Shadow has taken to cuddling me at night, but his sister, Tin Whistle, has taken to having a party on my daughter’s bed.
While she’s in it.
It’s gotten so bad, the girls are looking at building a door. The upstairs is two rooms, and we only ever had a curtain over the opening between them. If they want to get any sleep, they need to make a door to fit.
Plus, we need to get these teenagers adopted!
Beyond that, we are having another quiet day of domesticity. I expect to be heading out tomorrow to do put shopping for New Years, and run other errands.
It’s such a gorgeous day, today. Clear blue skies, sunshine and temperatures just below freezing. T-shirt weather! 😄
Sad Face’s nose is still looking messy from a fight a few days ago. No new injuries. It’s always a bit distressing when I tend to the cats and find fresh blood. Most recently, on the fur of one of the friendly white and greys. Friendly to humans, that is. Friendly with most of the other cats, too, but they do get testy with each other, at tumes. To be expected, with so many maturing males. From what I could tell with the blood I saw, it wasn’t his. There were no injuries!
It is turning out to be a gorgeous sunny day. Our temperature has even gone above freezing, which is a few degrees warmer than forecast.
I got to enjoy the sun and warmth during a quick trip into town. Three of our four 18.9L (5 gallon) water jugs for drinking water needed refilling. We usually do it when two are empty. Of course, I picked up a few more little things, but will be doing a larger trip, once pay comes in.
Before I left, I checked the tires on the truck, and none of them needed topping up. That’s a good sign. Especially since we will probably have to wait until the end of January/beginning of February to get those valves replaced, depending on what the status is with my computer.
The check engine light was on again, so after I got home and unloaded, I hooked up the OBDII scanner. I got the expected codes for rich fuel mixture but, lo and behold, there was a new one.
Not an unexpected one.
Yup. There’s a code for the oil pressure sensor. Our new reader even gives extra info, including the fact that this code is very common for our make, model, and year, plus the top fixes. Those included changing the filter, doing an oil change, and even replacing the sensor. The most common fix being a simple oil change.
I really like having this other OBDII reader my husband got me. The first one we got just gave the codes, and that was about it.
This one also allows me to clear the codes. The rich fuel codes are permanent codes, but I’ve found that, after clearing the codes, then tanking up, they would clear themselves. The most important thing is knowing what’s going on, and getting an idea of how urgent or not something is.
If all goes to plan, my only outing before January will be when my husband’s private insurance disability payment comes in – with all the holidays, I’m not quite sure what business day that will be – and I make one last shopping trip of the year. We will be doing both an oil and a cheese fondue for New Years, so the food we get needs to be fresh, rather than the mostly frozen finger foods we got for Christmas Eve and Christmas day. Christmas day was highlighted by charcuterie boards – we had so much, I had to split it between two!
On Christmas day, we gave the cats a break with the ear cleaning. We’ve treated them with mineral oil for 10 days, and from what we’ve read and been told, that should do it. Some of the cats, however, still have insanely dirty ears – a sign of either continued mite activity, or just that it was so bad, we haven’t been able to get it all out. Our grandma seems to be the worst case. Black gunk in the ears of a black cat. It seems we just didn’t see what was happening until it git really bad, and my goodness, it’s hard to do her ears!
I do think it has made a difference in her, though. She is becoming more active and her appetite seems to be improving!
Some of the cats seem to be developing what looks like dandruff around the ears. We suspect the mineral oil may be getting a but much for their skin. So when we started up the ear cleaning again (if we need to do one, we need to do all), we switched to coconut oil. The girls are the only ones that use coconut oil in cooking, so the big Costco size tub they got is still quite full. It just needed to be melted, first, so the prepered strips of paper towel we use can absorb it. Which had the added benefit of the oil being still warm when we started.
