We haven’t seen a lot of bird action at the bird feeder stand we’ve moved outside our living room window. The odd nuthatch would show up on the platform, or a blue jay would land on the hook for the hanging feeder, but that was about it.
Today, some goldfinches discovered it, and my husband was able to get some photos. :-)
Next time we do our big shopping, we’ll pick up a bag of mixed birdseed, and see what else shows up! :-)
The Re-Farmer
For the past few days, we haven’t been putting anything out at the feeding station; there was no point in continuing to put out deer feed this time of year, so I didn’t bother buying more when we ran out. When next we buy seeds, I hope to get mixed bird seed, and have a bird feeder out the living room window to put it in. :-)
There are still enough seeds left on the ground to attract birds, and today, I got photos of a male redwing blackbird (the females look VERY different).
This particular bird has very little of the red showing through its wing. Perhaps it is transitioning from juvenile to adult?
The red is certainly there, though under black feathers.
I really wasn’t expecting to see them in our yard, since they prefer wet and marshy areas.
Not that there are much of those right now.
I’ve read in the news today that there are 3 fires threatening some communities to the west of us. Not close enough for us to see any smoke.
We also got weather alerts today, for the heat. Though our local temperature is at “only” 19C, the next town is at 29C. I wish I knew where our local weather readings are coming from, because they seem to be on the low side. I’d like to see the weather station and how it’s situated. The station in the next town over is a class A station; about as perfectly situated as a weather station can be.
Stating tonight and through to Friday, there are possible thunderstorms but all for the southern and western parts of the province. They will likely miss us, though I hope we at least get rain. Temperatures are predicted to hit 23-25C, with humidexes of 31-35C.
From the weather alert;
Residents of and visitors to the above mentioned regions are advised to take the following precautions to protect themselves, their families and their neighbours;
And that is why we aren’t doing yard work during the day!
I think we might want to move the bird bath over to the East side of the house, too, once we clean it up.
The Re-Farmer
A chilly day today – enough that we actually turned the furnace back up again – but that’s okay. We got rain!
Not much, mind you, and I never actually saw it rain, but things are damp out there, which is so good to see. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to get more. I certainly hope we do! As nice as what we got today was, it’s no where near enough, though we are still supposed to get more now and again, throughout the night.
We saw a new bird this morning. I just barely got a few photos before it took off.
An American Goldfinch. I’ve seen them at my sister’s bird feeder, and was hoping they would show up in our area, too. Just the one, so far, but at least I know we can expect to see more of them.
Though we did get rain today, there is still a burn ban, and we haven’t done a burn in ages, so our trip to the dump today included stuff that would normally go into the burn barrel. We also got another load of paint out of the garage. One more trip should clear out the last of what’s there right now.
After going to the dump, my daughter and I went into town for an errand, taking advantage of the trip to play some Pokemon Go. Which meant our regular stop at a Pokegym at the beach. The lake was so choppy in the wind, I had to go and get pictures.
The town has finished grooming the beach. It all looks like a giant Zen garden right now. :-D
Definitely not boating conditions! The water is still very cold, and the wind off of the lake was pretty chill. Neither of us had jackets, so we didn’t stay long!
With the chill and the damp, this evening sounds like a good time to sit with a hot cup of tea and catch up on some crochet. :-D
The Re-Farmer
First off, a happy mother’s day to all the moms out there. I hope you had a lovely day of it. My own was nice and quiet, and I am quite delighted with my early mother’s day gift from my husband; an OBD II diagnostic tool that plugs into the van, with readings sent to an app on my phone via Bluetooth.
According to it, the van is doing just great. In the near future, I’ll have to get my daughter to drive, so I can see what readings come up while driving.
My husband knows what makes my heart to pitter patter very well! :-D
We haven’t been seeing any deer lately, again, though the piles of feed I’m leaving out in the evening are gone in the the morning, so they do seem to still be coming out. There is still plenty of scattered grain for the birds, though. Right now, we’re still getting mostly fox sparrows and white throated sparrows, but today we saw a new one.
There were only two of them, so we almost missed them among the other birds.
