After doing some shoveling this morning, I headed in and took a break with breakfast and a pot of tea before heading out again in the afternoon.
I waited too long.
I started by doing the upstairs litters, then getting the burn going, getting rid of our burnable garbage along with the sawdust litter. While tending that, I cleared the paths to the electric meter. With how warm it was getting and how the snow was changing, even in that time, I put a cover on the burn ring sooner than I normally would have, then went to get little Spewie out and clear the driveway.
It was too late.
It’s -4C/25F right now, bright and sunny. All the paths I dug earlier, where it’s darker, have melted away, but the snow is just getting wetter, stickier and heavier. Too sticky for the snow blower. I had to give up after only a couple of passes across the front of the garage.
While it’s not much of a problem for shoveling paths, with the snow just getting wetter and heavier, there’s no way we can shovel the entire driveway.
Which means we’re stuck. Our vehicles can’t get through that, either.
On top of that, the roads aren’t plowed, and I suspect they won’t be.
Hopefully, the warmer temperatures will take care of it for us by the weekend, when we are supposed to reach above freezing temperatures for highs from then on. I know the highways will be clear by then, but it’s rather different on gravel roads.
The weather app also tells me it’s snowing right now, and not a flake is showing up on the security camera live feed. Still, it’s a large system moving in. We might get the 5-10 cm (about 3-5 inches) over the course of the day.
Today, I tried to have the door open in my room while I was doing stuff on my computer. I don’t expect Nosencrantz or even Marlee to leave the room, but I’m getting really tired of the constant interruptions of the “safe” cats scratching at the door to be let in or out. In fact, most of the cats are okay coming in, even if Marlee snarls at them. Nosencrantz even stayed on her window shelf rather than hiding somewhere. Marlee parked her butt under my printer table and snarled at any cat that went at the food bowls, and they basically ignored her. Butterscotch was settled under a foot stool I have near the heat vent under the window; a favourite spot for many of the cats.
But then, there’s Turmeric.
She was creeping around and snarling beside the cat cage, which is how I found out Butterscotch was under the stool, enjoying the heat vent. I shooed her away and she wandered on and around the bed for a while. I even pet and cuddled her for a bit, to calm her down, before settling at my computer again.
Then the fight happened.
Turmeric attacked Butterscotch.
I got her away, but not without some damage.
I’m glad we picked up those large gauzes, not long ago! I ended up with two long scratches under my arm, and a few puncture wounds on the top. The gauze was large enough to cover all of them.
Tissue also tends to be snarly when she comes into my room – she really hated being isolated in here when she was healing. But not even she tends to actively attack one of the ladies.
Turmeric, on the other hand, will actively try to search out, stalk and attack Butterscotch, Nozencrantz and sometimes Marlee. I can’t understand why. I mean, we’ve brought Potato Beetle in, he’s never been kept away from the other cats, and she’s never gone after him like that. She especially gets along well with Grandma, who moved out here with us, and let Turmeric “nurse” after Beep Beep decided weaning was going to happen, whether her kittens wanted it or not.
Oh, for crying out loud!!!
I just got interrupted while I was writing the above. Nosencrantz was on her window shelf on my craft table, as she often is, when Leyendecker… LEYENDECKER!!! suddenly jumped onto the table and attacked her. WTF???
I just don’t get it.
Yes, we have too many cats in the house, but it’s a big house, and many of the cats don’t even bother coming in when my door is open. There is nothing to explain why we are having so many cats specifically targeting Butterscotch and Nosencrantz. Especially Nosencrantz. Not even Marlee is as much of a target, but maybe that’s because she is the snarly one and, having survived being abandoned and on her own for 2 years, is no soft target. They are not “new” cats anymore.
I just. Don’t. Get it.
Well, at least this time, I didn’t have to physically separate the cats and end up with more unintentional wounds!