Or, should I say, when I started. Before my daughter was able to start brung7ng cats, I was able to do Clarence, Tin Whistle, Misty, Shadow, Ghosty, Cheddar, Potato Beetle and Ginger, all on my own. They let me just come to where they were, curled up on my bed, and do their ears. Even Ginger, who had among the most severely dirty ears, due to not being able to self clean as well, no longer complains or tries to fight. Beep Beep is another one that has become quite calm about it, but I couldn’t reach her in the middle of the king-size bed. 😄
In the end, it was only Soot Sprite and The Beast (Tiny) we couldn’t find. Knowing the routine, almost all the other cats were milling around the good bowls, waiting for their wet cat food. Soot Sprite came up from the basement, and we got him done, but we had to start opening cans before The Beast came up from the basement, too!
This is Ginger, with a full belly, enjoying the cat cave. We have a second one, but the cats don’t use it.
I hope the coconut oil works well, and we can finally get their ears all clean. There are three cats that are still really bad for some reason. Thankfully, Ginger is not one of them!
I found myself waking up way too early this morning. That’s what I get for going to bed before midnight!
It has been warming up all night, and is supposed to stay above freezing for most of the day.
I think the yard cats are liking it. Only 25 came around for breakfast! They don’t get as hungry when it’s warmer.
The fog is still here and expected to stay for a while longer. The resulting frost on the trees is quite gorgeous – and I’m happy yo not have to drive in it!
I did get some good news of a sort, this morning. Our oldest cat didn’t show up for breakfast this morning. When my husband came out, I told him about her being missing, and that was why we’d come knocking at his door after we couldn’t find her during the ear cleaning session. I feared we were now looking for a body. He told me that she did turn to be in his room! He thought all the cats were out before closing his door. She may have been under his hospital bed, far enough that we couldn’t see her. Or maybe under the table that holds his little medication fridge.
While I’m glad she was around after I’d gone to bed, the fact that she isn’t coming around for food concerns me. For now, I hope she is in her usual spot, cuddling my daughter in bed!
The Re-Farmer
(This post will be published late: it seems we lost power, while I was writing it!)
Not having my desktop is getting frustrating in unusual ways.
But first, the cuteness!
In the parcel we received yesterday (thank you!!), a blanket was used as packing material, with instructions that it be used for the outside cats.
They love it!
Especially Sad Face, who now seems to prefer it over the self warming mat.
My usual task of switching out the trail cam memory cards, after feeding the outside cats, is pointless right now. I don’t have a computer to upload the files to.
The solar camera, however, is supposed to be wifi accessible. My husband looked up which app it needed, which I downloaded and started to set up. Then, I continued the set up at the camera.
Once the camera wifi was turned on and readied in the settings, I tried to link it to my phone.
As far as the app is concerned, the camera doesn’t exist.
Same with my wifi settings.
It’s much warmer today, with almost no wind, but it was still below freezing, so I wasn’t going to hang around. I might have to bring the camera indoors to figure it out.
The other frustration is a blogging one. Normally, in the days leading up to Christmas, I do things like embed daily Christmas carol videos. Then, in the days before New Years, I do some “10 most popular posts of the year, type stuff.
Things I am not going to do on my phone.
When writing these posts, I work in several tabs at the same time, with related posts I intend to link to, open in still more tabs. I also spend quite a bit of time, finding and selecting videos to embed.
Can’t do that on a phone. At least, not the way I prefer to do it.
I also have issues with tapping a screen. I end up with many more typos, autocorrect messes the strangest things up, and it’s just a lot more painful on the hands – though not as painful as using the little Bluetooth keyboard. Overall, it’s just not conductive to writing like I usually do.
Tomorrow, I go into the city. My husband suggested I stop somewhere to pick up a rescue USB. So I will try that before I start calling computer repair places.
Speaking of tomorrow.
My mother called. She’s not doing well. The exterminator is coming tomorrow, you see, and the letter she got has so much she needs to do…
She would have gotten that letter maybe a week ago. She never told me about it. I knew she got it because she told my brother, and he updated me, but we didn’t get a date from her.
