I’m heading to my mother’s this afternoon, then taking her to a medical appointment, so I thought I would bring some things from our garden to her.
I picked the potatoes from under just one Irish Cobbler plant, which had a pretty decent amount of larger potatoes. There were also small ones, so I just buried them and the plant roots again. There’s a few orange carrots, a zucchini we harvested earlier, some Roma and Indigo Blue tomatoes and a Sweet Chocolate bell pepper. While cutting some thyme, I noticed a shallot that got missed, so I grabbed that, then added a couple more we’d harvested earlier. I also cut some spearmint for her. I decided to add one of the Black Beauty tomatoes we harvested earlier, too. The softest one I could find among the lot. After bagging it up, I remembered to grab a head of garlic for her, too.
My mother being my mother, I expect to get a lot of snarky comments and backhanded insults. 😄 She’ll have issues with the brown pepper and different coloured tomatoes. She did ask me to give her some of the tomatoes to try, but then launched into a long speech about how bad it is to have not-red coloured tomatoes. And, of course, she’ll tell me how my sister brought her soooooo much from her garden, and it’s so much better, and she’s just one person, so it’s all too much, and how bad it was for me to bring more.
My mother is very predictable. 😁
But I’m giving them to her anyways. Who knows. She might actually show appreciation for a change. 😄
We did have one really nice, ripe Indigo Blue Chocolate tomato for my daughter to taste test. I’d picked three and put them in my pocket so I could use both hands. One was so ripe, it split when I bent over, so it needed to be eaten right away.
My daughter found them absolutely delicious. Nice and sweet. Juicy, but not too juicy, with a rich tomato flavour. We have others harvested that will need to be eaten quickly, and I don’t think that’s going to be a problem at all! 😄
The Indigo Blues are an indeterminate tomato, so I can expect to be able to harvest small amounts of them more often, from now one. The Romas are starting to ripen in mass quantities, so I might just wait on processing the ones we’ve picked, so we can do larger quantities all at once.
On another note completely, we did try to use the new bread machine yesterday.
Something went wrong, but I don’t know what.
I came into the kitchen to check on it, and it was off. There was still power to it – the display was showing the exact settings I started with for a basic 1.5lb loaf. It should have been showing a count down on the time. It just wasn’t running. The bread dough had been completely kneaded and was just sitting and rising the pan, so I left it. Later on, my older daughter took the dough out and baked it in the oven, so we now have one, perfect little loaf in bread jail to try.
Hmmm… I wonder. We keep our bread in a bin – bread jail – to protect it from the cats. I wonder if maybe a cat stepped on the controls while we were not around, and shut it off? We’ve set the bread machine up on the counter near the microwave, where it could be plugged into an outlet on a different breaker, and plenty of space around it for when it’s hot and baking. It’s the one counter the cats are allowed on, as they like to sit and look out the window.
That’s about the only thing I can think of, other than mechanical failure.
My daughter plans to try again, later, so we’ll see!
Who knows. I might come home to some fresh bread to try. :-)
I headed outside to check on things just a little while ago. The winds are quite severe right now, and I was eyeballing some of the trees, wondering which one was going to come down, next! At least the wind is blowing in a direction where they would fall away from the house, not towards it.
After picking up a few fallen branches – not many – I checked on the garden.
The trellised tomatoes definitely needed some help! Even a few of the Romas needed to get extra support. The big surprise with them is how many of the almost ripe tomatoes I’d left behind were now ready to pick! I hadn’t planned on that and ended up using the bottom of my shirt to hold them all.
I had to add more support to a number of Indigo Blues and Black Beauties, plus adding structural support to the Black Beauty trellis. With the wind direction going through the garden, the plant laden trellises were acting like sails!
These are all the tomatoes that were picked today, including from this morning. On the left are the Black Beauties, including a broken branch I found, with a couple of tomatoes on it. I just looked up how to tell when Black Beauties are ripe, and I can’t say it helped much. From the photos and video I saw, the are supposed to get more red on the bottom. Other articles said they get completely dark. As you can see, one is completely purple on the bottom. The colour is photo sensitive, so the parts that get the most sunlight are the darkest. The ones with bright green on the bottom are at least clearly not-ripe. The information I found also said they should start to be soft and slightly squishy. They are all rock hard! Which means even the all purple one is not ripe.
I think.
They are now laid out on a screen in the cat free zone and will hopefully continue to ripen. The Roma VF tomatoes don’t need more time, but they will be fine like this until we find a sauce recipe we want to try. The Indigo Blues, for the most part, should be ready for fresh eating now.
I think.
On a completely different note, our new bread machine has been cleaned and set up, and we just need to wait for a couple of ingredient to reach room temperature before we start our first basic loaf. I’m quite looking forward to it!