Next to the white throated sparrow, you can see the bodies are almost identical, until you get to the head, neck and chest. I’m guessing that means it’s also a type of sparrow, but a quick search for sparrows has brought up nothing with a head like that. I’ll have to try looking some more later, but if you happen to know what it is, please feel free to let me know in the comments. :-)
Update: May 14
It looks like the new bird is a Harris’s Sparrow.
The Re-Farmer
Early this morning, I spotted some movement at the edge of our spruce grove. It turned out to be a bird, enthusiastically digging and pecking at the ground. A surprisingly large bird; not as big as a grouse, but certainly bigger than a blue jay or crow. Not something I recall seeing before. Unfortunately, it was too far to identify by eye, so I got some pictures zoomed in as far as our lens can go. They’re not good pictures, but enough to identify it.
From what I can find, it appears to be a Northern Flicker, though there are different kinds that can look quite different.
The most distinctive thing about it was the splash of red at the back of the neck. The other distinguishing feature is the black bib.
A number of the photos of Northern Flickers I saw also had a splash of red on the cheek, but this one did not have that.
As it later flew away, I was able to see the underside of its wings, which appeared to be a bright yellow.
The Norther Flicker is a member of the woodpecker family, so it’s interesting that this one was pecking, not at wood, but at the ground.
Later on, my younger daughter and I got some progress done on the sorted wood piles in the garden. We’ve now removed all the wood we’d already sorted, except for the pile I set aside to keep for potential projects. More will be added to it as we finish going through the original pile. When we got to the larger pieces, we had to saw most of them in half so they would fit in the wheel barrows. We could really tell when we were cutting apple wood! The wood is so much harder, and the patterns in the rings are so distinctive and lovely. Even the ones I didn’t choose to keep, I set them to one side in the piles we’re making near the fire pit, for use when we’re cooking or, if all goes well, able to do some smoking.
My poor daughter. By the time we were done for the day, she was just wasted. She was really too sick to be doing this sort of work, but she did it anyways, and I really appreciate it!
After that, I went to the post office and, along the way, I found our shaggy neighbours were closer to the road, so I pulled over to get some photos.
Zooming in with a cell phone doesn’t get very good pictures, unfortunately, but still. Bison!
We got some unexpected people visitors today. First, my brother and his Lady Fair, who live nearby, came over to pick up the last of some stuff he’s got in our root cellar. I was all excited because his beautiful dog finally allows me to pet him! Then my older brother came by, just as they we leaving. My mother’s car has been stored here for the winter, and she wants to register it again soon, so he came to put the battery back in. It turned out to need charging, so he started doing some stuff at the barn. When I went out to join him, I stopped to take a look at a pile of wood that is sitting in the barn yard.
Only to discover, it’s not a pile of wood. It’s a pile of something else, covered in wood.
What on earth was I seeing under there?
Whatever the wood is covering has moss growing on it, and there’s a layer of plastic. Something is showing through holes that I at first thought was ashes?
So I asked my brother.
It’s insulation. My youngest brother had put it there.
My youngest brother died in 2010.
Why is it there? My brother didn’t know.
The wood on top showed up more recently.
What on earth are we going to do with a plastic covered, moss covered, wood covered, pile of insulation, sitting in the barn yard?
The Re-Farmer
It was a rather cold day today, but peaceful. At least for us. From what I’ve heard, two more homes were lost in yesterday’s fire to the North of us. At this point, I know nothing more. The province’s website that is supposed to have an up-to-date interactive map of current fires has not been much help. It didn’t have either of the local fires on there at all. I’ve seen others comment on the site’s lack of updating, as they’ve had to turn to social media to keep on top of the fire situation.
We never got the predicted showers, but at least with the reduced wind and colder temperatures, the fire risk has dropped a bit.
It was another day of the birds, outside. I think it might be a while before the deer start coming back.
Oh, my. As I was inserting the above photos, I heard another thump at the dining room window. I went outside and found a little junco on the ground. My younger daughter came out to hold on to it, to keep it safe from the cats, until it was ready to fly away on its own. I’m hearing her come back inside right now, so it must be gone.
This is the second junco we’ve tended to after it hit the dining room window, just today. The earlier one took quite a bit longer to recover.
Here is the female, dark eyed junco from earlier today, in my daughter’s hands. It was very calm about being held, too.
