Last night turned out to be a rough night for all of us. No one got much sleep at all. We couldn’t even blame the heat for it, as we had a decently cooler night.
In my case, when I finally fell asleep, I was down so hard, I never even heard a cat knock a display off a shelf, onto the floor. Ghosty, for some reason, has been determined to climb up onto the shelf, through or over the display shelf, to jump down the other side, rather than simply walk on the floor to get to the same spot. It’s an ongoing problem, and she only does it when I’m asleep! I discovered it when I had to get up to go to the washroom and had to pick everything up, just to be able to get to my door.
*sigh*
I was outside, feeding the outside cats and doing my morning rounds early enough that I could go back to bed for a few hours.
Well… I tried to, that is. Didn’t actually get much sleep, again. I didn’t put the display shelf back again, figuring it was just an invitation to disaster, which meant half a dozen cats all wanted to explore the now empty top of the shelf it rested on.
Loudly.
Eventually, I gave up and headed out to get the mail and pick up a few things, including a 40 pound bag of kibble for the outside cats. Later in the afternoon, my older daughter joined me and I found out her night was bad, too. She has her pre-op appointment booked next week, but she’s considering finding the doctor’s phone number to talk about increasing her meds again. The girls and I had plans to do a deep clean of several rooms today, but with how we’re all feeling, it’s going to have to happen piecemeal, over several days.
Towards the end of the afternoon, I headed out to do the evening cat feeding and rounds. I was coming about to go to the isolation shelter when I realized there was a cat inside, watching me.
It was Sweetie! She actually was willing to go into the isolation shelter again!
She took off when she saw me walking towards the shelter, but at least we know she’s coming closer for food, and willing to go into the space she spent so much time in, before going to the rescue.
I saw Slick this afternoon, too.
Slick is no longer pregnant. *sigh*
She’s lost two litters this year. It’ll take time before we know if this one survived.
No sign of the one kitten I spotted not long ago, still. Hopefully, it will start showing up at the furthest food bowls, and we can start working on socializing it, or at least getting it comfortable with coming to the house for food and shelter.
After the cat feeding, I watered the south garden beds from the rain barrel. We’re not expecting rain again for almost 2 weeks, and it’s supposed to get above 30C/86F on the weekend. After today, I’ll be making a point of trying to get outside early, before the heat hits, to water the garden. On the plus side, the water table is high enough that I don’t need to water any of the trees and berry bushes. It’s only the garden beds that drain and dry out quickly, even if there are still puddles in the lower areas.
In the old kitchen garden, I actually did a tiny harvest.
Next to the peas are three self seeded tomatoes. They won’t have time to reach full maturity, but I’m leaving them be, anyhow.
In the next image of the above slide show, growing along the edge by the path along the wattle weave bed, there are a few self seeded chamomile, including one that has started blooming!
After the south beds were done, I watered the main garden area, too, though with a hose. One of these days, I’d like to set up a water tank so that the main garden area can be watered with ambient temperature water, rather than from a hose. By the time it’s done, the well water is so cold, it can shock the plants.
With that watering done, I went to check on the food forest trees and bushes, and spotted something that made me smile.
They are unripe and still rock hard, but we have them!
Unfortunately, by the time I was finishing up, I was starting to have pain issues. It seems to kick in after I’ve done a fair bit of walking. It’s almost at the point where I’m wondering if I should go to the ER or something. My own doctor is away right now and we have a phone appointment booked for when she gets back, but if this keeps up, I might have to find an alternative. There are no urgent care clinics out here. We don’t even have any walk in clinics any closer than my doctor’s clinic, so the ER would be pretty much the only other option. If I did that, I would expect to spend many hours in the waiting room, since I would not be an “urgent” case. At least the diclofenac works, though it can take a while to kick in. When the pain hits, it doesn’t matter if I’m sitting, standing or lying down.
Oddly, while talking to my older daughter and describing where the pain it, it’s almost identical to the pain she is having! Hers is worse in other ways, given what the cause is for her.
Ah, well. Nothing much either of us can do about it right now. I don’t even have a diagnosis, and I won’t until I talk to my doctor. Even then, that would only be if the ultrasounds actually found something.
Still, I’m managing to at least get outside and get at least a few things done. I’m quite excited that we have our first gooseberries since getting planting that bush. It brings back memories. We had a gooseberry bush here when I was a kid and I used to love eating them fresh off the bush. In retrospect, I was eating them under ripe, but I loved that sour taste. I did taste one of the biggest gooseberries today. It was pretty nasty! 😄 They still have a ways to go before they are edible!
On my list of things to get done in the garden over the next while, along with loosening up the area near the corn bed and sowing tillage radishes, it’s getting time to uncover the corn and put a mulch down around them. Right now, there are a lot of weeds and I’ve been leaving them, since they are acting a bit like a living mulch right now. We’ll see what I manage to get done over the next while. If the yards dry out enough, I might be mowing, instead. That, at least, shouldn’t trigger the pain levels like walking does.
We were expecting a very hot day today, so I was up early to water the garden thoroughly before things got too hot – even though we have rain in the forecast. Depending on which app I check, we’ll either get rain or thunderstorms. Just before I started writing this, our phones started going off with tornado warnings, but it looks like the system will be passing to the north of us. We might get some rain from the edges of it. We did hit 31C/88F today. As I write this, past 7pm, we are at 28C/82F right now, with the humidex making it feel like 30C/86F.
After I did the morning cat feeding (with some cats very confused by the early hour!) and garden watering, I went back to bed. I must have been really beat because I slept for about 3 hours, checked the time, then passed our for another 2 hours.
Unfortunately, today has turned out to be a bad pain day, and not just for me. My daughter somehow ended up getting a sun burn yesterday, even though she was in the shade most of the day. I’ve been getting so much sun since it got warm enough to work outside longer, I don’t get burned, though apparently I’m quite the redneck right now. 😄 Meanwhile, my other daughter has had increased health issues again. Her pre-op appointment in the city is a couple of Fridays from now – the day the bin my brother is renting is supposed to be delivered! My younger daughter will have to stay home so she can meet them and tell them where to drop the bin off.
Aside from the pain related to why I got those ultrasounds done, my left hip has decided to start working wrong again. Not a lot of pain there. The joint just isn’t moving right and wants to give out.
I am so thankful for all the arm bars and hand rails that were installed for my father, all those years ago!
Eventually, though, I did head outside. I had to use the walker for it, but I set up the new deer scarer my brother picked up for me.
I’ve set this one up by the corn, which is going to need the netting removed from it pretty soon. I set the other one up by the peas to keep the deer away with the sound of a dog barking. With this one, I expect raccoons to be more of an issue, and I set it to the ringing of a bell, since I think raccoons would get used to the sound of a dog barking very quickly.
Once that was set up, I wandered around and checked on various things. In the next image in the slide show above, you can see some chard leaves. These are planted between the garlic and are finally starting to grow! Still pretty much nothing on the spinach in the other row; what little germinated and survived promptly bolted. It does look like we will at least have some Swiss Chard for greens this year.
In the next image, we have a red nasturtium flower. The seeds I collected were from a package with a variety of colours in it, and so far we’ve had yellow and red. They are still quite small, but adding that straw mulch once they got big enough has really helped.
Next is the row of summer squash. Those are picking up quite nicely. The plan is to grow them vertically, but I’ll need to remove the netting to do that, and they still need that protection for now.
The last picture is of the fennel and chicory. They’ve had a bit of a growth spurt! Unfortunately, some of the fennel at the end of the bed got flattened. Stinky found his way under the netting and I found him lying there. I opened the netting up at the other end, so as not to spook him, then moved to scoot him in that direction. Instead, he panicked and started running into the netting over and over before I finally got him to go out the open end. *sigh* He didn’t do too much damage, at least. We added more rods to the hoops over the fennel and it’s getting so tall, it’s almost touching the top of the netting again!
We just got another tornado alert on our phones while I was writing the above paragraph. While that is passing to the north of us, our region and the entire south end of the province are currently under a severe thunderstorm watch this evening and overnight. The warning includes 4-6cm (about 1.5-2.5in) hail, 50-70mm (about 2-3in) of rain and wind gusts up to 100km/h (about 62m/h). For us, we’re to expect rain starting around 4am tonight and lasting until about 10am.
We are definitely not going to be hit with the worst of it, for which I am thankful, but my heart hurts for the people that have been slammed by these storms, over and over again.
Today turned out to be a bad pain day, so I didn’t get much accomplished. I did my morning rounds, as usual, but as the day wore on, things just kept getting worse – and I was mostly just sitting at my computer, crocheting some new items for the market on Saturday, not attempting anything active or physical!
I did remember to call my doctor’s office to make a telephone appointment to go over my ultrasound results. It turns out the doctor is leaving for holidays for 2 weeks, so I wasn’t able to book it until the 20th. The fact that the clinic hasn’t contacted me for an appointment by now means either 1) nothing showed up in the ultrasounds or 2) the doctor hasn’t seen the results yet. All I can say is, there is something wrong and it causes problems that fluctuate in severity.
It was bad enough that I asked my daughters to take over the evening feeding of the outside cats (still no sign of Sweetie). One of the things on our to-do list was to pick up prescription refills for both my daughters, but in the end I asked them to call them in for pick up tomorrow, because I wasn’t up to the trip into town. I have a couple of other places to go at well, and I really should visit my mother, too.
Thankfully, by around 7pm I was feeling well enough that I could go outside to walk around and get some fresh air with my younger daughter – until the mosquitoes drove us inside. We decided to give the last few garlic scapes another day before a final harvest, but I also spotted a couple of firsts, today.