I reminded her of how little she had to do, the last times the guy came to spray for bed bugs. He’s used to having to go into homes with people who have mobility issues.
Then I asked if my sister had her day off tomorrow, and could help her, because I’m going to be in the city, with a stop at the clinic along the way to do some regular bloodwork. She said yes about the day off, so I suggested she call my sister.
The thing is, the exterminator can come in anytime between 9am and 4pm. Because he’s doing other provincially run buildings in the area, too, there is no way to know when he will make it to her town. He has shown up right at 9am, and at just before 4pm. My mother should be staying out of her apartment for 12 hours, instead of the 6 hours recommended for people who don’t have respiratory issues. Which means one of us needs to get to my mom’s for 9am, then stay there until the guy arrives, then find somewhere for her to hang out for hours. She’d rented a motel room before, but she doesn’t want to do that anymore. I can’t blame her for that! Still, I’m not able to do it this time, so hopefully, my sister will be able to step up. Otherwise, my mother will basically be hanging out in the common room.
She wondered where the bed bugs came from. I told her, since she doesn’t get out much, it’s likely from within the building. She told me her apartment is going to be the only one sprayed. I told her, my thought is that others have them, but they just aren’t reporting it.
Which means the common room is most likely where they are being spread.
Another frustration! If that’s true, then her apartment being sprayed won’t do much, since she will just get infested again. Ideally, the entire building would be done, including the common areas. It’s not a big place, so it is pretty feasible.
Standard practice is, he will leave traps to check, and spray again in a month. I think my mother would rather live with the bed bugs. It was already a fight for my brother to keep her from canceling tomorrow’s appointment.
Today is the third Sunday of Advent; the day of Joy.
For me, at this point in my life, Joy is having a quiet, boring life!
We don’t have any running around and errands to do, so it’s another day of domesticity. I am considering whether or not to run an errand today or tomorrow, as it looks like we don’t have quite enough kibble to wait until I do the city shopping on the 20th; my husband’s CPP Disability comes in early in December, so we’ll be doing the bulk of our stock up shopping for January before Christmas.
We are at -4C/25F right now and might warm up another degree. We’re getting light snow every now and then; just enough that it looks like fog in the distance when I check the live feed on the garage cam.
I’m happy for the milder temperatures, for the outside cats.
The older and larger ones are fine. It’s the youngest ones that would probably not have survived this long, if we had more typically average temperatures for this time of year.
I counted 35 this morning, I think. It could have been 34. As I was finishing my rounds, I spotted Sad Face by the old dog houses near the outhouse. This is the closest thing to evidence I’ve seen that those old dog houses are actually being used for shelter.
With the inside cats, we’re having a “fun” time. Though we had spent well over $600 on medication for ear mites to treat all 16 cats we had in the house at the time (not counting the kittens, yet), it seems it didn’t take. We had two types of medication. One type was drops squirted into the ear, but they didn’t have enough doses for that many cats on hand, so the last few doses were the (more expensive) type that is applied to the skin between the shoulder blades.
We’re pretty sure those were the ones that didn’t take.
So now they all have ear mites again, including the kittens. Plus a couple of the cats just have a really hard time cleaning their own ears. Poor Ginger. He’s got it the worst. Particularly in the ear he can’t clean at all, on the side he’s missing a leg. Somehow, Toni is managing it with just one front leg – for now. Then there’s our old grandma that moved out with us. She’s getting on in years, and we can see she’s starting to show her age. So she’s not doing as well with cleaning her own ears, either.
We certainly can’t afford to buy medications for all of them again. The clinic wouldn’t even be able to sell them to us without seeing at least one cat first, because it’s been more than 3 months since we’ve brought a cat in to that clinic. The kittens that got fixed recently would have been treated for ear mites while they were getting spayed/neutered if the vet saw any, but those would come back rather quickly if all the other cats have them.
I’ve been told that an alternative is to treat their ears with mineral oil, every day for 10 days, and that should kill off the ear mites.