Meanwhile, I’m going to start looking up some basic, refrigerator tomato sauce recipes now!
This morning, I had the largest harvest out of the garden for this year, and it was almost all tomatoes!
There are a couple of handfuls of green and yellow beans under all that.
I wasn’t sure about the Indigo Blue tomatoes, and how to tell if they were ready. Last night, I was reading about an almost identical Indigo type tomato (honestly, I think it was the same tomato with a slightly different name, because it was from a different company than where I got these), and it mentioned the bottoms getting very red when they ripened. We had some that have been red on the bottoms for a while now, so I decided to pick them. I’m glad I did, because they were starting to split!
As for the Romas, I picked the ripest looking ones, including the one I found had fallen off on its own. Some might have been good with a bit more time on the vine, but I wanted to get the weight off the vines. These are very prolific! According to my daughters, they’re not very good for fresh eating, though. There are enough to make some tomato sauce or something along those lines. Probably not enough to make it worth breaking out the canner, so likely just for the fridge and immediate use.
After finishing my morning rounds, I headed out to do some errands. My first stop was the post office; my husband had ordered a new exercise ball, now that we have a cat free zone to store it in, in between uses. Then I gassed up before heading to the nearest Canadian Tire and Walmart stores. It started to rain while I was heading to the gas station, but while driving to the next city, it cleared up – though it was still hazy from all the smoke! I was amazed all that rain wasn’t enough to get rid of the smoke. In the time it took me to get home, though, the winds have picked up and are now blowing from the south, so the smoke is being blown away from us, instead of towards us. I can finally flip the fan in my window to blow air in, instead of out!
[Update: Well, I’m confused. We’ve got 3 weather warnings right now. Two for wind, one for smoke. According to the weather maps, the winds are coming from the north/northwest. But as I drove home, the car was being buffeted from the south side of the road. As I look at the security camera live feed, I’m seeing trees being blown around, and it looks like it’s from the south. I look out my window, and it looks like they’re being blown from the west. So I guess things are swirling around a lot! I’ll be looking for downed trees and branches, when this is over.]
At the Canadian Tire, I was after pellets for the litter boxes. They keep them in the vestibule by the exit, and I saw the hardwood pellets, but when I was ready to pay for a couple of bags, I was asked if I wanted hard or soft wood. The hardwood pellets had gone up in price awhile ago, so I got the softwood pellets.
Then I picked up the bags on the way out and realized the price on those had gone up, and they now cost more than the hardwood pellets. It’s only a difference of 50¢ a bag, but I’ll have to remember that. I do wish Walmart had them in stock more regularly, because they’re almost $3 per bag cheaper.
While at the Cdn Tire, I went looking for puppy pads, but the ones they had were far more expensive. I did, however, find some carpet powder designed for cat or dog mess cleanup. I’d run out of that awhile ago, but couldn’t find any the last time I was in the city. I also found the fire bricks I’ve been slowly stocking up on. The last time I was at a Canadian Tire, it was a different location, and I couldn’t find them, nor even the section they would have been in. The lady I asked didn’t even understand what I was asking about, and assumed they were a seasonal item. I’ve been buying the bricks in groups of four. By the time we will need them when building our outdoor kitchen, I hope to have enough to spare for other projects.
I found the puppy pads I needed at Walmart. Things seem to have improved in that respect. I’m no longer finding giant turds under my desk. Just giant pee spots. It seems Two Toes has figured out the litter boxes for at least one job! I came home to no mess at all, so maybe she’s figured it out for the other job. Thankfully, the kittens seem to have all figured out the litter boxes. Finally! Still, I was almost out of puppy pads already. I need at least 4 of them to protect the space. Two folded in half, and partway up the wall, and two fully open, layered on top and covering extra carpet. I’m also using pet odour eliminators and, now that I have it again, the carpet powder to dissuade cats from the area.
After talking it over with the family, we decided it was worth it to dip into savings a bit and pick up a new “toy” for the kitchen.
I got a bread making machine.
These were our choices.
The box on the right, with the white background, is a larger machine and has two different size Express settings, while the other, with the blue, has one Express setting, but also a yogurt setting. We’re more likely to be making yogurt than Express bread, which needs both bread flour and fast acting yeast. I did get fast acting yeast, but we never buy bread flour.
I believe the one on the right was a Hamilton Beach brand. It was $10 cheaper. I went with the blue boxed Oster brand for one simple reason: the other brand had only one box on the shelf, and it was bashed up. The outer packaging of the Oster brand didn’t list what its 12 functions were, so I couldn’t use those to decide. I didn’t see the list until I opened the box at home and read the instruction manual.
