We have had many cats over the years. At one point, we were an impromptu cat shelter and had a dozen of them at once, but only a couple were ours.
We have never had a cat that liked to do this at all, never mind so frequently. It seems he’s more comfortable upside down than right side up!
The Re-Farmer
Some days, it’s clear I live in a magical fairyland.
It’s warmed up again, enough for there to be fog last night. Which promptly became frost on anything it touched.
The view of our spruce grove from our driveway gate.
Usually, it goes away rather quickly when the sun comes out, but it’s been overcast and still a bit foggy, so the magical fairyland remains.
So gorgeous.
The Re-Farmer
We got quite a bit of action outside our living room window today!
The beauty of digital photography is that you can take lots of pictures and not worry about running out of film, then go through them later to pick the best ones.
The downside is that you can take lots of pictures, and then have to try and choose the best one! Today, alone, I took about 200 pictures. Oh, how to choose!
Well, here is a sampling.
The pine grosbeaks were back. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them. I forgot how big they are! Almost as big as the blue jays.
Speaking of which…
The blue jays are funny to watch. They have a definite preference for certain seeds, and are large enough that they can use their beaks to flick through the seeds, flinging them all over, just to find that special one! They’d eat the others, too, but only after picking out their favorites.
I got some really good photos of the outside cats that showed up today, like this one of Butterscotch, who is staring at our mama cat in the window.
Then there was Trüllbus the Crime Eater… also checking out our cats in the window.
Nasty Crime Boy also made an appearance.
I have a hard time telling Crime Boy and Trüllbus apart when they are not right next to each other. :-D
Even The Mothman made an appearance today! It’s been at least a week since I’ve seen her. Then I realized all over again, what a big frikkin cat she is!
She spooked the deer, too.
Yes, we got deer as well. Two of them; the nasty one and the one that stays close to him for some reason (see video)
I picked this photo, not because it was the best one, but because you could see the difference between the two, a bit. The little one looks thin, and its coat is rougher, compared to the round belly and smooth coat you can see in the other deer in the background. It’s not as clear in this photo, but you can see her hip and shoulder bones sticking out more prominently, too.
They did eat together for a while, then something spooked the little one. She went off to the side for a while, but she she tried to come back, the other one chased her off. She then went into the spruce grove and hung around. At least she has things to nibble on in there, even if it might not be as good as the feed I’m leaving out. Still, the poor thing looks quite hungry. :-(
The Re-Farmer
The pair of deer are here as I write this. This was taken moments ago. The one deer is quite nasty!
The other one is still around. I hope she gets a chance to eat. She looks much scrawnier than the mean one, and rough around the edges. :-(
Now that we’ve been here for a couple of months, I’ve looked back at some things. Now I want to look forward.
I had some idea of what would need to be done here before we moved in, and not a lot has changed. Continue reading
Earlier today, I noticed our piano bench still had the sticker from the movers on it. So I got the number and looked it up on the sheets.
It was number 082: Char . Taibls
Or is it Chav . Taihls?
(hav . Taihls?
I remember looking at that and wondering what on earth it could be. I would never have guessed it meant the piano bench.
The Re-Farmer
We got another lone visitor at the feed today. Not the same one as yesterday, as this one has the dark patch on its chest.
And it is definitely the aggressive one that usually comes with another deer. The other deer did show up later on. The only reason I saw it was because this one suddenly dashed off to chase it away. :-(
In going through the photos I took today – especially the ones where the deer was eating at the feed closest to the house – I realized that I could see our house reflected in his eyes.
In all my years growing up in this house, while we certainly saw deer, we never had anything that encouraged them to come so close to the house like this. This is the closest I have ever been to a live, wild deer. Just a few feet away, with nothing but glass between us.
On the wish list, I would love to build a long, narrow deck on that side of the house, with a ramp on one end. This way, we could use the actual “front” door, and my husband would have a ramp for his walker, and not have to lift it up and down those two steps at the door that we use now.
I can see us, some day in the future, sitting outside on the deck and having the deer used to our presence enough to come right up to us.
The Re-Farmer
We’re still figuring out our internet out here. Back when we had unlimited data, we averaged about 300-350 gigs a month, between the 4 of us. This is not surprising, since we not only had our desktops online all the time, but our phones were using WiFi, as well as other devices occasionally. Between actual productive stuff, there was also gaming and whatnot.