It started to stand itself up and look around after a minute or so. Note its bent under foot. The other foot was like that, too. No damage, it turned out. It seems that it just wasn’t aware of it, quite yet.
When it finally did start to flutter away, it just moved over to my daughter’s arm. And immediately pooped on her! :-D
It seemed fully aware at this point, looking around and watching us closely, but content to stay on her arm for several minutes more.
After a while, it flew off to the bench seat on the platform to our old clothes line. There was a cat about, though, so I came over to encourage it away. It moved to this bush and stayed there for another minute or so before finally flying away, none the worse for the experience.
While it’s unfortunate so many birds are hitting our window hard enough to stun themselves, it is so amazing to be able to hold them and watch over them until they can fly away on their own. They seem to like the warmth of our hands as they recover, too.
Pretty awesome!
The Re-Farmer
With the fires in the area, it’s no surprise that we aren’t seeing any deer, at all. It has, however, been a day full of birds outside our window.
Mr. Blue Jay allowed me to take his photograph today, though they certainly did make me work for a good shot!
In amongst the masses of bark eyed juncos, this bird went off into the flower garden and started digging like mad into the dried leaves.
I’ve had two strong suggestions as to what this bird is. Either a fox sparrow, or a type of thrush. I spent some time looking and comparing photos online to ones I’d taken myself.
Bird identification sites often have really unhelpful photos, I’ve come to notice.
Ultimately, it was the markings on the head that made the ID for me. These are fox sparrows, of the “red” variety.
Speaking of red.
I had taken so many pictures of these red birds before the snow fell, but it never occurred to me to try and identify them. I think I may have just lumped them in as another type of bird in my mind. While looking up local bird species online, however, I found photos of these guys, and it turns out they are purple finches. In the above photo, you see both the bright red males, and the less showy females.
As I was zooming in to get photos of what I though might have been the thrush/fox sparrow I wanted to identify, the bird turned and I realized I was looking at a new visitor!
This is a male white throated sparrow. Love that distinctive patterning on the head. It made it much easier to identify it, though it wasn’t any easier to find online. My bird book doesn’t have it at all, though it does have several other types of sparrows.
Just look at the face! :-D
Looks like some females were in the crowd, too.
Weather willing, I will soon be raking near this area, to get some of the leaves out of the flower bed and clean up dead branches. We are finally starting to see some green forcing its way through the dead leaves. Not too much longer, and we’ll be able to start trying to identify the plants around here, as well as the birds! :-)
The Re-Farmer
Alas, no pictures of deer today. I did see one cautiously making its way towards the house, just a few minutes ago, but it saw me move in the window and dashed right off.
Sadness.
I did, however, manage to get a photo of a blue jay today. For the past few weeks, even if I’ve been at the window, watching them for a while, the moment I get behind the camera, they all fly off!
This morning, I managed to get just one decent picture, through the sun reflected on the window.
I love how they collect so many seeds in their beaks like that, before flying off.
It was a fairly quite day today. We’re still in recovery mode and pretty low on energy. My younger daughter and I made a run to the dump with our garbage and recycling, before heading to town to find a new handle for our garage door. In the process, I remembered to pick up some chain and a carabiner to replace the heavy duty wire that’s been used to hold our main gate steady. It has a sliding bar across the top to close it. I’m not sure why it also needed the wire to hold it closed, and one of these days, I’ll remember to ask a sibling about it. :-D The chain and carabiner will be much easier to handle than twisting and untwisting the wire every time. It’ll look better, too! Plus, we’ll have the ability to add a lock as well, if we ever need to. Sadly, there have always been people who seek out solitary farms as targets for theft and vandalism. At best, the RCMP are at least half an hour away, and that assumes they can even find any individual farm. My oldest brother and I are already talking about adding a security camera on the garage, which would catch anyone coming in or out of the driveway, and another on the house itself.
Such is life, even in the sticks!
My daughter and I went to two different hardware stores, looking for a garage door handle. Both stores had only one option available! They were even the same brand and style. On the plus side, the second place we went to had a much, much better price.
On the down side, while driving to town, I went into a coughing fit so bad, I had to pull over and get her to drive the rest of the way.
It’s so nice having another driver available!
