I went into town today, driving my daughter to work. We got there at our usual 10-15 minutes early, but there were already several cars in the parking lot, and people standing by the doors. I’ve seen this before, but not with so many people. Weird.
Since I was in town anyhow, I made a quick run through the grocery store. My husband was running out of brown rice (he’s the only one who eats it) and the girls were running low on lactose free milk. There was plenty of milk, but almost no rice of any kind at all. Oddly, there were no potatoes, squash or onions. Entire sections of fresh produce were empty. I find myself thinking there are other reasons for the stuff to be gone, besides more panic buying. There was no shortage of bread or meat on the shelves, but they haven’t restocked in things like flour, sugar or yeast yet.
Still no toilet paper, either.
Thankfully, we are not in any need of these items.
Once at home, I did a couple of different breads. One was a sourdough soda bread from Alaska Sourdough, the cookbook that got me into sourdough many years ago, though I acquired my own copy much more recently.
This recipe uses 4 cups of sourdough starter, along with oil, sugar, salt and baking soda. I tried to get a video of the chemical reaction when the baking soda (mixed into a “jigger glass” of warm water) is added, but it just couldn’t capture how the mixture just… foams. It’s really quite fun to watch!
The recipes in this cookbook are hand written, and in this one, the instructions forget to mention when to add the salt! I just add it with everything else, before the soda and flour are added.
The recipe also said to use 8 – 10 cups of flour.
Eight to 10??? What’s with all these recipes that use huge amounts of flour? I barely got 3 in. I’d wonder if my sourdough starter is too thick or something, but it’s the same with non-sourdough bread recipes, too. I know we’re really dry here, this time of year, but it shouldn’t make that much of a difference!
This recipe requires just one rising, so it got shaped into loaves right away and I left them in a warm oven to rise while I made another double batch of my seedy bread. I ended up making it into a bunch of mini-loaves this time, just for fun. By the time that bread had its two risings, and finished baking, the sourdough bread was ready to go into the oven.
They came out so pretty!
While I was working on that, my other daughter came down for a break and let me know her sister is now working in a tent.
A tent?
The cash desk now has a plastic curtain around it, to protect the cashiers from plague customers who won’t keep their distance. It hangs from the ceiling, and is Tuck Taped to the counter, with windows cut into it to reach products for scanning. The pharmacy counter has its own plastic wall, with a slit for the pharmacists to go in and out at one end, and a slit at the pick up counter. Customers, apparently, are still trying to stick their faces right up to the openings.
People suck, sometimes.
After I picked my daughter up at work, she needed to go to the grocery store, so we swung by on the way home. Some of the empty produce displays were no longer empty – there were onions again, though not many. Still no potatoes or squash. So very odd!
As we were going through the till, I couldn’t help but comment to the cashier about how nice it must be, to be able to clean the belt more often. She confirmed that, yes, it is! She was quite enjoying the cleanliness. Customers still try to shove things onto the belt, but at least now the cashiers are allowed to tell them to stop, so the belt can be cleaned. I remember only too well how difficult it was to keep things clean in between costumers, when I worked as a grocery store cashier!
They’re also back to single use plastic bags. This franchise had only recently made such a big deal about no longer having plastic bags and encouraging people to bring, or buy, reusable bags. Now, if people bring their own bags, they have to pack them themselves. It’s long been known that reusable bags are very unsanitary, but it took the Wuhan flu for that to finally be taken seriously. :-(
Well, we’ll be able to go back to staying home for the next few days. No plague people hiding among the deer that visit us. There is plenty to keep us busy! The only thing I’ll need to remember to go out for is to get the mail, since I’m expecting my seed order to come in soon. I look forward to starting some of them indoors.
Oh, I also broke down and ordered a bottle cutter. This is not something we can find locally. I chose a type that can cut square bottles, as well as round. I look forward to using it to help make bottle bricks! Since I already know we plan to make the walls on our cordwood practice building 8 inches think, we can get a head start on making these.
Also, my daughter found a really nice recipe for no-knead Focaccia that I think we’ll be trying out tomorrow.
We continue to have frequent visits from deer in our yard. I got this photo out my window yesterday evening.
Of the 5 deer in the photo, 4 of them are a family group. One of them was part of a group of 3, two of which I could see through the trees near the old garden area, but they never came any closer to the house.
I don’t imagine there was much left at the feeding station, this late in the day, but they’re still coming by to snack on what they can find!
They are so pretty.
Speaking of pretty, check out this beautiful Potato.
Potato Beetle has gotten into the habit of dashing in front of our feet as we walk, slowing down, forcing us to step around him, dashing in front again, slowing down… then flinging himself onto the ground and rolling.