With our satellite internet, the maximum data package available is 100 gigs. I figured, since doing things like World of Warcraft and watching videos is pretty much out, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. If we reached our data limit, we still had internet. It would be extremely slow, but we could do things like check our email, and we wouldn’t be charged more.
Except that didn’t work out very well, so my husband talked to our provider about being able to keep our speed and pay extra for the data overage. At a rate of $2 a gig.
That should also have been fine, but it quickly added up and we ended up with an almost $300 bill. Almost 3 times what the basic package costs, and almost double what we were paying for our internet/cable bundle before the move.
Next month in, we quickly hit our data limit again. Which is where we ended up getting a second account. It was cheaper to have a second satellite dish installed with a second account. There are other advantages to that option that will be of benefit in the future, too.
Well, 50% of that got used up real fast, too.
Now, part of that can be explained away by various downloads that were done. It took my husband 3 days to download his Star Wars game. It’s not that big of a file, but it’s just how it is with satellite. Once installed, playing that game uses almost no data at all, but with his desktop dead, he installed it on his laptop. It took some doing for various other technical issues.
I just had a conversation with my daughter about our data usage. She and her sister had gone into their settings to look at their own data usage for the past 30 days. She only used 25 gigs, and her sister’s use was almost non-existent. And yes, they have been playing the Star Wars game, too. The biggest drain my older daughter was seeing in her computer was labelled “system”.
So I looked at my own settings.
I found this.
What in the heck is going on here??? Why is my system using more than 80 gigs in the past 30 days? I don’t even have my desktop ON as much as I used to.
There’s nothing that lets you break down into more detail.
My other usage is negligible. Even my WiFi usage on my phone is barely more than 10 gigs over the last 30 days.
WTF?
I went through some other areas in the the settings and found one thing I could turn off; all notifications. I’ve got the metered thing set, but that only applies to WiFi, and I’m hard wired into the router.
So I’ve got some sort of data vampire in my system.
I am curious, now, what my husband’s laptop’s data usage is. If my desktop system alone is using over 80 gigs in 30 days, if his is going the same thing, no wonder we’re screaming through our limited data so quickly.
One of the things we will be doing is resetting the usage stats at the end of the month, when our data plan rolls over. Then we can start monitoring both and compare.
If you have any thoughts, suggestions, feedback or personal experiences on this, please feel free to comment.
The Re-Farmer
We’ve made a lot of progress with unpacking. Yes, I still have stacks of boxes behind me as I type this, but just about everything else is unpacked, or at least partly unpacked.
I even managed to repair my dad’s bedside shelf, which I am now using. This allowed me to move the large-ish end table I had on my side of the bed over to my husband’s side, so we could put his tiny fridge on it (for his medication), get his CPAP machine off the floor and have a place to tuck away his bottles of distilled water for the CPAP humidifier.
We still haven’t been able to find some of the girls’ things. There was some stuff in their third floor bathroom that was in a bag we can’t find, and some movies that were on another floor, so they shouldn’t have ended up in the same box. Also, we found other stuff from their bathroom, so those items should have been there, too.
While my brother and I were at our van yesterday, checking on the engine, I remembered to go into the glove compartment and get the paperwork from the movers that was in there. On moving day, I barely had time to skim over them as I signed them, and just shoved them into the glove compartment as we were leaving.
Today, I finally had a chance to sit down and look at them closely, to try and figure out what happened to the girls’ stuff.
I still have no clue. The sheets tell me next to nothing useful.
This is so frustrating.
As near as I can figure out, the above photo is mostly third floor stuff, but also second floor stuff. Maybe.
While this one is of second and third floor stuff. The information I was looking for should have been on these two pages. I can barely decipher it at all.
All over the place I see the word “mettals.” I think it’s supposed to be “metal”. But metal what?
“Matters”, I’ve figured out, means “mattress.” “Pichers” are “pictures,” and likely refers to both pictures from the walls and my daughter’s paintings. Then there are the shalfes, pellows, pillasstic taibls, hendels, wood and even anberallas.
I’m guessing shelves, pillows, plastic tables (I am guessing our collapsible tables, including the folding one they didn’t fold), handles (???), wood (my daughter’s easel?) and umbrella.
The other pages are no better.
There is 4 pages of this, each with two columns. The first page was mostly
marked boxes and bins. According to the sheets, including the piano, we had 234 items. Some of those items were things like a bundle with our mop, broom, window cleaner and snow shovels, taped together. The piano bench had its own number sticker, but I don’t see anything that even remotely looks like it could be “bench”.