Our very first nasturtium flower has emerged. These were direct sown using seeds we saved from last year. All the flowers in that bed are doing much better, now that they have a straw mulch around them.
In the next photo of the slide show above, I have a couple of Albion Everbearing strawberries. I’m not expecting much from these at all this year, so it’s nice to see at least a few strawberries developing.
It was while I was walking with my daughter in the early evening that we spotted our first tomato! (Which you can see in the next image.) I hadn’t even noticed any flowers, but we have one Manitoba tomato plant with a few flowers and a developing fruit. With the weather we’ve been having, the tomatoes aren’t actually growing much, so seeing this was a nice surprise.
The last image isn’t a first, but more of a last – the last of the flowering bushes. The mock orange has just exploded in blooms! It is definitely liking the weather we’ve been having.
The sad thing is, we’re going to have to move it at some point. My mother planted it against the laundry platform, and it’s in the way when we try to hang things. Not that we’ve been able to use the clothes lines much this year, but it is something we want to use as often as possible in the summer. The other thing is, we’re going to have to do some maintenance on the platform itself, including lifting it and replacing rotting wood. It needs to be on bricks or blocks or something, so that it no longer has direct contact with the soil. I suspect it has actually sunk into the ground a fair bit. The bottom step is almost lower than the patio block that is butted up against it, and is quite rotten. Some of the boards on the floor of the platform need to be either replaced or reinforced. To do that, we need to access the platform from all sides, and the south side is completely covered by the mock orange. So, it will need to be transplanted at some point.
I’ve just been watching the Gardening in Canada video released today, and it was interesting to hear her comment about the super El Nińo we’re supposed to be getting this year. It depends on where you live, of course, but she talks a bit about how it will mean a cold, wet summer, and a long hot fall. Something to consider, when it comes to planting in July.
Right now, I’m thinking of re-sowing bush beans in the square raised bed. Only a few of the seeds I planted have come up, and a few of those look like they got munched by insects. The seeds I used are older, so I’m not surprised by the low germination rate. I’ve also got more seeds germinating in that tray of winter squash and melons! If we really do get a long, mild fall, they might actually have a chance to reach full maturity. Either way, I plan to give them a chance. I’m also looking to plant spinach again – we have yet to have any spinach or chard succeed this year, though we do have a few new seedlings right now – and more peas.
You can click through for a short video I managed to take while doing the evening feeding. Being in the isolation shelter means cat soup treat. Curtis had spent the night in the shelter, came out after the morning feeding, then right back in again later. Then Havarti scrambled his way up to the window. Domino is back with her cuddle buddies, and that helps. She definitely still wants to go out the windows when I do the food and water, but when she can’t get through, she is willing to accept the pets. I know that, once she is out of isolation, I’ll probably never be able to touch her again, but in all the time she was with the foster, she hid and never accepted pets like this.
I sent the video to the rescue chat group we have and they were so happy to see her accepting pets.
They also told me, it looks like Sweetie might be coming back, too. She has not settled in at all. They can pet her, but she is constantly anxious. They sent some photos and video. In the video, she is being petted but not responding at all, other than moving her head, watching with giant, terrified eyes. Poor thing! They are going to try and give her more time, but if she can’t accept the indoor life, she will be coming back here.
After feeding the outside cats, I did my evening rounds, and finally had a chance to go into the fenced off area where the tulip patch is, and the saffron crocuses. For all the mulch I added, the weeds have taken over, and I couldn’t even see the saffron crocuses anymore. I pulled handfuls of weeds until I got close to where I knew they were, then had to be extremely careful. After pulling up the tallest stuff, I had the creeping bellflower leaves covering everything. With those, I basically had to grab a single leaf, carefully follow it down to the ground, then pull it out. Pulling from higher on the stem usually resulted in it breaking.
I couldn’t get everything, but the crocuses are no longer buried. Those are the thin, grass-like leaves in the above photo.
I also cleared enough to access the crocuses and a couple of nearby tulips, but that was all I was able to do, today. I’ll have to go in again and clear around the tulips. That is going to take a while!
My older daughter came out while I was putting the “gate” back and showed her some of the progress in the garden. Then we gathered some fresh herbs for the fish she was about to cook for her sister and herself ( my husband and I don’t like most fish) for supper before I continued with my rounds – pausing to check out the pink rose bush.
The white rose bushes are almost done blooming, and the mock orange is looking like it’s about to explode into flowers any day now. Some buds at the bottom are already starting to show white petals.
I was heading towards the barn to take a peek inside, walking past a couple of my brother’s trucks, when I heard a noise coming from one of them. As I went to check one of them, I heard the noise again, coming from behind me. This truck has a home made plywood cap on it that extends over the cab of the truck. For a moment, I feared a cat had somehow got locked inside, though I didn’t think my brother had opened the doors while they were here least weekend.
I opened the door and found this, looking back at me.
I would say this is one of the four that had been in the garden shed until my taking things out finally scared them off. The other three and the mama are probably under or in a shed somewhere. I looked around to try and see how it got in and realized the entire wall of the cap by the rear windshield wasn’t there. 😄 There are just small panels on either side, but there is more than enough space for critters to get in.
So no trapped critters. Just curious ones! I was actually happy to see it. I miss them being in the garden shed!
Now to how this morning went.
My daughter and I headed out 2 hours before her appointment, which should have gotten us there almost half and hour early. We did stop briefly at a gas station in the one town along the highway to pick up some drinks for the road and to get the maps app up. If we get it going from home, the app links to our wifi, then basically doesn’t like to switch to data once we’re on the highway, and the app doesn’t work right. I didn’t actually need it until we were well into the city, but it was ready for my daughter to be my Nav O once we got closer.
Along the way, there was a section that we needed to slow down at – the section of highway that got washed out during the storms not long ago. With all the rain we had yesterday, the gravel patch job was a real mess. I noted that they did install double culverts where the highway washed out, so this shouldn’t happen again, once they finished fixing and paving it.
We had to make one more stop at another gas station shortly after reaching the city, but neither stop took particularly long. It was the traffic and road conditions that set us back. Then, once we found the place (the streets being every bit as broken up as I expected) we found the parking lot I’d seen on the satellite map.
The entrance was through a back lane and partially blocked by a truck unloading cargo.
With all the one way streets, it too a bit for me to be able to drive around and back track. I did manage to get past the truck. From the signs, we saw they did have visitor parking for the clinic – a whole three spots. One of them was occupied. Another was “small car only”, and meant it. The third required me driving to the other end of the lot to turn around and drive back the other way so I could pull in, because there wasn’t room enough for me to drive right in, then straighten out, without hitting a parked car – and my truck isn’t particularly big!
As we walked around the building to the doors, the first red flags appeared. This is NOT a safe neighbourhood. We were maybe 10 minutes to my daughters appointment time at 10am, and there were already several people listing about. This is the sort of area that I wouldn’t want to be walking around in broad daylight without something I could use to defend myself.
No surprise, the entry doors were locked. No signs. I finally saw what looked like a possible intercom with a keypad and pushed a button I hoped was to someone inside.
No one answered, but a Purolator guy came through and let us in the first doors, and a staff member saw us and opened up the second set of doors.
They had a sign in sheet for the visitor parking that I filled out so we wouldn’t get towed, then my daughter checked in. Being a first visit, she was given a clip board with a form to fill out, and we sat in the first waiting room. When she handed that in, we moved to a second waiting room. My daughter was called in soon after.
Given what happened the last time she saw a specialist in the city, I offered to go in with her, as a sort of body guard. She said she would be okay. I will say now, from the start, that she was very happy with this appointment. It was an intake appointment, and she came out with a date for a follow up appointment near the end of next month.
Her appointment went quite long, so I had a lot of time to sit there and look around.
This place is a “community health centre”. Being downtown and in a sketchy area, there are some things I would expect that is different from other clinics. Still… there were significant difference that I could see.
All clinics have a few larger posters on the walls, giving health information about specific things. Or with information for people in abuse situations, telling where they can reach or for help. These are clean looking and informative as much as the space allows for.
This place was splattered with small posters all over the place, and they sent out more red flags. A poster about fentanyl, for example, wasn’t giving information on the dangers of fentanyl, but was about the “myths”, suggesting that using it was not all that dangerous. Another poster, instead of, say, giving information on how to get help for sexual exploitation, or cautioning about the dangers of promiscuous sex (plenty of other signs showed they have out free STD treatment kits) instead directed the reader to an app on… how to engage in promiscuous sex “safely”. Other posters basically pandered to all the current identities and ideologies currently trending, written like they were aimed at people with the cognitive development of kids in elementary school. None of them were about how to get healthy or avoid health problems. They were all basically enabling self destructive behaviour. The focus on race in some of them was both creepy and paternalistic.
Aside from all that, the longer I sat there…. Well. Let me put it this way. In my years, I have been stalked, threatened, harassed and physically attacked by a drunk person who wanted to kill me. I’ve walked through downtown city streets in the wee hours of the morning, when the bars were closing down and the drunks were staggering about. I lived in high crime areas. Then there was the situation with our vandal. Not once, in all these years, did I fell as unsafe as I did in the waiting room of this clinic. Everything around me triggered red flags. Even the times I got smiles from the staff felt… wrong.