This cold has really done a number on my chronic cough. :-(
We had some other things happen that were polar opposites. Such as my husband’s disability payment coming in early (they do that every now and then!) on the plus side, then getting a call from the tax preparer and finding out he’s now owing $3000 instead of the $1300 that came up when we tried using Turbotax at home. I don’t understand how he can owe anything. He’s supposed to be paid back taxes, retroactively, from two years ago! And here we thought getting our taxes professionally done would mean it would be better, not worse. On top of that, it’s going to cost us almost $70 in fees.
*sigh*
This has happened every time we’ve moved back to this province, no matter how late in the year we’ve returned. We would be expecting a return, only to end up owing thousands. This time, though, I am sure that has to be some kind of mistake.
Living here was supposed to save us money. Instead, it’s been unexpected expenses, one right after the other!
Ah, well. We’ll figure it out in good time.
The Re-Farmer
For the past while, we’ve had a huge drop in deer visits. I didn’t see any yesterday, until quite late, when one showed up, then ran off when it saw me in the window. Pretty sure it was a new one, since our regulars are no longer bothered by seeing us.
We are certainly getting plenty of birds, though, including this new one that I’ve been trying to identify.
There were two or three of them among the dark eyed juncos and the male redpolls that were also in the feeding station. Looking through my bird book, its body looks similar to a Brown Thrasher, but the eye and beak are totally different. Another closer match is the Fox Sparrow, but according to the book, we’re not really in their territory. They might be passing through during migration, if that’s what they are.
If anyone reading this knows what they are, please let me know in the comments! Thanks. :-)
As I was taking pictures of the new birds, there was a sudden whoosh of movement and all the birds flew off.
Well, almost all.
What a beautiful hawk! I barely managed to tilt the tripod over to snap a few quick pictures before it flew off, with its meal, into the trees. Much to my surprise, the pictures all turned out, but only a couple caught the hawk’s face as it looked over before flying off.
This is one of the things we have to consider, if we do get chickens.
Later on, I went to tell my older daughter, who was upstairs, about the hawk. She hadn’t seen the hawk, but she did see the fallout, as panicked birds suddenly flew up, including one that smacked right into the window near her.
She went out onto the roof and moved it, so it could fly off when it regained consciousness.
Except, it didn’t. It hit the window hard enough to kill itself. It looked like one of the new birds, too. :-(
Wow.
This all happened in the mid morning or so. Shortly before noon, my younger daughter and I headed out to the city – our first trip to the city since all that work was done on the van – for a much needed Costco trip.
Just to jump ahead a bit, the van ran beautifully. Also, I didn’t get a call back from the garage about those parts they’d ordered for me. I’m not sure how I would have handled such a call, now that the work they wanted to do turns out to not be needed at all. Aside from not bringing the van in, of course.
I had hoped, even though it’s a Friday, going to Costco in the early afternoon would mean missing out on the crowds.
Maybe we did, but it was still insanely busy.
We didn’t go to the closer one, which is smaller, has a ridiculously horrible parking situation, and where the pharmacy staff were such a problem. Instead, we went to one that was not only larger, but also near a whole lot of other shopping.
Along with our usual bulk grocery shopping, I had one goal in mind. To get more undies for my husband. We’re in the city. That shouldn’t be a problem, right?
Well, it turns out that Costco didn’t carry any in his size. They do in clothing, just not in underwear. Which makes no sense.
So after we finished at Costco, with all its joyous moments (seriously; what is it about people who saunter to a stop, blocking the entire isle, and just stand there, staring into space? This happened several times, all different people!), we figured we’d just go to that mall up the block. They had a Marshals there. Marshals has clothes, right?
We’ve never actually been to a Marshals before.
It turned out to be kinda like a crappy Winners. We found the teeny, tiny men’s underwear section, half of which was shirts, and it was such a disaster, I could barely find anything at all, never mind the size and style I wanted. There was only one brand, too – an expensive one, of course.
But we’re in a mall, right? There’s lots of other stores we can try, right?
I found a map and… it wasn’t very encouraging. Still, there were several possibilities among the athletic stores.
We went to about 4 or 5 different shops. Any that did have men’s underwear had hardly anything at all, none in the style I was looking for, and certainly not the size.
What the heck?
As we were leaving the mall, my daughter pointed out that there was a Winners across the road. So that’s where we tried next.
