It took almost 5 hours, but I’m done. I’ve sent photos and info to get cats fixed and adopted out.
I had to pause part way through and get a daughter to help me take pictures of Nico and Susan.
It took some doing to send these. She wanted it all texted to her phone.
Which means texting from my phone.
From a cell phone dead zone.
Yes, I have my phone set up for WiFi direct, but it doesn’t seem to work.
My first message was to confirm it was going to the right number, and that took almost 10 minutes to send. I even paired my phone to my desktop, so I could access the photos and type on a keyboard, but it still sent using data on my phone. I was able to leave my phone in the living room, though, where it got a better signal, while still doing everything from my desktop, which ended up working rather well.
It would be good to get the outside cats adopted into indoor homes. No more keeping their butts warm at the melted spot over the heat bulb! :-D
As we worked out on the phone, I started with pictures of Butterscotch and Nosencrantz first, with Nosencrantz being up for adoption, but not Butterscotch.
Then I found (or have to take) pictures of Saffron, Turmeric, Tissue, Nico, Cabbages and Big Rig, for getting fixed and adopted. Beep Beep was included to be fixed, but not adopted. Susan and Layendecker were also included for adoption, though they are already fixed.
Then I sent pictures of Agnoos, Tuxedo Mask, Chadicous, Potato Beetle and Chadicous to add to the list of outside cats that can be caught. So 6 more cats to get fixed and adopted out.
Once those are done, the next focus is the cats that are not at all socialized, or not socialized enough. I mean, we might be able to catch Rosencrantz, but that’s it. Rolando Moon is already fixed and not adoptable, anyhow. For the others, they will lend us traps to catch them, so we wouldn’t even consider it until summer, anyhow.
Of the ones we can catch, there are a total of 9 females, at $75 each, plus 5 males. I don’t know what the rate is for males, as we didn’t talk about it. Usually, it’s half the cost of getting a female done.
Can you imagine trying to get all the females done at $350 each?? Then another 5 males at $175? Plus the cost of vaccinations, on top of that? And then there would be the cost of the cats we’d need to trap.
As I was working on sending the info, I got a call from the shelter.
Talk about a completely different attitude! Not at all like that first call. She started by asking if I’d heard from the person she’d sent my contact info do, and assured her that yes, she had called me, and we had an excellent conversation and worked out a plan that will span months. I made sure to thank her again for getting us in contact with each other. She was happy to hear that.
Then she got to the real reason she called! :-D
She remembered I had mentioned a new cat showing up fairly recently, and she asked if I lived around a certain area several miles to the north of us. That is where a long haired cat, white with black spots, has gone missing. Our Distinguished Guest is a long haired black cat with a white blaze on her chest and white socks. So we traded descriptions. We’re a bit far from the white cat’s location, but it is possible it might find its way here. She asked about the Distinguished Guest and her condition, and she does appear to be healthy. She wasn’t starving or anything, when she first showed up. I did tell her I think we’re dealing with a cat dump, not a lost cat, but you never know. Someone might actually be looking for this cat, so it’s good to have the word out. It’s not like we can check the cat for tattoos at this point.
All of this is going to be done slowly over the next few months. If all goes well, we’ll have half of our indoor cats adopted out, and most of the outdoor cats, before next winter, and any remaining outdoor cats will be fixed. Which should basically be just Butterscotch and Rolando Moon.
Oh, we had something else nice happen in the middle of all this. While at my computer, I spotted some movement on the garage cam live feed. It was my daughter heading for the gate. She had received notification that UPS had delivered a package for her. I hadn’t seen the truck, but sure enough, UPS had found us, and tied the package to our gate.
The last time we tried to get something delivered by UPS, it was delayed something like a week, because UPS couldn’t find us. It looks like our new sign has already made a difference! Our physical address still doesn’t show up on any maps, but the package still got here, without any issues.
So all in all, it has turned out to be a really good day!
Okay, so after yesterday’s rant, I am very, very happy to share some good news that came out of that call with the shelter.
Depending on how things go, many of these cats will have forever homes! How many… we’ll see. I counted a total of 18 this morning.
I did have an unpleasant surprise this morning, though.
Chadicous has blood all over his chest and front legs!
It looks fresh, but I didn’t hear any fighting. I also could not find an injury, nor did he seem to be favouring any part of his body. It could be he has a small puncture wound somewhere that just happened to bleed a lot, but isn’t bleeding now. Or it’s from another cat, but none of the cats appeared to be injured.
There was nothing different in his behaviour, as he did his usual flinging himself bodily to the ground in front of my feet, asking for pets.
We will be monitoring.
I was just finishing off my rounds when I spotted Agnoos in the bird bath-turned feeder.
Many he’s hoping a bird will just fly into his mouth? :-D
Now, the good news.
I got a call from the woman I was told about during the shelter call. She is connected with the larger organization that the vet had told us about. They have a donor program that allows them to get females fixed for only $75. !!!!! That includes shots, too. Plus, through this larger organization and their foster volunteers, they can adopt cats out. She told me of the number of cats she did last year (I am remembering 150, but I’m not confident that it’s right), all have been adopted out.
