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Okay, this is weird

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

Thanks to our vandal, we’ve got trail cams set up in key areas. After finding the lock on our gate glued a few times, back in 2018, we set one up on a tree facing the gate, and that’s how we caught our vandal in the act. Since then, part of my morning routine is to switch out the memory cards and check the files.

Sometimes, however, weather, snow, or other factors means we skip a day – or longer, if the weather is really bad. I’m not too concerned about that since, if the weather is bad enough we can’t get to the cameras, our vandal isn’t going to get at what they’re covering, either!

The corner of the property the house and outbuilding are on is at an intersection. When we first moved here, the stop signs for the road that goes past our driveway each had a name sign for our road, though. And when I say “our” road, that partly means the road is named after my family, and that name was on one of the stop signs. The roads also all have numerical designations. This is true of pretty much all the roads around us; they have a name that’s usually from a family with a long time farm along it, and a number.

For many decades, none of the roads had any names at all. Most people went by section numbers. In fact, the electric company still uses that system. Beyond that, it was more along the lines of “turn onto the gravel road and drive X number of miles…” and so on. For as long as I can remember, right at the corner post of our fence was a sign with my late father’s initial and surname on it, which helped in giving directions! As you can imagine, that made things difficult for emergency vehicles to find places, so the roads were given proper names then, at some point, got numerical designations too, and everyone’s driveway got a marker number.

Well, after we started having issues with our vandal, first the stop sign with our family name on it got knocked to the ground and the sign stolen. Then the sign with my father’s name on it disappeared. It was hard enough to get people to find us, since our physical address doesn’t exist – Google maps has several miles of the road past our driveway listed as “unknown road” – but without those signs and landmarks, it made it more difficult. So I decided to make a sign to put at the corner to make things clear. You can read about that here, here, here, and here, where my brother helped me install it far better than we could have done, with the materials we had! (all links will open in new tabs)

With the other signs going missing, I made sure to have a trail cam set for the new sign. More specifically, the area in front of it. We even got a new trail cam that could take a combination of stills and video, and we were able to mount it directly to the corner post.

Then one morning, I came out and it was gone. Ripped right off. Of course, we have no proof, but there’s only one person who would have taken it.

We ordered a new camera, which is now the gate came, and set it up on the corner post again – this time with an older camera set up to monitor the new camera!

In the end, though, we didn’t want another camera stolen off the post, so we found something we could use as a stand. The new camera couldn’t be set up on it, so we used an older camera that can only take stills, set up out of reach inside the fence line rather than on the post, and the new solar powered camera went to monitor the gate.

This set up has worked out well. Granted, we have barbed wire fences, so it’s not like a determined person still couldn’t get at it, but it works out. We do see our vandal going by ever now and then, since he lives so close to us, but since we were able to get a restraining order against him, we no longer see him making rude gestures at the camera anymore. The visible presence of the cameras themselves are a deterrent. Well. Except for the one that got stolen!

So that’s the background.

In the winter, there are always times when we can’t get at the sign cam because of the snow, but there’s less of a concern in the winter. Our vandal is in no shape to climb over the huge plow ridge at the intersection, or make his way through snow drifts, to get at the sign. I wasn’t able to switch out that camera’s card in the last little while, but was able to this morning, and this evening I was finally able to go through the files.

Yes, I did see our vandal go by in a couple of them, but I found something else far stranger.

It’s not unusual to see people stopping on the road at or near the intersection and getting out of their vehicles. This time, however, we got images of three young men walking away from their stopped vehicle towards the intersection.

Then climbing the plow ridge to get to the sign.

One of them posed in front of the sign while a second one took his photo, and the third one stayed further back.

I have no idea who these guys are. They looked to be maybe in their late teens or early 20’s, and I’ve never seen them before.

They would have seen the sign cam, of course. The sign cam may now be further back from the fence line, but it’s visible from the road. From where they climbed the plow ridge to get in front of the sign, they were facing it. The one guy who took the photo even seemed to look right at it. They had to know they were being recorded.

Whatever they were doing, they seemed to be having fun and were all laughter and smiles, but…

What on earth could there be about our sign that they’d go through that effort to get to it, and why would one of them want to have his picture taken in front of it?

It’s a complete mystery for all of us!

The Re-Farmer

This is what $624 combined looks like, plus an update

/ Re-Farmer / 6 Comments

$623.68 to be exact.

Ouch.