Part of safety issue was how the staff had to use security key cards to go in and out several doors. Clearly, it wasn’t just the people outside the clinic that was a security threat. From one of these doors I saw two women come out, talking loud enough for everyone in the waiting room to hear. The older (white) staff member was quite angry as she demanded to know how the younger one knew that there was a laptop. The younger (not white) woman said she’d seen the older woman use it for a presentation. As they walked down the hall, I could see the anger in the older woman as she was first silent about being seen using it, then declared that there were two laptops, but only certain people were allowed to use them. This younger woman was clearly not one of them. The conversation, such as it was, continued as they went down the hall.
Shortly after, the older woman came back down the hall alone. I made eye contact with her and she gave me a friendly smile, totally at odds with how she behaved towards the other woman.
I had found news articles about an investigation and report about this place, released last summer. Among the things they looked into were problems of racism and a “toxic work environment”.
I just saw an example of that. Clearly, firing three board members didn’t fix anything.
By the time my daughter was done – looking quite happy – I was feeling my skin starting to crawl from the skeevy creepiness of the place.
We didn’t talk about it right away. Just getting out of the parking lot and avoiding people staggering in front of the truck, was an issue and I had to focus on driving. It was around 11 by then, and neither of us had had breakfast, other than sharing a bag of beef jerky from the truck snack stash during the drive in. My daughter wanted to buy us breakfast and I remembered that our route took us past a mall that was convenient to get into. So that’s where we ended up going. We found the food court and the first thing I spotted was a bento place I knew was good, even though I’d never been to this location specifically, before. On seeing the menu, we both ended up ordering the exact same thing. A salmon bento – normally, I would have gotten chicken, but it was tempura salmon – and a taro bubble tea.
It was amazingly good. That is one thing I do miss about living in the city. Having access to such a variety of fast meal choices from all over the world.
While there, I mentioned to my daughter about how I felt while at this clinic, that it wasn’t safe, and that I never wanted to go back there again. She was really surprised, because she’d had such a good appointment. I tried to describe what I was seeing with the posters, which she hadn’t had time to look at herself, and she just sort of … made justifications for them. She didn’t see what I saw and, chances are, she’s not going to get what the problem with them was.
This is going to be an issue.
Her next appointment is going to be more on the medical side rather than the intake side, and seeing what surgeons she needs to be referred to. Hopefully, she’ll be referred to actual good ones.
As for the drive, I was very happy to be getting out of the city – and that Damocles didn’t drop the sword again. The truck behaved. I needed to get gas, but the prices in the city were $1.649/L instead of the $1.599 we saw when we’d stopped at a station in the town along the highway. I had decided we would be getting gas along the way, but there was one last gas station, just outside the city, that was at $1.579, so we stopped there. I am planning to do a Costco run on Friday and will be filling the tank there, so I just needed to top up a bit. I’m glad I did, because when we drove through the town again, the gas prices there had gone up to $1.649 while we were gone!
Once at home, I was curious and looked up reviews for this clinic.
I wish we’d done this before.
Yes, there were some glowing 5 star reviews with comments like “best place ever!” But there were just as many 1 star reviews – and virtually nothing in between. These gave more information. At least one other person commented on how unsafe it felt in the clinic – especially for women – while others commented on the unsafe neighbourhood. People who had been going there for years commented that things had gone down hill so badly, they would not be going back. Some would say the doctors were great, but the nurses were horrible. Others would say the complete opposite. A lot of people talked about not getting the care they need, including being turned away from the walk in clinic, being denied mental health help (counseling and therapy are among the services provided), being pushed to go “trans” instead of getting help with their mental health, and some talking about wanting to take their own lives after going there. Plenty finished their comments with “don’t go. Just, don’t.”
Yes, I tried to bring it up with my daughter.
It just got her back up.
This is going to be a problem. I truly do not think she is going to get the care she needs there. I’m reminded of when my husband tried to be the “good patient” for so long, while his real problems not being addressed, and by the time that was looked at, it was too late and he was permanently disabled.
So… I don’t quite know how to deal with this right now. I just know, down to my bones, that this place is not good.
*sigh*
Anyhow. That’s where we’re at right now.
Tomorrow, I’ve got a day at home, and then we’ll be doing the usual end of month running around, plus my daughter has her blacksmithing workshop. When I have the chance to work around the yard, I have a new thing to focus on. My brother and SIL will be having a large bin delivered about half way through July, and it will be picked up again after 10 days. This will be for hauling away the non-scrap metal junk. My brother will take the metal to a scrap yard himself – he has the trailer and equipment needed to do it – for cash.
They’ll have it dropped off near our current junk pile, which actually has quite a bit of metal stuff in it, so anything we want to have hauled away can be brought over to that spot.
I’ll finally be able to clear stuff away from around the garden shed. I hadn’t wanted to do it yet, because there is so much in the junk pile already. Anything we add to the pile now will be hauled away by the end of July. Judging from the size of the bin they’re having dropped off, my brother has identified a lot of stuff in the outer yard that needs to go!
What a difference it’s going to be, with my brother and SIL able to come out so often now, and with the resources, tools and equipment they have. Night and day, really!! There was only so much we could do on our own and, with all the health issues showing up, it’s getting harder just to maintain what we managed to get done in our early years here. I’ve been feeling like we haven’t been able to hold up our end of the bargain for living here anymore.
Well, it’s certainly going to be a very different summer, this year!
The rain started early this morning, and hasn’t really stopped since. We were getting thunderstorm warnings but, from the look of the weather radar, our weird climate bubble is in action again, and the most severe parts of the system is going around us.
Which means no progress in the yard and garden outside, but that’s okay.
First, an update on Domino. Curtis shared the shelter with her for the night. When I came around filling kibble bowls, I pause to pet Curtis through a window, eventually letting him out.
Domino came over and let me pet her!
Granted, she was after the window. She wants out. However, she didn’t run away or act all tensed up when I started petting her. She even leaned into my hand! Which she’s never done for me before.
Along with the dry kibble, I mixed up some of the freeze dried cat food mix to make a pate for her. This is the stuff that was donated. I’ve never heard of it before. Going over the ingredient list, is has all sorts of things good for the digestion, so I wanted to make sure Domino got it as a treat. When I brought it over after doing the kibble, Curtis climbed back in through the window to rejoin her, and they both seemed to enjoy the new food quite a lot! Curtis didn’t stay long, though, and I let him out soon after.
Bug so wanted to go into the isolation shelter. I would have let her in, but she runs away when I come close still, so I wasn’t able to open a window for her. Ah, well.
We waited for the worst of the rain to be done, then my younger daughter and I headed to town. Our first stop was at the post office, where I picked up my second package of replacement seeds, this time from MI Gardener.
The broccoli-rabe is something new for us to try next year, as is the Copenhagen Market cabbage. Possibly the Atomic red carrots. I can’t remember if I’ve tried that variety before, but we are out of carrot seeds in my stash. The rest are to replace seeds we either ran out of this year, or are almost out of. Next year, we’ll have to have a better set up for starting seeds indoors. One where no mouse can eat up all our seedlings as soon as they germinate, as well as having a warmer ambient temperature.
After getting the mail, it was off to town and a bank machine to get out some for the next stop; the clinic where my husband’s doctor had the paperwork for Canada Revenue ready and waiting for pick up – after paying the $70 for it. My husband has his own lines on the form to fill out, and then we can mail it in.
That done, it was off to the grocery store to refill a couple of our big water jugs and pick up a few groceries. Then some gas and home.
The entire time, my daughter was messaging the family, letting them know where we were, and that yes, the truck is still moving! Every time I grabbed the shifter, I was half expecting it to just slide around, because that linkage had fallen off again. It didn’t happen, but it’s going to be a long time before I stop getting that sensation! Especially when we are driving in the city. I keep waiting for that sword to drop!
Once at home, we pulled up to the house to unload, then my daughter took care of parking the truck and closing the gate while I put things away. By then, it was time to feed the outside cats for the evening, and I took the time to mix up more of the freeze dried cat food mix for Domino – this time adding more hot water to make it more soupy.
Once again, Curtis came over and wanted back into the isolation shelter, and I let him. Domino came right over to the window and would have run out if I wasn’t blocking it while pouring her treat into the kibble bowl.
She let me pet her again.
Not just a little bit, either. I stayed in the rain, petting her until I was starting to get too wet and cold, and she let me!!! She was pushing her shoulders up into my hand so I could scritch them for her, and rubbing her face into my arm. This is a HUGE step forward!
I’m still amazed that she didn’t adapt to the indoor life and spent the last two months hiding from people. She is more friendly to me now than the entire time she spent in the isolation shelter before we took her to the rescue! It would have been nice if she could have been adopted out to spend the rest of her days as an indoor cat.
Ah, well.
The rain is supposed to continue through most of the night. Tomorrow, my daughter and I have to leave by about 8am to get to her appointment in time. It’s in a horrible area to drive in, and I expect to have trouble finding parking. The satellite map shows me that there is a parking lot across a street from it, but nothing tells me if it’s public or private parking. Of course, because of all the one way streets, we’ll actually have to drive around and back track to get there.
I would really love to be able to go to a specialist that doesn’t require driving through downtown in the city. The streets are narrow, they haven’t been properly maintained for years and are crumbling, there are too many one way streets, and the parking sucks. Unfortunately, it seems that our province’s health care system has tried to mash everything into or near the downtown area. They don’t care for anyone living outside the city. We don’t have enough votes to matter.
Yeah, I’m feeling pretty cynical about it. We’ve been dealing with this BS for too many years.
