when they’re nearby. We’re not in a position to have cows ourselves, so I get to enjoy them vicariously through the renter! :-D
While my daughters and I were in the city, my darling husband finally got through to our internet provider and had a little chat with them.
We had internet soon after.
The problem is still not solved, though. It’s just a make-do until a tech comes out to check the secondary account’s satellite disk.
When they first brought this up with my husband, they said it would cost us $125, just to have someone come out.
By the time he was done with them, that fee was waived!
Also, we are back to using our primary account for now, and we will NOT be charged double the price per gig. However, anything we do use is that much more on our bill, so we will be rationing our data for a lot of things.
While we do have a signal with this dish, it is not the same as it was, before all these problems started, just a few days ago. Data transfer speeds are insanely slow, and it can take several attempts just to get a web page to load. WordPress has always been troublesome, but it took me about 8 minutes just to get the editor loaded so I could write this post!
Still, it should mean I can catch up on posts with images. I always resize the images into smaller file sizes, so they don’t take up much data. The following photos all uploaded faster than I could get the editor to load!
So these go back a couple of days. :-)
In the last while, we have been regularly putting the kittens and Beep Beep in the basement for the night, then my husband is usually the one who opens the door for them in the mornings. So we still have cat food both upstairs and down.
The cats, of course, always act as though they’re starving, even though there’s plenty of food in the upstairs bowls. What they’re really begging for is wet cat food, and they get that only once a day. The dry kibble is always available.
Since the adults cats now go into the basement regularly, they’re also going for the kittens’ food bowls, so I added larger tin, so that the kittens could still get at some.
Just look at those buggers! They’re crowing around the smaller containers, like they haven’t eaten in a week!
We have been mixing kitten kibble in with the adult kibble. I think the adult cats like the kitten kibble better! :-D
While I was tending to the kitties that day, it was also the day to check the temperature and humidity in the root cellar. While there, I noticed something I had forgotten about.
The two bottles of our most recent batch of mead!
We were supposed to taste test a bottle after different lengths of time. One of them was supposed to be opened up on my birthday. I completely forgot about it!
At some point, I’ll grab one and bring it up for a taste test. :-)
While checking the garden plots, I discovered something unfortunate.
All three beds of beets had quite a lot of their greens missing. It seems we had a deer visiting! She especially seemed to like this Baldor variety.
In the squash bed, I had a more pleasant surprise.
The largest squash plants that I thought were green zucchini turned out to be…
… sunburst squash!
From the number of buds we’re seeing, it looks like we’ll have quite a lot of them over the summer, too. :-)
I had one last surprise that morning.
While checking the usual spots for fallen branches, I went by the fire pit, which hasn’t been used in over a year. I noticed the skunks had been digging in the dirt, right beside it, and something in the dirt caught my eye.
That white you see?
That’s a glazed brick. One of the many we have all over the place.
Looking around at other spots the skunks had dug up, I saw signs of more.
The fire pit has a ring of bricks around it, completely buried.
It must have taken years for them to be covered by that much soil!
With no fire bans right now, we can actually use our fire pit, and uncovering the bricks will be a good thing to get done, too.
I am really looking forward to being able to do cook outs again!
While doing my rounds, before going to the city, I went to the usual spots to see if any more branches had come down during the night.
None had, but when I reached the fence near the pump shack, I heard something moving on the metal table beside it.
It took me a while, but I eventually saw a kitten slink under the table itself.
Was that Junk Pile cat’s white and grey baby?
Near where I was standing is a spot the cats use to go under the chain link fence. Rosencrantz, whom I’d seen earlier as I put kibble out for the yard cats, went through, stopping several times to look back at me and give me a death glare! :-D
Just look at that face!
So was that Rosencrantz’s baby I was seeing?
She made her way to the pump shack, then settled down in front of the door, keeping an eye on me. I could no longer see the kitten under the table, but then and orange head popped out of the hole at the bottom of the door!
I’d actually enlarged that hole last year, when Pump Shack kitten was living in there. (We haven’t seen Pump Shack cat, nor her mom, Guildenstern, in a very long time.)
It took a while, but the other kitten did eventually come around.
Of course, there’s that little sapling in the way! :-D
This is most definitely NOT the grey and white kitten I saw before. This one has more white, and also has patches of orange in it.
So this is a first time sighting of these babies!
These would be the younger siblings to Keith, David and Junk Pile cat.
Shortly after this, my older daughter and I headed for the city. Having gone looking around online last night, I had several possibilities for washing machines that I wanted to check out at Home Depot.
Once at the store, I went looking at the machines. I wasn’t too surprised that there were fewer than what I saw online. Aside from the prices, I had also looked at ratings. GE had some of the lowest ratings, while Whirlpool had the highest. Those were out of budget, though. Plus, I wasn’t seeing any on display.
I had an employee acknowledge me when I first got there, asking if I needed help right away. I didn’t, yet, which worked out for him, since he said he needed to go to the back for a while. This gave me lots of time to look at the machines before settling on this one.
