It seems so very strange to be sitting here and realizing it’s almost 6pm right now, and we’ve got bright sunshine outside. I’ve gotten so used to the sun setting between 4:40 and 5pm, it feels almost wrong for the sun to still be up. Of course, we just had daylight saving time a few days, which would account for some of that, but I was getting this sense even before the switch.
Before I go on, though, we must have the cuteness!
Would you look at those adorable faces! Clarence and Cheddar.
You’d never know from the photo that Clarence is quite the troublemaker. 😁😄 One of his favourite things to do is run and jump onto my office chair before I can reach it to sit down. He will then roll onto his back and look at me, like he’s all innocent. 😄
Anyhow…
Today has been a pretty quiet day, though I made a discovery this morning, while I was outside feeding the cats this morning.
For some time now, I’ve been finding frozen throw up on the ground here and there, with roundworms in it. Surprisingly large and distinctive looking things! On learning that Button needed to be treated for worms 3 times before he was clear of them – and then he suddenly grew to the size he should have been for his age – I just sort of figured it was from one of the tiny cats. There are three small ones, plus one more that’s a bit bigger, but not by much. My bets were on The Grink, a black and white, but the other three white and greys were candidates, too.
While going to the isolation shelter with kibble, I just happened to be in time to see a cat that had finished throwing up, and yes, the throw up had worms in it. The cat, however, was not any of the ones I thought it would be! It was a tabby that’s about the same age as my suspects. It’s the one that was all sick and stuffy, and allowed us to treat him, last fall. He is now somewhat socialized. He’s quite a bit larger than the suspects, which is why I hadn’t considered it might be him.
In a way, I’m glad it’s this one, since he is socialized enough that the chances of treating him are much higher. The Cat Lady was going to try and get some medication for us, but 1) we weren’t sure which cat needed to be treated and 2) if it turned out to be one of the more feral ones, we wouldn’t be able to use it anyhow. Of course, it’s also possible more than one cat has been leaving evidence of roundworms frozen in the snow, so that may still be true.
We had a Colorado Low making its way up today which, for our area, meant we did get a pretty good snowfall shortly after I’d gone back inside, but nothing major. The south part of the province got a lot more than we did. My husband’s bubble packs were delivered late this morning, and it had been snowing a while by then. The current pharmacy delivery driver is also a school bus driver; I see him go back and forth past our place, every weekday, on the trail cam files. He starts his deliveries after he’s parked his bus in the morning, and told me about the different areas he’d already been to, and still had to go to. By the time his deliveries were done, he would be going straight back to the bus for more driving! Deliveries are only one day a week, but it does make for a long day of driving for him! Thankfully, the road conditions were still pretty good, and the snow stopped not long after.
I did end up going out later this afternoon. Several packages had arrived earlier than tracking said they would, including a large one for my husband, so I got a daughter to come along and help load it into the truck. It was not at all heavy, but awkward – and fragile! My husband was able to get himself a larger monitor for his computer. It’s a gaming monitor, with a curved screen, but he got it mostly for reading electronic books. With his disability, he spends a lot of time on his computer, and he was having a very hard time being able to see on his old monitor. This one is much, much easier on his eyes. The other monitor is still good, though. My daughters both have dual monitors for their desktops; an essential for my older daughter as she works on commissions. One of her monitors is quite old and starting to die, so she will have a much newer monitor to replace it.
Speaking of which, my older daughter has a birthday this month. She has chosen Pizza Hut take out for her birthday dinner. It’s a bit early, but we will probably be doing that tomorrow. While I’ve given up sugar and simple carbs for Lent, exceptions are made for special occasions – like birthdays!
As I write this, we are at -4C/25F and haven’t reached our high of the day yet – and it will not get any colder through the night. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to have a high of 2C/36F, then it’s supposed to drop below freezing again. So tomorrow will be a good day for the drive to pick up birthday pizza! We’re trying a different location this time, and will be going to the town our new doctor is in. In fact, the Pizza Hut is right near the clinic – and a grocery store. So I’ll be taking advantage of that to pick up a few things, including a birthday cake. Or a cream pie. Or cheesecake. My younger daughter will be with me, so she will help me choose. 😊
All in all, I’ve been quite enjoying another nice, quiet day! I admit, though, I’ve been procrastinating terribly. I want to set up an area in the basement to start seeds, but I just haven’t been able to get to it. There isn’t a lot my daughters can do to help me, since I haven’t quite decided how I’ll be setting up – I need to consider that, if we have a wet spring, water is going to seep through the concrete even in the new part of the basement, which has weeping tile, which isn’t doing its job anymore. That means setting up pedestal fans, box fans and blower fans all over, again.
The main issue, though, is the stairs. Stairs and my knees are not a good combination. Especially if I’m going to be carrying anything.