With all the snowfall warnings we got, my mother called me up last night to talk about helping her with errands today. In the end, we decided I would check conditions on the morning, and we’d go from there.
Well, I’m not going to my mother’s today.
Not even the deer wanted to take my path to the sign cam. 😄
We didn’t get a lot of snow. I was keeping an eye on the highway conditions group I’m in, on Facebook, and people were talking about the icy road conditions. Which makes sense, considering how warm it was while the snow was falling. Nothing but ice on the road, under that snow! Still, the people posting had driven the highways several hours before I would need to, so it wouldn’t necessarily apply anymore.
There was some drifting at the end of the driveway, but the gravel road looked okay. No plowing needed. I shoveled out the sidewalks and a path to the garage, but that was about it. I was going to combine trips and head to town to our regular pharmacy first for a prescription refill, so I called them up just minutes after they opened, thinking to leave soon after.
The pharmacist that answered the phone happens to live half way between us and town. When I said that I was hoping to pick up today, but would require delivery if I didn’t make it, she told me the roads were still very icy. If I were using our van, with its good winter tires, I probably would have gone for it. However, we’re not using the van right now, nor would I use it to run errands with my mother. While my mother’s car has good all-weather tires, they’re still not winter tires, and can’t handle the ice as well.
So I decided to reschedule with my mother to tomorrow. We’re supposed to get more snow later in the week – hopefully not too much, because we’ve just accepted an Easter dinner invitation in the city on Saturday that a daughter and I will be going to! – but not early tomorrow.
I called my mother to reschedule, and she was all “but it’s so nice and sunny outside!” as if that somehow meant there shouldn’t be ice on the roads. If she can’t see it, it’s not real! 😄 Then I headed outside again to shovel the drifts out of the end of the driveway. It didn’t take long. The snow was still light and the drifts weren’t very hard packed. Yet. Which is why I wanted to get them cleared now. I didn’t want them to be there if we do get more snow later on.
Then, since I was out anyway, I cleared the snow in front of the garage so the side doors can be opened easily. Then I widened the path to to the garage. Then the paths to the electricity meter and the burn ring. Finally, I cleared the paths around the cat shelters and to the shrine, where we still keep a food bowl for the shiest of the cats. The snow was blown around enough that the food bowls inside the kibble house had snow in them, and even the trays under the water bowl shelter were full of snow! The cats were definitely happy to have access to food in the sun room. There were 16 of them, just in the sun room, when I put food out this morning. I counted 23 altogether.
Then I came in to a lovely breakfast my daughter prepared. What a sweetheart!
So today is going to be a quieter day than planned. I’m good with that. By rescheduling with my mother to tomorrow, and getting our prescription refills delivered the day after (I am so thankful for that service!!), it’ll mean much less driving around, too.
Meanwhile, the storm warnings are still happening. A Colorado Low is coming in, and the south end of our province is now expected to get another 15-25cm (6-10 inches) of snow, starting tomorrow afternoon and over the next couple of days. How much of that will reach us, or even as far as the city, is hard to say. After that, our highs are supposed to go above freezing, then keep getting warmer. It’s a good thing the municipalities have been clearing the ditches and culverts. That will go a long way to prevent flooding. Not that we’d have anything close to the flooding we had last spring!
I am really looking forward to the snow being gone, and things being dry enough to start working outside!
Views and follows of this blog have been slowly growing over the years. A bit thank you and welcome to those who most recently joined the family! I really appreciate that there are people out there who are enjoying what they find here enough to hit that follow button! I hope you find things interesting and useful. 😊
One of the things WordPress does in their “insights” section is show how many shares the blog gets, and where they are shared to. It’s no surprise that Facebook and Pinterest shares are pretty high on the list – they’re pretty much equal for second and third place among platforms shared to the most. I was rather surprised to see that shares to Telegram pretty much blow away everything else. There are almost twice as many shares to Telegram than all other platforms put together!
Which has me curious.