In other words, he’s trying to kill us by tripping over him. :-D
I was very late in doing my rounds this morning, and Potato Beetle was the only one around at first. That meant I got to pick him up and carry him – it was either that or constantly trying not to trip over him! – and he was very content to stay in my arms. Unlike Butterscotch, Beep Beep or Two-Face, who are in constant motion while being carried.
He so wants to come inside!!
There has been zero interest in our attempts to adopt the rest of the babies out, which is really frustrating. Two-Face is booked to be spayed later in April, which means we’re going to have to bring her inside, if only to make sure she doesn’t get pregnant, first.
But we already have 7 cats inside. It’s getting to be a problem. Part of the reason I did my rounds so late this morning is because of being kept up most of the night by cats.
Which reminds me. When topping up the outside cats’ food and water last night, we had an extra visitor in the sun room. Stinky is back! He stayed around, hidden behind the makeshift cat cave, while I was in there. Later, I could see him through the bathroom window, eating the cat kibble. When I looked again at about 2 am, he was still there and eating again! This might explain while, some mornings, all the food bowls have been completely empty, with barely a crumb left behind.
I was talking with one of my daughters this morning about the outside cats, and how we’re slowly getting them fixed as my other daughter has been able to afford it. We were talking about how the outside cats want in, but we just can’t do it.
Unless…
There is a possibility.
If we can clear and clean up the new part basement, then find a way to make a door over the entry to the old part basement, we could do it. We could move the litter boxes downstairs, and they would have a huge amount of extra space if we keep that basement door open. The old part basement has the pumps, including the sump pump reservoir, so we don’t want to let them in there.
I guess that’s incentive to get the basements done faster!
We shall see.
Meanwhile…
Today, being Sunday, is our day of rest. Normally, I’d be in town right now, while my younger daughter is at work for her short shift. The pharmacy she works at is closed on Sunday now, due to the Wuhan Flu, so we are all home today. For a moment I thought that, hey! I could go to church! But the churches are all closed to services right now, too.
Which leads me to another topic entirely. Normally, I try to stay away from stuff like this, but this blog is about our new life here at my old family farm, and this is one of those things that is affecting us. Even as relatively isolated as we are.
I am just so frustrated about all the panic over the Wuhan Flu. People are being so stupid about it. This morning, my husband caught an article about a couple in BC that walked into a grocery store and bought their entire inventory of meat.
I have two immediate thoughts about that. The first is, who has the money to buy that much meat? The second is, why did the store allow it? Retailers have the discretion to limit purchases. Why didn’t they?
Meanwhile, I just read the updated protocols for the hospital my husband has appointments with in the city at the end of the month. His appointments have not been cancelled, but the hospital is now allowing access at only 2 entrances. The main entrance and one to the cardiac clinic, which is also the emergency entrance and the one we will be using. Everyone who comes in will be checked for symptoms and asked about their travel history.
The thing that bothers me so much about all this is the panic – largely induced by the media. I’m certainly not against precautions, but so much bad information is out there right now and, as mentioned earlier, people are being stupid about it, and their behavior is affecting everyone else, in a negative way.
Another part of my frustration is this.
We’re nearing the tail end of the annual flu season right now. While there is non-stop hyperventilating about the Wu Flu around the world, in the US alone, between October 1, 2019 and March 14, 2020, there have been an estimated 38 – 54 MILLION flu illnesses. There have been an estimated 17 – 25 MILLION flu medical visits. There have been an estimated 390,000 – 710,000 flu hospitalizations, and between 23,000 – 59,000 deaths.
I’ve found the Canadian numbers. The Government of Canada website has weekly reports. The latest report, as of this writing, is March 8 – 14, or Week 11. From that last link:
Severe Outcomes Influenza Surveillance
Provincial/Territorial Influenza Hospitalizations and Deaths
To date this season, 2,232 influenza-associated hospitalizations were reported by participating provinces and territories Footnote 1.
68% of the cases were associated with influenza A.
Of the 978 cases for which subtype was reported, 55% were associated with influenza A(H3N2).
The highest cumulative hospitalization rates up to week 11 were among adults 65 years of age and older (71/100,000 population) and children under 5 years of age (69/100,000 population).
273 ICU admissions and 97 deaths have been reported.
68% of the ICU admissions and 71% of the deaths were associated with influenza A.
With so many people coming in to be checked for the Wuhan flu, more cases are being diagnosed for the annual flu. Many cases don’t get recorded, because people just don’t go to the doctor or hospital and get diagnosed. (Side note, the annual flu strains are listed as Influenza A and Influenza B, with A having several sub categories.)