I was tending to the flexible hose for the emergency septic diverter, getting any liquid sitting in it, out, and the cats were very interested! Syndol, however, went for a post-eye view! 😁
This morning, I was just starting to feed the cats outside, when my cell phone started ringing.
*sigh*
There’s really just one place that calls my cell phone.
Home care.
Yup. They were short staffed again. This time for my mother’s morning meds.
Given what time it was, I quickly finished feeding the cats, grabbed my purse, then finished short rounds before heading to my mother’s. With what time she’s supposed to take her morning medications, I didn’t have time to change or call her ahead. So my mother got a bit of a surprise when I came in the door instead of home care this morning!
I wasn’t there for very long, but a lot happened in that short time. She has some confusion about her meds and that led to her making all sorts of assumptions and accusations. Then she commented on how the case coordinator we had a meeting with yesterday had said we’d soon be getting rid of the lock box. Very clearly, she said this, according to my mother.
Which is the opposite of what she actually said.
After answering her as best I could while doing her meds, I took her blood pressure. It is much better this early in the day than in the evening. She had already made herself some breakfast, but I was able to empty her commode for her. I offered to help her dress, but she was happy to stay in her warm and fluffy night gown today, as she doesn’t need to go anywhere. My sister will be coming by later, so she will be able to do more light housekeeping and laundry for her. Hopefully, she also found a hot water bottle and some Velcro shoes for my mother, too. Finding shoes that my mother can get her feet into is even harder than for me. She has massive bunions and bunionettes, so her feet are much, much wider at the ball of the foot, even compared to mine. My sister was also planning to bring some microwave dinners as well. Home care will be able to heat those up for Mom, if she wants them to.
As we were talking, my mother mentioned that our vandal and his wife had stopped to visit her not long after I’d left yesterday. !!! It seems they were on the way back from another chemo treatment. Apparently, he was so sick, he couldn’t sit down, but had to lie on the couch and, even while driving, has to lay the seat back.
If he’s that sick, he shouldn’t be visiting my mother.
But, he’s playing her like a lute, and it’s working. She feels so sorry for him, and started telling me how my brother and I shouldn’t be “afraid” of him, and that we should basically suck up to him because he’s sick. She heard the messages he’d managed to leave with my brother’s voice mail, and knows full well he claims we caused his cancer, among other far more vile things he said about me and my daughters. Unfortunately, she is easily swayed. I don’t know what he’s trying to get out of her (and I doubt his wife has any idea that he made those calls), but he’s certainly succeeding in getting her to feel sorry for him. I think my brother may need to keep an eye on her accounts to see if any checks made out for large amounts get cashed!
After I left, I decided to stop at the post office to pick up a couple of parcels. I have another that’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, and was going to pick them all up on my way home from getting the truck to the garage, but went ahead and got the two that were there today, anyhow. More on that later!
Once I got home and updated my family, I called up the case coordinator. She was actually in her office, so I was able to talk to her directly. I knew she would have heard the messages I’d left yesterday, but there was no need for her to follow up on those. I wanted her to know about how my mother had declared she had said the opposite of what she really said, about the lock box, and about my mother’s confusion with her bubble packs.
I also mentioned that our vandal had showed up yesterday. She is somewhat aware of that situation. We talked about how it would work out if my mother were in a nursing home. Particularly the one she wants to be in. I would hope that we’d be able to ban him from visiting her, but they don’t really have security. Their security is to keep nursing home patients from wandering off, not to keep people out. The only real way to keep him away would be if there were a court order, and we looked into that several years ago. My mother would have to go to court herself, which she physically can’t do. My brother, as PoA, could only do it on her behalf if a doctor declared my mother mentally incapable of doing it herself. That she is physically unable to doesn’t matter. Granted, her cognitive decline would make it difficult for her to do it, too, but she’s not far enough gone for the PoA to kick in, in that regard.
Either way, it’s disturbing that he keeps showing up at my mother’s, and that she lets him in. At least his wife is with him, so he’d be on better behaviour. Apparently, he’s so unwell, he can’t sit, and had to lie down. Even while in the vehicle, he has to have the seat back. Even the case coordinator wondered, if he’s that sick, why is he stopping to see my mother?
Once all that was done, I could finally make myself breakfast – brunch? Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Once again, I am giving up sugar and simple carbs. Bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, that sort of thing. The first year I did that, it was not that difficult. Last year, it was oddly difficult. But then, it wouldn’t mean as much if it was easy.
I ended up making a creamy meat soup for breakfast, with bacon lardons, celery, mushrooms, ground beef, mushroom broth, cream, a can of mushroom soup and a handful of shredded cheese (cheddar and mozzarella). It turned out delicious!