Today I did our first stock up shop in the city. While our temperature is a balmy -6C/21F, the windchill is brutal. My weather app says it feels like -22C/-8F, but at least a few times I was walking in it, it sure felt much colder!

The drive in was good, though. Swirling snow on the highway, but the wind wasn’t letting anything accumulate.

I decided not to do Costco today, in order to take advantage of some sales that end tomorrow. My first stop was at the international store, where I could first enjoy some dim sum for breakfast.

I didn’t feel like bagging at the truck with this wind, so I brought bags into the store with me, for a change.

I balanced the weight in the insulated bags poorly, though, so I shifted things around a bit. This is what I got.

For our Easter basket, I picked up a flat of eggs. We’ll get more at Costco, but I want to get some pickling right away. I also got a Polish sausage, a cheese ball, a jar of cheese stuffed olives and a small dinner ham for the basket. Oh, and the whole cloves, which are used as a decoration. We’re running low.

The frozen turkeys were on an excellent sale, so I grabbed two – and then got one of them for free with my loyalty points. The Honeycrisp apples were also an amazing sale, so I got two bags of those. They were $1.99 each instead of $6.99.

The Stash teas were also on sale, and I ended up getting 4 boxes of those altogether. We normally buy our toilet paper at Costco, and we still will get their big house brand package, but the house brand TP here was also on a good sale, so I got one for our stock up supply.

There’s some cleaning vinegar (10% acidity) and laundry detergent. Normally, I’d by detergent at Costco, but I don’t normally do the laundry and hadn’t realized we’d run out completely! I got some marble and Old Cheddar cheese as well, because the sales were good, but will likely get more at Costco. We use cheese a lot.

The Soy and Oat milks are for my lactose intolerant daughters, along with the coffee creamers, which does bother them, but they don’t use enough of it at a time for it to be much issue. I got a smoked ham for general eating, plus a slab of salmon for the girls that was on sale. There’s a slab of smoked bacon, the soy sauce brand my husband likes, and some bananas.

The grand total, after taxes, was $216.10, after just over $50 was taken off for the sales and deals.

My next stop was Walmart. I was really after just two things there. Cat food and supplements.

I did have a few extras that weren’t on my list. My “splurge” of the day was a small plastic shelf and 4″ plastic plant pots. I really didn’t want to use peat pots again and, with the larger seeds I want to be starting next, I went with these. I do have similar plastic plant pots that we found while cleaning up the basement, but they’re pretty old and the plastic is getting brittle, and the price was right on these. They had the giant bottles of shampoo and conditioner in stock, so I got one shampoo and two conditioners.

Then there was my supplements.

*sigh*

I got two boxes with 32 tins each of wet cat food, plus 6 bags of dry. The two more expensive kibble bags were about 9kg, and the others were 7.24 and 7.5kg in size. I also grabbed a couple of small bags of chocolate eggs for our Easter basket – our one non-traditional basket item is a bit of chocolate. I had run out of my supplements almost completely, so I got my magnesium, B12, Zinc and D3. D3 is the only one that was cheap! With the others, I did get the ones that were the best deal, so they should last me a while, but… ouch.

Those plant pots were a really good deal, and not even on sale. A package of 6 was $1.24, so I got four packages.

Aside from all that, I got a bottle of water for the road, for a grand total of $410.22 after taxes.

*sigh*

I’ll be doing our Costco shopping in a couple of days, and I want to make sure to tank up and get everything we can squeeze out of our budget, because on April 1st, our Prime Dictator’s new carbon tax is coming into effect, and the price of everything is going to go up. Another tax on top of a tax on top of a tax. Meanwhile, all our MPs are getting a raise on the same day! Because, of course. 🫤

On the way home, I made sure to hit a bank machine and take cash out, then stopped at the septic guy’s place to pay him for emptying out our tank yesterday. Including a tip. I will always tip the septic guy!

While driving on the highway, on the lookout for his driveway, a thought occurred to me. When I called him to do our tank and arrangements were made, he never asked for our address. He’s been here often enough to remember where we are!

When I got there, I met the lady of the house and had some questions. The guy was in their shop out back, so she called him and he came over to talk.

I told him that the septic pump it still not shutting itself off and asked what he could see while emptying the tank. The first thing he confirmed for me is that he saw nothing at all out of the ordinary. The float was not stuck.