Best of all, we don’t have to pay right away. As long as we make payments and pay them off by the end of 2022, they’re good.
At only $75 per female, that will not be a problem.
After talking for a while, we worked out that Butterscotch will be done first. Plus Nosencrantz, if she can get access to the surgery for both of them.
Oh, that’s the other thing. She does the surgeries at the vet clinic we are already using! She’s got a deal with them to use their operating theatre when they aren’t using it themselves. Tomorrow, she will call me back with, hopefully, a date for Butterscotch, possibly as early as next week!!!
Once those two are done, we will shift focus to getting the inside cats done. Then, the outside cats that we can easily catch, and finally, focus on trapping the cats we can’t touch.
If they are up for adoption (on learning more about Butterscotch, she immediately recognized that she was not an adoptable cat. I really appreciated that she caught that), they may not even need to wait for the local surgery. We might be able to take them to the organization’s facility in the city, where they will get the necessary treatments, and get adopted out from there, instead of having another trip back here.
Once I’m done with this post, I will start sending her the information she needs about me, including an emergency contact number if they can’t reach me for some reason, and information about the cats, starting with Butterscotch and Nosencrantz.
My plans for the day have just changed dramatically.
I was inspired by WolfSong to try something new – and help with that urge to be planting something already! Winter sowing.
Today, I finally got some seeds started.
We’ve been keeping a variety of plastic bottles and jugs for potential garden use. We’ve got mostly the blue water bottles. The distilled water we get for my husband’s CPAP used to come in the same type of jug as milk does, but suddenly all the brands seemed to switch to those blue bottles, all at once. Which was a problem, at first, because many of them no longer had handles of any kind. It made it very awkward for my husband to fill his CPAP humidifier, as the sides would collapse inwards as he poured. He ended up transferring the water to an empty jug with a handle, to keep from splashing water all over his CPAP!
People must have complained, because the next time I had to buy distilled water, the bottles had handles attached to their tops.
We have 4 different types of jugs, including two styles of juice bottles. I decided to try one of each.
I’ve been cutting plastic containers to use in the garden for some time, and it’s a real pain, so today, I took the easy route.
My wood burning kit includes a knife tip. The heated tip makes it SO much easier!
I started by cutting drainage holes in the bottoms, and air circulation holes at the tops, by inserting the knife through the plastic, then giving it a bit of a twist to widen the hole.
Then the jugs were cut most of the way around. With each jug having a different design, they each were cut at different spots.
How much was left uncut to create a hinge depended on how much of a flat area there was. Which, in the case of the blue jug, meant none at all, but that plastic was soft enough that it could still work. The juice jugs are a heavy plastic, making them the most difficult to cut, while the water jug that is the same as milk jugs is such a soft plastic, the melted plastic of the cut edges actually stuck together again in places, and they had to be recut!
I’m hoping the blue bottles work the best, because we’re going to have so many of them.
Just to be on the safe side, the hinges were reinforced with strips of duct tape. For the jugs with distinct handles, the hinge was placed just under them, while the one with indentations to create a handle had the hinge placed above, so the container wouldn’t squish into itself if grabbed by the handle.
The handle of the blue jug is at the cap, so it didn’t matter on that one. I just followed one of the lines, just above the middle.
That done, it was time to put some soil in them.
They all fit in one of the baking trays we got last year, to make it easier to carry seedlings around. Especially the ones in the red Solo cups. Those have come in very handy. I plan to get more They are very inexpensive at Costco.
I had the seedling mix potting soil recently picked up to use for this. Once the soil was in, it all got thoroughly watered.
The water almost immediately all drained into the tray.
I watered them more, drained the water out of the tray and used it to water the soil again. After doing that a few times, I used a spray bottle on the soil surface, while leaving the bottoms to sit in water.
Even then, only the surface became moist. The soil mix was still bone try below.
I spent a bit of time, working on moistening the soil before leaving it to sit while preparing the seeds.
I had already decided to try starting kohl rabi indoors, as our attempts to direct sow them outdoors last spring failed completely. It was the same with the kale. All I can think is that something ate the sprouts as soon as they emerged. It was the second year I’d tried kohl rabi, and the first year’s attempt also failed, with only a few plants surviving, only to be decimated by cabbage moths and flea beetles.
So this time, we’ll go with transplants and, if it works, we’ll be making sure to protect them from both critters and creepy crawlies!
Bahahahahahaha!!!!
Okay, I do remember, while going through our seed inventory, looking into the packet for Early White Vienna kohl rabi, seeing a few seeds, and deciding to keep them. Until today, I didn’t realize where was only five seeds left!
Once the seeds and their labels (strips of masking tape) were ready, I used a chopstick to make evenly spaced holes in the soil for the seeds.
Then I used the spray bottle to water into the holes, because it was still so dry under the top layer!
