I believe this is the one the girls have named Magda. Such a sweety! She doesn’t like to be carried, but I discovered that if I use the bottom of my shirt to make a pouch, she will happily go for a ride in it. 😊
While checking the garden beds, I was happy to see this, in the high raised bed.
Click through for a second image. These are the peppers that are supposed to be more of an orangey yellow, and they are finally turning colour!
I hadn’t planned to harvest anything this morning, as I decided to go into the city for our Costco shopping trip. I did end up gathering a couple of melons that had fallen off their vines. One of them looked like a mouse had tried to chewing through it. It didn’t get very far, though. I’m sure one of our yard cats had something to do with the limited damage!
Meanwhile, we figured out why my husband’s disability pay came in earlier than expected. It turns out we have a new statutory holiday. National Truth and Reconciliation Day. I hadn’t seen anything about it anywhere, including the usual places I would have expected to. I don’t see it as being a particularly popular holiday, since it’s basically just a pander to activist types pushing the residential school/mass graves hoax. They have no interest in truth, and certainly don’t want reconciliation, and if their agenda end up hurting their own people, they don’t particularly care about that, either. Oh, I’d better watch myself, though. If our Prime Dictator has any say in the matter, being a “residential school denier” will be an arrestable offence.
But I digress.
As lovely as it was out there this morning, today has worked out to be another very windy day! We’re going to have a lot of clean up in the yard of small branches – not large ones, thankfully, nor any fallen trees this time.
We’re supposed to get a bit of rain in about an hour, and our overnight temperatures are supposed to drop to 7C/45F tonight. When I go my evening rounds, I’ll have to remember to drop the sides of the plastic “greenhouse” we put around the eggplant and pepper bed. Hopefully, the winds will have died down by then, and the box frame won’t become a sail! It’s tied down really well, with means the wood would probably break before it came loose from the stakes. !!
While tonight and tomorrow night are supposed to be pretty mild, our forecast has changed once again. We’re now looking at 3C/37F in a couple of night, and 0C/32F the night after.
We’ll have to make sure to harvest all the green tomatoes before then! It’s a shame we have no way to cover them, because overnight temperatures are supposed to warm up again after that.
Or… the forecast could change again, and we won’t be getting any frost yet at all!
In the colander are what might be the last of the Purple Beauty peppers – they have had a lot of strangely small, thin walled peppers. There’s also a Sweet Chocolate pepper in there, as well as a few hot peppers. There are a couple of eggplants, and all three types of beans, some Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, plus a few San Marzano tomatoes.
In the bin are the Former de Couer and Black Cherry tomatoes. I’m picking most of them a bit on the green side, to get some of the weight off the plants.
Yesterday, we were able to get some things into the freezer.
I grabbed all the bell peppers and prepared them for freezing. If you click through to the next image, you can see them laid out in a couple of gallon sized freezer bags.
Earlier, I cut up enough melons to fill two baking trays. Those will be bagged up later.
While chopping up the peppers, I took advantage of my husband coming by and taste testing the four different kinds of bell peppers we had (the last variety still hasn’t turned colour yet).
His conclusion:
They all had that “bell pepper” taste, but they were very mild – as in there wasn’t a lot of flavour. The exception was the yellow pepper. Those have much thick walls, to it was great to hear that.
Something to keep in mind when deciding what varieties to grow next year.
In other things, we’ve got another windy day today. It’s supposed to continue through to tomorrow. So far, I’ve found found a few downed branches, but no fallen trees! We’re going to have to keep an eye/ear out for the next while.
I did end up going out this morning. My older daughter is feeling sick today and didn’t have the energy to cook. So she sprung for take out for all of us! Which worked out fine, as it gave me a chance to refill a couple of the 18.9L water jugs in town.
We’re supposed to reach a high of 26C/79F today, while the overnight low is, remarkably, supposed to be 21C/70F!
Tomorrow night, however, the overnight low is supposed to drop to 7C/45F, so we’ll need to make sure to drop the sides of the plastic around the eggplant and hot pepper bed. In a few days, we’re supposed to drop to 1C/34F. The eggplant and pepper bed can be covered, but we’ll have to pick all the green tomatoes, and probably the last of the melons and squash, too, since we have no way to protect those from frost. The high raised bed has a cover on it to protect the peppers from deer, and support any peppers tall enough to grow through it. We can use that to hold protective covers off the plants.
We’re 19 days past our average first frost date, so I am certainly not complaining. Still, it would be awesome if the weather decided to say milder for a bit longer!
After the last couple of days, I plan to take it relatively easy today.
Part of “taking it easy” for me includes finally doing my morning rounds as usual!
Since I’d gathered a larger harvest yesterday, I didn’t expect to gather anything today. I did find a couple of things to pick though. A handful of Carminat purple beans, a single green Seychelle bean, a hot pepper and…
The clusters still look quite green, but I noticed some of them had already started to drop seeds among the melons in the trellis bed. So I grabbed a clean bucket and tried just shaking the seeds into it. Things were still too damp with dew, though, so I broke off the seed heads that were starting to drop seeds and dumped them into the bucket whole.
Quite a few seeds were dropped into the bed, so I think we can expect a fair number of self sown onions in there in the spring!
There are still some seed clusters that are very green that got left on the plants to be gathered later. For now, the bucket of seed heads is in the house, sitting in a sunny spot in the cat free zone. We’ll collect more seeds after the seed heads have dried off.
I made no effort to separate types of onions in here. There was really no practical way to do so. There would be only two types of onions – a red and a yellow – that we had tried growing last year. At this point, if we are going to start growing onions from our own seeds, there isn’t as much need to keep track of varieties, or even keep the seeds separate. It’s not like we’re going to be packaging them up for sale or anything like that.