If you share my posts, where do you share them to, and why do you share to that particular platform? Also, what kinds of posts inspire you to hit that share button?
One of the things we had to do because the cats were so determined to dig up the soil in our house plants – especially Cabbages! – was cobble together barricades around each individual plant or pot. For smaller plants, we used the plastic containers from cheese balls and pork rinds we found at Costco. Containers I meant to save to use to protect plants in the garden. I’d cut them into strips to put around the inside edge of the pots and, when that wasn’t enough, to loop over the plants. That worked for things like the aloe vera, but one pot with a jade tree in it was just too big. I ended up using some 1/4 hardware cloth I had – again, something I bought to use for something else entirely – to make a wall around the entire pot. It took 2 pieces to go all the way around. This pot is a square with an inner pot that can be removed. The outer pot has a reservoir for bottom watering, and we had to jam the hardware cloth between the two. It was the only way to keep the cats from simply pulling it out. That still wasn’t enough, and we had to make a “roof” over it, too. I only had 1 inch hardware cloth left, but it was enough. Sometimes, we’d find Cabbages sitting on top of it, looking out the window!
Now that the living room is barricaded and can be used as a plant room, most of our house plants have been moved over. The one hanging in the kitchen can stay, since the cats have been leaving it alone up there. A couple of larger pots, however, needed a second person to open and close the door in the barrier and keep the cats out.
Yesterday, that finally got done.
One large aloe vera handled the transfer well. After removing the plastic strips around it, it was a bit floppy, because some of its leaves were forced to grow into curves by its protective force field.
The jade tree in the big pot had outgrown its cage a while ago. Branches were starting to grow through the larger holes of the “roof”, so that had already been removed. My daughter was a sweetheart and was able to manhandle the pot into the living room for me – the thing barely fits on the largest shelf of the plant stand we’ve been using for them! Once it was in place, I wrestled with the hardware cloth to get it off.
As soon as it came off, everything fell over!
There were three main stems in the pot and, with the cage around the pot holding them up, they didn’t have the strength to hold their own weight! On top of that, the branches were twisted around, some around each other, in various directions.
It took some doing, but…
I got it supported.
I had some thick doweling left from my outdoor kitchen model. They’re short, but strong enough that I could put them around the thickest stem and use super long twist ties to support it at the base. I was even able to support a smaller stem to those as well. The third stem got its own support.
That still left floppy tops, though. After scrounging around, I found a couple long cherry wood stems in the basement we’d saved with the intention of eventually carving something out of them. One of those is now shoved into the middle of the pot, and I was able to weave some paracord around various branches and stems and get them lifted up and supported.
The top broke off one of the smaller stems, along with a whole lot of leaves. After cleaning up all the broken leaves, I planted the broken top. Jade trees are remarkable in their ability to propagate. If I wanted to, I could have started up a new plant out every single one of those fallen leaves. I think the broken stem has a good chance of survival.
It will take a while, but eventually the stems will gain strength and be able to support themselves. Still, it’s interesting to see how the cage that was there to protect the plant also weakened it so much.
There’s a life lesson in there.
Meanwhile, now that these last two big plants are moved away from the dining room window, it suddenly seems to much bigger and brighter in there! 😄
I forgot. I should have filled the tank again on my way home yesterday.
Quick Dick explains it well.
The cost of everything is going to go up again.
This is going to hurt so many people.
Folks, if you haven’t started to grow and raise as much of your own food as you can (and this is a worldwide problem), get starting doing what you can, as best you can.
I had intended to do the Canadian Tire and Walmart trip next, but we were running out of too many things that we get at Costco, so I did that today, instead.
After my morning rounds, of course.
We are at 0C/32F as I write this, and it is quite gorgeous outside. I counted 23 cats this morning. They are spending far less time in the sun room with the warmer temperatures. I don’t know what they are doing, but so many of them are showing up with burrs stuck all over their fur! At least Pointy Baby (in the front) will let me pull them out of his fur with remarkable patience, but even he has his limits!