*sigh*
I’m concerned my daughter was referred to this clinic, too. It’s one of those places that is very… ideologically driven, shall we say… and was the subject of a report released last summer, documenting a toxic work environment, racism, sexism, etc. Three board members got fired over it, though I couldn’t see anything that singled any board members out for the problems. Just vague “management” issues. This referral is after she saw a specialist in a different clinic, and was treated horribly. When I found out what happened, I encouraged my daughter to file a formal complaint, but she doesn’t want to go through the hassle. I have no reason to believe this clinic would be any better, since that first doctor was supposed to the top specialist in our province.
I was able to get a couple of big jobs done in the garden. It’s going to be an odd growing year. We had another cold night last night, dropping to about 6C/43F It looks like the cold has killed some of the melons and at least one winter squash transplants that managed to germinate in the tray that got resown after a mouse got to the seedlings. A couple more winter squash have germinated in the tray and I’ll transplant them when they get their true leaves, but it’s really too late for them, unless we have a super long, mild fall. The next time I have a chance to check out a garden center, I’m hoping to find more winter squash, at least.
Right now, I’m thinking of what can be direct sown for succession sowing. I’ll be doing more peas and bush beans, I think, and possibly some beets, but that’s not what I sowed today.
The first bed I worked on was the winter sown kohlrabi bed.
The down side of having a cover that can keep the cats out is, it’s much less convenient to weed.
Lots of crab grass. Thankfully, the remaining mulch kept most of the elm seeds from germinating. That is getting to be a real problem in other areas. Especially inside the protective collars around the tomatoes in the bed next to this one, and in the chain link fence bed.
In the next image of the slide show above, you can see my little surprise. There are actual kohlrabi growing! Absolutely tiny, but surviving. I was going to leave them to grow bigger but, as I was clearing the weeds, there were rhizomes going right under the little cluster. I ended up transplanting them to one end – a whole four tiny seedlings that probably won’t survive, but at least there’s a possibility.
The rest of the bed got completely worked over as I pulled all the rhizomes I could. Unfortunately, there were quite a few tree roots in there, too, and there isn’t much I can do about those. In this location, the roots could be either from the elm in one direction, or the cherry trees in the other. Both are close enough and spread roots far enough to be possible. It might even had been both, not just one.
Once the weeding was done, I have the bed a deep watering. Especially in the three rows I planned to sow into, which you can see in the third image.
In the fourth image, you can see what I decided to plant. American Spinach, Rainbow Swiss Chard, and I had some seed tape of Uzbek Golden Carrots left. They are old seeds so I don’t expect a good germination rate, and I hoped there was enough to lay down a double layer.
Before sowing anything, I noticed my brother had left some cardboard in the garage for me that was just right for this bed, so I cut strips to lay it down as a mulch between the rows, plus a couple that would be used to lay over the carrots to protect them until they germinated.
I didn’t need much. I had only enough of the home made seed tape left for half a row. I thought I had more seeds left in the packet and went looking, but couldn’t find it. So I grabbed the Hedou Tiny bok choy seeds we collected last year – something got to the ones planted in the old kitchen garden. The rest of the new row in the middle got those. The carrots got covered with the strip of cardboard, but not the bok choy.
Then the spinach and chard got planted in the rows still marked by twine on either side. There weren’t a lot of seeds in the packets, relatively speaking, and both got emptied in the planting. Then the cat proof cover got set back on.
Hopefully, these will take. We do have some seedlings from the rainbow carrot mix growing, but very few. I might try planting more carrots later on, but we’ll see. The chard and spinach planted between the garlic are just not growing, and what seedlings there were seem to be disappearing. It would be nice to have some greens that survive!
That done, I moved on to reclaiming the small, square bed near the compost ring.
The first image is the “before” picture. The boards on the side are from a same size frame that had been around another bed. They’re pretty rotted out, but they should last at least a couple more years. They still had their screws, so I took those out, first.
In the next image, the bed is all weeded, and the soil pulled away from the sides.
My original plan had been to join the corners opposite of how the frame already in place is, but it turned out the pieces weren’t all quite the same length, so I mixed and matched to get them to line up to the existing frame as best I could. Once the corners were screwed together, I had to be careful shifting it around to lay on top of the bottom frame properly. The wood is dry and rotten enough, I could hear it cracking at the corners.
I rummaged around in the scrap lumber pile in the garage for a while, and found some pieces I could cut into eight 8″ lengths, which is the new height of the bed. Four of them were screwed into corners, and four into the middles of the sides. One side didn’t line up at one corner. After screwing the vertical support piece to the bottom board, it left a gap between the support and the top board. More rummaging in the scrap lumber pile and I found something thin enough and cut it to 4″ in length. It was a bit narrower than the gap, but nothing the 3″ screws I was using couldn’t secure.
That done, I cleared a path to the remaining pile of garden soil we bought years ago and uncovered it. I thought I might be getting two wheelbarrow loads but, in the end, only needed one to top up the bed. In the next image, you can see the finished bed, all cleaned up, topped up and leveled.
The next thing was to protect the bed from being used as a litter box!
I had decided to use the rods from my hoop kit to made supports, running to opposite corners and crossing in the middle. This time, I decided to try something different. I found a drill bit that was the same diameter as the rods in this kit and drilled holes in each corner of the frame.
Which was fine for three of the corners, but one corner is a lot more rotten. There was no solid wood near enough to line up with the rods in the other corners, so I had to make do with what was there. Hopefully, it will be enough. The hoops will not be holding anything heavier than netting, and there shouldn’t be a lot of stress on it.
In the end, it took 6 rods to create each hoop. The hoop set into the rotten corner is a bit wonky, but otherwise it’s holding.
For the netting, I decided to dig out some green dollar store netting from last year, instead of the black netting I’ve been using elsewhere – the black netting that snakes can get caught in. The green netting is quite long, and I wasn’t sure it was wide enough to simply drape over the top, so I decided to wrap it around, instead. It was wrapped low enough that the netting could be secured to the ground with ground staples in the middles, outside the frame, while also being clipped at the bottom of the hoops at each corner.
I still had a lot of leftover netting, but I didn’t want to cut it, since it’ll be used elsewhere, some other time. After fussing with the netting to gather the excess toward the top and securing it with clips, I just pulled the excess length up and over the top and back again, before securing it in place with a clip, too. You can see the final mess in the last image of the slide show above. 😄
With this bed, I might transplant the one Arikara winter squash that has germinated in the middle, and then I will likely plant bush beans around the perimeter.
But not today.
That done, I headed inside for supper before coming back out to do the watering.
Which is when the phone started ringing. I hadn’t bothered to tell the family I was outside, so when the phone started ringing, they thought I was in my office and could answer. After four calls and no messages left on the answering machine, my daughter came looking for me. I went in and saw it was my mother, which was a surprise. I’d gotten a call from the nursing home this morning – at her request – to be informed that my mother was not feeling well. They’d already informed my brother yesterday, as he’s the primary contact, and he let me know. I was told she’d had a very rough night and was doing worse today, coughing, having a hard time breathing and talking. I was informed as to what treatment she was getting, and that she’s still in quarantine. She’s not the only one that’s sick, and if enough people in her ward are ill, they have to shut it down to visitors. For now, she can get visitors that need to wear a gown and mask, which rules me out because I can’t wear a mask.
I had asked the nurse that called me to let my mother know that I knew she was having a hard time talking, so I would not be phoning her. So it was very odd that my mother would phone me! She would have gotten the message, but when I mentioned it, she didn’t say anything about getting it. She did say that the nursing home phoned me this morning because she asked them to, but I told her they’d also already contacted my brother, yesterday. I told her about the medical treatment she was getting. She knew about the antibiotics but was saying they weren’t helping – I had to explain to her that it takes at least a few days before she would feel any difference, but she expects immediate response. I told her about the medication to help with her breathing, but she couldn’t remember anything about that one, then told me whatever pills they give her, she takes. I think she’s having a harder time remembering what she’s taking and when.
Of course, she started saying how she was so sick and didn’t think she was going to live much longer. Which she has been saying for the past… five? six? or so years. Thankfully, she is in the nursing home now. She’s coming up on 96 years old, and a simple cold can be dangerous at that age.
That got her to talking about the funeral and what I thought of it, and how she was surprised to see so many people. Then she told me, in a round about way, that she wanted us to make sure that her funeral had lots of friends there. I told her, we would let people know, but didn’t mention that she’s pretty much outlived most of her friends already.
By the end of the call, her voice was getting pretty squeaky, though she sounded a lot better than I expected, and even seemed to be in good spirits. Finally being where she has wanted to be for so long has definitely made a positive difference in her, even when she’s feeling sick.
After the call, I took the time to update my brother, then headed back out to finish watering the garden beds before it got too dark.
There are a few things I want to get done tomorrow, which is Friday, because I’m going to be doing some driving around on Saturday. June is a birthday month, and Sunday is Father’s Day, so we will be combining both on Saturday, to avoid crowds. My older daughter has offered to spring for Pizza Hut, which we haven’t had in at least a year. The nearest one is about an hour’s drive away. I’ll have other errands to do as well, including a dump run, which I did not do while we had my brother’s car and the truck was in the garage. Next week has got medical appointments, my daughter’s blacksmith workshop (she’ll be bringing home a forge when it’s done), and our first stock up shopping trip. So the more I can get done in the garden in between all this, the better!
Hard to believe we’re coming up on the solstice and the first day of summer already. With the cold nights we’ve been having, it feels like it should be April or May, not coming up on the end of June!
My daughter and I headed out for my ultrasound early. I had instructions that included drinking 500ml of water by a certain time, so we first went to the Walmart parking lot, since it was nearby, and and I chugged it. We were early for the appointment, but didn’t wait too long before heading over to the hospital.