It was a GE, but not the same model I was seeing on the website that had the lower ratings. In fact, I don’t recall seeing this model online at all. The price was also easier on the budget than others on display. There were several cheaper ones but… they were also TOO cheap! And I don’t mean just on price.
There was also the issue of size, which turned out to be more of a non-issue. Where we have the washer and dryer is already tight. My daughter at home measured the width and messaged me the info. Our machine at home was 26 7/8ths wide. We could go up to 27 inches, but that was it. The machines were all either 26 7/8ths inches wide, or 27 inches wide. This one was 27 inches wide.
I then waited for the guy to come back.
And waited.
After a while, I asked a nearby cashier if she could see if someone was available, on the possibility there was someone else in that section.
There wasn’t.
So I waited some more, wandering around a bit.
Which is when I discovered there was a whole other section of washers and dryers I’d somehow managed to not see.
Of course, that’s when the guy came back.
I told him I was looking for a washing machine, mentioned that I’d just noticed the other section. After a quick walk around, I showed him the one I said I’d decided on.
“No,” he said.
I could only laugh. He did explain, though.
Basically, the brand sucks. He’d never use one himself, and wouldn’t sell one, if he could avoid it. His recommendation was to go with either Whirlpool or LG. I’d seen both brands were highly rated, but I hadn’t looked at any LG models online.
The first one he took me over to was a Whirlpool. It was over budget but, more importantly, it was 27 1/2 inches wide. That half inch would make a difference.
He showed me a couple others he recommended, both LG, that were 27 inches. The closer one we came to, I told him straight up was out of budget, so he showed me another one.
After going back and forth, I went with the cheaper LG.
This is it.
It cost $100 more than the GE, but it was still within budget. Well. Almost. After taxes and whatever fees were added on, it ended up costing $835 and change. So $35 over budget. It is also a higher capacity machine, at 5.5 cubic feet instead of 4.9 cubit feet in the GE I was looking at.
Unfortunately, they do not keep an inventory of stuff like this. It has to be delivered from the national warehouse in Ontario.
Expected delivery to the store: Friday, the 24th.
That’s more than a week away.
Now, I could have decided not to buy it, then tried going elsewhere, but that would most likely have meant going to another city, at a competitor’s location where we got our replacement hot water tank. That store has higher prices for the same makes and models, though, so even if I were able to find an identical machine, I probably could not have bought it.
So I bought the machine. If we really, really have to, we can go to town and use the laundromat.
As he did the computer stuff, and put me into their system, we had time to chat. I told him about our washer dying yesterday, and how we had to decide if it was worth fixing. I told him about finding the plastic part under it, and he cringed. I mentioned the screws, and he cringed a bit more. Then I mentioned the puddle of oil, and he did a whole body twitch while in the middle of typing. :-D
After the transaction was done, he made sure to let me know to expect a call on Thursday, the 23rd. If there was no call, he said to call him early on Friday (I made sure to take down his name). The delivery trucks stop running at 4:30. Once they stop, there would be no chance of it arriving until Monday, so it would have to be early enough for him to make some calls about it.
The new washer will be delivered to the store. We’re too far away to have it delivered to our place. Which actually helped a bit, since it kept the price down. There would have been a delivery fee on top of everything else, but he was able to waive that.
So we’ve got more than a week without a washing machine.
And I needed to do laundry, yesterday.
While we could make the trip into town to use the laundromat, we’re not going to bother. At least, not yet. My daughters have already done a load of their own laundry in the bath tub, and I’m about to do the same.
The one good thing about the new washing machine not coming in right away is, we have time to haul the old one out and clean up the mess of oil under it.
By the time we got home, I was surprised it wasn’t even 2pm yet. If felt like it should have been more like 4 or 5!
This has been a very expensive month. I had to buy the push mower. Then I had to buy the parts and pieces to fix the sink. My daughter bought the new stove, and now we’ve bought a new washing machine. Meanwhile, we’ve got the riding mower still in the shop (at this point, I’m hoping they’ll continue to take their time getting to it!), plus my mother’s car will be ready for the end of the month. That one, at least, I’ve got almost 2/3rds paid off. My older daughter is still getting regular commissions, but my younger daughter is not going to be able to find a job for some time, given the pandemic situation, and our Premiere extending our “emergency” status for a couple more months, in spite of the lack of cases in our province. So it’s not like there’s any way for the income to increase with the outgo!
Unfortunately, it means a lot of things we’d hoped to get done this summer, likely won’t happen. We need to buy plywood for a floor on the trailer, and more for other projects we had in mind. I was hoping to buy materials to create a base for the cordwood outhouse we were planning to build this summer. While there is a lot we can get started on to prepare that won’t cost money, we do still need to buy some things, like mortar ingredients, and I was hoping to have concrete paving stones as a “floor” to build on. That project will likely have to be pushed back to next year. Plus, if anything else breaks down, there’s very little left in reserve. I’m just thankful we had as much as we did, set aside, to cover these. I just can’t help but think, how on earth are we supposed to come up with $10,000 for a new roof, when stuff like this keeps happening?