Now, please understand that I’m not trying to say that the annual flu is somehow worse than the Wuhan Flu, or anything like that. There are significant differences. The fact that the Wuhan Flu is spreading at the same time as when the annual flu was in full swing is taxing health care systems to the max. Proper care should be taken.
Wash your hands with soap and water frequently.
Stay home if your sick, if you can. My husband used to work in IT, with government contracts, so he spent much of that stage of his career in various provincial government offices. Government employees are paid by salary, not by the hour, and tend to have generous sick leave and insurance policies. Yet so many people would show up at work, sick, hacking and coughing all over the place, acting like they were some sort of hero for being soooo dedicated to their jobs, that they came in even while sick. The next thing you knew, dozens of people are having to call in sick because of that one plague person spreading their colds. If you can stay home, do it! Not just from work, but going out in general.
Also, wash your hands with soap and water, frequently.
If you can’t stay home, take precautions. That’s where those masks come in handy. Masks aren’t there to prevent you from catching a virus. They’re there to keep you from spreading it to others if you’ve got it yourself.
Wash your hands with soap and water. Frequently.
Keep your distance from other people – stay out of each other’s “personal bubble”.
Wash your hands with soap and water. Frequently.
Sneeze into tissues. Cough into a tissue or your elbow.
Wash your hands with soap and water. Frequently.
Don’t lick your fingers before handling money, paper, etc. That is a MAJOR problem in retail. An astonishing number of customers slobber all over their fingers to better grip their cash or cards, then hand their germ riddled item to some poor part time cashier, who doesn’t have sick leave or insurance, and can’t afford to lose any hours due to illness. Keep your spit to yourself.
Oh, and…
Wash your hands with soap and water. Frequently.
Seriously. It doesn’t take much care to reduce the spread of germs. It’s not like they can get around on their own.
The frustrating thing is not that people are taking the Wuhan Flu seriously (panic behaviour being another issue entirely). It’s that we DON’T take the annual flu just as seriously.
Every year, before flu season, people are given the exact same information for precautions to prevent the spread of the flu.
Every public washroom in places like grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants and department stores have posts with instruction on hour to wash your hands properly. Seriously. People need to be told how to wash their hands.
And people don’t do it.
So many just use the bathroom and leave, without going near a sink.
It’s disgusting.
It gets people sick.
How many people would be protected, every year, if we kept up these basic hygiene practices, all the time? Especially at risk people, such as those with preexisting health conditions or the elderly.
How many productive hours would not be lost?
How many lives would be saved, every year?
Right now, we’ve got people panicking over the Wuhan Flu, with the media whipping it up to a frenzy. Emergencies are being declared. Economies are being shut down. Yet, we have the equivalent of the Wuhan Flu, if not worse, every year, around the world.
Again, this is not to make light of what’s going on right now. It’s just so frustrating that it took something like this for people do engage in simple behaviors we should be using all the time.
Of course you just know that, once this is over, many of the same people who went into a frenzy of toilet paper and hand sanitizer panic buying (all those survivalist and prepper sites are certainly being vindicated right now!), or doing things like buying up the entire inventory of meat in a grocery store, leaving nothing for those who actually need the food, will probably go back to business as usual; going to work sick, coughing all over their co-workers, and not washing their hands with soap and water throughout the day.
I’ve been told I should make sure to add warnings before I post certain things, so I’ll start with that. Towards the end of this post, there are pictures of a dead bird.
Aside from that, during my morning rounds, I did get photos of Two Face. Her wound is healing quite nicely. You can hardly tell where it is, if you’re not looking for it!
I have been feeling pain in my left hip for some time. I got X-rays and they found the beginnings of osteo-arthritis, which is not surprising, but also bone spurs, which explained the pain I was feeling. That pain is pretty much always there, but not very severe. About the only time it’s a problem is when I sleep, as it means I can’t lie on my left side for very long. Otherwise, it doesn’t really slow me down. At least not more than anything else does. :-D (image source)
I’d hurt my right hip some months before and had it X-rayed, too. It also showed mild osteo-arthritis beginning, but that’s about it. That hip had stopped bothering me.
Until a few weeks back. While walking across the dining room, I suddenly couldn’t put weight on my right leg. There was something wrong with my hip joint. I was close enough to the dining table that I could grab a chair and sit down. After a while, I was able to get up and “walk it off”.
Then the pain went away as suddenly as it started.
I then basically forgot about it.