They actually got me in a bit early, and the ultrasounds – I got two different types in three different locations – were done quickly.
The tech had asked questions and I gave her some back ground. She was really nice and just sort of kept talking. At one point, I mentioned that I almost had to cancel the appointment because of what happened to our truck. She was glad I hadn’t, because these appointments are hard to get! I ended up telling her the name of the garage the truck was towed to, and that they had a second location in this city. Turns out, she had heard of them. Her son had taken his vehicle there to get a diagnostic. When he decided he would do the work himself, then asked how much he owed, they didn’t charge him for anything. When she takes her own Honda in to the dealership garage, it’s $200, just for a diagnostic. Every time she has to get work done, it seems it’s always at least a thousand dollars. I told her I had zero hesitation in recommending our garage and told her about when I’d gone to the second location after dropping cats off at the vet, so very last minute, and never got charged for all the testing he did to try and find why my battery gauge was doing what it was doing. She was quite happy to hear a first hand recommendation like that.
After I was done at the hospital, my daughter and I filled the gas tank, then headed back to the Walmart area. I went to the same place as last time. Where I saw others on the way out at $1.569/L, this one was $1.529 – and they had their 5¢ off/liter sale again, too, so I got a nice little discount! Even so, I was shocked that it took less than $45 to put in 3/4 of a tank. The car’s tank is so much smaller than our truck!
Once at the Walmart, we had a late lunch, then both did a bit of shopping. We took our time about it, but we didn’t need much and the store is still undergoing renovations, so it wasn’t that long. The one thing I did remember to get, for both my husband and I, were iron supplements and vitamin C. The type of iron I was after turned out to be behind the counter, so I had a nice chat with a lovely pharmacist.
As we were leaving and heading to my brother’s car, we could see dark clouds moving in and were starting to hear thunder. We weren’t sure if the system would reach where we lived, but it was definitely coming close. We loaded up the car and headed out. It started raining as we drove and I had to get my daughter to figure out how to get the wipers going, since I couldn’t look around to figure it out while driving.
It was way more convoluted that it should have been! 😄
For most of the drive, we were heading in the same direction as the storm, but eventually we were driving along side it. We could see the mass of clouds and rain heading towards where we knew the house was.
I had planned to back up to the house to unload, but we were just pulling up to the driveway when we realized it had started to hail. My daughter quickly got out to open the gate, and I drove straight into the garage. We got the car inside just in time!! The car is a lot smaller than our truck, so there was plenty of room to pull forward, and we could close the garage door.
In the video above, the first one was taken as I waited for my daughter to catch up to me from the gate. We hadn’t brought our re-useable bags, so she used the back door and dashed to the house to get some. As we set up to unload the back of the truck, I was able to close the door part way and got the second part of the video. The noise you hear is the hail hitting the metal garage door.
Thankfully, in the time it took for us to fill the bags and gather things up to go to the house, the hail had stopped, if not the rain, so we just got wet while dashing to the house.
Well. Hobbling somewhat quickly.
My older daughter was waiting to open the door for us, too.
Once we were all settled in, I headed out again to feed the yard cats and do a quick status check. It had pretty much stopped raining by then. The transplants done this morning are looking okay, so far.
Back inside, I took the time to update my brother and SIL. I haven’t heard back from the garage yet, which means they didn’t get a chance to install the part today, and I wanted to let my brother know.
Before starting this post, I remembered to text the garage to change a burnt out headlight for me. I have a new bulb waiting in the truck. It would just be a pain – literally – for me to get at that third bolt in the wheel well that would allow the light fixture to be removed. Once the truck is ready, we have to work out how to get their car back to them after I pick up the truck.
In other things, before we headed out this morning, we got messages from my SIL. She had found out when the funeral for our vandal was going to happen and where, through Facebook posts. I had messaged my sister about it, knowing she wouldn’t see the messages until after she got home from work, but never heard from her. My brother already promised my mother that he would get her to the funeral, so it doesn’t matter. If people have a problem with us being there, that’s on them. He may have hated us, but we still loved him.
Anyhow.
We’re currently expecting to keep getting rain off and on – more on than off – until about 2am. Our phones have been going off with tornado warnings, but not so much for where we are. The system is moving directly over us, though, and we are definitely getting some lightning. Tomorrow is supposed to be clear of rain, which is good, because we have an insurance appraiser coming out to look at the buildings on the property. Hopefully, my brother will be able to find a better property insurance policy with a better company. The nights of rain and days without will be good for the garden, that’s for sure.
Getting more done outside today is definitely not going to happen. Hopefully, I’ll get at least some of it done tomorrow. If we do end up getting the truck back tomorrow, I’m hoping it’s early enough to check out a greenhouse in town and see if they have cabbage and winter squash transplants available. I’m really unhappy about the destruction of what we’d planted ourselves. I want to try these varieties again next year, and this time I’ll make sure to start them indoors earlier – and protect them from any mouse looking for lunch! I’m already looking to order new seeds for the varieties I ran out of because I had to do second sowings.
One good thing about the storm, though. We went from 31C/88F to the current 20C/68F, and it feels so blessedly cool! I might even be able to get a decent sleep tonight!
I had not planned to go out at all yesterday, for starters. I had my medical appointment in the the smaller city hospital this afternoon, and anything we might have needed could wait until we were done with that. My younger daughter was even going to come along to help out.
While I was doing the watering, I couldn’t resist taking these photos.
The white lilacs are in full bloom, and the honeysuckle in the old kitchen garden are just getting into that phase. They are looking just gorgeous!
Though, if you look at the background behind the white lilacs, you can see some of the clusters of dry Chinese Elm seeds among the leaves. They’ve been falling like snow for days, and won’t be done for a while, yet, even with the high winds we were having.
I did not expect to be later picking some of these to make a bouquet for my mother.
I was just finished up with the watering and gone inside, where my daughters updated me on the water pressure issue. They’d been doing dishes when suddenly the pressure dropped, dramatically. One of them was headed to check the pump and about to send a message to me, asking if I was using the hose, when they got my message asking them to check the pump because I’d lost pressure on the hose!
So we all just stopped using water for a while!
In the middle of all this, the phone rang. Twice. I managed to pick up and saw the display showing it was my mother, just in time to hear her hanging up.
I called her back immediately, and she was all surprised to I did. Yes, she had just tried to call me, she confirmed. I told her, you have to let it ring more than twice for us to reach it! She just laughed with a “you know me…” response.
No, I don’t recall her ever doing this before, so it’s not typical of her.
Then she informed me that our vandal had passed away on Friday. This was Monday. She had just found out from my sister.
For those who have been following this blog for a long time, you have been reading about the issues we’ve had with our vandal. When we first moved out here, things had been fine, but he had been working for years, trying to talk my parents into changing their wills and NOT leaving the property to my oldest brother. This included many verbally abusive messages left on my mother’s answering machine, and showing up at her place to yell at her. The property was originally supposed to go to the youngest of my brothers, who died in a quite horrible accident, more than 10 years ago. Our vandal expected the property to be left to him instead of my oldest brother, since he and my late brother had been so close, and he helped so much. When I told him I was good with it going to my oldest brother, he became furious. He’d spent the last few decades hating on my older brother, who was never able to find out what went wrong, and soon shifted that to me. Over the next while, we had to deal with verbal abuse, stalking, harassment, and the vandalism of our gate. He even went after my daughters. It got to the point where we though he might show up drunk and try to burn the house down, or even come over with one if his guns.
After we got him on trail cam video, vandalizing our gate, I pressed charges. They were stayed, unfortunately. When I caught him trying to do it again, I filed for a restraining order. Then the illegal lockdowns hit, and court dates kept getting cancelled and rescheduled, so it took almost a year before I finally got the restraining order. He retaliated by filing a civil suit against me for money, based on all the stuff he had abandoned on this property (while helping himself to pretty much everything that still functioned and ever returned them – a large part of why my mother asked us to move here and take care of the place). It was because of him that my mother transferred ownership of the property to my oldest brother, so it was taken out of the will completely.
The restraining order was for a year, and he did stay away. When it expired, I didn’t try to renew it. It’s such a pain to go through the court system, and I didn’t want to go through that again if I didn’t have to. For the most part, he did still stay away, though there were still a few incidents, some of which we caught on the trail cams. Then he got his cancer and blamed me and my oldest brother for it. We somehow gave him cancer. There were a few more incidents, from him yelling at me from the road while waving his colostomy bag at me, to showing up at my mother’s to yell at her, and leaving more of his vile letters slipped under her door. He kept using my late father and brother to try and manipulate and guilt her into giving him property that was no longer hers to give, anyhow.
We had been quite close in the past, and it was clear his behaviour was the result of his drinking and an undiagnosed mental illness. My mother kept ragging on us to reconcile with him, but couldn’t accept that we had tried, our doors were still open, but we would not put up with abuse and threats, and that is was on him to take the steps. Basically, in her mind, we should have just put up with his abuse to “keep the peace” and give him whatever he wanted. Except the land. She and my father never wanted the remaining two quarters to go to him.
Which leads me to something I have not said on the blog before, and will only say now, and only this once, since it no longer matters.
I had three other brothers. My middle brother already got his quarter section across the road from our driveway. He was our vandal.
This was a man with a big heart who did help us out quite a few times over the years. He helped a lot of people, many of whom took advantage of that big heart – especially girlfriends. What I later found out was that, when he helped us, it wasn’t out of generosity, but manipulation. He felt that, because he helped us with things years ago (even though we reciprocated whenever we could), that meant we had to let him say and do whatever he wanted to us, and we had to put up with it.