Which means that when we start seeds for next year’s garden, we’ll be having Onion Surprise. 😁
I had a long day taking my mother to her specialist appointment in the city yesterday, and now another long day with her today. I did have time to do some of my morning rounds, though, and was able to gather a good sized harvest!
In the giant colander, there are a good number of Chocolate Cherry tomatoes from by the chain link fence. I also picked a few green Seychelle beans from the bed shared with the Crespo squash, and I even found a few on the one plant next to the purple Carminat pole beans. There are even some Royal Burgundy bush beans in there.
I found a melon lying on the ground in the raised bed – it harvested itself! 😄 There are a couple of yellow peppers, plus a Sweet Chocolate. Some of the peppers that are supposed to be more orange are finally starting to turn colour. There’s a single G Star pattypan squash, plus a few San Marzano tomatoes.
When it came time to go into the old kitchen garden, I knew there would be quite a bit, so I grabbed the bin. Those are all Forme de Couer and Black Cherry tomatoes in there.
Including a rude looking tomato! Click over to the next photo to see what I mean. 😄
After that, I left things to my daughters and headed out to my mother’s.
Long story short: her apartment finally got sprayed for bed bugs. There were no sign of any, so they will have to come back only one more time. Her neighbour got sprayed, too. I get the impression that apartment has been the main source of the problem in the building.
My mother then had to stay out of her apartment for 6 hours. Technically, she should stay out for 12 hours, as she has respiratory issues, but she refuses.
The neighbor says they only need to stay out for 4 hours, but I have no idea where she got that from. The notification letter they all get says the same thing. At least 6 hours.
We made sure to take along my mother’s supper time medications, as well as the information sheets the eye clinic gave her, yesterday, to go over. While we were waiting for the exterminator to arrive, I did go through some with her. I took the grid eye test, which is a flat magnetic sheet, and put it on her fridge. The grid has a black dot in the middle that is supposed to be focused on. I spent some time explaining the test to her, how to do it, and that she should be checking her left eye with it, every day. I even held it for her while she did the test, as instructed.
While explaining the grid test to her, how to take the test, what she’s looking for, I was saying, your left eye this, your left eye that, with your left eye…
Yet she still stopped at one point and said, “with my right eye, then…”
…
No. Your right eye can’t even see the dot in the grid. It’s for your left eye.
It’s going to take a while for it to stick, I think!
We had a nice chat with the manager while her apartment was being sprayed – she parker her walker across from her door and would not move until the exterminator left.
Then we had to find something to do or somewhere to go for six hours.
I was going to move the truck into the loading zone in front of the doors, to make it safer for my mother to get in, but the exterminator’s truck was in there, and he was chatting with the manager. When I got there, I did apologize for my mother’s behaviour over all this.
She is still utterly convinced the exterminator rifled through her closet to find and steal 70+ year old passports. In fact, at one point when it came up in conversation, she started saying, “maybe I should call the police?” When I said no, she said I was accusing her of lying. I told her, I didn’t think she was lying, but that she probably just put them somewhere and forgot where. When she moves, she’ll probably find them again. Her response was that I was “against” her.
*sigh*
Anyhow…
It was a good thing I caught up with them, because the manager remembered to ask if my mother’s bed had mattress covers. She doesn’t, and the exterminator said she needs two – one for the mattress, one for the box spring. Then he remembered he might have one and checked in his truck. He did have one and gave it to me for my mother’s mattress. We’ll still need one for the box spring.
Then I mentioned I needed to move my truck so my mother could get in, and we said our goodbyes.
By this time, though, my mother had come out and was sitting in her walker, watching us suspiciously. She called me over before I moved the truck and started asking me questions… why was the exterminator still there? Why was the manager sitting in his truck? etc.
Oh, gosh. I just realized what she was getting at.
She thought they were waiting for her to leave, so the manager could use his master key to get into her apartment, so they could steal things.
*sigh*
Anyhow.
We got her into the truck and then headed out for lunch. There was one place she wanted to go to, because someone new bought it and she wanted to see how it was, now that it wasn’t “browny” people that owned it (it had been owned by a Korean family). *sigh* The place was still being worked on, on the inside, but when she saw the worker’s vehicles in the parking lot, she thought it was open and wanted me to go inside and check. I had to tell her, no, you can’t just walk into a construction zone!
So we went to a chicken and pizza restaurant.
She ended up ordering a vegetable pizza this time, which I normally would not have thought much of, except that my mother is once again deciding that the reason she’s having trouble with her eyes is because of food, and so she needs to eat more vegetables and green things.
There is no known cause for macular degeneration, and there is no food she can eat or not eat that will make any difference. But she heard something somewhere – maybe last week, maybe last month, maybe 30 years ago – and just latches on to things.
We’re going to have to watch her on that, because she’s going to start causing malnutrition in herself if we don’t.
I had something else, so she had a small pizza to herself, with some left over that was packed up for later. We took our time eating, though – we did have 6 hours to kill! – then went across the street to a little department store she wanted to check out, while she was out and about. I helped her get across the street, then moved the truck to park by the store, so she wouldn’t have to cross the street again. The nice thing about that was that I was able to pull up really close to the curb – and that extra height made it downright easy for her to get into the truck when she was done!
We then both went in and did a bit of shopping.
There’s only so long we could drag that out, though.
There was nowhere else she wanted to go, and there is nowhere in this town where one can just hang out. We even tried driving around parts of town we’ve never gone into before, but there wasn’t a whole lot of that, either. 😄
We managed to use up about 2-3 hours before finally just going back to her building and sitting in the common room. No one else was around, so we brought out the information the eye clinic gave her and I went over it with her. Most of it, the doctor had already explained to her really well.
It didn’t take long to go through it all.