It was better than the Marshals, at least. The shelves were better organized, but again, there was only one tiny display for the men’s section, and nothing in the size we were after.
I checked on my phone and found the nearest Walmart. I figured that would be our last stop. Even if we didn’t find the style I was after, if I could only find the size, that would be great.
Walmart, at least, has a nice, big section for men’s underclothes – but still a tiny clothing section.
Men, you guys are really short changed in the clothing department! Sheesh!
We found several brands in the style we wanted. Yay, right?
Nope.
There was a lot out of stock, so my daughter and I kept hunting for the right size, somewhere. After a while, I stopped looking at what was there and started looking at the labels in front of the hooks.
It turned out they weren’t just out of stock. They didn’t even CARRY the size we needed. In any brand, or any style!
What the heck??? He wears a common size. Why don’t they have it?
This was supposed to be our last stop, but we had noticed further down the parking lot, a Marks.
One more try…
Sure enough, we actually found both the style and size we were after!!! Finally! So I bought as many packages as I could afford without messing up our budget.
When we got to the counter, me looking a little wild eyed by now, the cashier asked us if we’d found everything we were looking for.
I told her that yes, we did, and that they were the ONLY ones to have what we were looking for. She looked completely surprised. Not even Walmart, she asked? Nope. Nothing in this size. That is so strange, she tells me.
It’s their most popular size.
Which doesn’t surprise me in the least. So why don’t other places even HAVE the size at all?
Who know buying underwear would be so difficult?
By the time that was done, we were both exhausted and more than ready to go home.
I really, really dislike shopping.
After we got home and unloaded, it occurred to me that none of us had the energy to cook supper. My older daughter is sick, my younger daughter is also getting sick, and just unloading the van was more than enough to remind me that I’m certainly not yet recovered from this stupid cold.
Since my daughter can now legally drive, I asked if she was up to a trip into town, so we could get some take-out. Thankfully, she was. So off we went to the van and…
When she tried to open the garage door, the handle came off.
Talking to my oldest brother not long ago, I mentioned this. He told me that thing has needed replacing for probably 15 years. It just never got done. It was on our list of things to fix sooner rather than later. Well, it just got bumped up higher on the list. :-D
My daughter had to go into the garage from the back door (which is used so rarely, it has self-seeded trees growing in front of it) and open it from the inside. The bar that runs through the hole to the handle is still there, and I couldn’t find any pieces that fell off onto the ground, so I’m actually not sure why the handle hadn’t fallen off sooner! :-D
I was just informed that we had deer outside our living room window again. A group of four. It’s almost completely dark at the moment, but still enough light for us to see them. And for them to see us. And hear us. Even the creaking of the floor had their ears going in all directions, and they could hear my daughter cough! As I was at the window, one was watching me until I shifted slightly, and off it ran, startling the others away.
So we will stay away from the window for a while, in hopes they come back.
Looks like we’ll be going into town again tomorrow, even if it’s just to pick up a new handle for the garage door! :-D
The Re-Farmer
This morning, I took my younger daughter for her knowledge test to transfer her driver’s license to this province.
Butterscotch, in command of the deer feeding station.
To recap: she did not have a full license; just the learner’s license. She never had a chance to take her road test. When she tried to transfer her license, once they saw it was a learners, she was told she had to take the written test to get a new license for this province. Then, because we are past the 90 day grace period, they kept her license, because she cannot legally drive in this province with it.
After doing the online practice tests, my daughter was quite worried about this. So many of the questions were unrelated to the rules of the road, or phrased so badly and without context, it was difficult to understand what was actually being asked.
We ended up leaving more than an hour early – and she was still worried about being late! Ah, a daughter after my own heart. :-D On the way, we stopped in the town my mother lives in to fill the gas tank. This is the gas station we’d stopped at when we were bleeding coolant, and one of our regular gas jockeys had crawled under and found the broken pipe. Well, he was there this morning. When he saw us, he came over and asked how things went, so I entertained him with the story. Turns out he was all worried about us, and was so happy to find out everything turned out okay!
One, lone dark eyed junco, just chillin’
I really like this gas station. They have such great people working there. Plus, they have this section of home baked goodies that no one else has, because they’re baked by one of the gas jockeys! :-D It’s become a bit of a ritual, that when we stop there for gas, I pick up some cookies (they are sold in twos) or a piece of Nanaimo bar as a special treat.