Hence why I feel so conflicted. On the one hand, I grieve losing another brother. On the other, I am thankful that he is finally at peace. There was something very wrong with him, and the people that should have helped him seemed to mostly enable him, instead. Of just didn’t realize he was literally inventing things in his mind that we never said or did, and told everyone about them. He alienated my late brothers children from us, telling them they were banned from the property, even though we’d never done anything of the sort. His inner demons destroyed someone I loved, leaving behind a shell of hatred, bitterness, envy and anger aimed at me and my daughters (he somehow seemed to forget I have a husband).
Obviously, there’s a lot more that happened that I can’t write about on this blog.
After my mother told me about his passing, we spoke for a while and I told her I would pass it on to my oldest brother, as I knew my sister wouldn’t. My mother had told my sister to email me about it, but she never did. She was the only one that still had any contact with our vandal (I will continue referring to him as such again, from now on), and had been visiting him. His wife had called to let my sister know, and probably told her not to tell me and my brother. We already knew our vandal didn’t want us at his funeral.
My mother wants to go to the funeral, of course, which would require transportation for her and her wheelchair. Something my brother is willing to do. We just don’t know when the funeral is. Talking to one of my daughters about it after, we came to the same conclusion. If we do show up, it would be bad – my daughter even thinks his wife might physically attack me. If we don’t show up, it would also be bad.
But we don’t know when the funeral is, and there have been no announcements or obituaries.
I passed the news on to my brother and SIL. Some time later, I got a message from them saying that they were going to visit my mother with flowers and a card to check on her.
Not knowing when I’d next be able to visit my mother, I decided I would meet them there.
My brother had brought my mother some lilacs he picked here, when they visited her on Sunday before going home. I decided to pick some white lilacs to go with the purple ones, then grabbed some honeysuckle, too. I wrapped the cut ends in a damp paper towel and tucked the bundle into a vase. Even without water in the vase, I seat belted the vase in place.
Earlier, my husband and I had talked for a bit about treating the family to burgers, and getting some red meat into everyone, when I came home from my medical appointment. Since I headed into town unexpectedly, I figured I would do that one the way home.
I got to my mother’s before my brother and SIL did. After I got the flowers set up in the vase with water, I sat down and asked how she was feeling.
Oh, you know… and she started describing her aches and pains.
Okay… so how are you feeling?
She went on about her being tired and her other usual complaints.
I finally said, okay, but how are you feeling about the news.
She seemed startled by the question, then started talking about how he was no longer in pain and at peace now, etc.
What I could see was that she really didn’t care, one way or the other. Which can’t be blamed on cognitive decline, because she was much the same way when my father passed away.
At one point, she started telling me how wonderful our vandals wife was because she stuck with him, even when he was sick. Other women would have left him.
Oh, how I was biting my tongue to not say flat out, “you mean like you did with Dad?” When my father needed her most, she moved out – largely because of our vandal – leaving my dad to what I later learned was continued verbal abuse, that my mother won’t even acknowledge happened.
After a while there was a knock at the door and my brother and SIL came in. They had brought her a bouquet, which my SIL started setting up in a vase they had brought, while my brother tried to give her a card. My mother started chastising them for spending money on flowers, unlike me, who brought flowers I picked and didn’t pay for. We managed to cut that off and suggest, “just say thank you…”
Aside from a few odd tangents, the visit actually went rather well. My mother had started to give me a shopping list, which included Voltaren, but I saw the staff had left her a printout of her medications and treatment, and the prescription version of Voltaren was on the list. I told her I’d talk to the nursing station about it, first. The rest was stuff from the grocery store; some fruit (she complained they only gave bananas and mandarins, and she wanted apples and grapes), some Ginger Ale in small bottles, because she found them so handy, and some crackers.
With how light things are for so late, I almost lost track of time. When I realized the grocery store was going to close soon, I grabbed the list and quickly headed out. My mom kept trying to delay me so she could give me cash, but I left my brother and SIL to explain to her I didn’t have time for that.
I managed to get the items and out of the grocery store a little more than 5 minutes before closing.
My mother was quite happy when I got back. I spent the next while washing the grapes and apples ahead of time for her, while my brother helped her look at the receipt and get out cash to pay me back. Which I would have been find if she hadn’t, but it wasn’t worth making a bit deal out of it (the nursing home doesn’t want residents to have cash with them at all, for obvious reasons). Then I made sure one of the packages of crackers was open, so she didn’t have to fight with the plastic sleeve.
Meanwhile, different staff came by several times. Someone came by with the snack cart, another came by with her bed time pills, and one even came by to help my mother get ready for bed, though she said she would come back after we were done visiting.
After I’d brought the stuff for my mother, we realized it was getting quite late – my mother’s window faces west, so we were getting lots of sunshine, making it feel more like the afternoon than evening. So we wound down our visit, then said our goodbyes, with all of us talking about our efforts to find out when the funeral would be and passing it on once we did.
On the way out, I made sure to stop at the nursing station to talk about the Voltaren, since my mother wanted me to buy more for her. It was confirmed, she now is getting the prescription version, two applications a day, so there is no need for me to get the Voltaren.
Then she told us there had been some… incidents, with my mother.
In general, she had been very easy, but as she has settled in, things have started to change. My mother is a big one about everything being quiet around her, but there is one non-verbal resident that makes vocal noises, but can’t speak. My mother kept telling her to shut up, and even grabbed her arms. !!!! There were other incidents, but this was the only one that got physical. She had handled it, and we were very appreciative of how she did it – and for informing us about it. We’ll have to have a talk with my mother. As it is, her behaviour has meant she can’t be included in some activities on another floor for now.
We had a good talk with the nurse before leaving.
After we parted ways, I headed for the DQ to get the burgers my husband had requested. As usual, I parked in one generic spots along the street rather than into their lot, as I find maneuvering in the lot with the truck is not worth the hassle. I got the stuff, loaded the truck and started backing out when I realized I’d forgotten to let the family know I was on the way home with food. So I pulled back into the parking spot and sent out a message.
That done, I backed out into the street again, and that’s when the sword dropped.
I tried to go from reverse to drive, but the shifter just slid smoothly from one side to the other, without any of the “clicks” while passing gears.
I knew exactly what happened.
A year ago, this happened after I’d gone to my mother’s apartment to do her grocery shopping. The truck got towed to a garage in that town, where it was found to be the linkage to the transmission. He had to order a part but, while waiting, he had jerry rigged it with a C clip, and it was working find. When he found the company sent the wrong part, we talked about it and decided to just go with the C clip. He told me he couldn’t say how long it would last. It might last a few years, or never break at all.
Clearly, it broke.
So there I was, in the middle of the street, unable to move the truck.
I popped my hazards on and sent a quick message to my brother, asking if they were still relatively close and saying I needed to get the truck towed. I quickly messaged my family, then called CAA.
Amazingly, I got a human being right away. After talking to the agent for a while, a tow was arranged. They even had the new address for the garage we use in their system already (they officially relocated barely a week before).
I got a message from my brother telling me they were just one town up the road – they’d spontaneously made a stop along the way, so were much closer than they normally would have been, otherwise. I updated the family, and then had to wait.
The truck broke down at really the best possible spot. Yes, I was in the middle of the street, at an angle, but vehicles could get around me, and I wasn’t blocking the driveway into the DQ. I had quite a few people stop, asking me if I needed help. Some even offered to push the truck out of the way, but I told him, it wasn’t going to move. It technically was still in reverse.
After awhile, my brother and SIL arrived and parked nearby. I told them more details about what happened and about the C clip that likely broke. My brother popped the hood but couldn’t see anything. He started the truck and tried to get it into gear, but nothing happened.
We still had people stopping and offering to help, which we greatly appreciated, even though we had to say know.
Then this couple came by. On hearing our brief explanation on why we couldn’t push the truck out of the way, the guy – a young, skinny little guy – said, Oh, I know what’s wrong!
He then got down on the ground and shimmied under the truck – he was small enough to fit! – while my brother stepped on the brake, just in case. He immediately saw that the wires had come loose from the transmission, then crawled back out and said to try it again.
Sure enough, he had temporarily “fixed” it. My brother was able to drive the truck across the intersection and into a parking spot.
He was pretty sure he was able to get it into neutral, but that was it. It would no longer move.
We were extremely thankful to this guy – and I noticed his girlfriend on the side, with a grin, proud grin on her face the whole time. At one point, he was talking to my SIL and mentioned he was a mechanic that worked on big rigs. As to what he found under the truck, he said “this happens all the time.”
!!!!!
So now we were no longer blocking the road and just had to wait for the tow truck.
CAA had sent me a link with a live status map that I kept checking. I knew I would be getting a phone call from the tow truck driver as soon as they were on the way. I didn’t recognize the company name on the page linked to, though. I also noted that, while they had the town right and the address for the DQ I was next to right, the cross streets listed did not exist in this town.
???
It took a while before I realized what I was seeing for the expected arrival of the tow truck, though.
Apparently, a tow truck wasn’t expected to arrive until this afternoon.
Which would have been roughly a 15 hour wait.
Yes, the system said things were busier than usual, but the next afternoon???
My brother recommended I call back, which I did.
This time, it went to the automated system, and the robot voice started asking questions – after telling me I had no open calls on file.
The robot voice even cut me off while I was giving the address, saying they could find no such address, before I finished.
Finally, it said it sounded like I was asking to speak to a live agent. Which I hadn’t, but I took it.
I finally got a real person. A different voice from before.