Then he told me, it’s the pill starter. It has to be, because there’s nothing else it could be! I mentioned I’d talked to my brother about it, and that it had been changed relatively recently, but the septic guy said this is actually a pretty common problem. He was able to tell me that a new pill starter costs about $250. We won’t have a budget for that until I get my caregiver tax credit in, so for now, we’ll have to just turn it on manually every now and then. He told me that we shouldn’t need to turn it on for at least a week. That’s about how long it takes for both sides of the tank to fill. I’m glad he told me that, because I was concerned about running the pump dry, but I don’t really know how big the two sides of the tank are. Given our use of our plumbing system in general, I would still expect it to be filled faster than a week. He said to just take a look on Monday and see if both sides are full, then turn it on if it is. I won’t be doing that. Every time I look down into there, I’m afraid my glasses will fall off! And no, they are not loose or anything. I get that feeling every time I look down from a height. 😄

Then he mentioned that he could come out next week and replace it for us, before we’d need to turn the pump on again. I didn’t realize he did that sort of thing, too! I thought we’d have to call a plumber! Nope. Apparently, it’s a pretty easy thing for him to do. I suspect he wouldn’t be doing it the way my brother changed it out, before we moved out here, which was through the basement.

No matter. I would much rather get the septic guy to do it than call a plumber! I’m just really happy with this guy. He’s come out here when we’ve had septic problems several times now, and always been really fast about it. The last time we called to book the tank to be cleaned, my husband accidentally called a different company, and they wouldn’t have been able to come out for 2 weeks! They would have been a lot cheaper, but I’d rather pay extra for a guy that’ll come out when we actually need him. The cheaper rates are made possible because they arrange their schedules to do a whole lot of people in one area at a time, so there’s less driving around for them.

So that was done, and now we have more information to work with.

After I got home and everything was unloaded and put away, I assembled the small shelf I got. It’s for the cats. There’s a space in my room that currently has a stool over a circulation vent that has a cat bed on it. I want to replace that with the shelf, and set up four cat beds on it.

I found a problem as soon as took the straps off the package.

Along with the side pieces, there are foot pieces that each have a cap piece tucked into them.

There’s only three foot/cap pieces.

Without all the legs, I can’t put it over the circulation vent, so I ended up putting it on top of the foot stool that’s already there.

This must be pretty common, because it came with a sheet saying, “missing parts? or questions? DO NOT RETURN TO THE STORE to obtain replacement parts.” 😄 There’s a website to go to instead. This isn’t the first time this has happened. A few years back, after we finished clearing out the old basement, I got larger plastic shelves to use down there, to replace the wooden ones that were rotting from the floor getting wet every spring. I wrote to the company and got the missing parts very quickly. I’m pretty sure it’s the same brand.

Once we get the missing parts, we’ll set it up without the foot stool under it, and secure it to the wall more effectively. We’ll probably wrap the verticals with jute twine, too, for the cats to scratch at.

Meanwhile, I’ve got cat beds, caves and blankets on it now, and the cats have been exploring it. sometimes, even staying on it for a while.

They still prefer gathering into massive cuddle piles on my bed, though!

Which is fine. That’ll give me a chance to wash the cat beds and blankets, so they’ll be fresh and clean for tonight.

But first, I need to contact that shelf company about the missing leg/cap piece!

The Re-Farmer

Well, crud

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

I’m back from helping my mother with her shopping. The septic guy came and went while I was gone, so as soon as I got home, we went into the basement to turn power back on to the pump. With that tank having just been emptied, is should NOT have turned on, if it was just the float being stuck.

It turned on, and won’t turn off.

When I talked to the septic guy and mentioned what was happening, his first thought was that it was the switch. That may be true. We’ll have to get a plumber in to look at it, though.

Until then, we’ll have to manually turn it on and off, regularly, and do things like turn it on before starting to shower, then turning it off after. Same with doing the laundry. It takes a while for the solids side of the tank to fill and overflow into the greywater side, but we’ll have no way of determining that.

*sigh*

Sometimes, I think this place is going to be the financial death of us.

The Re-Farmer

Not a good start to the day!

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This morning started out pretty normal. All our usual activities. Including the use of water. Which means, of course, the pumps in the basement go off.

Well, this morning, I heard the septic pump go off, but after a while I realized it wasn’t turning off.

I waited a bit longer, and it still wasn’t turning off.

Finally, I went into the basement. Everything looked normal enough, but it was just running and not stopping.

I finally turned it off manually, so I could check the filter my brother had installed in a section of pipe running from the tank to the pump.