The city we went to is roughly an hour’s drive, and we’d left so early that, even with the stop for gas, we were an hour early. Which worked out, because neither of us had had breakfast, plus it gave us the chance to find the place, first. Which turned out to be incredibly easy to find. We were told to arrive about 15 minutes early, so that’s what we did.
When my daughter got called up, she had all her paperwork from the broker that started her file for her, ready to go. The lady helping her just had to look up the file and continue the process. She was really great about explaining the exam process, and how my daughter needed to get a minimum of 24 out of 30 questions correct, and so on. Then she took my daughter to the testing computer. The questions turned out to be MUCH more realistic than in the online practice tests. They actually made sense, and were about the rules of the road.
She did 24 questions, then the test shut down, because she’d got them all correct. So she got 100% on her knowledge test. Awesome!
Then she had to do the eye test, were we discovered that she does NOT need her glasses to drive. She will use them, because she prefers to (she gets headaches from eye strain if she doesn’t), but there will be no restriction on her license. Cool!
The Mothman makes an appearance!
When the final processing for her license was started, we hit a problem.
The system was asking for her to turn over her current license.
Which had already been taken.
It turns out, they shouldn’t have done that. While my daughter could not legally drive here with it, it was still a valid license. She could still use it in our previous province, plus it was her valid photo ID, until 2022.
Not only that, but when her license was scanned, they only scanned one side. So even though the person helping us could find the scanned image on file, she had only the front information, not the back.
Now, the only reason this was an issue was a matter of credit for time driving. If they could use her current license, she could go for her road test at any time, because she’s been driving on her learner’s license for more than 5 years. If, however, they couldn’t use it, she would not be able to take her road test for at least 9 months.
The woman helping us called the broker where we’d started the process, to find out if they still had the license, but the person who started the file wasn’t available. After some discussion, they figured it got sent away already to the department all returned licenses go to. So she phoned there.
The license had arrived there, just yesterday!
Which meant they could scan both sides of the old license for the file. The woman helping us, meanwhile, used a copy of the scanned front of the license already on file, just to be extra sure – and my daughter got a copy for her own files, too, just as I did with mine.
Because of when her birthday is, though, when she gets her plastic copy, it’ll only be valid until the end of August. Which meant it cost less to process her license, since they only charged for the shorter time.
Cool.
As we were doing this, I told the woman helping us that I had some ID related questions for after it was all done. I had shared some of the issues I’d had with getting my license during conversation. When my daughter got her temporary license, I told the woman helping us about my husband’s attempt to get his license.
As soon as I said that his ID didn’t match his birth certificate, she knew exactly what was coming; he was told to get a legal name change.
Yup.
I brought up how this didn’t make any sense. He’s already using his legal name. It’s on his birth certificate. Everything he’s got – save his old license in this province, for some reason – has the name he uses. Even the Department of National Defense and the Government of Canada is good with the name he uses.
As we were talking, a guy came over and asked if he could join in, and he was able to give us more information. What it comes down to is, it’s up to the Identity Unit. Whatever they say, everyone else’s hands are tied, and they are basically the overseers of identity in this province. We talked about the issues of identity theft and security, which I totally get, but it still doesn’t make sense to demand that my husband change his legal name to… his legal name.
At one point, he asked why my husband wasn’t interesting in doing the legal name change, and my response was basically, why should he have to go through all that process, when he’s already using his legal name. In the conversation, I used as an example how it’s not like my sister, whose legal name is one thing, but the name she uses is completely different. It’s not entirely even an English version of her birth name, since there really isn’t any English equivalent. This is his legal name that is on his birth certificate. Every other place has been fine with using his second name. He has always used this name. Sure, they can understandably change things now, but why should he essentially be retroactively held to these requirements? It’s still his legal name.
Well, it turns out this guy completely understood not wanting to go the legal name change route. He’s newly married, and his wife is in the process of legally changing to her married name. The whole thing costs about $200, there are many hoops to jump, and one of those hoops is to go to the RCMP and get fingerprinted.
With the amount of pain my husband is in, that kind of running around is asking way too much.
In the end, he suggested we try calling the Ombudsman, explaining the situation, and asking for an exemption. We even got the name and phone number.