I was completely prepared to stay with my mother until 7pm, but she told me that I could go home. She was really tired and was going to just sit and close her eyes for a while. She had her leftovers for supper, and I’d added a bottle of orange juice I’d gotten with her meal on the way home from the city yesterday, that got forgotten in the truck, so she was prepared for taking her medication with her supper while in the common room.
So I headed home.
When I got home, my younger daughter was adding more supports to the tomatoes at the chain link fence that yesterday’s winds had managed to blow partly over. I ended up helping her with that, then she moved on to start breaking down the tree that the winds blow over and onto a crabapple tree.
I had gone to talk to her when our phones both dinged. My husband had sent a message.
My mother had called and left a message on the answering machine. Something about her keys?
I had completely forgotten.
While digging in her purse at one point, my mother gave me her keys to put in my pocket, so they wouldn’t get lost.
They were still in my pocket!!!
I had dashed into the house to get my purse when the phone range again. It was my mother, trying again – from the number on call display, a neighbour had let her use their phone. I told her, I was leaving right then and there!
When I got there, so was so apologetic about having me drive all the way back again. Meanwhile, I was apologizing for forgetting I had her keys! It was pretty funny!
Enough time had passed that she had eaten her supper and taken her medications. It was still early to get into her apartment, but by less than an hour, so we went in anyway.
I had offered to come back to help her put things back and she had said no, so this actually worked out.
I was able to put the mattress cover on her bed – and found out that they’d given her, and others, mattress covers long ago. She didn’t want me to put it on her bed, and basically scoffed at the fact that they had been given them in the first place.
*sigh*
So, somewhere in her closet, she had 2 more of these. Maybe when my sister next visits my mother, she’ll be ablet to find one and get it onto the box spring.
I made up her bed and put a few things away.
If she didn’t have to wait until the health care aid came to help with her nightly medications, she would have gone to bed right then and there!
I did make sure to set out the little miniature tagine bowl and lid I’d brought for her. She thought it was adorable! This will be a handy container for the health care aide to put her pills into, after removing them from the bubble pack, so they can both easily see that the right number are in there. Plus, my mother can more easily pick up the little bowl to take them, rather than trying to use her hands. Some of her fingers are deformed with arthritis.
The extra trip was good for another reason. I had forgotten to hit a bank machine earlier, to take cash out for the septic guy. We’re almost into October. Time to get the tank emptied for the winter.
We’ll need to contact the septic repair company again, too, and hopefully get a date on when they can come and repair the leaking pipes at the expeller!
I really hope we’re not getting ghosted by this company. We’ve had this happen before with other companies, in the first couple of years after we moved here. I have reason to believe it has something to do with our vandal defaming us, though I have no actual proof. Our vandal has a past history of trying to prevent companies from doing things here at the farm, and even on property in the heart of our little hamlet that my parents used to own. Then, when they tried to sell it, he drove off two potential buyers!
Yes, he felt he was entitled to that property, just like he feels he’s entitled to this property, too.
Of course, it could be this company is just really busy, trying to get jobs done before winter. Unfortunately, with past experience, I can’t help but wonder.
Well, if we don’t hear from them after trying to call them back several times, there is another company we can contact again. They are in a completely different town that our vandal doesn’t really go to, that I know of, so the chances of them having any contact with our vandal is very low.
The main thing is that this gets repaired before the ground freezes.
Thankfully, our system has still been working so far, even if the greywater is all just soaking into the ground, as if we had a septic field instead of an expeller. The leak must be pretty close to the surface for the ground to become saturated like that, so if it doesn’t get repaired, the whole thing will freeze, the greywater will have nowhere to go, and the ice will break the pipes even more.
*sigh*
Tomorrow, I will hopefully not have to go anywhere, except maybe the dump. I don’t know if I dare to to the nearest landfill again, with how bad it has gotten lately (I don’t want another flat tire!), but the next nearest one is also open on Saturdays. I just need to find it.
If all goes well, though, I’ll finally be able to catch up with stuff here at home!
Like prep and freeze a whole lot of bell peppers and melons, and either freeze whole tomatoes, or start another sauce in the Crockpot.
It’s not even 8:30pm as I start this, but it feels so much later – and not just because the days are shorter and it’s full dark outside!
Today was my mother’s appointment with the eye specialist in the city, but there were things I needed to do before getting to her place.
Which meant, of course, I got almost zero sleep last night. It seems the more I need to actually get sleep before scheduled activities, the harder it is for me to actually fall asleep!
Meanwhile, my daughters took care of all my usual outdoor routines today, which was a huge help.
The first thing I had to do that had me leaving quite a bit earlier than I would have needed to get to my mother’s, was to stop at the home care office. They needed a couple of signatures from me related to the hospital bed they provide for my husband. I also had a copy of the Power of Attorney paperwork for my brother that they needed in order to process my mother’s file for long term care. This was the last thing they needed as far as the paperwork goes. I spoke to the coordinator for a while. He had already talked to the next coordinator about long term care placement. Physically, my mother would only qualify for supportive living, which would be great for her, but behaviorally, they would not be able to provide her the support she needs. Her racism certainly would make it more difficult, too – the home care aids have already reported some unfortunate things my mother has said. Since they were there for only a few minutes, to help her take her medications, there isn’t a lot of time for her to really get bad with any of them. They do have instructions, though, on how to deflect and, if necessary, simply get out of the situation if it’s particularly bad.
As for the care facilities, her paperwork will first go to the supportive living coordinator, where it will be rejected. Then it will go to the long term care coordinator, who is already aware of my mother’s circumstances, and a decision will be made. If she does qualify for long term care, though, this will get her on a waiting list, unless something happens that puts her under urgent placement. Like if she fell and broke a hip, she would go straight from the hospital into long term care.
Or if she got herself evicted, though that’s a grey area.