We’ve considered getting a bread machine for some time. With the summer heat, it’s really unpleasant to be kneading dough during the day, then the baking heats up the house even more, so my daughter would stay up all night, baking bread. All of us are also broken, one way or another, and it’s been getting increasingly painful to knead dough. So we’ve been buying most of our bread. With this, we can put everything in the machine and have fresh baked bread by morning, without wrecking anyone’s back or knees, and without heating the house up. Plus, if we want, we can set it to just make the dough during the night, then take it out and bake it in the oven in the morning. A friend of mine does that and says it really improves the taste and texture that way.
The only thing we’ll have to be careful of is, where to set it up and plug it in. As it is now, we can’t run the AC and the kettle at the same time, without tripping a breaker! The kettle is on a power bar, but the AC has to be plugged directly into the outlet.
That’s one way to find out that particular outlet is on the same breaker as the dining room outlets – plus the living room ceiling light and the kitchen’s range hood!
Hopefully, we’ll be able to get it set up and bake our first loaf of bread tonight. 😊
I didn’t head outside to do my morning rounds until after TTT got her morning medications. Somehow, I managed to not look out a window until then, so it was quite a surprise to see how hazy everything was. There’s smoke everywhere. I’ve just checked the live fire maps, and all the fires are well to the north of us. Air quality warnings say the smoke is coming from the territories and northern areas of the prairie provinces. Looking at the live feed on the security camera as I write this, I can see the smoke in the trees of the old hay yard, and my younger brother’s field across the road just sort of disappears.
I didn’t do much of of harvest this morning. I didn’t have a container, so I didn’t try to pick beans. I might come back this afternoon, but will likely leave it to tomorrow.
While pruning the Roma tomatoes, I knocked three off their vines, and found a fourth one already on the ground. I’d put them in my pocket as I found them and kept working and, unfortunately, squished one while bending over! So that went into the old compost pile. There was only one zucchini ready to harvest, and I grabbed the last two of the Sweet Chocolate peppers that had matured the earliest. My daughters had picked the third one a couple of days ago. I can certainly see why they are called “chocolate” peppers!
It feels strange to be half way through August and be harvesting so little. The peas are still having their second production, but there’s only enough that I pick a few pods and eat them while doing my morning rounds. We have yet to have a good year for peas. I think it’s time to harvest the potatoes in the old kitchen garden. They’ve almost completely died back. The purple potatoes in the grow bags are still lush and green, though.
The Roma tomatoes are ripening steadily. I could have picked more, but I want to leave them to ripen on the vines longer. The Indigo Blue and Black Beauties are still rock hard. I suppose I could be harvesting carrots and turnips, but I want to leave most of them to harvest for the winter, not for casual summer eating. With our garden turning out to be so much smaller than planned, there just isn’t much to harvest on a regular basis.
Wow. In the time it took me to write that, I can see on the security camera that the smoke has gotten even denser!
In other things, TTT is doing incredibly well after her surgery. The vet clinic called yesterday to follow up on her, and we made an appointment for her to get her staples removed. This will be just with a tech, not a vet, unless we see some sort of problem that needs to be checked.
We did have a surprise last night.
She actually nursed Tin Whistle for a while! Until now, she’s shown no interest in nursing, nor have the kittens shown an interest in her. Considering that one time, when we let Cheddar in, the kittens tried to find nip on him, I am slightly surprised. They are very close to weaning, though. In fact, Decimus has taken to batting them away when she’s done with them. She comes in just long enough to nurse for a minute or two, and that’s it. She wants out again, and spends almost no time with them at all now!
TTT, on the other hand, it quite okay with them. I’ve seen them grooming each other and now, she actually got nurse. I don’t know that she’s producing milk anymore. While she was rolling around, we could see only two active nips – possibly three. I know I saw her nursing 6 kittens one time. Did she have losses that we never saw? I know her kittens are hanging around the house now, but we’ve got other little ones from other litters, and all the moms nurse all the kittens, so we just can’t tell which kittens belong to which mother!
As for TTT and the inside kittens, so far, there have been no other attempts to nurse, but we’ll see.
There is one major downside with TTT being in my bedroom/office isolation ward.
She hasn’t figured out the litter boxes yet.
With the kittens, I had to put puppy pads under my desk, but it does seem we’ve been able to train them to stop going there. I’m not finding little puddles or tiny turds anymore.
No. Now I’m finding big, adult sized puddles and turds.
At least the puppy pads make it easier to clean up. It’s obviously TTT. Last night, I even caught her peeing on my pillow, and we had to strip the bed and do laundry. I had grabbed her and dropped her into a litter box, but she was so startled, she just ran off. With so many litter boxes to choose from, you’d think she’d figure it out, but nope. She wants the puppy pads! She waits until I’m out of the room, since it means I’m no longer at my desk, so I come back to find the results, and she’s back to napping somewhere. Frustrating!