Which means doing all the cats, every day, for 10 days.
I just had to make a list to count and, unless I forgot someone, we’ve got 21 cats in the house right now, including 8 kittens. This, after losing three kittens, Marlee escaping and disappearing, and adopting Nosencrantz out after her escape and unwillingness to come back indoors.
We’ve decided to give it a try. If nothing else, it’ll help clean their ears.
So my younger daughter and I have taken on the task. She holds the cats down while I use mineral oil and some paper towel to clean out their ears. It’s only been a few days, so far, and I can already tell the difference. Some cats actually looked really clean and clear from the start. Others… it’s rather horrible!
Some of the cats are good about it. We have a couple that fight us off quite a bit. Then there are the ones that complain loudly, because their ears are so bad, it’s uncomfortable. Ginger has started to connect the unpleasantness of being manhandled with some relief, afterwards, so he’s already becoming more co-operative.
All of the cats look hilariously bedraggled, with their oily ears and heads.
The mineral oil we have is pharmacy grade (we’re going to need to pick up more, before we’re done!), so it’s safe for them to groom it off. It’s sold as a laxative, though, so… we may have some explosive results after a while!
Between the cost of food, the lysine, vet treatment, etc., is getting ridiculous. Yes, we do have a rescue that’s helping us, but it’s basically just one person running the show. There is the huge rescue in our province that the Cat Lady left that will work with rural communities like ours, but there’s a reason she left them. It seems the bigger the organization gets, the less they become about the animals, and more about the money and the politics. 😥 That and it turns out, when the Cat Lady was still with them (and paying out of pocket for things they were supposed to cover), they had issues with us, and claimed we were just “breeding cats” – as in, on purpose, instead of doing the best we could to prevent just that. Heck, population control is one of the biggest reason we’ve got so many cats indoors! And why we sought help to adopt cats out, get them fixed, etc. Nothing like connecting with a rescue, only for them to get upset with us for having cats that need to be rescued… When they tried to adopt out a pair of kittens from us to someone in BC that turned out to be a hoarder, she left them, started her own rescue, and found local homes for them, instead.
With the Cat Lady in the middle of moving right now, plus it being a time of year with so many holidays, we can’t expect to accomplish much right now.
So what options do we have? I’m not prepared to call the municipality had have them send someone out with a gun.
One option has come to mind.
We could become a rescue, ourselves.
I’m not entirely sure how it works, but if we could start a non-profit rescue, we would have access to resources we don’t have, on our own, including funding and tax benefits, and maybe being able to support fosters, etc. that would help us find forever homes for the cats. Not all of them, of course, since we do need yard cats out here in the boonies, but they need to all be fixed!
Oh, my husband just came by and reminded me of another cat I forgot to count.
We have 22 cats inside.
Once things have settled down for the Cat Lady, I will talk to her about it and see if that is a reasonable option. Perhaps we could even become a branch of her own rescue or something like that.
Well, time to get my butt off the computer. It’s almost time to oil up some ears!
We are having a quiet day of domesticity today, so not a lot to write about.
I like boring days. Very restful!
I did have to share this photo, though!
How many can you find?
I counted 13, but there is a single ear that I can’t quite link to a body, so there might actually be 14 in there.
Little Patience is barely visible! Just a tiny face.
There is one cat “missing” from the pile. Hypotenose went into old kitchen while I was doing the kibble and warm water, and disappeared under the couch. Rather than try to dig him out, I finished my rounds, thinking he’d be at the door, wanting out, by the time I was done.
I couldn’t see him when I got back, nor could I hear anything. I checked again some time later, and still nothing. I started to think maybe he’d gone out while I was going in and I just didn’t see him, but then I checked another time and found some stuff knocked over.
Currently, there is a little pile of kibble in the middle of the floor that will hopefully lure him out, but so far, he seems to have found a place to hide and nap or something.