We spoke about the meal assist, too. We’ll be trying it out at every two weeks, first. They have only 2 hours to do the meal preparation. We would have to make sure they have all the ingredients, any recipes needed, and containers for the meals to go into the fridge or freezer.
After finishing at the office, I was going to pick up fried chicken and potato wedges at our favorite place – the gas station! 😄 It was too early for their chicken to be ready, though, so I stopped at the grocery store to get drinks. There weren’t any that my mother would be willing to drink, so I went to the gas station and just parked until I was sure their first batches of chicken would be ready. I actually found appropriate drinks there, too!
I also made sure to pick up a couple of 5 Hour Energy bottles, and drank one of them right away.
My mother was very happy when I arrived with the food! She keeps saying, she shouldn’t eat fried chicken, because she has made associations with it and various physical complaints, but she really loves their fried chicken was wedges!
We had enough time that we could have a nice, relaxed lunch, and I could tell her about how things went at the home care office. We talked about her bubble packs, and how she needs to not take anything except when the home care aides come in. She told me how, this morning, the aide took the prescriptions out of the blister and set them in front of her in a pile, but when my mother spread them out and counted them, one was missing! The aide, on hearing that, said that she would need to make a report, but my mom knew it had been in the blister. After looking around, they did find it. It may have just stuck to her hand or the packaging as she got it out for my mother.
I told my mother that when I take my supplements, etc. I have a small bowl I put them into first, then take them all at once from the bowl. She liked that idea, so I went digging around her cupboards and found the smallest bowl she had – an absolutely delightful vintage glass dessert bowl with three handles and a pattern of grape clusters and leaves. I’m totally in love with it!
It’s still pretty big for the job, though, so when I told her I collect tiny bowls and how handy they are, she asked if I could bring her one.
I now have a mini tagine wrapped up and in my purse to bring to her. I think she’ll find it adorable!
We talked about the meal assist, and she’s not happy with it, and says that she can do meals on wheels. They deliver 5 days a week. It’s certainly an option, if this doesn’t work out, but we’ll try meal assist first.
We started to talk about the exterminator coming to her place tomorrow, and that I would be there early to try and move as many things away from the walls as can be done. She started to get very angry about it again. She’s convinced they have singled her out for abuse, and that they just want to go through her stuff and steal things. Frankly, I no longer have patience for her behaviour on this. She is very much at risk of getting evicted, and she doesn’t take it seriously. This has all dragged on far longer than it should have, because she would not let them do their jobs. So many people are bending over backwards to try and help her, and she just refuses to accept that she might be the one that’s causing the problem, not everyone else.
I was able to redirect that conversation more than a few times today!
When we left, we had what turned out to be a very easy and uneventful drive. The location of this clinic may be on the opposite end of the city from us, but it is very easy to get to from my mother’s town. The only unfortunate thing about the drive was that I was feeling myself start to fall asleep. I’m glad I got two of those 5 Hour Energy things. My mother even helped open the bottle for me while I was driving!
Once there, I got her checked in and then we sat in the waiting room. We were early, so I told her I was going to close my eyes for a bit.
I think I actually fell asleep for a bit!
Whether I did nor didn’t, by the time my mother’s name was called, I felt so much better.
The first stage of her appointment was for an assistant to ask various questions, check her current medications list, and try to get an idea of just how long my mother has been having issues. It was not easy. My mother’s sense of time has gotten pretty bad, but for all her complaints about her vision, she insisted the problem was her glasses, and didn’t even realize that her right eye was going blind!
He did a quick eye test with her, with the left eye covered, then again with the right eye covered. Her left eye can still see pretty darn good. With her right eye, she couldn’t even see a single large letter C. All she could tell was that there was a roundish shape. She also had some issues when he held up different numbers of fingers at different distances. Sometimes she got it right, sometimes not. At one point, she couldn’t even see him waving his hand back and forth in front of her right eye.
Next, he took her to a machine to take photos and video of the inside of her eye.
It was not easy.
The typical instruction is “focus on the green X in the middle.” To which my mother would say, “there is no X.”
After that went back and forth a bit, I told her to just look straight ahead. He went with that for the rest of the testing on that eye.
The assistant was so very sweet and awesome. He treated her so nicely, with such a gentle mannerism. I found myself wanting to give him a great big hug! 😄
It took quite a while to get the images he needed. It’s hard enough to stare straight ahead and not blink for several seconds at the best of times. It’s even harder for my mother, who had nothing she could focus on.
That done, it was back to an examination room, and for the doctor to see her.
It turns out her eye is really bad, and he was pretty alarmed about it. She’s had blood pooling in her eye for quite some time, but we just can’t get a handle on when she started to have problems. The only thing I could confirm is that I took my mother for her regular eye exam in February, and there was nothing of concern at the time. I was there and saw the photos of my mother’s eye. This damage was not there.
The doctor spent quite a bit of time explaining things to her and making sure she understood what was going on, as best she could, and to ensure she was able to give informed consent for the treatment.
She had to get drops to dilate her pupils, antibacterial drops, a needle to freeze the eye, and finally the needle for her first treatment.
All of which my mother put up with extremely well. When he was telling her what had to be done and made sure to get her verbal and written consent, her response was simply, “do what you have to do.”
Personally, I think I’d rather go blind than have injections directly into my eyeball!
She was pretty amazing about it.
Along with all that, he took the time to give me information booklets, a grid test for her left eye that she’s supposed to do daily, and a bottle of artificial tears. He really stressed with my mother, how important it is to NOT rub her eyes, touch them in any way, or even touch her face near that right eye. If her eye starts to itch, she is to take an eye drop.
If she starts to feel severe pain, though, she is to immediately return to the clinic to see him or, if it’s the weekend, to a nearby hospital that has a specialty in eye care.