Another, different sort of frustrating, is in sympathy with my younger daughter. She got sick yesterday evening, and is still stick now. So far, she doesn’t feel bad enough to go to a hospital. She’s trying to think what she might have eaten that could have done it to her, but she didn’t eat anything different than the rest of us, and no one else is sick. During the night, she tried to eat a piece of bread, and that didn’t stay down. She’s so hungry, but doesn’t dare eat. At least she’s feeling a bit better, but that’s not saying much right now.
Hopefully, whatever it is, will pass quickly and completely!
As for me, I’m going to see if I can escape my room, without any kittens escaping, and try and get something useful done today!
I seem to still be in recovery mode today, even after taking yesterday as a day of rest. I tend to forget just how draining it can be after spending time with my mother, even when she’s having one of her better days!
It’s also working out to be a hotter day. We’ve got a high of 26C/79F for today and tomorrow and, depending on what app I’m looking at, we’ll be hitting either 29C/84 or 31C/88F by the end of the week.
I did get at least one thing accomplished – finally! I cut away the web of roots and got the water pipe out from where I’d tried patching it, to the tap.
It took more digging and cutting to find the bottom of the tap and cut it free!
The only thing holding it upright was the web of roots, and that length of conduit pipe.
The short sections of rigid pipe were filled with dirt and roots. A couple of them had to be blasted with water before I could get them off the water pipe.
I did find where water can been coming out, when I did the patches and tested the tap. Quite a split in the pipe!
How the ground pipe was joined to the tap pipe was not what I expected. I thought there might be some sort of threaded connector. The metal pipe is jammed into the water pipe – and it is still very water tight, and very secure! I’ll probably have to cut it off, if I bother to at all.
I would like to use the original tap again. Even parts of the original metal pipe, too, if I can. However, my intended replacement for all this is to use an ordinary, heavy duty garden hose that can be easily removed, as needed. The dirt and roots in the short sections of pipe reinforce my plan to have a long pipe, from house to tap, to protect the hose.
For now, however, I will not remove the rest of the pipe, to the house. There are going to be much larger roots to cut through, plus it runs through a higher traffic area that gets regularly mowed, so I don’t want to dig a trench until I’m ready to put in the new system. I’m very interested in seeing how that hose end that comes out of the ground is attached to the water pipe!
So, for this project I need to get a long enough heavy duty hose, enough pipe, with drainage holes, to fit together and reach from house to tap, angled fittings for the ends that will get a removeable seal around the hose to prevent water, dirt or critters from getting in, and appropriate pipes and fittings to attach the hose to the tap assembly. For the tap itself, I want to build a box for the vertical pipe with the tap mounted on the garden side. I liked the original post’s little roof over the tap and will probably expand on that, to double as a shelf or something. The box will have a door at the back to access the hose and pipes, with room enough to store a few things, like the cord that will be used to pull the hose through the underground pipes, should it ever need to be removed, repaired or replaced.
Once this is installed and complete, I plan to make a vegetable washing station under the tap, using salvaged materials I’ve found around the property.
Hopefully, by the time it’s done, it’ll be good enough to last another 50 years or so.
After I finished up with the tap and hose set up, I headed towards the house and checked out the old kitchen garden. I was finally able to get a photo of one of the developing luffa.
I’ve been able to spot three of these. Hopefully, they have been pollinated and will develop into mature luffa gourds before we get frost. These are so high up, there’s no possibility of hand pollinating!
Before heading back to the house, I had an adorable surprise.
Tiny, familiar kittens.
Octomom had brought them to the house!
I only saw 4 of them, including this one.
They still can’t move very fast, so I was able to catch this one and hold it for a little while. This one is completely black. I saw the other black one, and it appears to have a white patch on its chest. I also saw the brown and the grey tabbies. Where the other 4 are, I could not see. Eventually, Octomom came around for them, but only two followed her across the yard. The rest were still hiding under the storage house.
While I was outside, I started to get some messages from the Cat Lady. She was at the vet with the kittens, and the prognosis is not good. They would have died within the week, she was told. As it is, they have a cat virus (calci), herpes, low glucose, low oxygen, pneumonia, infected ears and sores in their throats. The kittens have been at the vet all day, and the bill is getting high. I feel so bad about this. We were only going to pass on the one kitten, so now it’s double the expense for her, and we have no way to help out.
Priority is going to be spaying and neutering, because a lot of this is exacerbated by the sheer number of kittens.
Oh, wow!! Something just happened while I was writing this!
Two Toes is letting Tin Whistle nurse!
I had been expecting the kittens to at least try to nurse on her, since Decimus leaves the room once she’s done with nursing, and batting them away when they want to nurse more. They had not been trying, though, nor did Two Toes, until just moments ago!