There is a reason we use the old kitchen as a buffer zone between indoors and out! 😄
Well, it took a while to make a dent in clearing storage space in my computer. It seems to have made a difference already. It looks like most of the volume wasn’t even photos or video I take casually. It’s all those trail cam files. I keep way more than I need to! At some point, I’ll have to go through a major delete session. Especially with the files going back a few years. I really just need to keep any files that have our vandal in them, but he has so many vehicles, I don’t recognize them all. Plus, I do like to keep the files that caught wild life, too!
I have some morning cuteness for you to start with, though!
When I first took the cat bed out of the cage and set it next to the one the cats were all crowding into, they ignored it for quite a while. Eventually, though, the cat puddle spilled over, and now they are using it. As I was coming in from my morning rounds, I spotted these two on it and had to take a picture! The black and white has now named Patience. The tortie still needs a name.
Anyhow. Time to catch up on yesterday!
I headed to my mother’s early (checked the truck’s tires first; they’re down a bit, but not enough to need topping up), stopped long enough to go over her shopping list, then did her shopping for her.
I usually bring food for us to have for lunch, and my mother insists on paying me back, even though I tell her she doesn’t need to. She’s been increasingly fussy, though. The best fried chicken and wedges she loves so much, she’s decided are the cause of her “heart” problems (it’s not her heart, but she doesn’t understand anatomy and refuses to believe all those test results showing her heart is incredibly healthy and strong), so she now refuses to eat them. The Chinese food she loved, she now refuses to eat because she’s decided they serve cat meat, and the family that runs it is… well… Chinese. There’s a chicken restaurant that she used to go to regularly, but she said their food always gets to her cold (not an invalid complaint; at least for their chicken dinners). She did love their pizzas, but the last couple of times I brought pizza, she was aghast at the price. Which has gone up quite a bit, and she is convinced it’s because they’re cheating people and the government should make it so all pizzas cost the same. She also thinks restaurants all buy their pizzas frozen from the same place, apparently. Basically, all the options in her town have been slowly eliminated for one reason or another. The last time I was there, I brought a couple of croissant sandwiches and a Chef’s Salad from the grocery store for lunch. I asked if she wanted me to do that again, and she said no. It costs too much (it didn’t cost much at all), and she had food.
Well, I hadn’t had breakfast yet, and I don’t want to eat her groceries, so after I picked up what was on her list, I was going to pick up a submarine sandwich. It was big enough to share, if she changed her mind. Then I remembered the have a hot food display with whole rotisserie chickens, chicken pieces, nuggets and the like, so I decided to see what was in there, thinking maybe there was some hot food I could bring back.
I’ve never seen these in the display before, but they had complete meals available! A big piece of chicken and thigh, a generous quantity of mashed potatoes and a generous quantity of vegetables, for $6.99 !!! I put back the sub sandwich, then grabbed one meal with beans and carrots, and one with peas and corn.
When I got back to my mother’s, I found she had been busy heating up leftovers and putting together a lunch for us – breakfast, for her also! I’m glad I picked up the dinners. Her list was short, but as I put things away, I found her fridge pretty empty. It’s not that she can’t afford to buy groceries. I think it’s more because she keeps cutting more and more foods out of her diet, because she’s suddenly decided they are bad for her! At least she did have some hamburgers made with beef my sister gave her (beef is one of the foods she’s decided to stop buying, opting instead for more processed meats!), so I sure as heck didn’t want to be eating a protein she needs for herself!
She actually did seem happy with the dinners, too – especially when she saw the price tags on the containers. So we had ourselves a good lunch, and she was all set for supper, too.
My sister had visited my mother yesterday, and changed her bedding for her. I got an email letting me know she found bed bugs. *sigh* My mother’s building is run by the province’s public housing department, which subsidizes rents, so there is one provincial number to call. They did have a separate maintenance number, which I made sure to add to my mother’s phone list, since calling the main office is an exercise in frustration. The automated system just punts you to voice mail, but the voice mail boxes are always full, so you can’t leave a message, anyhow. The maintenance number gets you to a real, live human being – eventually.