When we finished and I was getting her next appointment in 4 weeks, and helping her pay for some of the tests not covered by our system, my mother just sat on her walker seat with her eyes closed, because she couldn’t really see. Once everything was taken care of and she was in the truck, I gave her my husband’s driving glasses – sunglasses designed to fit over regular glasses.
She really, really loved how much that helped!
Also, she looked adorable in camo print driving glasses. 😄
By this time, I was getting really hungry, and I figured my mother would be, too. When she started talking about getting me to heat up a can of soup for her supper when we got to her place, I was not about to leave it that way! I wanted to get gas in the city, where it’s a lot cheaper right now, and the gas station I stopped at had a Burger King attached to it. I ended up getting chicken fry meals for both of us, as that was something easy to eat while driving.
My mother said that the food could wait until we got to her place but I told her, when I get hungry, I start to become dizzy and ill, so I needed to eat. I set my food out on the console, and hers stayed in the bag.
As we were driving, I saw in my peripheral vision, as she reached out to take a fry!
“Temptation!” she said. 😄😄
I told her she could help herself! She had only a few, though.
Once we got to her place, though, I brought the food out for her to have right away. The home care worker would have come and gone while we were out, so I made sure she had her supper time pills with food.
She was quite happy with this.
She still wanted me to open up a can of soup for her, though, for later.
I took the time to explain some of what we brought home from the clinic, but only briefly. I’ll be back tomorrow and I will stay with her for the 6 hours she has to stay out of her apartment, if that’s what it takes! That will give us plenty of time to sit down with the information and I can explain things to her in ways she could understand.
When we first got to my mother’s place, though, I did a quick check on my messages and found my daughter had sent me photos.
It was very windy today.
We lost a tree.
When I got home, I just had to check it out and get some photos of my own, too.
In the second photo of the slide show above, I just had to get a picture of how perfectly it fell in between to other trees, without getting caught on them!
The crab apple tree in the third photo was not so fortunate.
The spruce landed right in the middle, breaking off about a third of it.
Well, this is one of the sick trees we were needing to remove, anyhow!
We should be able to use the trunk of that spruce, though. This is one of trees too big to use as a raised garden bed. We should be able to take the bottom, widest, 10 ft and set it aside for the outdoor kitchen we will be building. Part of the trunk is cracked, though, so I’m not sure we we’ll get a full 10 feet that isn’t damaged, or what we can salvage from the rest of it.
We shall see. It’s way too windy to even consider breaking it down and cleaning it up.
Once again, it will be up to my daughters to take care of the outside stuff, as I will be with my mother tomorrow.
I’m not sure what we can do for such a long time. There aren’t places to just hang out in her town, and I don’t think she’d be up to any outings. Plus, we want to go over the information the doctor gave her. We could stay in the common room of her building, but it might not be easy to have a private conversation in such a public space.
Well, we’ll figure it out!
Until then, I need to get myself to bed and, hopefully, get a solid night’s sleep this time!
Okay, so today turned out to be completely different then planned!
Today was supposed to be a day to catch up on things outside before I have to do things with my mother for the next couple of days. Then I noticed that my husband’s CPP Disability came in earlier than I expected. So it was either do the first stock up shopping trip today, or do it on the weekend.
Today, it was!
My daughter came along this time, so we could try a different place for the shoes she’s been trying to buy for herself. There was going to be a prescription delivery this morning, though, so we just needed to wait until that was done.
Then the phone started ringing…
One of the calls today was from the home care guy, about my mother.
The first thing he brought up was that one of the aides that comes in to help my mother with her medication found a notice slipped under my mother’s door. It was about the bed bug exterminator coming in to check/spray her apartment today, and did I know about that? I told him about the call my brother got, and that they will be coming in on Friday afternoon – a manager and a tech, just to do her place – and that I would be there.
They are really bending over backwards to try and not have to evict a 93 yr old!
So for that day, while my mother is supposed to be out of her apartment for at least 6 hours, he has cancelled the home care visits.
I also explained that she does not seem to actually have bed bugs, but it looks like her neighbour does. So until this is taken care of, the home care aids will be wearing shoe covers and gloves and the like when they visit her. Hopefully, that will help my mother to take things more seriously.
Probably not.
Then he told me that the home care aids have been coming in in the mornings, and found that my mother had already taken her morning medication. That would be her usual 5am time, which has never been a requirement, but it seems she’s always been doing that. We’ve told her, she can sleep in. Take them when the care aides arrive.
When it comes to her before bed pills, she now has two, but insists she only takes one, and the other one she will take before she goes to bed, some hours later. They come in at 9 for the nightly pills. She should be taking both. She has been told this, too.
Then there is a confusion of bubble packs, and they are finding blisters have already been opened. It looks like she’s been taking the pills out and deciding what to take and what not to take? Either way, it’s hard for them to keep track.
He’s asked us to talk to her about it. If she can’t stop messing with her medications, they will have to put the bubble packs somewhere she can’t reach.
This could be a real problem.
After we got that call, I got another one… from the same home care guy! This time, it was about my husband. They’re supposed to do annual checks on those getting services; in my husband’s case, it’s about the state of his hospital bed and if it’s still in good shape (he had to have one replaced a couple of years ago). They also need a couple of signatures for his file, which I can do, so I will be leaving for my mother’s early tomorrow, so I can stop at their office, first.
Then I tried calling my mother. I ended up leaving a message, telling her I got the call from home care, and saying she needs to not touch her bubble packs, and only take her medications when they are there to help her with them.
I tried to be quick about it, because we were expecting the pharmacy delivery driver to call. It turns out he’d tried to call while I was on the phone with home care. While I was leaving a message with my mother, my daughter heard the honking at the gate, and ran out to get the delivery.
I’m so glad she did, because I never heard a thing!