Because of the different shapes, they each fit a different number of holes in the soil for seeds. The jug with the indented sides for a handle meant it had space for only five holes, so that’s where I planted those five, lonely White Vienna Kohl rabi seeds. Being 2 years old, we may well have none at all germinate, but who knows? The white jug had room for the most seed holes, so that’s where the Russian Red kale went. The last two got the Early Purple kohl rabi seeds.
Once the seeds were in, covered, watered with a spray bottle, labels affixed, it was time to close the containers.
I used packing tape to close up the jubs. The tape is enough to hold them together while the jugs are being carried, but to also be easy to remove, later on.
At least I hope they’ll be easy to remove!
The tray was drained again, then it was time to take them outside.
There we have it. Four different jugs, sown with kale and kohl rabi.
I’m leaving the caps on, since they have air circulation holes, but if the holes turn out to be too small, I might still take them off. We shall see.
I had originally planned to leave the jugs somewhere else, but decided that first spot was not visible enough. I had to consider things like cat and deer traffic, as well as where we shovel the snow from the paths. Hopefully, this spot will be easy to monitor, and they won’t get knocked about by critters. They will also get lots of sunlight, too.
Not that you can tell in the above photos. It wasn’t even 6pm yet, but it was full dark when I set these out!
I still have kale and purple kohl rabi seeds left. I might try starting some indoors, when we start other seeds, then direct sowing the last of seeds. That would give us a chance to compare all three methods.
For those new to visiting this blog (Welcome! Thanks for visiting!), I’ll give a bit of a background.
When we moved here, there were a number of yard cats. My late father loved the yard cats and took care of them, and we are continuing to do so. Outdoor cats do play an important part in keeping the rodent population under control, so they are quite welcome.
Of the cats that were here when we moved in, there are three left that are “originals”. In fact, I have pictures of them from when a daughter and I were able to visit in 2015. Being in the country, the life span for cats is pretty short, so we’ve been encouraging the cats to stay close to the house as much as possible. The females do tend to stay, but the males usually disappear. Once in a rare while, they come back.
The first summer we tried to adopt out yard kittens, we did manage to get a few adopted out, though a couple ended up indoors, either because they were injured and required more care, or they would otherwise not survive outdoors. We’ve also been snagging the females to bring them in before they could get pregnant. We were able to bring in two pregnant females, both “originals”, to have their litters indoors. One was a successful transition, while the other hated being indoors so much, we discovered she was killing her own kittens. We had to let her back outside, where she promptly got pregnant again, and those kittens got well taken care of.
The end result is that we currently have sixteen cats indoors, two of whom moved out here with us. The males are fixed, but most of the females are not. We had been able to socialize some of the female yard kittens enough that we could snag them indoors before reaching their first heat, then had to work on socializing them all over again, as they got used to new cats around them, and learned how to use a litter box, etc.
The thing is, in the last couple of years, we have been able to adopt only one cat – and that was at about the time time we had to bring in another, so the number indoors stayed the same. We’re in the country. Everyone already has more cats than they know what to do with. We are where people dump their unwanted cats. If we want to adopt cats out, we have to reach out further.
A few years ago, before the world went insane, we reached out to a “local” humane society, but got no response. No one answered the phone, they didn’t respond to emails or Messenger. Talking to other people who tried to go to their location, they found the doors locked and no one around.
I follow them on Facebook, however, and recently there has been a lot of activity. So I thought I’d try again and, in the wee hours of the morning, sent a note on Messenger. This morning, there was a response, asking for a phone number. I got a call soon after.
Here begins my rant.
When I sent my message, I briefly stated we had some socialized yard cats to adopt out and asked if I could put the word out through their page. I didn’t want to have to turn them in to be able to adopt them out.
I would have been happy with a simple yes or no.
The first thing I was asked was if they were fixed and up to date on vaccinations. Which, yeah, I understand they would need to know that, but did it have to be the place to start? The person clearly had already made some assumptions, so I had little chance to explain our situation, and she was far more interested in our outside cats than the inside ones.
Because we’re expected to be able to have all of them fixed and vaccinated, too, even though we can’t even touch most of them.
At one point, she did mention in passing that they were completely full.
Yeah. That’s why I was asking if I could put the word out through their page, not bring them in.
They also weren’t going to offer any sort of assistance, unless the cats were fixed and fully vaccinated.
And since the male indoor cats were fixed and there was no chance of the indoor females getting pregnant, we needed to focus on the outdoor cats. We need a plan of action. Do we have a plan of action?
…
We went from my asking “hey, is there a chance I offer socialized yard cats up for adoption through your page?” to “spay/neuter/vaccinate the outside cats.” Especially the females.
Because they’ll get pregnant, you know. Population control and all that.
Yes. I know.
And they probably have FIV, because there are intact males, and they are likely fighting.
…
I eventually got a chance to say that we had about 20 outdoor cats, give or take, and the cost would be extremely prohibitive (not to mention unrealistic). She started telling me that those 20 cats would quickly become 80 cats.
Yes. I know. Cats can get pregnant.