There is a rather interesting problem we have found that we get pretty much every spring. As the snow melts, a moat forms around the garage. At this point, there’s still a lot of snow, so no moat – but the path through the snow to the garage cuts through part of the low spot. Which means that any snow that melts pools in this one spot along the path. In the morning, it’s frozen, rough and very slippery. By afternoon, it’s melted and getting deep. There’s no way around it, since the water extends below the snow, too.
Thankfully, my boots are pretty waterproof, but when we have heavy loads in the wagon to bring to the house, the wheels sink into the water thawed inch or so of mud at the top, which makes it even rougher once it freezers overnight again. We really need to lay a whole lot of gravel down in this area!
Especially when we have loads like this to drag through it.
This is actually a small Costco shopping trip for us, but we do have four 11.6kg (about 25 pounds) bags of kibble, plus a case of 48 cans of wet cat food, weighing it down.
I didn’t want to do too large of a trip, since I was using my mother’s car, but it was sort of a moot point, anyhow. This came out to $530.28 ($27.59 of that was taxes). That’s quite a hit on the budget. Yes, it’s a monthly stock up trip, but we still need to keep part of the budget for buying fresh produce locally throughout the month. And we still need to do the Canadian Tire and Walmart trip. Not that we have a lot to get there (the main thing is to restock our stove pellet litter supply, which is inexpensive), but I also did a local shopping trip last night that ended up costing just over $200 – half of which got “reimbursed” by my husband, who asked me to pick some stuff up for him that we don’t normally get, but still. Ouch.
So what did I get for $500?
The four bags of kibble cost $37.99 each. They’ve gone up in price again, I think. Still better than elsewhere! Canned cat food, case of 48: $38.99 Toilet paper: $22.99
Butter, 5 pounds at $4.89 each – the price has actually gone down! Canned chicken for the pantry: $17.99 – I think that has gone down slightly, too Peanut butter, 2kg size: $8.89 Nutella, 2pk: $13.69 We almost never buy Nutella, but my daughter has a recipe she wants to try with it, and it’s cheaper to buy it at Costco Iced Tea mix: $7.99 sale price ($2 off) Regular mayonnaise: $10.69 Kirkland cream cheese, 4pk: $9.49 Crimini mushrooms: $4.99 – the white button mushrooms are now the same price as the crimini, so there’s no reason not to get the tastier ones! Strawberry jam: $9.99 – there were similar sized jars of slightly cheaper jam, but this brand comes in jars we like to reuse for other things Fresh blackberries, 2 clamshells: $4.99 each – which is a really good price for blackberries in packs this size! Basmati rice: $12.99 – not the brand we usually get, but they didn’t have what we normally get. I hope it’s good. The last time we tried a different brand, it was awful. Goat cheese, 2pk: $10.69 Farmer sausages: $9.99 Pork Loin: $26.35 Even the pork is starting to get expensive. They’re sold by weight, which makes it easy to choose a smaller one by looking at the price. Getting the smallest one used to put the price at or near $20. Not anymore! Tilapia fillets: $21.85 There was actually quite a lot of fillets in the package for that price. My daughters will get a few meals out of that. Ground pork chub: $19.99 Lean ground beef chub: $32.78 sale price ($8 off) This thing was quite large. I haven’t seen ground beef sold this way at Costco for many years. Rotisserie chicken: 2 at $7.99 each These are still cheaper than buying whole, uncooked chicken. Tortillas: 2 packages at $9.99 each
And that’s it. I didn’t get any of the giant blocks of cheese we normally get at Costco because they didn’t have any in stock. There’s other stuff I might have picked up normally, but couldn’t justify the expense. There are getting to be too many months where I see things and think, “oh, we’re getting low on that, I could pick some up…” only to not do it because of the price. Things like garbage bags, freezer bags of different sizes, facial tissue, etc. Instead, we end up getting smaller sized packages elsewhere, or skipping it for another month.