That done, we could finally get what we needed – particularly ice packs – and headed out.
Our first stop was for my daughter’s shoes. We went to a factory outlet place she had recommended to her.
I so need to go there for my next pair of steel toes.
It’ll take some saving up for it, though!
While looking around at their displays, we could hear noises from other parts of the building. Those were the sounds of boots being made! It truly was a “factory” outlet, and every pair of shoes and boots in there were hand made.
Other stores carry their brand, though. In fact, the last time my daughter had herself a really excellent brand of shoes, it was this factory’s brand. She wore them until she outgrew them, and cried when they didn’t fit anymore.
She found the same boots!
She is so incredibly happy now. She’s been needing good shoes for a long time; her feet are almost as messed up as mine! They cost about $300, which took her a while to save up for, but these should last her a lifetime.
The entire rest of the day, she was practically dancing beside me as we walked around! No more foot pain. No more back pain!
This outlet happened to be not far from our first stop, which was the international grocery store.
This is what $123.57 looks like.
That doesn’t look like much for $123!
The seafood, oat milk – regular and chocolate – and coffee creamers are for my daughters.
This is where we like to get some excellent cheeses to try as treats. This time, we got both a honey gouda and a beer gouda.
The herbal tea is nettle; something for us to try. We do have nettles and could probably make our own, but we don’t have a lot and I like to leave them for the butterflies whose caterpillars like them.
The other tea is Irish Breakfast; something we haven’t picked up for a long time.
There is also an instant milk tea on there. We’ve tried something like this before, but it was a different brand. It has individual packets to make 1 cup of milk tea, which can be very handy at times.
The soy sauce is the Filipino brand my husband likes.
The applewood smoked bacon is a locally made brand I’ve not seen anyone else carry. After much searching, we finally found ground sage – a strange thing to be out of stock all over for such a long time! Last of all, we picked up some sweet potatoes (yams, on the receipt). We have a lot of peppers right now, and I found a recipe for a bell pepper and sweet potato soup that my daughters might want to try. Something I will taste, but I’m not likely going to be able to eat!
We also had a lunch at this store, before we did the shopping. Dim sum and smoked salmon sushi, which was really delicious. I forget what that cost. It was out of a different budget.
Our next stop was a Superstore. There wasn’t much we wanted to get there, though. It’s probably the smallest shop I’ve done at Superstore in a very long time!
This is what $91.12 looks like.
The only things we were really after was torpedo buns, a giant block of cheese, and to check out their energy drinks section, in case they had Beaver Buzz in stock.
They did not.
We got the torpedo buns, as well as a sourdough loaf, and a giant block of mozzarella cheese. After that, we just took a quick look around and added a big bag of bacon and cheddar cheese perogies, a couple of bags of pot stickers, two 1L boxes of orange juice, some prosciutto and a large package of chicken breasts.
Next, it was time to hit the Walmart, for what turned out to be the biggest part of our shop. This is what $298.73 looks like.
Yes, that’s a canopy tent in there! It was on clearance, and we needed one.
The canopy tent was on clearance, at $39, so I really didn’t want to pass that up.
The planned purchases included a large bag of dry kibble and two cases of 32 cans of wet cat food, for the inside cats. I also found a package of the XXL (30’x30′) puppy pads that I wasn’t able to find last month.
We got some toilet paper and a couple of spray bottles of eco-cleaner.
There is a couple of packages of hot dog buns to go with the hot dog wieners we got. The roti was a last minute grab; I haven’t had roti in ages! It won’t be as good as fresh made, but I don’t care! 😄
There’s some lean ground beef in there, as well as a frozen turkey – Canadian Thanksgiving is coming up, so it’s cheap turkey season!
We got some coffee, some ice cream to have with our melons, and there was a good deal on the soy milk my daughters like so we got two 2L of those, too. At the request of my older daughter, we also got a bunch of energy drinks.
We also got a couple of cold drinks for the road, and a package of cookies and cream donuts, which I’ve never seen before, as a road munchie.
The donuts were… okay. I had no desire for a second one! 😄
There are a couple of items visible in the cart that aren’t on the bill, because my daughter bought those.
So that was our stock up shopping for today.
On top of that, we got $40 of gas on the way out, at 1.329/L In the city, though, we were able to get gas at $1.269/L, so I put in another $40. We’ll do a fill, and I’ll reset the trip meter, at Costco.
The gas is a different budget, but gas and groceries together totaled $593.42, plus our lunch.
I’m certainly glad we brought along all our ice packs. Our high for today, here at home, was 26C/79F, but it would have been at least a couple of degrees hotter in the city. Plus, the truck would have gotten even hotter inside. By the time we got home, even in insulated bags and with ice packs, things were starting to thaw out!
Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, with a high of 28C/82F, and very windy. Since I’m going to be taking my mother to the eye specialist, I’ve asked my daughters to give the garden a deep watering for me. We’ve had some rain over the past few days, but nowhere near enough.
Meanwhile, I have not been able to get through to my mother today. I’m at a bit of a loss. My brother had called her about the exterminator coming out on Friday, and that I planned to be there, but if they showed up at her door today, she might have thought he meant today – and would be wondering why I wasn’t there! She may be staying out of her apartment for the required minimum 6 hours.
That’s just a guess, though. For all I know, she’s hanging out in the common room with some of her neighbours.
Well, if I don’t get through today, I’ll be finding out what happened, tomorrow!
I’m just glad we got this first stock up shopping trip done now. I really did not want to do all this running around on a weekend!
I had another sleepless night last night (courtesy of the cats!), so my daughters took care of most of the morning stuff. That let me get at least a couple of hours of sleep before I headed out to the garden, just before noon.
We got a smattering of rain yesterday evening, so I used one of the side walls from the broken market tent to cover the onions that were curing outside. Once things were warmer, I uncovered them again, so they could get some sun and air flow.