The filter is a sort of basket with a handle on it. When I opened the top and lifted it out, it was completely black and so clogged, it was holding liquid, and not draining!

I popped in the other basket (we switch out between two of them) and set the clogged on in a container we have in the old laundry sink to soak in detergent. Once the filter casing was refilled with water and sealed, I turned the switch back on. The pump turned on immediately, and I left it for a while.

It still wouldn’t shut off on its own.

I finally went back down and turned it off manually again.

I made sure to listen to the pipes, and I wasn’t hearing much splashing, so it does sound like the greywater side of the tank had been emptied.

While doing my morning rounds, I went to check the outflow area. It’s not an area we check often in the winter, because it’s so hard to get to. Much to my surprise, for most of the distance to the area, I was actually able to walk on top of the snow and it held my weight! All that freezing and thawing has resulted in a very hard surface.

This is the outflow. One of our jobs for when things thawed out was to clear in front of it. At some point, someone laid down what looks like a piece of metal roofing, bent into a slight curve, to direct the flow towards the pond. It is full of debris. Now, instead of flowing to the pond, it goes off to the side and towards the inner yard, and where the old collapsed log building is.

The area in front was wet, but I honestly couldn’t tell if there had been a recent outflow of grey water from the tank.

I’m hoping the problem is something as simple as the float being stuck.

Oh! The phone just rang. I called the septic guy and left a message, and he just called back.

He’ll be coming over to empty the tank this morning, and is okay with my paying him tomorrow, when we’ll have cash.

Time to go take the insulated tarp off the tank, and unlock the gate!

Fingers crossed that it’s just the float, and this will take care of it!

The Re-Farmer

It worked!

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

It’s almost 1am, but I just had to write this post!

I hoped the plumber would have called while I was at my mother’s.   When he hadn’t called by the time I got home, I called again and left another message.  This time I mentioned we had only the one bathroom, and were using a honeypot.

No call.  Which probably means they are really busy.

With the drain cleaner having no effect, and the plunger just splashing and making a mess, we were getting pretty frustrated.

Then I remembered we might have another option to try.  After looking around, I found this stuff.

There wasn’t a lot left in the bottle.  We’d been using it for a while, but when I tried to get more, I couldn’t find it.  Even the employee that tried to help me had never seen it before, though she did still try to find it for me.  Then we just forgot to use what we had left.

I dumped the last of the bottle into the toilet bowl, then left it for several hours.

Just a little while ago, I tried plunging again, and it actually worked!  We have a flushing toilet again!!!

We have seriously got to find more of this stuff.

It also confirms for me that the root of the problem is the main drain pipe itself.  Too many decades of grime coating the inside.

So we definitely still need to get it cleaned out, or it’s going to clog up again. 

Plus we need to stock up on this stuff and use it regularly!!!  It’s like magic!

The Re-Farmer

Time to call the plumber, and slip sliding away!

/ Re-Farmer / 9 Comments

It’s a bit nippy out there this morning. As I write this, we’re at -11C/12F, with a wind chill of -25C/-13F. We still have high winds, but not as bad as yesterday. I do see fallen branches around the inner yard, but not in areas we can get to to clean up, until the snow is gone. We’re looking at a possible high of -7C/19F this afternoon. Not bad for going out to help my mother with her errands.

Over the past few days, we had some rain, then the high winds and cold, and last night we got a light dusting of snow. The end result?

Our driveway and the flooded parts of the paths are a skating rink!

You can see where they were skidding around while trying to cross the ice! It’s frozen solid now; no need for rubber boots this morning, that’s for sure!

I counted 28 cats today, and they are definitely taking advantage of sun room to get out of the wind. Looking out the bathroom window, I was really wishing I had my phone with me to get a picture. On the platform above the heat lamp, there was at least 8 or 9 cats, all smashed together, looking at the window, creating a forest of necks, heads and ears sticking out of a furry mass! There were more in a pile on the other half of the platform, all curled up around each other on the self warming mat. It was adorably funny!

What isn’t funny is, we’re going to have to call a plumber.

For the past while, our toilet hasn’t been flushing well. Almost, but not quite, clogging. I tried plunging it last night, but with no actual clog, all I was doing was splashing water around. What I think the actual problem is, the drain pipe from under the bathroom to the septic outlet needs to be augured. When the drain for our washing machine started backing up, we had a plumber come in and he augured the pipe from under the kitchen to the corner under the bathroom. It’s likely the first time that was done since the addition was built, and we got running water in the house. Which means the other length to the septic tank has probably never been cleaned, and likely has 50 years of gunk accumulated inside.