Two Toes is doing really well. She seems quite happy, loves head pets, and gave me kisses today!
Whatever fight she was in that left her with a broken leg, the fur on her face and head is full of scabs that are healing well.
The only down side is poor Snarly Marlee! She does NOT like the kittens. The girls try to bring her into the living room for a while, so she can get a break, while they are there.
Hopefully, it won’t be for much longer. It would be fantastic if we could adopt them all out!
I’ve been doing so much running around in the last while, I am so glad to finally have a day when I can stay home! I’m going to be doing more running around throughout the rest of the month (our gas budget for the car is already blown away!), so I’m going to take full advantage of this day of rest. In fact, I’ll probably go for a nap right after I publish this!
After medicating our tripod Houdini, I headed out to do my morning rounds and see what was ready to harvest.
There was a surprising amount of bush beans to pick, considering they got harvested yesterday, too. That zucchini grew quite a lot, overnight! I grabbed a couple of larger turnips, and a few Spoon tomatoes. I had to resist picking just-ripe Romas this morning. We will be harvesting substantial amounts of them, soon!
I also picked all the shallots that were at the end of the wattle weave bed, next to the Sweet Chocolate peppers. The kittens have been rolling around on them, so the stems were broken. They won’t get any bigger after that. The stems were so badly damaged, they weren’t even salvageable for the greens!
I’m quite happy with what I’m seeing in the grape vines.
All the clusters are getting very red, and a few are an almost-ripe deep purple.
I think we’ll be making jelly with these when they’re done. 😊
For now, it’s time to peel some kittens off my knees, back and shoulders, and see if I can get a nap in.
Taking my mother to my brother’s place for a visit went rather well, overall. There were a couple of predictable incidents, like when she suddenly started yelling at me in a rage because I took a slightly different route than the one she always took. That took some time to calm her down. It amazes me how, in her mind, the “short cut” that she always took (it isn’t any shorter, nor is it a faster route) is the only right route. Which, in itself, I wouldn’t mind, but the sudden and incredible anger she displays because I prefer a different route just blows me away. She’s more laid back about other route changes, but this one, and one other, just set her off like nothing else. The one other route that sets her off, my brother had driven her and took a different route, probably more than 20 years ago, and she still hasn’t forgiven him for it. Very strange.
There was also the very predictable attempt to pit my brother against me. Of course, she brought it up completely out of context, saying that I’d “reminded” her that this is no longer her house – but she paid for the roof! She neglected to mention the parts about her and my sister being in the area, and my not inviting them over for an unexpected and unplanned visit, or how she had tried to guilt me by saying “don’t forget, you’re living in my house.” Then she tried to say that she “paid for everything”. Everything? She seriously has zero understanding of just how much my brother and I are spending to keep this place up – the “perfect” house she asked us to move into that turned out to be in far worse shape than I ever thought.
Thank God my brother now owns the property!
What was also not a surprise, but still sad to hear, is that after I said no to her about coming here, they instead went to visit our vandal. This, in spite of the abusive messages he still leaves on her answering machine, and the horrible things he says to her about me. I’m quite disappointed in my sister for doing this. She says she wants to stay out of it and be neutral, but there is no neutral in this. Part of taking care of our mother is protecting her from herself, too. And there is nothing neutral about staying in contact with him, knowing the things he’s said and done to the rest of us.
Ah, well. What’s done is done. I just hope it doesn’t come back to bite us in the butt.
My mother was very tired, even before we left, so the visit was relatively short. Which, of course, she turned around and made it sound like my brother wanted her to leave early, when all he had done was be solicitous about her being so tired, and giving her choices. She chose to leave.
During the visit, my daughter sent messages to keep me up to date on what was going on at home.
Two Toes had escaped again.
They reinforced the cage, and were able to catch her.
After I got home, I wanted to walk around outside, only to find…
… a tripod staple cat walking past me!
It took a while – and the help of another cat! – but my daughter was eventually able to catch her again and put her in the carrier.
She is such an escape artist, and so determined to get outside, that we had to make the decision to bring her inside and add her to the “isolation ward”. Which is getting pretty full! Her babies will be okay. Other creche moms will nurse them. Who knows. Maybe she’ll even nurse these guys…
When I brought the carrier in and put it on my bed, the kittens were immediately interested in it – and her! They were pawing at the door, trying to get at her. After a while, I opened the door, and a kitten dashed right in.
Much to my surprise, there was no hissing from her at all. The girls had tried to put the two sick kittens in the cage with her, but had to take them out, because she was hissing at them so much.
She comes out every now and then, but the carrier seems to be the spot she feels most comfortable in, and she goes back into the carrier fairly quickly. As I write this, she is napping in it right now.