The head office for public housing is located in the smaller, closer city, rather than the big city, where the legislature and most government offices are. When I mentioned that this office is for the entire province, my mother refused to believe me, saying it had to be just for our region, because if it was for the entire province, it would be in the bigger city. She simply could not accept that a government department’s head office could exist outside the capital city of the province. I tried to explain, but she was getting herself worked up, so I dropped it. A very strange thing to get upset over!
It was shortly after noon when this was all done, which means we had a couple more hours before her phone appointment with the doctor. I knew where was a chance she’d call early, though, and sure enough, she did. In fact, from the time, I think she was making these calls on her lunch break!
I set us up on speaker phone, and the first thing the doctor asked was, why did we have this appointment? I told her about the tests results that were supposed to be sent to her, and she said she had nothing on file. The last tests results she had for my mother were from September. !!! Then she said she would check online. Our province’s patient medical records are all digital now, but they’re sort of all over the place. She had to log into a system outside the clinic to find the test results.
They came back normal.
All of her tests and scans, including the one the test that needed 5 days to complete, came back normal.
My mother is ridiculously healthy, as far as their tests go.
So we went over my mother’s symptoms again, and mentioned the prescription she gave my mother to test out made no difference. We talked options and possibilities. One of them is to have my mother referred to a specialist, which is my mother’s choice.
The doctor, however, would have to see my mother in person and do a physical exam before she can make a referral.
My mother was starting to lose it at this point. With so many holidays over the next while, it was either making an appointment very soon, or in January.
Given the test results, this is not an urgent situation, so we’re going with January. I will call to make an appointment, later.
The whole call took less than 10 minutes.
As soon as it was done, my mother was all “I don’t want to see this doctor! I’m not going back there!” This time, however, her reasoning was legitimate, and not just her racism emerging again. She even said, she’d apologize to the doctor, but between her own English and the doctor’s strong accent (plus, she talks fast), my mother simply can’t understand what she’s saying. As it was, I was struggling to understand her at times, too, and kept having to ask her to repeat herself, and I can’t even blame my auditory processing issues for it, this time. I had the same problem when we were talking to her in person.
I still need to find myself a new doctor, too, so I’ll have to make some phone calls to various clinics and see if any of them have doctors open to new patients that would be willing to take both me and my mother.
My mother was also frustrated that we had two days with this waiting, for just a few minutes call!
As we were talking after the call, I got a 1 hour reminder from my phone, for the appointment.
I’m glad we set the new appointment for the afternoon instead of the morning, so that this time I was actually there when she called early!! My mother could not have handled this call at all, on her own.
But it was done, and we have some next steps to take.
I spent some time looking things up related to some of the other options the doctor mentioned that she can do herself at home. Some of what I found, she physically cannot do, but there is enough that she can do, that it’s not much of a concern. Then she started to talk about what other foods she should stop eating, and I had to play interference on that one. For starters, there is nothing diet related when it comes to her symptoms, but in her mind, everything comes back to whatever food issue she’s developed, based on something she saw on TV, read in a “women’s” magazine, or hear from her neighbours. It’s all pretty messed up. Even now, she will sometimes randomly tell me, I need to eat more soup (she has no idea how much soup I do or don’t eat). Why? So I will lose weight. She saw some guy on a daytime talk show, decades ago, saying something about eating soup to lose weight. I recall that particular fad, and this was a very long time ago! But it’s in her mind and, because some self proclaimed expert said it on TV, that magically makes it true, and she believes that if I just ate soup, I would lose weight.
Funny. She complains about her own weight, but doesn’t apply this magical advice to herself!
The thing is, she hears and reads all this stuff and latches onto it, and has decided that any ache or pain or whatever she’s dealing with, is directly related to a food of some kind, therefore she must cut it out. She could break her leg, and think that means she ate the “wrong” thing for breakfast. Very frustrating! Especially since she should know better. A lot of stuff she now believes is “bad” is stuff she helped grow, raise and process for almost her entire life. We butchered our own cows and ate lots of beef when I was growing up, but now beef is bad?