Well, we’ll find out soon enough. After I did as much as I could, one of my daughters went to use the bathroom, and it was clogged. The weird thing, though, is that the bowl keeps filling. We knew we had some sort of phantom flush. Every now and then, the tank would suddenly start refilling, even though no one had flushed, but I didn’t realize it was leaking into the bowl. We’ve got a tall, mobility friendly toilet, and the water level in the bowl has always been very low. When we replaced the innards of the tank this past summer, we were able to increase the level a bit, but not much. Frankly, I think the low water level certainly wasn’t helping.

Now, we’re actually having to bail the water out of the bowl, because it just keeps filling, ever so slowly!

Meanwhile, no amount of plunging made a difference. I even got our plumber’s snake out, but it can’t get around the U bend.

We do have toilet-safe drain cleaner, and gave that a try, but it did absolutely nothing.

So, we set up the honey pot in the bathroom to use until a plumber can get here. Much preferable to making our way through the slippery paths to a bone-chilling cold outhouse! I’ll give the plumber a call after I’m done writing this, then make sure to leave the gate open when I leave for my mother’s. Our plumber has 24/7 emergency services, but none of us were up to that. Hopefully, clearing the pipes will be enough to fix the problem, and he won’t find some other, bigger problem on top of that!

Why does this stuff always seem to happen in the winter?

One more odd thing that I’ve noticed before, but was never quite sure of until now. I heard the septic pump going off this morning. Obviously, no one flushed the toilet, and no other water was being used anywhere, because everyone was in bed, and it was about 15 minutes or more since I’d bailed water out of the toilet bowl. Which means we’ve got water leaking into the septic tank enough to trigger the pump. Granted, we’re going to need to get the tank emptied, once the snow clears enough to make it accessible again. I know the solids side of the tank must be getting pretty full. The liquid side has a float to trigger the pump, so it gets emptied regularly. It just empties more often, the fuller the solids side gets, since there’s less room for the liquid. Still, just how much water is leaking into there, that it should trigger the pump like that? This is something that’s been bugging me pretty much since we’ve moved here but, until now, I was always second guessing myself, thinking that maybe I just didn’t hear someone flushing the toilet or using a sink somewhere. My bedroom is right above where the septic pump is, so I can hear that, but I can’t hear if someone’s using water elsewhere in the house. This time, I can be 100% sure that no one was using water anywhere. Talking with my daughter about it, just a little while ago, she wondered if the phantom flush leak is just a bit slower than the leak into the bowl.

Definitely something to tell the plumber about.

Time to make that phone call, and then start heading out to my mother’s!

The Re-Farmer

Nothing to complain about!

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

Wow. I thought we had high winds here!

I just heard back from the Cat Lady. She was more than happy to change when we would be connecting.

Part of their roof just blew off!

Their new house has a metal roof and one of the panels went flying. Turns out the winds are higher in the city than where we are!

Thankfully, no one was hurt, and the damage was minimal, all things considered.

When it comes to our own winds, I’ve got nothing to complain about!!

The Re-Farmer

Adoption update, changes in plans, and a sad job finally done

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I got some sad news from the Cat Lady last night. The “problem cat” that they took on from the city shelter is going to have to be put down. For her to make this decision, you know the situation has to be exceptionally bad. She has had vets recommend euthanasia for cats many times, and she’s hung in there and saved so many cats, including several from us that are now living with them permanently. She was even wondering why the city shelter hadn’t already done it, long ago.

In the middle of all this difficulty, she was still thinking about us and her promise to help out.

The original plan had been for both tripods to go to the city shelter and their special needs area, while Ghosty would be going to the shelter that specializes in Siamese cats. However, because our adoptees are going from a loving home where they are well cared for, she feels it would be too stressful for them to go to a shelter, no matter how much they promise that tripods get adopted very quickly. If they were kittens, that would be a different issue, but if she wouldn’t feel right putting one of her own cats in there, she wasn’t comfortable putting any of ours in there, either.

I will trust her on that assessment!