So far, Butterscotch seems indifferent to her, contentedly sharing bed space with her, Nosencrantz is keeping her distance, and so is Marlee.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
While I was still at my brother’s, the Cat Lady came by to pick up the sick black and white kitty. She asked if there were any other sick kitties, so my daughter brought out the white and grey one.
I took this picture of the two of them napping together, yesterday.
I had not mentioned the second kitten to the Cat Lady because, to be honest, I didn’t think it would make it. Instead, it started to get better, though it’s still very weak and looks a mess. Plus, when I found out they were doing this out of pocket, instead of through the rescue, because donation money had gone to spays and neuters, I didn’t want to add to their expenses!
As sick as the white and grey one is, the black and white one is in worse shape. Before I headed out this morning, I washed both their eyes. The black and white one’s eyes were stuck shut again, and as soon as they started to open a bit, puss started to ooze out. From both eyes. The Cat Lady, however, has already let me know she’s picked up medication for them, and they will be seeing a vet soon for testing. Because she has the rescue, she can pick up medication that I can’t, without first bringing the cats in.
She is also asking if we can catch 4 older female kittens to place at that farm she was telling us about, plus she is going to arrange spays. Catching the mamas is not going to be easy, though! She was in a rush and using her vehicle to pick up kitchen cabinets they’d bought locally, so she wasn’t able to drop off a trap or anything else. She just took the kittens and that’s it.
She will also try to adopt the spayed cats out, but even if they end up coming back here, at least it will help reduce the number of kittens next year!
So that is done for now. I hope the kittens recover well for her. She’d be so heart broken if they don’t make it.
One of the things I asked the girls to do while I was gone was a bit of harvesting in the garden, mentioning what likely needed to be harvested. Which made it a surprise when I got a picture of these guys.
These are squash from the compost pile! I had intended to just leave them until the end of the season, but my daughter wanted to see how they are. She didn’t pick all of them, but I’m still a bit perplexed about it! I guess we’ll be cracking them open to see how they look.
Along with more bush beans, a few summer squash and some Spoon tomatoes, she also picked the largest, ripest Sweet Chocolate pepper. They had it with their supper. I’ll have to ask them how it tasted, since I can’t eat peppers without gagging, no matter how wonderful they look and smell.
I had my own accidental harvest.
While doing my evening rounds, I was checking the squash patch and found a couple of female flowers to hand pollinate. I’m amazed, every time I look at the candy roaster and pink banana squash. They are growing so fast, and there are so many of them! I also took a closer look at our one Honeyboat Delicata. It hasn’t been getting any bigger, but the colours were changing, showing that it was ripening. I moved it to look around and…
… the stem snapped.
It’s so tiny! Ah, well. I guess we can eat is like a summer squash, still. Plus, I spotted a couple more little Delicatas forming on another vine. Hopefully, these will reach the full size they are supposed to get!
So that was most of my day. I know I’m forgetting things, but my brain is pretty fried right now. Especially after I called my mother later on. Oh, right! After dropping her off, I had time to swing by her pharmacy to ask about when her prescriptions needed a renewal from a doctor. I’m so glad I did! It turns out the pharmacist had been trying to fax the paperwork to the doctor’s new office, not knowing that my mother is no longer his patient. He had extended her prescriptions himself, already, but he could only do it for 4 weeks, and only once. Then he gave me a copy of the forms they faxed to the doctor’s new clinic. When I take my mother to see the interim doctor, I can bring them along for her to sign, so there should be no hassle trying to look up what my mother needs renewed.
I waited until I knew my mother would be up from the nap she was going to take after I left before calling to let her know. I talked again about how this is going to be just about the prescriptions. This doctor isn’t taking new patients, so there’s no point bringing up any of the other things my mother wants to talk about. She always brings up the same things, but she’s convinced the doctors are hiding what’s “really” wrong with her and not telling her everything.
Then she started saying my brother should be taking her to the doctor. Because he’s so smart and knows English so well. Nice sideways insult thrown at me with that one. I pointed out that taking her to appointments is part of my “job” in living here. My brother not only has a much longer drive, but he would have to take time off work to do it.
Then she started complaining that my brother hardly ever calls her or visits her. I know full well he calls her, even though she treats him like crap when he does, and he is incredibly busy. I eventually got out of her that she was talking about how he used to visit almost weekly. This was before we moved onto the property. He would drive out here after work on Fridays, do more work around the property, trying to fix things, and since my mother’s place was along the route, he would stop and visit her, too. Part of our living here was to take that burden off of my brother, so he wouldn’t have to make the long drive out all the time. She didn’t care. She thinks he needed to keep right on making the drive out, just to visit her. She even said he needs to come out more often, because she’s getting older and he has to take care of her. I told her there’s three of us to take care of her, and it was wrong to put the entire burden on my brother, when he is the one least able to do it! He’s got his full time job, his own property to take care of and lives the furthest away. She pretty much told me flat out, she didn’t care.