I really, really hope this works out, because this whole thing is completely ridiculous.
They were both extremely helpful and awesome, and I’m so glad I asked them about it.
Before we left, we paused to use the bathroom before I left. When I came out and my daughter took her turn, the woman that had been helping us asked, was my sister in law’s last name XXX? Why yes, it is, except she’s my sister, not my sister in law.
When I had used my sister’s names as an example, and she started talking about the names issue with a co-worker, it occurred to her that she knew someone by that name – and it’s a very uncommon name. So she figured she’s ask me when I came out of the washroom. It turns out that, not only does she know my sister, but they are cousins, by marriage!
That was so funny! I ended up staying and chatting with her for a while, with my daughter joining us as I told her about our move back to the farm and all the “fun” it’s been, dealing with my parents’ things, the state of the house, and all the interesting things we’ve been discovering. That led us to talking about how, especially in our parents’ generation, there was such an insistence of doing everything themselves, instead of paying someone else to do it, even when in the long term, it would be cheaper to pay someone else to do it! Or to buy new instead of second hand, etc. She knew first hand what it was like! :-D
It wasn’t until we were walking to the van and my daughter asked about it that I realized she’s missed the part about how this woman was related to her aunt. Ah, what a small world it is!
Trüllbus the Crime Eater, coming through!
After we finished there, my daughter and I headed to the nearby Walmart. Our monthly shopping plans have had to change, with my husband’s newest medical appointment, so we did most of our non-Costco monthly shopping today. Normally, we’d wait until the last business day of the month, when his disability payment comes in, but today is when the much smaller CPP Disability comes in. It’s enough to do the monthly grocery shopping, at least. Plus, I really wanted to finally pick up some new underwear for him, what with either not being able to find his size in the style he wanted, or only being able to find them at $15 for a single pair, with only one lower end brand available.
Amazingly, not even the Walmart had his style in his size. There were 4 or 5 different brands, and NONE of them had it. In fact, they only seemed to have them in two sizes; small and medium. What the heck? Is there some sort of embargo on briefs going on I don’t know about? I finally got a package of 4 in the closest to the style he wanted I could find (at least the price was good!), but I can’t believe I still couldn’t even find what he wanted at a WALMART, in a city! Yeah, it’s a small city, but still… Sheesh!
Since we were there anyways, we paused to look at some of the summer stuff that’s out now. It occurred to me that I have yet to see a garden hose anywhere around here. I still want to check the garden shed, but there is no way my dad didn’t have garden hoses! If they’re not in the garden shed, then they found some legs and walked away. Along with too many other things around here. :-(
We’re also interested in getting a weed whacker – preferably an electric one – so we priced those out, too. Pretty reasonable. We are also looking to get a battery operated chain saw, though not at Walmart. We’ve got at least 4 chain saws in the garage and, as far as I know, none of them work. One could probably be considered an antique! I have no interest in hauling around jerry cans of fuel anymore, and the modern electric tools are just as powerful as the ones that run on fuel.
So we got the small grocery shopping done, including stocking up on distilled water for my husband’s CPAP. That done, we had one more stop to make; back to the town closest to home to pick up some prescription refills. As my older daughter has caught my cold (I’m still coughing myself, but at least I’m feeling better) and was feeling really awful today, we also made sure to pick up some “medication” for her. At the liquor store, in the form of a nice, spiced whiskey. :-D We rarely drink, so when we do, it’s at least a decent quality! :-D
Hopefully, we’ll all be healthy again soon, and can start manhandling the last of my parents’ stuff we need to move to the shed. The snow is gone and the ground it dry. It’s just that 2 out of 3 of us are too sick to do the physical labour. :-(
While in town, we took the time to play a bit of Pokemon Go, and at one point we were parked next to an arts and crafts store, which is also part of a used book store. I haven’t been there since we last lived in this province, so we decided to take a look.
I don’t know why they advertise as an arts and crafts store. They had basically nothing.
But we did come out with a whole pile of Brother Cadfael books. :-D
After all the running around, we were so glad to finally get home. Now that my daughter has her license, that’s one more thing to strike off the list! Next up is for my older daughter to get her ID transferred.
Little by little, it’s getting done.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 