That done, I finally got to opening the packages. One of them was the keyboard protector I originally bought for myself. March is a birthday month, though, and after talking to my younger daughter, I found that my older daughter would not want what I originally planned to get her. Knowing that she has the same issues with cats on her keyboard that I do – and her computer is how she makes a living – I decided this might make an acceptable gift, instead.
When I took it out of the box, I discovered some pleasant surprises!
This is what I got. (not an affiliate link) Just a basic acrylic piece in the large sise, that would fit over my ergonomic keyboard.
It was not the only thing in the box!
The cover itself came with self adhesive, no slip pads to protect the desk surface. There is also an optional back cover, with clear Alien Tape type stuff to attach it, if necessary.
Then there was the clear acrylic phone holder.
A colourful round mouse pad.
and… what the heck???
An odd looking stick and some brightly coloured fuzzy things???
The odd looking stick turned out to be a “fishing rod”, and the fuzzy things were the “lures”.
It was a cat toy, with two different fluffy “lures”.
I called my younger daughter down and asked her if she thought her sister would like it as her birthday gift. We knew she wouldn’t have much use for the phone holder, and the cat toy would, of course, be for the cats, but she said that yes, her sister would like the gift. So she took it upstairs to set up over her sister’s keyboard as a surprise.
Then she got the cat toy out and put it together with a highlight marker yellow lure, discovering that the rod was telescoping!
The cats went absolutely insane over it!
Unfortunately, one of them woke up my older daughter after parkouring off of her stomach to get to the other room and try and catch the lure!
So my older daughter now knows what she got for her birthday – and then promptly fell back asleep!
My younger daughter was able to get all the cats downstairs and played with them for some time. Only the three grandmas were completely uninterested, and stayed on my bed! Tin Whistle was the most insane with her leaping and twisting and flipping through the air. Amazingly, the cat that was almost as acrobatic was Tin Whistle was Cheddar! He’s such a big boy, I really did not expect that!
When she saw Tin Whistle actually starting to pant (cats should NOT pant!), she stopped and tucked it way into the bathroom, where the cats are not allowed, until next time.
I plan to get two more of these covers. One for my own keyboard and one for my younger daughter. While I did balk slightly at the cost, the extras that came with it more than made up for it! Only the optional back panel was included in the description.
I am getting quite the giggle out of this “Engrish” description of the large sized cover.
【large size】20”long x 7”Width x 4.7”high. 0.4” thick；- this is large enough to cover each of them with enough room for keyboard. It’s high enough allows boys with large palms to type without any hindrance. that you can use the keyboard easily. It’s thick so it can take the weight of you chonky adult cats easily. Compared with glass, the sturdy and drop-proof acrylic material makes it safer.
Boys with large palms!
You chonky adult cats!
Too funny.
On a completely different note, I’ve been chatting with the Cat Lady today. They’ve been in the US for the past while, combining a family holiday with her husband doing a presentation at a conference. It turns out he was offered a job and they are seriously considering moving. Or, more accurately, she would really like to move. He’s not too keen on moving. As someone who has moved so many times, I’d be more like her husband on this one! Plus, they’ve been in their house for less than 2 years. So why would she want to move?
Better weather (Florida).
Better healthcare (US in general)
No state income tax (her husband would get to keep 52% more of his income).
Better political leadership, both state and federal.
I can’t argue against any of those points. Especially right now, when our Liberal government has chosen a tariff war that will destroy our economy, rather than accepting the reasonable request of beefing up our border security, dealing with the fentanyl crisis and meeting our NATO obligations, all of which we should already be doing.
If you’re hearing about it in the news and the US is being painted as the “bad guy” in all this, and Canadians are all up in arms against Americans and boycotting, they are lying. We could easily have avoided a tariff war, but our governments, federal and most provincial, have decided to play a dick waving war. Most Canadians see that, but you won’t be hearing about them, in the media.
Like the quote, wrongly attributed to Sun Tzu, goes…
“An evil enemy will burn his own nation to the ground… to rule over the ashes“.
That is what our own government has chosen to do. Burn our nation to the ground, but now they can blame Trump for it. Our own government is the “evil enemy”, not the US.
Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where, if it were an option, I’d be moving, too. That whole “51st state” thing? That might well be the only thing that can save Canada. Lord knows, we haven’t been able to save ourselves. As I write this, Trudeau is still our Prime Minister, having stated his intent to resign after a new Liberal leader and PM is chosen, in a few days.
In our system. we don’t vote for our Prime Minister in federal elections. We have 338 elections for our Members of Parliament. The party that has the most winning MPs wins the federal election, and that party’s leader becomes the PM. The PM is supposed to also be an MP. Technically, he or she could still be PM if they did not win in their own riding, but they would not be able to debate in Parliament. In the rare event that this happens, an MP that did win would volunteer to step down. The party leader would officially move to that riding and be the MP in their stead.