As to the 80 cats comment, I told her no, not really. They’re yard cats. They tend to have a short life span. Of the cats that were here when we moved here, there are only 3 or 4 left.
There was a bit of a silence, followed by an “oh.”
Newsflash. We live in an area where things eat cats like popcorn.
Anyhow, she started to get really pushy about the “plan of action” and were we willing to do that, because they’re not willing to help people if they’re not willing to do that.
What “that” is, I never quite fully understood, but apparently, I was supposed to have it.
Eventually, she mentioned there was someone local who could spay and neuter cats at a lower price, and apparently would even come here to trap the cats and transport them. But she’d help only if people were willing to have a “plan of action.” I agreed to having my contact information passed on. Oh, and somewhere in there, she did answer my question, saying that no, they couldn’t post anything about our cats, because if they let just anyone “advertise” their cats, they’ve have nothing else on their page.
She could have told me that from the start, and in a less insulting way. It was actually the answer I expected, but thought it was worth a try. I now regret asking.
I was bighting my tongue a lot in this conversation. It really felt like I was being attacked for something I wasn’t even contacting them about. She just took over the conversation to push doing things to the outside cats, based on assumptions she had no interest in clarifying.
This is why I hate contacting humane societies. Only once have we had a positive experience. All others treated us with disdain, condescension or even open hostility. And we’re talking about experiences in three different provinces. It’s like they get special training on how to assume the worst about people, and treat them like crap. I realize they probably deal with a lot of shitty people, but that doesn’t excuse the attitude being aimed at everyone. It actually makes me kinda understand why people would dump animals at their doors. Or dump them in the country. It should not be done, and there’s no excusing it, but in my experience, shelter staff are doing a good job of driving people into it.
She must have caught on to my extended silences meaning I had a problem with what she was saying. At one point, she did switch gears and start telling me how great it was that we’re taking care of these cats, and thanking me for doing it, because there are people out there who don’t do that, and people who will just dump their cats.
I said yeah, that’s likely how we got some of the ones we have. That gave me an opening to bring up The Distinguished Guest as a possible lost cat. They did have a lost cat on their files for our area, but the description did not match.
As for her attempt to switch gears and thank me for taking care of the cats, she somehow managed to still be condescending about it, but that could be just me already being ticked off. Still, going from insinuating I was irresponsible for not having a “plan of action” (without defining what was actually meant by that) to thanking me for being responsible for the cats… let’s just say it was too late to make up for the damage done.
I was really glad to end that conversation.
With all our efforts to adopt these cats out, there is one thing that keeps irritating me. The woman I spoke to reminded me of it. She said that if the cats aren’t already fixed and vaccinated, no one wants them.
Therein is the heart of my rant.
If you’re paying to adopt a cat, yes, it makes sense to expect that they’ve received a particular level of care and treatment, first.
The thing is, any time we’ve had a nibble on someone interested in adopting, the first question is whether the cats have been fixed. Not about the cats themselves, their history, if they’re socialized, litter trained, get along with other cats, etc. No. Just, “are they fixed”.
Here’s the thing.
We’re not a pet store.
We’re not a shelter.
We are just trying to keep the cats from starving, or ending up in the belly of a coyote.
When we’re trying to adopt a cat out for free, to a good home, and the first question we’re asked is “are they fixed”, it tells me two things.
The first is, this person is basically asking us to pay THEM to take in a “free” cat. For a female, in our area, it’s typically $350 to get fixed. Yes, it’s possible to get it done at lower cost, but there are usually limits to that; either the people who do it are booked solid, or it would require putting the cats through the stress of a very long drive, or we don’t qualify for the programs because we don’t live in the right area, or are not destitute enough. This doesn’t include the cost of keeping up on vaccinations. What it all boils down to is, they want us to pay about $350 for them to take a cat, at no cost to them.
The other things is, if the person wanting to adopt a “free” cat isn’t willing to spend the money to take care of it themselves, then they are not the “good home” we’re looking for. The cats would probably be better off taking their chances with the coyotes.
What really chokes me after people find out the cats aren’t fixed, they act as if we are such terrible, cruel people for not doing it. Suddenly, we are the “bad guys” and irresponsible and the reason why there is such a huge problem with exploding cat populations.
Agnoos is not impressed.
Nope. We take care of our cats.
And other people’s cats.
And strays.
For the amount of money we’re spending since moving here, just on cat food, we could have replaced our roof two years ago, but we do it anyway. We’re not going to let animals go hungry, but expecting us to also pay to have them all fixed and vaccinated before someone is willing to adopt a “free” cat is not reasonable. If they’re not willing to pay to take care of a free cat, we’re sure as heck not going to do it for them, and they’re not the “good home” they’re trying to convince us they are. And I am not going to be made to feel guilty for it. We’re also not going to shoot them all because people won’t adopt a “free” intact cat, as has been recommended to us (not that we can do it, but we have plenty of neighbours with guns who could, and would, if we asked them to).