*sigh*
This, after she betrayed him so badly not long ago. She still can’t understand that there was anything wrong with what she did and has essentially forgotten about it.
So… that phone call wrung me out even more than the drive with her today!
My poor brother. He’s such a good man.
For all the stuff going on, it was good to at least see him and his amazing wife today!
Let’s start from the beginning of the day, which started off well!
I picked a tiny harvest this morning.
I decided to pick the one cob of purple corn that was the first to develop. I knew it wouldn’t be ready yet, but I wanted to see how it was. In particular the pollination. There was a fair chunk of it that had not been pollinated at all, so the kernels did not develop, but overall, it was pretty well filled.
One of my daughter’s doesn’t like corn, so my other daughter boiled the cob and we split it between us for a taste test. Of course, not being fully ripe, it would not have reached peak sweetness, but this is not a sweet corn to begin with. It was almost meaty in taste and texture. It actually reminded me of the corn I grew up with, that my mother saved seed from, year after year. I didn’t even know sweet corn was a thing until I was in my early teens, and my mother came back from a trip to visit family in the US, with corn seeds they’ve given her. She planted them in the spring, and I remember being astonished by the flavour of sweet corn. I still liked our old corn, though, and this was very much like that. We both enjoyed our taste test.
Later on, my husband and I left early for our medical appointment. Very early. My daughter sent us some cash to treat us to lunch. My husband hasn’t gone out since his last in-person medical appointment, and that was at least 2 years ago. We stopped in the town my mother lives in to pick up gas, then went to a restaurant for lunch.
Which is when I got a message from the cat lady, asking if she could call me. Talk about perfect timing! If we had left when I originally planned, I would have been driving when she messaged me and would not have seen it for some time later.
She wanted to talk to me about possible placements for 4 female outside cats! She was contacted by someone on a farm near my mother’s town. Their yard cats of 14 and 15 years had all passed away, and they needed mousers. They have an ideal set up, including an insulated and heated barn. Basically, they would be inside cats that are allowed outside. They gave their cats quality food, regular vet visits, and – as amply demonstrated by having cats that lived more than a decade – have been able to protect them from predators. There was even a vet lined up to check on the new cats.
There are rescues out there that would happily have given them 4 or 6 female cats right now, but they wanted to go through the Cat Lady, instead. They figure to start with maybe 2 cats and keep them in the barn for a couple of weeks before allowing them outside, then getting a couple more and repeating the process.
When I mentioned that our female cats are all nursing babies right now, including the ones with older babies (they just nurse any kittens that wants to nurse!), and it turned out the vet had brought up that concern as well.
In the end, she asked me to talk to the family about it. If we go with it, she will bring a trap for us on Saturday, when she comes to pick up the sick kitty.
I’ll get back to that later…
From there, we continued to the clinic. We got there early, and were shown into an examination room right away, but the doctor was in emergency at the time (this clinic is in a hospital building), so we were among several patients waiting. By the time she finally was able to see us, it was about 20 minutes past our actual appointment. Not too bad, except my husband was really struggling with pain levels.
She ended up spending a lot of time going over his medications list. Unfortunately, he forgot to bring his meds along, but he does keep a current list in his phone. There was some confusion about doses, because what he was actually getting didn’t match what the official descriptions said were available. I think in his case, because he’s on such high doses of some things, there are exceptions being made.
One problem that was unexpected is that she could not prescribe opioids. Apparently, the College is telling doctors not to prescribe them anymore.
Opioids are the only thing that have even remotely been able to bring his pain levels down.
He didn’t need those renewed yet, though, so we should have time for him to get a new doctor, when they arrive at this clinic in the fall. This doctor added that she couldn’t take him as a new patient, but we already knew that. This is just interim. Going over his medications list, she commented that he was going to have a hard time finding a new doctor.
*sigh*
Funny how it’s easy to find a doctor, if you don’t really need one, but if you do need one, and especially with a complex file like my husband’s, it’s harder to find a doctor.