But, thanks to my husband’s private insurance and disability income, the bills are being paid, there’s food on the table, and gas in the tank. Being hear at the farm, we’ve got a roof over our head (even if it needs replacing!) and are secure as “caretakers” of the property. We are much better off than so many others, and have much to be thankful for.
Well, there’s one thing that might help, on the financial side. Our internet provider has had a new tower built in the area.
When moving here, the only option we had was satellite and, because of plan limits at the time, we had to get two of them to provide enough data for our needs. (Getting internet is a necessity, since my daughter’s business is entirely online now.) Even then, we had issues. Eventually, we were able to double the data one of the plans. Meanwhile, we lose connectivity fairly easily. Particularly in summer, when the foliage is full. The primary account’s satellite is usually fine, but the secondary satellite is barely a couple of feet to the side, and the branches block the signal more frequently (I’ve lost internet several times, just writing this post!). As we reach the limit on the data plan for our primary account, we switch cables on our router to the secondary account – and we switched cables just this morning. We have been regularly going over our data plans, and while the company waived those costs for the past couple of months, due to the lock downs and more people being stuck at home, that ended this month.
My husband talked to the company and will arrange for someone to come by next month to do a site survey (when we’ll have money to pay for the survey). If they can get a signal to the new tower, we would be able to move away from satellite completely, have only one account, unlimited data, and save almost $200 a month.
Yeah. We spend over $300 a month, just to get internet out here, with limited data and frequent loss of connectivity.
After shifting the dryer, then moving the washing machine, my darling daughter squirmed her way behind it to see what she could see.
Besides cat fur dust bunnies from hell and miscellaneous objects that somehow made their way under the washer and dryer…
…and the round plastic cap?? of some sort, that was oily along its edge…
…and the rusted out screws…
…and the puddle of a yellowish oil.
We tipped the washer as much as we could, so she could look at the bottom to see where the plastic thing came from, or the screws, or maybe where the oil was coming from. Unfortunately, we couldn’t tip it enough for her to see. At least not without sticking her head in the puddle of oil.
The next thing to do was to pop off the back panel, to see if the drive belt was off or what else might be the problem.
The back panel turned out to be completely different from anything we found while researching stuff online. My daughter could not see where or how the panel came off. From her angle, it looked like all one piece. From above, I could see where there was a seam between panels under the power cord, but that didn’t help her any.
As she struggled with it, I made the executive decision.
Tomorrow, we’re going into the city and getting a new washing machine. It’s not worth the hassle to fight with and fix this old machine.
It’s going to decimate our contingency fund, but that’s what it’s for, I guess. Thank God we have it, but nothing had better break after this!
After looking around online, I found the best prices at Home Depot, of all places. Not that there is a lot of difference, really. We won’t be able to get top of the line, but we won’t have to get bottom of the barrel, either.
So everything is all put back again, until we have to drag it all out again tomorrow. We’re going to have to figure out how to work around that dryer. The entry way isn’t very big.
*sigh* I think we’re going to have to shove the table to the side in the dining room again. The only way I can think of doing this is if we bring the new machine into the dining room, pull out the dryer, pull out the washing machine, put the washing machine in the dining room, clean up the mess under it, install the new machine, put the dryer back, then haul the old machine out to join the old stove in the junk pile.
There are two steps between the entryway and the dining room that we’ll be hauling these over, too.
At least washing machines are light!
Well, I guess I’d better start heating to bed. The earlier we start for the city, the faster we can get this over with!
I want to end this on a fun note, so I have some photos to share with you. When heading out to do my evening rounds, I wanted to do some watering to empty our rain barrel a bit.
As I started towards the sun room, however, I found a furry visitor, eating cat kibble! Stinky was back for an evening meal. When he saw me, he started to head for the sun room door, so I decided to head towards the barn and check on things. With the winds we’ve been having, I wanted to make sure there was no damage, plus I wanted to give Stinky time to finish eating and leave.
When I came back, I found…
… two of them!
It’s been a while since I’ve seen two!
I watched them for a bit and took pictures – the zoom on my phone’s camera sucks, but it’s better than getting too close! :-D
This bigger one is the newcomer for this year. We had two coming over regularly, last year, and it may be these are the same two – or the little one is an offspring.
The bigger one ambled off and disappeared under the storage house.
The little one stayed to snuffle and nibble at the fence post we used to hook the chain to, when using the come-along to move the new cat shelter off the trailer a couple of days ago. After a while, he disappeared under the clothes line platform. At that point, I went ahead and did the watering from the rain barrel I wanted to. The rain barrel is right near the platform, but as long as Stinky was under there, he was well sheltered and would not see me as a threat.
The Re-Farmer 