So yeah. I’m frustrated. Being treated with condescension and being told I wouldn’t get help I wasn’t even asking for, unless we spend hundreds more dollars we don’t have, isn’t helping. We’re giving up a lot to keep the cats fed, warm and as safe from predators as we can.
Apparently, that’s not good enough.
Maybe we should start charging for the cats. $400 up front for a female, a month in advance, and we’ll take their chosen cat in to be fixed and vaccinated, and care for it during recovery.
I was returning to the house at the end of my morning rounds, when I found we had a visitor!
My brother’s dog had come by, and he really wanted to play with the kitties!
Nosencrantz set him straight with a half-hearted swap to the nose, while all the other cats stayed away. :-D
My brother’s dog wasn’t the only visitor. When I first came out with the kibble, I startled a deer that was in the south yard. It bounded through the snow a bit, then stopped to watch me for a while. Later, there were two of them that ran off as I went to empty the kitchen compost onto the heap.
They are so pretty!
As for out cats, we have still been trying to adopt out as many as I can, with no success. This morning… well, let’s just say I’m quite frustrated, but I’ll save that rant for my next post!
Doing the morning rounds is much more pleasant! We’re at a mild (relatively speaking) -15C/5F right now, though the wind chill of -21C/-6F made it a bit nippy. The wind was coming from the south, so it’s basically funnelling between outbuildings.
Not that it stopped the cats, any!
I counted a total of 17 this morning.
I’m happy to confirm – now that there so no longer frost on the windows – that the cats are using their house. Yesterday, I’d seen about five faces watching me from the main window. This morning, however, I saw something different in front of the window.
Something shiny.
It was the disposable aluminum pan that we had mounted above the fixture holding the heat bulb. The cats had somehow knocked it down!
I had been wondering for a while now, if the heat bulb was still working.
It is.
You can see that cats have been sitting on the warm spot above it!
That spot is there, even with the heat shield in place. At least it is, if it isn’t so cold out, the bulb can’t make a difference to the outside.
I am not too concerned about the shield being down; it was more an extra layer of protection, and to reflect heat back downwards to the cats. Like the smoke detector we also installed in there, it’s more just that one extra “just in case” bit. The bulb itself has a limited heat range, and the fixture has a steel “cage” to protect the bulb itself. The girls and I will still go out and fix it. In the summer, I could do it myself, thanks to the counterweight making it easier to lift the roof, and keeping it from dropping down again. This time of year, it’s a 3 person job; two to carefully lift the roof and hold it open, since the snow prevents it from being opened completely, and one to climb in and put the shield back.
Until then, it remains unshielded.
In the summer, we’re going to have to give this a thorough check and repair. It’s getting old, and when we lift the heavy roof, I can feel it twisting and cracking. The down side of the heat bulb is, it’s very dry in there, and I found the wood of the frame, at one of the roof hinges, has already split. It’s been screwed together again, but that was just a stop gap measure until we can work on it later. Once we do as many repairs as we can, I want to at least give it a new paint job on the outside. Hopefully, we’ll also be able to replace the shingles. They’re getting a bit beat up and worn out.
I’m so thankful to my brother for giving us their old dog house. He really went all out, with all the windows, as “porch”, the power outlets inside, the light fixture, and so on. The cats just love it, and it may well have saved a few lives. Farm cats tend to have short life spans, but at least we can keep the cold from getting them!
Aw, man, it’s all I can do not to go all Cookie Monster on the muffins I just finished baking!
I ended up making a dozen each of three kinds.
The cornmeal muffins were a basic recipe, though I added a bit of sour cream to the milk, for extra flavour.
Oatmeal muffins with a streusel topping, from the simplest recipe I found online.
Spinach and cheese muffins! I spotted a recipe online, but it used frozen spinach, which we don’t have. So I just used a basic muffin recipe, adding some of our dried spinach to the liquid mixture to reconstitute for a while, and added shredded cheese to the dry ingredients. We had some small pieces of Havarti and Old cheddar left over, so I finished off both.
The girls made supper while these were cooling, so I’m being good and waiting until after I have a meal before having any muffins.
But it is soooo tempting to have “dessert” first! :-D
The Re-Farmer
Update: Taste test is done!
Spinach and cheese: I think I didn’t have enough flour or over mixed these. They were almost like a quiche in texture! Still very tasty.
Oatmeal with struedel topping: not as sweet as I expected! Nice, but of the three, these were my least favorite.
Corn meal: these were awesome. The touch of sour cream gave a surprisingly big flavour boost. Corn meal muffins are my favorite, so no surprise I liked these best!
Oh, how lovely today it feels outside today! As I write this, just before evening, we are at a lovely -8C/18F. the wind chill is -13C/9F, but the wind is from the north west, so the yard is well sheltered from it.
The outside cats were quite enjoying the warmer temperatures!
Creamsicle Baby even followed me when I went to change the memory cards and frozen batteries on the trail cameras.
With the cold and snow, I hadn’t gone to the corner camera in a while, but today was nice enough to finally get out there.
Oops.