She also focused a lot on his diabetes. One of his meds actually causes weight gain. It’s an anti-depressant and he’s been on is since before we moved out here. What I remember is that it prevented weight loss, but she says is actually causes weight gain. She said it’s also for sleep. As someone who has Severe Obstructive Sleep Apnea, he certainly wasn’t taking it to make him sleep! He’s off that now, and he’s happier for it. As we were leaving, he vented his frustrations. He has so many problems, but doctors keep focusing on the diabetes. The way he put it, he’s got a heart condition that has a life expectancy of 4-6 years, from time of diagnosis. Which means 2-4 years from right now. He is in constant pain, and when I brought that up, she dismissed it. He had been told, early on, that until he gets his pain under control, he won’t be able to get his blood sugars under control. Apparently, that’s not a thing anymore. She did put in a referral to a diabetic nurse. Then she brought up “it’s the diet. It’s all the diet.” And the weight, of course. He won’t get his sugars under control unless he loses weight. I’d already mentioned, he barely eats, because of his pain levels. With all the other stuff, his blood sugars are far from a priority for him right now. She also brought up that he’s on cholesterol medication, but he’s never had high cholesterol. He was put on that by the first doctor we had when we moved out here, because that doctor puts all his diabetic patients over a certain age and girth on statins. Never mind that the actual research shows statins do nothing, and actually cause more harm than good. The doctors don’t seem to be on top of the most recent data.
<<< pause for interruptions >>>
Okay, more has happened, but I’ll get back to that later!
After my husband was done, including getting a requisition for blood work, it was my turn. I only needed one prescription renewal. Should have been fast and easy. She still had to “see” me as a patient, though, so she took my blood pressure. Which, of course, was high. It isn’t high when I test it at home. She was ready to prescribe me blood pressure medication, but I said I wanted to wait on that, because it doesn’t match at home. Granted, it’s been a while since I’ve tested myself, since my husband has the machine in his room now. So she asked me to test my BP morning and evening, three times a week, for three months, then follow up with our new doctor. It’s also been ages since I had my blood work done, so I left with a requisition for that, too.
I had also made an appointment with this doctor for my mother, but I really don’t think my mother would like her. She’s female, black and has a strong accent. When I called my mother about it, we talked it over. The only reason for her to see a doctor right now is for the same reason as my husband and I; for an interim doctor to renew prescriptions. Not the dozen other things my mother thinks a doctor should be able to fix for her. My mother has no idea about the status of her prescriptions, and once I realized she didn’t understand what she needed to ask the pharmacy well enough, I told her I would call them tomorrow, while I’m in town. If her prescription renewals are good for a couple more months, I’ll cancel the appointment. If she needs a prescription renewal within the next month or two, we’ll keep the appointment.
So that’s done.
As soon as I could, after we got home, I headed outside to do my rounds early, walk around and get some fresh air. It was starting to rain, but that was okay. I also fed the yard cats a bit earlier than usual.
Which is when I saw Not Junk Pile on the cat house roof.
With a dangling foot.
It looks like her foot is broken at the “wrist”.
Crap.
I’m bringing my mother’s car in for an oil change tomorrow. I’ve also asked to get that check engine light looked at, plus a check on the wheel alignment. I’m feeling a shudder in the front driver’s side tire that concerns me. We’ve got a budget for this.
We don’t have a vet budget right now. That’s going to have to come out of money meant for a vehicle down payment.
*sigh*
I called the emergency vet, anyhow. She said that, if we could bring her in tonight, they’d treat her. So my daugher and I got the cat carrier and went looking for her.
By then, it was raining harder, and there was no sign of her.
We went looking again later, but still nothing.
We did see her kittens, though, and figured out where their new “nest” is. It’s no longer in the tarp covered board pile (formerly known as the junk pile). They’ve found a way to get into the space under the concrete stairs outside the dining room door. A perfect spot for a mama and her kittens. Impossible for us to get at.
I’ve also been in contact with the Cat Lady. This is one of the mamas we were thinking would go to the farm she was telling us about. She’s going to work on arranging more spays for us, and will be dropping a trap off for us, too. Between adopting out 4 female yard cats, plus getting spays done, we should be able to reduce the number of kittens next year.
Of course, that will also depend on how many of this year’s kittens are female, too! Hopefully, we’ll be able to get some of them done, early next year, before they go into their first heat. This year, they started having babies before the snow was gone. 😥
While I was working on this, we’d gone out to try and catch Not Junk Pile. When it became clear we were not going to get her tonight, I sent an email to the vet clinic, letting them know the situation an dthat we’d be trying to bring her in in the morning. I then called the emergency vet back and updated her as well. That means we’ll have to be out and feeding the cats quite early, and try to get her into the carrier. My daughter and I will work to get her to the vet when they open at 8am, then drop the car off for 9am. My daughter can stay at the clinic while I take care of the car stuff. I’m also going to have to swing by the pharmacy to pick up prescription refills. My husband has been without insulin for several days now.
So far, there has been no phone call to reschedule, so I should be taking my husband to his medical appointment today. I’m not looking forward to it. It’s going to be such a painful drive for him.
I can’t wait until we are able to replace the van. I greatly appreciate having access to my mother’s car, but that little thing just cannot meet our needs.
The Re-Farmer 