When he brought the sheets for me to sign, he’d made a comment about how we had “a lot of stuff.” You wouldn’t know it, from what’s on these sheets! According to them, we just have a lot of mettal and shalfes.
In the end, though, there is no way of knowing what box they packed the girls’ stuff that’s missing into. It looks like they not only marked the boxes and bins we packed ourselves as just “box” or “bin,” but also boxes they packed have no listing of their contents.
Which is something I was told they do, when I was arranging all this.
These sheets are useless.
As part of the contract, the client is supposed to use these sheets to make sure everything gets to its destination. Given the circumstances of the delivery of our stuff, that was impossible. Even if we’d managed to unpack everything with 10 days and could say for sure there was stuff missing, there would have been no way to say which item numbers weren’t accounted for.
What a mess.
Meanwhile, I still haven’t heard back about my claim, when I responded by saying I expected them to repair the damage their driver did, on top of the basic liability for items damaged.
The Re-Farmer
We get lots of critter visitors. Yesterday, we got a people visit!
My oldest brother came by briefly. Being the sweetheart that he is, he brought along his mechanics stethoscope, and we checked out our van. The first thing we did was check the coolant. This was not an easy job, as the radiator cap on our vehicle is off to the side and under a hose.
We also discovered that I am very low on coolant.
I had the vehicle serviced before we drove out here. I should not have been low on coolant. Which means I likely have a leak somewhere. I have never seen signs of a leak under the vehicle, but it’s possible that any leak was happening only while I was driving, after the engine was warm enough for the coolant to expand into the overflow chamber.
He got as much as he could into the tester, and as best as we can make out, our coolant has enough anti-freeze to handle temperatures down to about -22C to -25C. Without being able to fill the tester fully, however, we can’t say that definitively.
We’ve been hitting temperatures of lower than -30C. Wind chills brought us to the -40C, but we didn’t drive in that, and the van was in the garage, so it was protected from the elements, at least.
Then we fired it up and waited until the noise started, which took about a minute. Using his stethoscope, we were able to pinpoint the source as the water pump. Likely a bearing. And yes, the cold could have caused this damage, with our coolant as low as it was.
On the plus side, if the water pump needs to be replaced, the part itself is not that expensive. Labour, on the other hand, could easily be much more. It all depends on how hard it is to get into there. It could cost anywhere from $300-$400 to fix.
Also on the plus side, when funds come in, we should actually have room in the budget for that. It’s do-able. As long as it doesn’t end up costing more. :-( Meanwhile, we will continue to NOT use our van, because driving it would likely cause more damage.
It’s a good thing we don’t need to go anywhere. And my other brother has told us to just leave his van at our place for now.
That done, my older brother’s next task was to salvage the parts he’d put into the old hot water tank. He’d spent quite a bit of money on that thing, and the parts are still good, so anything that can be salvaged will be useful.
The first thing he did was take out the bottom thermostat and remove the new heating band he’d installed at the bottom.
This photo shows that heating band. It had been in pristine condition when he put it in, but in the short time it was there, it got this corroded!
You can see an the bottom of the photo, what he’d used to McGyver the band in place, when it turned out to be too short.
That was one heck of a job. And it did work, for a short time. It was the last thing to try. Once that failed, there was nothing left to do.
In the next picture, you can see the top thermometer he’s about to remove.
The tank itself got dented up (you can see that a bit at the top left of the second photo) when the plumber dropped it down to drain into the sump pump reservoir. There were more dents all in a line. The bottom of the tank had started to rust quite a bit in one patch. It was weakened enough that the entire bottom had started to come loose!
That thing was way overdue for replacement.
Getting it out of the basement is going to be one heck of a job!
The visit also gave us the opportunity to talk about the house in general, and some of the work he’d done over the years, from what he had to do to get the pump to the septic tank working a few years back (you can see part of it in the background of the top photo), to fixing doors and the like. He even brought printouts of the historical data for the electric bills for this place! This will help me with budgeting a bit. Our usage is, of course, going to be higher, since the house was empty during the time period in the printouts. However, this was before the new windows were installed, so it would have been bleeding heat in the winter like crazy. I’d hate to think how much our current bill would have been if the old windows were still in! Hopefully, over the next while, we’ll be able to continue improvements to make the house more energy efficient.
Little by little, we’ll figure it out.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 