Well, that wasn’t going to be much use.
The last time I’d changed out the card and batteries, I’d noticed the nut at the plate was getting loose. I also noticed a lot of thread showing. The fixture has a nut on the inside, which is supposed to be threaded as far as possible, but these are not lock nuts. Every time I had to tighten the nut on the outside, that meant the nut on the inside was getting closer to the end of the threaded post. With that in mind, I made sure I had the tools I needed to fix it. After removing the camera, I had to take the plate off completely, tighten the nuts as they needed to be, then put it all back together.
Before I could check the files, though, I had some errands to run. I discovered the end of the driveway not only had a plow ridge at the road, it was drifted over from about the gate to the end of the road. I knew I’d have troubles if I stopped in the driveway to lock the gate behind me, and I didn’t want to stop on the road, so I asked the girls to shovel out the end of the driveway while I was gone, and just rammed my way through with the van!
The dump is open only for a few hours on Tuesday mornings, so that was my first top. We were also running out of dry kibble. The outside cats are going through it a lot faster, and I was only able to get three big bags the last time I bought any, so a trip to the smaller city was in order. The difference in price is enough to make the drive worthwhile, even though gas prices jumped 12 cents per litre since the last time I was out!
Dry kibble is still in short supply. It’s been like this for months, now. I got the last two big bags from these shelves, but even the smaller bags were getting low. The really expensive brands in the big bags were almost out, too. There’s lots of wet cat food, cat treats, etc. in stock. It’s just the dry kibble that’s low in inventory.
My sister works at this Walmart. I think I should ask her to keep an eye on the inventory and, the next time a shipment comes in, maybe pick up a few bags for us!
After the shopping was done, it was one more stop to pick up some packages at the post office – and my letter from the Court of Queen’s Bench, with the conference call information I need for our vandal’s vexatious litigation against me – before I was finally able to settle in and check the trail cam files.
The corner cam had 160 files on it. Only the first 4 were right side up! Most of the others were triggered by moving shadows and branches blowing in the wind.
There is a slight down side to having the camera set to take three still shots, then video!
Still, I did find some fun shots. I flipped the images to make it easier to see. This camera goes pink when it gets cold.
I think that’s a chickadee that triggered the camera in this shot.
The internal thermometer in the above shot reads -25C/-13F, which would be a few degrees warmer than outside.
Squirrel butt!! :-D Too funny!
The camera even caught it in mid jump. :-D
There were a whole bunch of files of the squirrel moving around on the ground before it finally ran off. The next files were of me, moving the camera around to fix it. I’m actually surprised it was still recording. The frozen batteries were so low, there were many files that were completely black, except for the red text saying the batteries were too low for the infrared flash.
Oh, sweet. In the time it took me to write the above, we actually warmed up another degree. Nice!
Well, yesterday, my daughter did a whole bunch of bread baking. Now it’s my turn.
With all the crazy stuff going on these days, the price of food skyrocketing, and so many people losing their sources of income, all those “crazy preppers” out there are looking pretty vindicated!
There was a time, not all that long ago, when everyone was encouraged to be prepared for emergencies – usually around the time when whichever city we were living in at the time was faced with flooding or wildfires or some other natural disaster. I don’t know when reasonable prudence started being viewed as “crazy prepper” (and no, I’m not talking about the super paranoid doomsday types that have always been around). You know things have really gone bizarre when people on canning groups on Facebook start getting pop ups advising to report people who looked like they are becoming too prepared. !!
Going into our fifth year living here on my childhood farm, a lot of things now being recommended as preparedness was basically how I grew up, and not much different from how we live now. I mean, we’re already doing bulk shopping once or twice a month, with modest local shopping in between, so stocking up for at least a month is our normal. Stocking up for 2 or 3 months over the winter is also a necessary part of living here. We are nowhere near where we want to be, yet, but that’s where all the gardening and other plans are fitting in!
While the needs of living here hasn’t changed much since I was a kid, the resources and technology available sure has! I’m just loving the various groups I’m on for leading me to some excellent sites. Recently, someone shared a link to this Food Storage Calculator. It’s a really awesome tool for figuring out how much shelf stable foods you would need, for various lengths of time. This is for the absolute, minimum essentials recommended. I found this bit at the beginning interesting;
The below calculator is based on estimates from organizations like the CDC and recommendations from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Home Production and Storage manual.
Years ago, in an early email support group for homeschoolers, the topic of emergency preparedness had come up. One of the members had been a Mormon, and said that they were encouraged to have at least a year’s worth of food stored up. Though she had left the church, that was a habit she kept up. It came in very handy when her husband suddenly lost his job and was unable to find a new one for months. The one thing they did not have to worry about was how to feed themselves and their kids, and she talked about what a boost to morale it was to be able to whip up a pan of brownies, while in the middle of such hard times. Her story really stuck with me. Seeing that the Latter-Day Saints manual was used for this was a huge plus, to me.
In the end, though, it’s still just a guide. Something to use as a starting off point, when planning one’s own supplies. (Also, it’s a fantastic site, and I encourage checking out the many useful and informative posts in there!)