The first thing I did was confirm that I had an open call, which she told me I did. I brought up that the ETA was for the afternoon the next day, and how was that even possible? (Particularly since I’d made a point of telling them I was blocking a street) She asked me who told me that ETA. I told her, I got it from the link they texted to me. She said she would talk to dispatch and put me on hold.
For quite a while.
Finally, she came back and told me that there were no tow trucks in the area available, and they might have to dispatch one from the city.
Not the smaller, nearer city. The further, larger city. An hour away.
At that point, I told her that first, the truck was moved and no longer blocking the way, though we were still at the same intersection. The next while was a jumble of trying to explain to her where the truck was, and having to spell out the name of the business whose parking lot we were now in. Then I had to explain that I could not stay by the truck for that long (I didn’t say it to her, but my brother and SIL really needed to get home, and it was well past 9pm by then). She told me that, if I weren’t with the truck, they might not be able to take it. I told her, yes they will, and that I would give instructions to the driver when they called me.
The call was winding up when the agent hung up on me.
This particular agent was the worst I’ve ever had to deal with. In fact, I’ve never had a bad call with CAA before, even at times when I was on the side of the highway with zero street information to give them, because I wasn’t even near a cross road. I’ve had some difficult calls, but not like this.
After that, I dug out the envelop my mother had put the cash she gave me into, took the cash out and wrote a note to leave under the windshield wiper, since the truck wasn’t really parked well. It just said “tow truck is on the way” on the front, then on the back I put my first name and phone number. That way, if the tow truck didn’t make it until the next day, the staff at the company could see the note and know it was being take care of, and could call me if necessary.
At this point, I was prepared to cancel my medical appointment today. As my SIL started driving us away (I’d already transferred our food and drinks to their car), she then told me that they were driving to their place, then I would take their car and drive myself home.
!!!!!!!
I don’t know what I could do without them!
As we were driving to their place, I checked my phone and saw that the tow truck drive had tried to call me and text me, but my phone made no noises. I completely forgot that my “do not disturb” setting had kicked in at 9.
I called the tow truck drive back. After explaining things a bit, he told me to text him the details, which I did.
Then I texted our garage to let them know why our truck was there, and what was wrong, knowing no one would see the text, or the truck, until this morning.
Once we got to my brother’s, they made sure I knew how to start this car – it doesn’t use a regular key – even though it’s almost identical to the one they’ve lent us before.
Which is currently in the shop, getting thousands of dollars of work done on it.
They even made sure my phone was linked with BlueTooth, which I would not have bothered to do at all.
It was around 11pm by then and full dark when I finally started home. It was just past midnight when I parked in our garage.
When I got into the house with the food and drinks, I could hear the girls rushing down the stairs to get to me, and I promptly got buried in hugs. They are in total disbelief about the truck breaking down, yet again! And thankful that I didn’t have to cancel my medical appointment!
My husband was unable to stay up and was already in bed, so we tucked his food away. I hadn’t eaten since before noon, and was getting pretty famished, so I ate and went straight to bed.
Of course, I had a hard time sleeping.
Still, I did get some sleep. Enough that I’m not really feeling very tired.
So I got up early and did the usual morning cat feeding, then did some transplanting.
My daughter and I will be heading out for my medical appointment fairly soon. I’m hoping we get home early enough that I can at least finish the weed trimming before the expected thunderstorms hit this evening.
Meanwhile, we wait until we hear from the garage (I’ll probably phone them first) and find out what they can do with Damocles and when.
*sigh*
This is getting so ridiculous. Like we need vehicle troubles on top of everything else!!!
The Re-Farmer
(ps: my apologies for any typos. I don’t have time to go over them again! I hope they aren’t too egregious!)
After waiting for the call from my doctor until well past the clinic closed, I headed outside to finish up.
The bi-color pear gourds transplanted, I wanted to sow the short season luffa next to them. I also wanted to mark where they were and protect any seedlings, but I was out of collars, so I grabbed more 4L water jugs and cut them to make more. The packet has only 9 seeds, so I cut 5 collars to plant them all in.
Along with the luffa seeds, I brought out the two types of sunflower seeds I have.
I wasn’t sure at first which of the sunflowers I would be planting, but I prepared the bed anyhow. First up, I loosened the soil and set in the collars for the luffa, giving each collar a deep watering. Then, while waiting for the water to be absorbed by the soil, I loosened the soil along the front of the bed, from end to end, then gave that a deep watering. By the time that was done, the water in the collars was absorbed enough and I planted the 9 seeds into the 5 collars. If the germination rate is high, I will probably thin by transplanting.
All the luffa and gourds fit into 1/3 of the bed (the posts for the chain link fence makes it easy to view distances). That leaves another 2/3s of the bed where I could plant climbing things. Potentially, melons, winter squash or cucumbers, depending on how things to with the second sowing in the tray. Currently there are a total of 5 melon seedlings and 2 winter squash, but zero cucumber. The cucumber can still be direct sowed, though, if necessary. Or I could plant one of the two new varieties of peas I have available to try. Or I could plant more pole beans.
After planting the luffa and giving them another watering, I hosed down the area I’d loosened along the front of the bed from end to end.
The sunflower seed packets both have about 50 seeds in them. After thinking about it, I decided to plant the Mammoth sunflower in half the bed, on the side with nothing else in it now. I figure if we plant climbing winter squash in there, the giant stems of the Mammoth sunflower could actually hold the weight. In the other half, I planted the Black Russian. The description says the stems of those are so strong, they can be dried and used as firewood! So those would be strong enough to support the luffa and bi-color pear gourds, too.
The recommended spacing for both was 12 inches, but I didn’t plant multiple seeds per spot, so I planted them more like 10 inches apart. I was eye balling it, so it’s not exact. Once those were planted, I watered them more to settle the soil around the seeds, and then I brought the netting down and secured it.
Next, I worked on the space for the black hollyhocks.
In the first picture, I’ve yanked out the tall crab grass and flowers. The flowers in this bed are ones my mother planted many, many years ago, and they are perennials. They also grow very tall. Right now, they are still a bit shorter than the crab grass.
The stones are over a cat grave. When I found a dead cat in one of the old dog houses, I buried it there, but could not dig a deep enough hole, due to rocks and roots. To prevent it from being dug up, I put a board over the grave, then weighed it down with rocks. That was several years ago, and we could removed the rocks and board by now, but I haven’t bothered.
After pulling up the greenery, I went over the area with a hand cultivator, digging up as many roots and rhizomes as I could get. Then I opened up the roll of hollyhocks to get an idea of how many transplants there were, before using a trowel to loosen the soil deeper in for the transplants. I started by planting the largest ones, closer to the rocks, and was just getting ready to plant the rest of them slightly in front when I heard my daughter.
The doctor had called. It was almost 7pm!!
So I dropped everything, hosed the dirt off my hands and went in.
My poor doctor. It was two hours past when the clinic closed, and when I mentioned I thought the call wasn’t going to happen because of that, she told me she still had two more calls to make before she could go home!
I got a quick run down on my lab results. Nothing showed up in the pap smear (the pelvic ultrasound is next week), everything was looking good except for one thing.
My iron. It’s low.
She wants me to start taking iron supplements.
My husband had the same recommendation, just a couple of days ago. We’re all low on iron.
I am pretty sure I know why, too. It’s been ages since we’ve been able to buy enough red meat for it to be anything but an occasional treat when I can get it at a really good sale price. We’ve mostly been eating pork and chicken. Any iron from vegetables isn’t really helpful, since it’s far less bioavailable.
It didn’t even occur to me to ask what type of iron she wanted me to take. I’ll talk to the pharmacist about it, the next time I’m there.
We went through my Xrays as well. Nothing showed up in my right shoulder. As for my knee, the OA has gotten quite a bit worse since the last time it was Xrayed. Likely due to that fall I had, before Christmas last year. I mentioned to her about going to the sports injury clinic, but they didn’t have the Xrays available to see yet, so I just got the injections, in both hips this time. I mentioned having the walker now, and the doctor at the sports injury clinic gave me a prescription for it, so I could claim it on our insurance.
Which is when she brought up about me getting new knees.
???
This was something that came up, quite awhile ago, but now that I’m using a walker, and with the Xrays showing how much worse my knee got, it turns out I could get a new set of knees, if I wanted to.
!!!
They’ve actually gotten a lot better lately – I haven’t even been using the topical painkiller at all, lately. So I said no, for now. I didn’t bring it up, but if there are any joints that I would want to have replaced, it would likely be my hips, first.
With that call done, I headed back outside and finished transplanting the lost of the hollyhocks, then gave them a deep watering. I’ll have to keep a closer eye on these, as the crab grass and those flowers will want to take over again a lot faster here, I think. Eventually, though, if they take, the hollyhock should get big and bushy enough that they’ll keep those from coming back as quickly.
At this point, anything that needed to be planted is planted. Next, I need to prepare the area where I’ll be planting the short season corn.
I might start that tomorrow morning. Early. It’s going to be a scorcher, so I want to get out there as early as possible. Then we need to do a dump run and, once the grass is dry enough, I want to get the push mower and weed trimmer out, and possibly the riding mower again, to get the areas I wasn’t able to do before the rains and storms came.
Meanwhile, my brother and his wife will be out for the weekend again, working on their caravan and whatever else they have on their list.
First, I just have to share an update, so you can laugh at me.
I’m certainly laughing at me. I am so silly.
I mentioned yesterday that I got a parking ticket, while waiting for my daughters at the hospital clinic. I’d been diligent about buying more time on the machine, as things dragged on WAY longer than we expected them to. I had some confusion between two receipts with times close to each other, but figured I was so tired, I somehow paid again, even though a session hadn’t expired yet. When I got the parking ticket and checked the times on my receipts, it showed I had paid and it had not expired at the time the ticket was written out.