She’s going to give herself some time to decompress from the situation with this other cat, and will then take Ginger from us on the weekend. Ghosty is going to wait until the other shelter has an open space, rather than go to the Cat Lady until they do. Toni is not being bullied like Ginger is, so she is not an urgent adoption. She was even willing to take Leyendecker instead of Ginger, since she’s quite familiar with dealing with cats with urinary issues, but Leyendecker is not the cat being bullied, and the chances of getting Leyendecker adopted out is much lower. His urinary issues are related to stress, and he’s had no issues at all for quite a while – just increasing the amount of wet cat food they all get seems to have helped with that, too.

So we get to keep Ginger a little bit longer. This time, we’ll be meeting in the town nearest us, rather than in the nearer city, half way between our homes.

I had intended to pick up more litter pellets after meeting with the Cat Lady, since I could only fit one bag in the cart along with the kibble. When my daughter wanted to go into town to pick up a few last things for her sister’s birthday, I suggested we go to the nearer city so I could get the litter pellets, too. That worked for her, so we headed out late this morning and ran our errands.

When we got home, I took advantage of our weather to do a job that should have been done awhile ago. We have not been able to do burns often enough, usually due to high winds, so our burnable garbage has been building up. Meanwhile, we’re getting to where my daughter wants to start burning the used litter, rather than adding it to the pile behind the outhouse, to compost. On top of that, we have not been able to cremate the cats we’ve lost over the winter. Today we happened to not only be pleasantly warm, at 2C/36F, but there was virtually no wind at all. It was time to finally get the job done.

The burn barrel is falling apart and needs to be replaced, so we’ve been using a burn ring, instead. That’s getting too full of ashes. So after digging a path through the snow to the burn ring, I also dug out a larger area nearby to basically do a bonfire. We’ve still got all those old rotten pallets we cleaned up from where the wood pile used to be, so I set one of those down on top of the snow where I’d cleared a space, then prepared a space in the middle for our lost ones. Their remains were kept under cover in the burn ring, so I moved then over, then continued to build up a pyre over their remains.

Between our paper garbage and the old pallets, I was able to built quite a fire – and wow, did it get hot! I couldn’t get close to it to tend the fire for more than a few seconds before having to back off to at least 10ft away.

I took advantage of this and cleaned out almost all the old rotten pallets, setting aside the wettest ones where they could dry in the sun, for the next time we need a fire. That junk pile looks so much better now! We’d intended to take the old pallets to the dump, along with all the other oversize garbage in there, but we were never able to hire someone to haul it all away for us. I would have preferred not burning them, since they are so full of nails, but we’ll just have to take extra care in cleaning up the ashes. Right now, I’m glad we didn’t get them hauled away, since they made for an appropriately hot and clean fire to take care of our lost ones.

Not something I ever expected to need to do, when we moved out here!

The good thing about doing something like this, this time of year, is that once things burned down enough, I could leave it to smolder. The fire melted enough snow around it to create quite a puddle under it, and there’s nothing but more snow for a substantial distance in all directions.

So there’s a job that finally got done. Hopefully, not one that will need to be done again for quite some time. This past year had an insane amount of cat and kitten losses, both indoors and out. Something the Cat Lady tells us has been happening all over our province, so it wasn’t just with us.

As for the inside cats, pretty soon we’ll be down one and, hopefully, we’ll be able to keep finding forever homes for more soon. It’s been really all over the place in getting adoptions done, but at least they are happening! I am so thankful we connected with the Cat Lady. She’s been awesome for us!

The Re-Farmer

Gorgeous morning, and good neighbours!

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It’s all gone as I write this, but heading out this morning was a glittering, sparkling winter wonderland!

All the trees were frosted like this. There’s no way the camera in my phone could pick up how it was all sparkling in the sunshine!

I also had a nice surprise when I got to our gate. Yesterday, I saw that someone had opened up one side of the driveway more for us, at the plow ridge. This morning, the other side was done! This time, the motion sensor on the trail cam was triggered, and I could confirm it was the same neighbour who would suddenly clear our driveway last year. Last year, we had enough accumulated snow that, once it was deeper than the bottom of our gate, we left the gate open, so he just went in and cleared our driveway for us. With how much milder this winter has been, and seeing our vandal do things like stalk along the road when the vehicles we’d sold for parts were being collected, we didn’t dare leave the gate open. Otherwise, I know he would have widened the whole driveway for us. As it is, he did what we could, just because he could!

Having such great neighbours does make up a lot for having to take extra precautions because of our vandal.

The good thing is, our new truck can handle a plow attachment. Hopefully, we’ll be able to find a used one, because even the cheap, generic new kits start at around $1300, before taxes, with some costing more than $5000!