So I figured it would be a good idea to go through the calculator results for ourselves, and talk about how I would modify it to our own particular circumstances and why. Hopefully, this will give you an idea on how you might modify your own results to your own situation.
Let’s start with the demographics. We are a household with 4 adults, and no very young children. I chose 3 months as the time frame, as we could potentially be stuck here for that long, if we had a particularly bad winter. Here is what the calculator came up with, and how I might modify the results.
The first section is for grains: a total of 390 pounds.
For us, 200 pounds of wheat just isn’t going to happen! While it might be worthwhile to have some wheat berries to cook as a cereal, this is an amount intended for grinding into flour. We don’t have a flour mill. We do intend to get one, but for now, it would be a waste for us to have that much wheat. It’s the same with 30 pounds of oats. At the same time, 30 pounds of flour is laughably low, since we do quite a bit of baking. A lot of that wheat weight would get transferred to flour. I might get 15 pounds of rolled oats, then otherwise transfer the weights to rice and pasta. Both of which come in quite a few varieties, so there’s no need to be bored with just white rice and spaghetti. For our uses, I’d probably either stay the same with corn meal, or even reduce it.
That, of course, would change once we do get a mill. As losing power is something that is likely to happen, I would go with a hand crank mill, and since we are working towards growing flour corn, it has to be something strong enough to handle such a hard grain. Also, manual mills would be quieter than electric ones.
The next section is canned or dried meats.
Twenty pounds for three months? That seems so very low! Especially for 4 adults.
As we do have a chest freezer and I’m finding local sources for meat, we’re moving towards buying in bulk until we are able to start raising meat animals ourselves, so this is a flexible area for us. For now, we actually should be buying more canned meats for those “just in case” times, and we do need to take into account that if the electricity goes out for too long, we risk losing whatever is in our freezer. Hence the need for shelf stable supplies. Canning meat ourselves is something we are working towards.
So for our needs, I would increase this amount substantially, but not until we are at a point where we are canning our own meat.
Twenty five pound of fats and oils. Hmmm. Interesting that it lists more fats and oils than canned or dried meats!
The two gallons of vegetable oil would, for us, become a gallon of vegetable oil, another of olive oil, and probably a mix of other oils in smaller quantities. For a 3 month period, I would probably add in another gallon of vegetable oil. We don’t buy salad dressing. It’s an easy thing to make an oil and vinegar dressing. We do buy mayonnaise, but it is also easy to make, and can be a base for dressings, too. That’s where the “extra” oil would be used. Oil and fat can also be used for emergency fuel and lighting, so more would never go to waste.
We don’t buy shortening. Or margarine, for that matter. Just butter. We buy 8-10 pounds of butter for 1 month. More if we plan to do a lot of extra baking, like before certain holidays. For our usage, a 3 month supply would mean 24-30 pounds of butter. Not realistic! Butter is not shelf stable, so it would probably be a good idea to have a few pounds of shortening. If we were unable to get out, we could probably get away with using oil in place of where we might normally use butter, so we could play with the quantities and ratios a bit. The quantity of peanut butter could stay the same.
Beans and legumes: 70 pounds total.
That’s probably more than we would need, for how much we eat them. Soy beans and lima beans would be dropped completely. We don’t eat them. Also, I’d probably make my own dried soup mixes. It’s something I’ve done before, in quart jars, including things like dehydrated vegetables, mushrooms and bouillon cubes. They worked our very well, though I would do them in smaller jars in the future. Also, no black beans. They turn the end result a very unappetizing grey! :-D
One of the things I have been picking up at Costco is cases of baked beans. The prices of those has pretty much doubled recently. It would be cheaper to buy dry beans and cook them ourselves. Among our gardening plans is to grow beans for drying as well as fresh eating. Along with just keeping dry beans, I hope to can plain beans, as well as making baked beans for canning, too. I would add chickpeas to this list, canned or dried. There are chickpea varieties that grow in our zone, so that’s something else we could someday, potentially, supply ourselves.
Milk and Dairy: 87 pounds
Shelf stable dairy products are a huge gap in our pantry. We should at least have some powdered milk. I don’t even know what to do with evaporated milk. And what does “other dairy” mean, in the context of shelf stable products? We don’t drink a lot of milk; it’s mostly used in cooking. What we do use a lot of is dairy products, such as cheese, sour cream, yogurt, more cheese, whipping cream… and more cheese. None of which is shelf stable. Well. I guess the cheese is, if stored properly. And we do love our cheese!
Sugars: 60 pounds.
I did not expect to see jams, powdered juice mixes or Jello in the sugars list.
White sugar and brown sugar are things we use quite a lot, since we do so much of our own baking. For honey, the 1kg (2.2 pounds) container we last bought from my bee-keeping cousin disappeared fast, so if we were to stock up on honey, we’d be getting more than what’s listed. Probably a 5kg (11 pounds) bucket, which is the largest my cousin sells. We’d probably get more molasses, too, though we don’t really use it all that much. Corn syrup would be off the list. We don’t use it. That amount of jam is probably more than we would need. I don’t know that we would include the Jello at all.