It happened again, yesterday evening. All I was doing was sweeping the floor. Without warning, I suddenly couldn’t put weight on my right leg, due to pain in my hip joint. My daughter had to come over and pull a chair out for me to sit down. Later, I was able to use one of my dad’s canes that we simply left where he kept them, hanging on arm bars (there’s a reason I left them there!) and made my way to my office chair.
Now, I’ve dealt with a lot of different kinds of pain. I’ve broken bones. I developed post traumatic osteo-arthritis in my feet and knees long ago, along with bone spurs in my heels and knees. I have bones that dislocate pretty regularly. Joint pain, muscle plain, pain from what turned out to be a large cyst that took my innards for a waltz. Typically, they limit me to a certain extent, but I can still maintain a level of activity that gets the job done.
Just don’t expect me to be able to kneel down, then get back up again, without help! :-D
This pain, however, is different.
This time, it didn’t go away.
I was, eventually, able to put weight on the leg and walk without the cane, but the pain stayed. I still have most of my range of motion, but for some things – like shifting my leg in my chair as I type this – it goes from not hurting while I’m motionless, to pain that prevents me from moving the joint.
It doesn’t feel like OA. It doesn’t feel like bone spurs. Still, I was able to go about and do my rounds outside, without a cane, and basically walk around like normal. I just had this pain, right in the joint, that wouldn’t go away.
I was trying to describe to my husband what had happened yesterday evening, since he had already gone to bed by then and missed it. He said it sounded like maybe something got in the joint.
Which brought back a flash of memory.
When I had my right hip X-rayeds, months ago, mild OA was not the only thing they saw.
They also saw loose bone fragments. I believe fragments were visible when I got my left hip X-rayed. Not unusual with OA, really.
But that might be my problem. Loose fragments may be getting into my joint, causing pain, then migrating out and my joint feels normal again. Except this time, it’s not clearing, so it still hurt when I make certain motions.
Just a little while ago, while sitting on my office chair, I tried to get up to reach for something.
And I couldn’t put weight on my right leg again.
I can still get about, using my left leg and a whole lot of things to lean on. My husband – the one with excruciatingly painful back injury – was sweet enough to bring me a cane so I could at least walk to the bathroom.
*sigh*
After I’m done writing this post, I’m going to have to see if I can walk on it again.
I guess this means I have to get another X-ray to confirm, and see if there is something that can be done about it. At the very least, I’ll have to call my new doctor’s office and see if I can make an appointment or something.
What a pain. Literally and figuratively.
Well, I certainly am not going anywhere in these temperatures. I’ll see how things go over the next few days. Until then, I’ll just have to keep a cane hand and, if worse comes to worse, use my dad’s walker to get around.
Today was my “day of rest”, during my daughter’s short shift. It was warm enough that I was able to do quite a bit of walking (playing Pokemon Go, of course. ;-) ), and was able to check out the conditions at the beach, too.
In the distance, you can see a ridge of ice on the lake. Beyond that is pretty much open water. At this time of year, and at these temperatures, the winds and waves are keeping the lake quite open, even in this comparatively narrow section of it; narrow enough that we can just see the opposite shore, though not in this photo. It will be some weeks, at least, before the ice is thick enough to drive on, and the ice fishing huts start getting set up.
It feels like it should be much later than it is, but it’s only just past 10am as I write this. My husband and I started our day early, so we could leave by 4am for his angiogram.
All went well. He is currently in recovery and monitoring, on a real hospital bed and everything! We got the lowdown on aftercare, and a nurse is coming by regularly to check his wound and his vitals.
We are looking at a mid afternoon discharge. The one thing that is a bit of a wringer is that he can’t use the arm at all for 48 hours. That means he can’t use his walker. He always has a cane handy, though (it just happens to be my cane at the moment! 😄), so he can use that.
Getting in and out of the van will be … interesting.
The doctor was able to let is know right away that they found no blockages. Which is good news. We just still don’t have an answer as to why his heart got so weak. Our guess is, it’s all the medications he is on, and for so many years.
He has to see his doctor for a follow up in 2 weeks, but we will have to find a new doctor ASAP, since the doctor, with another doctor, is leaving the province at the end of November, and the clinic has no idea when, or even if, they will get new doctors. We might be going to another town, 40 minutes from home, to get a new doctor. We shall see.
I had an appointment at a nearby city to do a stress test. Part of the ongoing testing to try and figure out why my stamina has dropped so severely since last summer, and trace the source of my fatigue. This is one of the tests to see if there might be problems with my heart.
Well, I’m certainly glad I was able to finish clearing out that old tire planter when I did, because it started raining that night, and it’s been raining on and off ever since.
So much so, we even found mushrooms starting to grow on one of the maple logs stacked behind the house!
The Re-Farmer 