This morning, when the parking company opened at Pacific Standard Time, I got onto a chat with an agent, which was the only way to contest a ticket. It wasn’t in their system yet, and they clearly were not in our province. The agent asked for some details on the ticket, and I gave the reference number on the receipt. In the end, I was given local contact information and a reference number to use for that.
One of the methods of contact was an email address. So I took a picture of the parking ticket and the receipt, next to each other, and emailed it in. I didn’t say much other than basically, “I got this ticket, here’s the receipt showing I was paid and time wasn’t expired yet”. I didn’t ask for anything. Just gave the information.
I got a response while I was working in the garden.
The first thing pointed out in the response…
The ticket and the receipt had two different dates on it.
I tucked the receipts into a pocket in my phone case, forgetting that I had a receipt from the last time I parked there, when we picked my daughter up from her hospital stay. The old receipt got mixed up with the new ones, and I never noticed.
The agent that responded had looked up my license plate and listed all the times I had paid for more parking, adding that it was obvious I had made the effort to keep paying for the parking.
My ticket was cancelled. Just this once, I was told.
Having made a very silly mistake, I would have been more than willing to pay the ticket once I realized it! How absolutely embarrassing. I was so focused on the time stamp for the expiration, I completely missed the equally large date right underneath.
I made sure to write back to own up to my mistake and thank them for cancelling the ticket. That was very kind of them!
Because of the time zone differences while waiting to be able to chat with an agent, I didn’t get out to the garden until quite late in the morning. Thankfully, today was not expected to get as hot, nor were we expecting more rain or storms. We’re not expecting more rain for almost a week, but in a couple of days, the heat is going to be back.
The first thing I wanted to do was get the last of the tomatoes into the ground. The one bed I’ve been working on is going to have quite a variety if things in it!!
These are the Chocolate Stripe tomatoes, and there were only 7 surviving transplants. I planted them in a block, protected by collars, like with the peppers and eggplant. These got support stake added instead of wire cages, which you can see in the second photo of the slide show above. After the picture was taken, I put a straw mulch around all the protective collars.
Then I got a seed snail of onions, choosing the roll with the smallest number of onions in it.
These turned out to be from our own saved seed. I moved aside the straw mulch on either side of the celery block and there was just enough to fit them in. After tucking the straw back, closer to the onions, they are barely visible! You can just see them in the second photo of the above slide show.
At this point, I had just a few feet at the north end of the bed to fill. I wasn’t sure how much I could fit in there, so I grabbed the snail rolls for more onions – Red Long of Tropea – the White Vienne kohlrabi I started indoors, the caraway and the French marigolds.
I took a picture of all the rolls together. Honestly, I did try to! Apparently, the touchscreen on my phone didn’t register my touch, because there’s no photo of them in my phone. This is not the first time this had happened!
I really don’t like touch screens. They don’t like to read my fingers.
In the first picture above, you can just see the snail rolls in the bin at the top corner.
I spaced out some lines to plant in, using a garden stake, then used the jet setting on the hose in each on to smooth is out and make sure the seedlings had plenty of water below them. In spite of all the rain we’ve had, and the soil being moist on top, it’s remarkably dry after the first couple of inches.
There were barely any surviving kohlrabi seedings, and they were pretty small. I ended up with six that I planted in two short rows closer to the tomatoes, alternating them with onions. Then I planted the caraway – those seedlings were very fine and delicate! – in between onions, managing to split them into nine rows of three caraway each. The last row got just the French double marigold. There were only 5 surviving seedlings in that row.
There were still onions left in the roll to transplant elsewhere.
In the second picture, you can basically see the onions, and not much else! I couldn’t put the straw mulch in between them, but I made sure to add it on the sides and end of the bed, where all the crab grass and creeping Charlie try to invade. Not to mention all the dandelions.
That bed is now done. Hopefully, things will survive! This bed now has two types of onions, celery, two types of peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, kohlrabi, caraway and marigolds in it.
Next, I wanted to sow the pole beans, which were to go in the bed with the white egg turnip and daikon radish.
I got the weed trimmer out and cleared the dandelions going to seed in the paths before I started!
In the first picture, I’ve unfastened the netting along the sides and pushed it up to the top of the hoops. After that, I removed the remaining leaf mulch between the rows – I filled the wheel barrow twice – then did the weeding and loosening of soil.
Which is when I discovered we had only one daikon radish.
The netting keeps the cats out, but not the bugs. I know there were quite a few seedlings popping up when I removed the greenhouse poly and put the netting on, and they’re all gone. Something ate them! The turnips show signs of insect damage, but there are still quite a few left.
In the second picture, the bed has been weeding and the soil loosened, including where the daikon radish had been planted. That dark line running the length of the bed is the shadow of the netting on the hoops.
While I was working on that, I set the red noodle beans to soak, which you can see in the next picture, and got my packet of daikon radish seeds to resow. This is the one thing my younger daughter requested, so I wanted to try again. They are only 55 days to maturity, so replanting should be fine.
I prepped rows with the plant stake and the hose again, as in the other bed. For the pole beans, though, I had a bit of a problem. This is a low raised bed, which means reaching into the middle, even though it’s just a couple of feet, is harder with my short little arms, and quite painful on the back.
So I cheated.
In the next picture, you can see the bean planting in progress. I have a length of Pex pipe that never got used as a hoop support, so it is still straight. I set the end where I wanted the seed to go and dropped a bean in from the top. Since they were wet from being soaked, they sometimes stuck to the inside of the pipe, but that was easily fixed with a short puff of air.
Once the bean seeds were in place, I used the plant stake I’d made the rows with to push the beans into the soil to the right depth, buried them slightly, then used the hose again, this time on the shower setting, to settle the soil over the beans.
I still had Red Long of Tropea onions left. Just enough to transplant all along the side with the white egg turnips. I have one roll of red beard bunching onions to transplant, and that should fit along the other side, but not today. It was coming up on 3pm by the this time, we were into the hottest part of the day, and I forgot to have lunch. So I put the netting back – the ground staples hold a lot better with the leaf mulch moved out! – and will transplant the last onions in there tomorrow.
What I have left for transplants are the holly hock, bunching onions, chicory, and bi-colour pear gourds. Plus there are seedlings popping up in the winter squash and melon tray I had to replant, though not very many yet.
I still haven’t decided on where to plant the holly hock. Those can get very large.
I’ve decided I will transplant the bi-colour pear gourds into the bed I just finished redoing at the chain link fence, along with direct sowing the short season luffa. I had thought to put winter squash in that bed, too, but I don’t know that we’ll have many of those. So I will plant my sunflowers in there. The netting over that bed is keeping some of the elm seeds out, but some are still getting through, so I will have to find something else to add to it before the elm seeds dry up and really start dropping. The potatoes are coming up, so I’ll soon be able to remove their protective cover of mosquito netting, which is big enough to cover the chain link fence bed. It was used there before but, in high winds, it acted like a sail and kept getting pulled loose from the ground staples. I don’t think the clips that came with the hoops I’m using to hold the current netting would be strong enough to hold the mosquito netting when high winds hit. Like the ground staples we’d tried to use before, the clips would just go flying! More thought is needed.
The chicory will go into the old kitchen garden, where there is still room in the wattle weave bed.
I have a bed in the main garden area that I planned to put winter squash and/or melons. I also expected to be able to interplant winter squash with the short season corn I plan to direct sow, after I move the black landscape cloth or whatever it is, and loosen the soil for planting them there.
I had meant to transplant the cucumbers in an available space in the trellis bed, but there is no sign of the second sowing starting to germinate. I might direct sow one variety of cucumbers in the chain link fence bed. There should be room after the gourds and luffa are planted. The other variety can be direct sown in the trellis bed, as originally planned.
That mouse that ate all the seeds and seedlings in that tray really set things back!
There is still much to be done, but at least the more time dependent things got done. I’m even already seeing little bush bean sprouts starting to elbow their way out of the soil in the high raised bed. I need to add trellis netting to the trellis bed supports pretty soon, too – the peas in that bed are growing fast! I think I’m even seeing carrot sprouts, though it’s really hard to say for sure.
So that is progress for today.
I am battling with myself.
I keep feeling like I should get back out there and do more – if not in the garden, then with the weed trimmer or push mower, or move things so I can use the riding mower… the list goes on – while the temperatures are decent. I’m also trying to heed the warning signs my body is giving me, to avoid overdoing it. My pain levels have been pretty low for the past while, and I’d like to keep it that way! Mostly, though, I’m battling fatigue. There’s been just too much going on, too much stress, both positive and negative, too often and too close together. In the past, with similar stress levels, I would push myself anyhow until one time I reached the point of literally collapsing from exhaustion. That was long ago and I was also sick with a cold at the same time but, with the old bod giving out on me more and more, I just can’t do that to myself anymore. I wasn’t even up to going into town in the afternoon, like I’d hoped to do.
So the work will continue tomorrow, as will the trip into town and to get the mail. I just have to time it so that I’m home for my telephone doctor’s appointment, to go over my lab results.
Dangit. I keep forgetting to call the sports injury clinic. They would have had my Xrays available weeks ago, by now, and I’d really like to see if there’s anything they can do about the joint damage in my right shoulder, elbow and knee.
Ah, well. Lately they’ve been improving. It’s my left shoulder that’s still giving me grief, and that one didn’t get Xrayed.