I wouldn’t not have thought of powdered juice mixes. Now that I think about it, though, it would be a good idea to have a supply of drink mixes, as their own category; juices, iced tea, lemonade, hot chocolate, coffee and tea would all be good things to have in the pantry. Plain water gets tiresome, fast!
Cooking essentials! Gotta have these.
For the amount of baking we already do, I’d probably increase all of these. The vinegar would be used along with the fats and oils for those salad dressings we would be making ourselves. For salt, I’d want to have a variety, but if I had to choose just one type of salt, it would be course salt. We have salt grinders for seasoning meals, but I like to use course salt for a lot of things. If space allowed, I’d include a variety of vinegars, too. Salt, vinegar and baking soda can all double as cleaners, too, so extra of those would never go wrong.
Canned fruits and vegetables: 320 quarts, plus 90 pounds of dried.
This is another area where we tend to be too dependent on our freezer, and why we want to move towards canning our produce. We do have a root cellar, so that helps. Almost all the fruits and vegetables we eat are fresh, with a small amount of frozen. We pretty much never buy canned, but once we’re growing enough to make it worthwhile to can them ourselves, it would make a big difference in the winter months. Before we moved out here, I had a dehydrator and used it to dehydrate purchased frozen vegetables. It works really well; the vegetables are already blanched and most are cut to size, so they can be laid out on the trays while still frozen, with no extra work needed. They were great in our jar meals.
While I’ve bought dehydrated vegetable mixes once in a while (they always include peppers in them, which is irritating for me), we’ve never really bought dried fruit. Sometimes I’d get dates, with their pits still in them, for snacking, but they’re quite expensive. We hardly even bought fruit leathers for the girls when they were little. We don’t buy raisins. Dried fruit in particular is something I would forget about when it comes to emergency supplies, but they would be good to have on hand. Ninety pounds, however, would be way more than our family would use.
Water storage. This is our weak spot! We are already buying drinking water, so at least we do have the big water jugs. Storing 183 gallons, just for drinking, simply is not an option. This is a big part of why we want to get that old well repaired, so that we have access to water even if the power goes out. The bleach is something we don’t buy. We found a half empty bottle of bleach among the laundry supplies while cleaning up the old basement, and for the amount we use bleach, we’re still using that bottle we found! Still, it would be good to have bleach on hand. It’s something I would have forgotten about, so I appreciate it’s in the calculator.
That 183 gallons is the minimum water required for drinking. Much more would be needed for everything else. A safe supply of water is, typically, the biggest and most common hurdle in emergency situations for most people, I’m sure. At least for us, we have the possibility of getting the original well working again. Even here in the boonies, most people have wells that rely entirely on an electric pump.
Of course, in our situation, we would also have to add in wet and dry cat food. Since switching to the wood pellets for litter, we’ve been going through that a lot more slowly – and it’s a product that is actually a fuel, so it can do double duty. A single 40 pound bag goes a long way.
This calculator makes for a very interesting tool. I like that it’s just the shelf-stable essentials. There are so many lists out there that include everything but the kitchen sink – and then tell you what to use for a kitchen sink. Even just this list, for a 3 month period, can look overwhelming. However, it’s a place to start, to modify for our own circumstances, and the sort of thing that can be achieved, little by little, without taxing the budget too much.
It’s good to be prepared.
Even if Facebook thinks your a scary extremist for putting up a bit of extra food!
I delayed heading outside to do my morning rounds, to warm up a bit before having the outside cats come out of their shelters for kibble.
I finally gave up and just headed out, because I knew they would be hungry. I was inside for a while before I took the above screencap. Yup. Almost noon, and we were still at -28C/-18F with a wind chill of -38C/-36F The wind was from the south west, though, not the south east, so the yard was protected.
I didn’t see as many of them this morning, and there was even kibble still in the tray under the shrine, from being topped up yesterday evening, so they were not too hungry. :-)
The Distinguished Guest is looking rather disheveled! She could use a good brushing. Not that we’d be able to. She lets me pet her while at the kibble house, but that’s as far as it goes. Mind you, that’s still more than we get with most of the outside cats that were born here!
Chadicous was quite happy to get some loving!
Such a handsome boy!
Once inside and putting a kettle on, I saw a flash of movement through the dining room window.
These two had come bounding through the yard to the feeding station! They looked so very excited. :-D It’s funny that they come running, and these same two deer come back several times a day, for that little bit of feed I put out. Especially since we’ve got chickadees, Blue Jays, Pine Grossbeaks and probably squirrels, going at it, too.
The good news is, we will keep warming up through to tomorrow.
They’re again telling us we’ll hit -4C/25F – the forecast changes frequently, of course – and we’re supposed to stay warmer than -20C/-4F for about a week. Even after that, we’re supposed to be just a degree or two colder, for the rest of the month.