Anyhow. I’m getting distracted.
Once we were done talking about the call and next steps, I was more than happy to head home, and my mother was more than happy to send me on my way, so she could go for a nap!! She did give me some Christmas cards to mail for her at our post office, because she no longer trusts the staff at the post office in her town. I was okay with that, as I turned out to have a parcel in the mail, anyhow. I’m glad I looked at her cards, though, because she had a wrong address for my nephew. I’ve since confirmed the correct address, fixed the envelop, and need to go back to the post office after I’m done this.
As for my parcel in the mail, it was a different brand of lysine for the cats. The previous brand we tried was more granular, instead of the fine powder we were getting before, from a supplier that seems to no longer supply lysine at all anymore. The granular is fine if it’s being mixed into wet cat food or dissolved into water, but it doesn’t stick as well when tossed in dry kibble.
This new brand is a fine powder, and I’m quite happy with it. It dissolves very quickly in their water, and when tossed with the dry kibble, sticks to it much better. Hopefully, this means the outside cats will actually eat more of it, instead of it falling off the kibble when I set it out! It’s working out so nicely, I think we’ll be putting this brand on a subscription. It came in a 500g bag, which is bigger than what we had found previously. We’ll see how long a bag lasts, first.
Now it’s time to grab a food of some kind, and see what other maintenance I can do on my computer!
After getting back from my mother’s, I tried to settle at my computer to watch some videos while I had supper, then do a blog post. Found myself having all sorts of images and videos not wanting to load. I thought it might be a browser issue, but it was just as bad when I tried others.
The rest of the family is not having any trouble, so it wasn’t our internet. While going through my computer, trying to find a cause, I realized I had almost no storage left, and almost all of it – over 1.7 T – was taken up with image and video files! I only have 2 T of storage.
[correction: I have 1.79T in storage. 1.29T was taken up with image and video files.]
I emptied my trash, which was mostly deleted trail cam files, and I’m now transferring things to my external hard drive. Later, I plan to do some clean up and clear temporary files out. I hope that makes the difference!
I take a lot of pictures.
My daughter, however, took this one, while I was out.
Of these ones, the two tuxedos on the left will watch as I pause a few feet away to take a picture, but as soon as I move closer, the start moving away.
Syndol, posing pretty in the middle, and the white and grey in front, LOVE attention. I can pick those two up and cuddle them, and they can’t get enough of it.
Hypotenose and the two orange cats are “touch and go”. I can touch them, but then they go! I am sometimes able to pick up the almost all orange cat and hold him for a bit, but he doesn’t like it and wants down quickly.
In other things…
I didn’t have anywhere to go today, which means I finally got some progress in the living room. Since it has been turned into a cat free zone, we’ve developed the terrible habit of shoving things in there, just to protect them from the cats. The girls even keep their laundry baskets in there, because when they have the baskets upstairs, cats will pee in them!
The girls and I have been taking turns doing a little bit and a little bit there, but we’ve not had a day when we can just focus on it. The problem is, we don’t know where else to put a lot of things. There’s a reason they’re in the cat free zone! However, we’ve decided we’ll be doing our Christmas celebrating in the living room this year, and that includes any decorating.
We’ve done no decorating at all. Normally, we’d have the tree up on the door in the dining room by the Feast of St Catherine’s (Nov. 27) and decorations around the dining room by now, but with the kittens we have now, even having the tree hanging against the door (which we don’t use), several feet off the ground, it not going to be enough.
For our non-traditional Wigilia feast on Christmas Eve, we’re planning to have all finger foods and do a Columbo marathon. For New Years, we’re planning on doing a fondue. It’s been ages since we’ve done fondue, and we have two pots. One is suitable for lower temperature fondue over a candle, like a cheese or chocolate fondue. The other has a gel fuel burner and a stainless steel pot for high temperature oil fondue, so we can cook meats or do tempura vegetables.