Unfortunately, I don’t see that situation improving any time soon.
But, we have what we need.
Once at home, I took the pork lion and split it into three pieces to freeze individually. The ground beef got divided up into four large Ziplock freezer bags, while the ground pork got split into four medium Ziplock bags. With what we still have left from our beef freezer packs and our recent Superstore trip, our chest freezer and fridge freezer are both quite full.
We’re still good, for which I am grateful. There are many who aren’t.
This afternoon, I headed into town with my mother’s car (the last time I started the van, it started better than it has been lately, but now there’s a strange noise coming from around the alternator), ran a few errands, then met up with the egg lady. I got a couple of flats of eggs for ourselves, and a dozen for my mother. I didn’t have my usual large insulated bag, so I just put our flats in the back of my mother’s car. I then went to my mother’s place to deliver her eggs before heading home.
The highway home has a couple of places marked with signs to warn that they are bumps or dips. One of them – a dip – has been getting much, much worse. For some reason, the highways department just won’t fix it.
I forgot to slow right down when I hit it.
I swear, the car got some air time on that.
When I “landed”, I heard it.
From the back of the car.
A sickening “crunching” noise.
I was really dreading what I would find after I parked the car and opened up the back.
I was most definitely expecting something much worse! I didn’t even notice the bottle of washer fluid when I put the eggs in, since it is kept tucked into a hollow way off to one side, and the eggs were in the middle.
We just lost the one egg. Even the eggs underneath were okay.
I am not alone in wishing the highways department would fix that dip! It’s brutal on vehicles, and many people have complained about it. Someone even went a put a big home made sign in the ditch beside it, painted with the words “fix me!”
I’m just glad the damage wasn’t any worse today! 😁
I did a lot of highway driving today, and my last stop was to pick up the replacement tub surround. It just barely fit into the back of my mother’s car! I actually couldn’t close the hatch after taking this photo, and had to lift the other end to rest on the back of the front seats, first.
The surround I’d found online wasn’t in stock, so I ended up one that was a bit more expensive. I think it’s identical to the one we have right now. I also got the adhesive and caulking.
One handy thing with getting the same type of surround: after we take off the old pieces, we can use them to mark out exactly where to cut holes for the taps and faucet – and the screw holes for the arm bars. I would rather not make new holes into the walls if I can avoid it, plus they are currently in just the right positions, too.
Until we take off the old pieces and see what’s under it, we won’t know if what sort of damage there may be underneath. Only then will we know what else we may need to get to finish the job.
That won’t happen until the plumber makes it out. I left a message with him and he hasn’t called back yet, which is very unusual. I think I’ll call again.
Meanwhile, I also got the replacement fixtures, though again, not what I was originally looking for.
I did find the set that was just like what we have now, but for an extra $5, I got this one, instead. Levers instead of round knobs will be much better on arthritic hands.
We don’t need the shower head, since we have the hand held, but there were no sets without the shower head. Just sets without the faucet and diverter. Which is fine. An extra shower head is not a bad thing to have.
Now we just have to see how much the plumber will end up costing! Who knows. If all goes well, I might still be able to get my new glasses, after all!
On another note, my media storage on WordPress is well into the red zone. I’ve tried resizing old photos from blog posts made in our early days, before we realized just how limited our storage was, started resizing our photos to smaller file sizes and upgraded. My current plan with WordPress doesn’t exist anymore and is grandfathered in, and the next one up is way too expensive, when all I need is media storage space, nothing else.
So I have decided to go back and remove some older posts. For a long time, I had a Critter of the Day series, with photos of birds, deer, cats and other wildlife. I haven’t made those posts in a long time, and they don’t get hits anymore, so there’s no reason to keep them, even though they were fun.
Hopefully, that will free up a decent amount of storage space. I posted quite a lot of those!
The Re-Farmer 