We’ve got some warm, sunny days coming up, and mild overnight temperatures, so I lifted the bottom half of the vinyl sheets wrapped around the box frame over the eggplant and hot pepper bed.
As you can see in the foreground of the photo above, Syndol is checking out the eggplant and hot peppers I harvested out of there this morning!
This is the rest of today’s harvest. We have a first today!
Yes, a couple still have some green on them, but I wanted to get some of the weight off the plants. It was much the same with the few tomatoes I collected today.
Also, yes, that is a mutant Little Finger eggplant on the left! I actually remembered to bring pruning shears to cut the stems – they are surprisingly spiky! – and it was rather a surprised to cut one stem and get two eggplants! There are two Classic eggplant in there, too. I’m harvesting a bit smaller, as the large ones we’ve harvested before were getting pretty seedy inside. Mind you, we could leave some longer just to collect the seeds, but it’s probably too late in the season for any of the ones still on the plants to have viable seeds to collect.
The long, straight hot peppers were easy to harvest, but the curled one was so twisted around the stalk and another pepper, I ended up breaking off the top of the pepper itself, rather than the stem.
We also have one melon today, and one purple Dragonfly pepper. The colour is very much the same as the eggplants!
Pretty darn good for near the end of September in our area!
The German Butterball potato plants have all died off, so we should be harvesting those, soon. A few of the winter squash are starting to look ready to harvest and get set aside to cure, too. The one Jebousek lettuce that seeded itself should have seeds ready to collect, too. The kohlrabi look like a total loss, though. The flea beetles just decimated them. 😢 We finally got some to actually grow, and this happens. *sigh*
As we build up our raised beds, making it so they can be covered with insect netting is going to be important! I would really like to grow kohlrabi and cabbage and brassicas in general, but it looks like that’s just not going to happen until we have a way to protect them from those flippin’ flea beetles!!
Well, my upcoming stock up shopping schedule has changed again.
Normally, I would be heading into the city for our first stock up shop in a couple of days (Thursday), but I’ll be taking my mother to the eye specialist, instead. With that in mind, I’d already picked up a few things I knew we’d be running out of, yesterday, when I got more cat kibble in the town north of us. Grocery prices there are much higher, so I didn’t much at all.
Today, I wanted to refill our two empty 18.9L/5 gallon water jugs in the town nearest us. The only other thing we needed was more bread. Before I left, I asked my daughter to message me if she spotted anything else we were out of that couldn’t wait until Friday.
When I parked at the store and checked my message. Nothing from home to add to the shopping list.
There was, however, a message from my brother, asking if he could call me this afternoon about my mother.
Nothing he was in the office today, I figured it was urgent! So I let him know I’d just parked in town and that he could call me on my cell phone right away, if he was still able to.
He was.
Long story short, he got a call from the public housing department that owns the building my mother lives in. They don’t want to evict a 90+ year old woman, but if she doesn’t let them in to check/spray her apartment for bed bugs again, they have no choice.
They are going to be there on Friday. They even have an exact time (usually it’s between 9am an 5pm, and would have been done tomorrow, not Friday), and a manager will be there, due to her accusations of theft.
Right away, I assured my brother that I would be there. I had already been planning to go there tomorrow, as they usually come on the last Wednesday of the month.
The city shopping can wait.
As her Power of Attorney, my brother gave them permission to do in. I’ll shoot to be there earlier to move things away from the walls – they just need room for the wand to reach – and run interference with my mother. She has to stay out of her apartment for at least 6 hours. Given that she has respiratory issues, it should really be 12 hours, but that would mean spending the night somewhere. None of us have homes accessible for her, and she is no longer willing to rent a motel room. It was during a time she spent the night in a motel that she believes the exterminator stole stuff from her. Stuff that makes no sense for anyone to steal.
The guy my brother spoke to told him, they have to deal with this sort of thing all the time, unfortunately.
He also said they don’t think my mother has bedbugs, but they’ve been spraying her neighbour’s place for the past several months. If her neighbour has them, it would not take much for them to spread to her apartment. Plus, the eggs can stay dormant for up to a year. However, if the egg casings get sprayed, when the hatch, the hatchling will die as soon as it emerges. So even if she doesn’t have bed bugs, they still need to spray a certain number of times to ensure it stays that way, as far as the eggs go, at least.
So that pushes the city stock up shopping off to Saturday.
Ah, well. We’ll deal!
I still only intended to get just bread and water refills, but I still looked around.
It turns out they had some really good sales on. So good that some things were completely out of stock. The sale ends tomorrow, so that’s not surprising.
The store itself in in the process of being completely rearranged, too. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to be a lot more logical in organization – and it looks like they’re expanding their international section, too!
So I ended up getting more than intended, and not all things I would normally get.
This is what $61.89 before taxes would have looked like – not counting the 60¢ for the bottle caps that got paid for when I picked them up at customer service. I cashed in a winning lottery ticket that paid for them. 😄
My loyalty card, however, had $20 I could take off the purchase, so this actually cost $41.89 before taxes.
This is what I got:
Each item shows how much the sale prices took off. You can see on the bottom that the total discounts and savings was $39.11, or 39% of the sub-total. That would be the sub-total before the $20 was taken off, so that means I had $59.11 in taken off altogether, leaving me with having to pay only $43.33 after taxes.
The things I normally would not have picked up were the boxed cereals, the instant puddings and the granola bars.
With the whole chicken, I try to get those on sale whenever I can – especially with it being over $8 off, like today.
The fruit juices were something I was looking for specifically for my daughters. I find fruit juices way too sweet. They’re basically like mainlining sugar, but it gives my daughters something different to drink.