So however we arrange things in the living room, we need to make it so there is room for the food and fondue pots, all four of us can reach the food, and all of us can see the TV. We almost never use the TV – we’ve got an antenna and can pick up a few channels, or we can use the Roku, but we usually end up watching things on our computers, instead.
As I write this, my daughter has taken over and is now vacuuming, but I interrupted her. I checked out the bathroom window and saw a great pile of cats trying to squeeze into the cat bed under the platform. The thermometer in there is at 0C/32F, so it’s warmer that outside, but they’re enjoying the body heat. There is another cat bed inside the cage, but they aren’t using it, so I popped into the sun room to move it next to the bed they’re trying to all fit into. Most of the cats ran off while I was doing that, but not the one fluffy black kitten with the white blaze on his face. This one is more socialized, and learning to enjoy cuddles, so as I backed out from under the platform, I picked it up to hold.
And promptly got a wet hand.
He back end was wet and looking wrong, so I brought him inside. I held him while my daughter gloved up and did a thorough washing of his nether regions. As near as she can tell, he got a matt in his fur over his urethra that has fallen off, leaving a bald spot. She was able to clean other matted fur and found a small wound in the process. We put some antibiotic cream on it and put him back in the sun room, after drying him off as best we could.
If we didn’t already have so many cats in the house, we could have kept him inside to keep an eye on him, and called the rescue. The Cat Lady and her family, however, are in the middle of moving. Their house finally sold! I don’t expect to have any rescue related activity until next month, and certainly don’t want to send another sick cat their way! The vets keep finding all sorts of other problems when they get checked over.
Oh! I just got a message and some photos from the Cat Lady! One of her daughters has the flu, and she’s being cuddled by Muffin (who now has a new name) as she’s laying on the couch! So adorable!
She still won’t let the Cat Lady touch her, and will hiss and bite her, instead! She’s bonded with the Cat Lady’s husband, goes out to job sites, has strangers coming up to her in her fancy truck seat all the time with no issues, cuddles with the kids, but will NOT accept the Cat Lady, even after all these months!
Anyhow… I’ve been distracted!
Time for me to get back to work and help my daughter in the living room, and figure out what to do with the space!
Oh, that reminds me…
I finished setting up the “plug” for the air conditioning vent. My brother had cut a piece of 4″ Styrofoam for it, but it still needed to be trimmed. The vent pipe itself worked rather well to “cut” the edges as I pushed it in, then cleaned it up more.
Since my brother used a hole drill attachment to install the pipe, I had the round pieces from the wall, each with a pair of drill holes in them from when my brother first marked out where to make the opening. One of the holes is right in the centre. The circles fit perfectly inside the vent pipe. One of them is a piece of panelling from the inside. So once the foam was trimmed to fit in the vent, I used a small, round curtain rod that happened to be in the living room, to make a matching hole in the middle of the foam. I took a piece of doweling left over from when I made the outdoor kitchen model and flattened one side, then carved a recess in the middle. I looped some paracord around that, then strung the ends through the centre hole of the “ugly” disc, then threaded that through the foam. I used some double sided foam mounting tape to secure the disc of panelling onto the inside end of the foam, with the paracord threaded through the middle hole. The cord got knotted against the piece of panelling to hold both discs tight against the foam, then I made handle out of paracord ends. The whole thing fits perfectly into the vent pipe, and I can line the disc of panelling up with the wall behind it. I’m rather pleased with how it turned out!
When that was done, I checked on the luffa that was drying over the heat vent. It had started to get mold on the outside, before it got too dry for mold, but when I broke the outer skin off, I found the mold went straight through. No sponge, and no viable seeds.
Darn.
It just didn’t have a long enough time to grow!
Ah, well. We’ll be trying again in the future, after I get fresh seeds!
The Re-Farmer 