Something else to try and figure out how to squeeze out of our budget!

The Re-Farmer

I guess I wasn’t done, after all!

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But I at least got some rest, first.

I saw my daughter on the garage cam, trying to cut her way through a snow drift in front of one side of the garage that didn’t need to be cleared. It was so deep, she had to use a shovel to cut into it before little Spewie could do its job. When I cleared the area in front of the garage, I hadn’t made a wide enough turn radius, so when we headed into town and I tried backing the truck out of the garage and turning into the driveway, I couldn’t back up far enough to clear a corner of the drift I’d left behind.

So I quickly took some painkillers, bundled up and headed outside, grabbing the snow shovel along the way.

After talking to her for a bit to explain that only the one edge of the drift needed to be cleared, not the whole thing, I stayed out to help. The area in front of the garage was drifted over even deeper than when I cleared it yesterday, and it wasn’t light and fluffy, like in the yard! To top it off, my daughter could maneuver Spewie only in certain directions without the wind blowing the snow right back into her.

For the next while, we had a routine. I’d use the shovel to break up the snow along the edge she’d just cleared, then rested while she cleared the area I broke up. Once she did a pass, she’s drag the snow blower back towards the garage, then she could rest while I broke up the next area of snow.

We kept this up until we cleared a decent sized area, far enough to clear that section of drift that I’d hit, then my daughter started making the first cut through the snow to the gate. While she did that, I started working on the turning radius space that she couldn’t get into with Spewie. After a while, though, she stopped and asked if I could help her out. In order to not trip the power bar by overtaxing the snow blower, she was doing a lot of slow back and forthing, while dragging the extension cord behind her. She kept stepping on the cord as she backed up, so I helped by simply following along, holding the cord off the ground behind her, moving back and forth with her, while also pulling more slack from the garage along the way. My daughter had the cord slung over her shoulder, so this ensured she never had to have the cord pulling at her as she went along. We have 100′ extension cords, and we need to use both to reach the end of the driveway – roughly 150-160′, I’d say. Dragging that behind you can get pretty “heavy”.

As we got closer to the gate, I was trying to see if the road had been plowed, but was very perplexed by what I was seeing. Everything was so glaring white, I just couldn’t make things out until we get closer.

I was seeing a mountain of snow, blocking the end of our driveway.

It was easily the worst plow ridge we’ve had left across our driveway, in the 7 winters we’ve seen since moving out here! Not even when we were snowed in for a month, did the plow leave behind a ridge so high!

Once we reached the gate and my daughter stopped to unlock it, I went back to get the snow shovel, and a metal shovel to break up ridge. The snow shovel is plastic and already has a crack in it, so I didn’t want to use that to break up the plow ridge.

Then I clambered over the ridge to start working on it from the road side, first. I quickly realized that, even if Spewie were powerful enough to clear the ridge (which it isn’t, even if I broke it up, first), the snow was so full of gravel, we couldn’t have done it, anyhow. Spewie’s parts are plastic, so the gravel would have completely wrecked it.

Check this out.

It’s hard to see, with everything so white, but that plow ridge reached to over halfway up my thigh. I had to use both shovels to steady myself, just to climb over it.

You can get a better idea of how tall it was in this next photo.

I’d cleared about half of the ridge at this point.

The thing is, it isn’t enough to clear enough space to fit the truck through. There needs to be a turning radius, of course, but we also need enough space to get in and out of the truck to open and close the gate.

It’s a good thing I enjoy shoveling.

By the time I mostly cleared the ridge, my daughter was almost done the rest of the driveway. She even cleared a path to the trail cam for me, while I got the last bit done, and she could finish her pass and turn around.

While she did her last pass, I went back to working on the turning radius by the garage. I hope I got the range right. It was actually faster for me to use a shovel to clear the space than it took for my daughter to cut her way through the last section of driveway with Spewie, so I just kept on clearing until we finally caught up with each other.

Once everything was put away and my daughter brushed the snow and ice off of Spewie, we were more than happy to hobbler our way inside. I’m thankful for the longer daylight hours, because it was already starting to get dark by the time we were done!

My husband, sweetheart that he is, has offered to order take out pizza for tonight. Once I’m done writing this, I need to decide if I’m up for the drive. Not that I can eat pizza during Lent, but they might have something on their menu I can have, instead.

What do I feel more up to? Cooking, or driving?

I think driving might just win.

The Re-Farmer