With the bread, I usually get rye bread, but at $2 a loaf, I got two regular loaves of whole wheat bread, one whole wheat Texas Toast and one white sandwich bread.
With the cereals and granola bars, I got four different types for our 4 very different tastes.
The instant puddings were only $1 each and, at first, I picked 4 different flavours. Then I noticed they were all “low fat”. Fat is flavour, so that means they had to replace the fat with something else to make them taste good; usually sugar. So I went for the regular kind, but there were only two flavours that weren’t sold out.
Funny. There were plenty of low fat versions in stock. 😄
So, not the shopping trip I planned, but a pretty good one, I think. We got some things that are very occasional treats that I only pick up when the prices are good. Sometimes I’ll get them at Costco, but there usually isn’t a lot of space on the flat cart for what are essentially frivolous purchases.
Not too shabby, I think. Especially with today’s food prices!
Today was another one of those days where I just quickly fed the outside cats early, and left the rest of my morning routine for later. As I write this, we are at 16C/61F, with a “real feel” of 13C/55F.
I’m quite enjoying this, but it’s a bit cool for the garden.
Before I did what would normally be my morning rounds in the afternoon, I headed out to the town north of us to pick up more cat kibble at the livestock supply place. The inside cats’ kibble was out completely. With my mother’s upcoming eye appointment in the city on the day we would normally do our first stock up shop in the city, I decided to get two 40 pounds bags this time, for both the outside and inside cats. While I was in town, I hit the grocery store for a few items as well. Normally, I wouldn’t, as groceries are quite a bit more expensive, but not as expensive as the extra gas it would take to drive to the town nearer to home, where we usually do our smaller trips.
Once back home and everything put away, I gave both the inside and outside cats a light feeding. The outside cats were practically fighting each other to get at the bowls.
The inside cats, not so much! 😄
After feeding the outside cats, I could finally walk without having them try and trip me, meowing for food, and I was finally able to do the rest of my rounds. There was even things to harvest!
The two larger melons you can see in the photo fell off their vines as soon as I lifted them.
That little Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon is so tiny! With the stem completely shriveled up, though, there was no point in leaving it. I’m curious as to what it will look like, inside!
With the cooler weather, I wasn’t actually expecting to harvest tomatoes, but some of them looked ready enough. We have so many other tomatoes inside right now, these can stay in the bin in the cat free zone to ripe more before we use them. These are the Forme de Couer tomatoes – including one green one that broke off its vine as I was harvesting the red one next to it – and Black Cherry tomatoes. No San Marzano or Chocolate Cherries to harvest this time around.
Last night, my older daughter made a large pot of tomato soup using fresh tomatoes that was quite delicious. After I finished what I was doing outside, I got the Crockpot set up to make more tomato sauce/base. I used some of the small onions that were harvested yesterday, as well as 8 or 10 cloves of our garlic – the strings of garlic have been brought in from the garage and can now go into the root cellar, making room for the onions that can be braided. Then I just used up what vegetables we had on hand. This time, that included a Little Finger eggplant, one Dragonfly pepper (any more than that, and I probably couldn’t eat it), the one little green zucchini we had, and all the beans that were left over. It got whatever seasonings I felt like using (basil, thyme, paprika and turmeric, this time), plus salt and pepper, along with some olive oil and apple cider vinegar. Then as many tomatoes as could be fit into the Crockpot were added. This time, I seeded them, only to reduce the amount of liquid, so it won’t take so long to cook it down to the thickness we want.
This will be left to cook on high for a few hours, while there are people up and about to tend to it, then on low into the night, for maybe 6 hours. When the time runs out, the Crockpot automatically switches to the warm setting, which is still hot enough to keep cooking it. In the morning, it will be blitzed with the immersion blender, then go back on high, with the lid propped open to release moisture, until it’s cooked down to the thickness we want.
After that, we leave it to cool down completely, generally using some of it as a pasta sauce while it’s still hot. Once cooled, it’ll go into freezer bags and into the freezer. We can then use it later as a sauce, as the base for a tomato soup, or included in any “use watcha got” soup we make.
But I’m getting ahead of myself!
When I first headed out to check on the garden beds, I just had to get some photos of the Crespo squash. Our mighty, mighty Crespo squash! It is absolutely thriving!
I actually found two new squash developing, including the first one you see in the slideshow below.
Yup. That’s in the cherry trees! That one looks like it will be a survivor. It’s even bigger than the one in the second image that I’ve been watching. I wasn’t sure if that one got well pollinated or not. It’s starting to look like it has, but the first one that started growing in the trees died off when it was bigger than this, so it’s hard to say at this point.
The next photo shows one on a vine that’s stretching into the spruce grove. I’m pretty sure that one was successfully pollinated, and has a good chance of survival.
The next photo is of another surprise find. It was buried in the tall grass, so I weeded around it and set it on a brick to keep it off the wet ground.
I didn’t try to get photos of the two larger ones growing inside the bean trellis, but I just had to get a photo of the largest one, with my foot for perspective. THAT is more like they are supposed to look like. Though this one is still small for the variety, it’s the largest we’ve ever managed to grow, and I’ve been trying to grow these for something like four years now!
This new bed and location is definitely ideal for this squash. Even the deer are leaving it alone! Which is surprising, since they go through the path right next to the squash, to get in and out of the spruce grove, and I know they were eating the sugar snap peas in the bed not far away. The first year we grew these, the deer and groundhogs got to them several times before we could get enough barriers around them.
Now, we just need the frost to hold off longer, to give them a chance to mature more!
It would be great if we had another mild winter like last year, but that was a strong El Nino year, and this year we’re getting a strong La Nina – which typically means a colder, harsher winter, in our region. Which seems to be what the Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting, too.
We shall see.
Until then, I’m going to appreciate the upcoming warm weather that’s in the forecast for the next week.
The Re-Farmer 