On announcing his intent to resign, our Prime Dictator got the Governor General (who is supposed to be a neutral representative of the crown, but is a partisan T2 appointee) to shut down parliament. This was to avoid a planned vote of non-confidence which would have passed and triggered an election. The act was blatantly unconstitutional, but then, most of what T2 and his Liberals have done for the past 10 years have been unconstitutional and often outright illegal, and they’ve been getting away with it.
With T2 (not to be confused with his father T1, who was the most hated PM in Canadian history until now) saying he will step down when a new party leader is selected, there is now a leadership race. They managed to get rid of the one person that was actually competent (a woman born in India, and if there’s one thing our “feminist” PM can’t stand, it’s a strong, ethnic woman), so there are 4 people running for leadership. The one that they are blatantly working to install is Carney, a guy that hasn’t lived in Canada for more than 10 years, holds 3 passports, has destroyed the UK economy and, it turns out, has been advising our Prime Dictator for the past 5 years. So he’s been busy destroying our economy, too. Of course, he isn’t an MP, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He’s actually worse than T2. If (when) he is installed, he would automatically become PM – though when asked directly, when he would resign, T2 said it would be up to whoever won the leadership race. So… he might not resign after all.
Carney, meanwhile, has already talked about using emergency measures in Canada. My prediction (please, God, let me be wrong) is that, once installed into office, he’ll pull a Zelensky. Invoke the war measures act (aka: the emergency act) and declare martial law (because, Trump), and ban any elections. They can keep parliament from resuming, but can push through that “internet safety” bill they were trying to force through before parliament was shut down. This bill, if passed into law, would literally allow for people to be arrested for thought crimes and pre-crimes. Basically, anything anyone says that the government does not approve of can lead to charges, but it would also allow people to press charges against each other essentially for hurt feelings. It would allow them to ban opposition parties, start arresting anyone who disagrees with them, and give them the power to control the media, including social media.
It blows my mind that Canada has fallen so far. Worse, there are so many people who actually cheer this on.
So… yeah. I can understand why so many people have been leaving Canada (a trend that has been going on for years) for greener pastures, like the US.
I would certainly be sad to see the Cat Lady and her family go, but if they are able to escape, more power to them!
Thankfully, we live in the boonies. Things would be much worse if we still lived in a city!
I also mentioned to the Cat Lady about my having to cover for home care so many times. She completely understood our situation. Her mother had gone through the same with her mother (the Cat Lady’s grandmother. She had to be there almost all day, every day, because there were so many cancellations and screwups.
Suddenly, our situation doesn’t seem to bad!
When I got the call this morning, I confirmed that this evening’s med assists were still on schedule, and was told yes. I’m still half expecting my cell phone to ring, and be told they suddenly don’t have staff again.
The main thing on my schedule for today was to go to my mother’s and help with her grocery shopping, but of course, there was plenty of things that had to be worked around the time I would be gone.
Part of my morning routine is to top of the dry kibble for the inside cats, luring (or chasing) them out of my office/bedroom and closing the door, leaving only Butterscotch and our elderly Freya in the room. Freya doesn’t bother Butterscotch, ever, so that works out. Once the other cats are out, I keep them out long enough that she can use the litter box without getting harassed by some of the younger cats, eat and drink, and just de-stress for a while.
She seems to be getting use to the routine, and has started to go around more and more of the room, like she used to when she first was brought in from outside. Which means that every now and then, I’d come back into the room and I can’t find her in any of her usual spots.
She hasn’t gone up there in ages! It used to be one of her favourite spots to take naps, but it’s a favourite spot for a lot of the cats. I didn’t dare move too close and startle her away, but I did manage to zoom in for a photo.
Clearly, she was not trusting me, even though I didn’t come any closer!
Once the inside cats were done, it was time to do the outside cats. While we still have lots of donated wet cat food, since it’s too cold to give any to the outside cats, we were getting low on dry kibble in the bin. I reached a level where it was a mix of regular store kibble and a particular brand of feed store kibble. It’s been a while since they had that kibble, so I thought they might be willing to eat it again, after changing things up, but nope. I can see by the trays that they are actually picking out the other brand of kibble, and leaving the feed store kibble behind!
Getting more kibble from the feed store got added to my to-do list – just not that brand!
Once the outside stuff was done, I had time to look up some things and found we had at least on package ready to pick up at the post office, so I would leave a bit earlier to do that first.
I also decided on a style of camp commode honeypot to use in place of the bucket we’re using as a honeypot right now. I ended up choosing this one (not an affiliate link). It was the tallest of the ones I was looking at, has the elongated opening, can handle a lot of weight and still be stable (at least, that’s one of the selling features), has a padded seat, and can be folded up to take less storage space.
Plus, it was on sale. Bonus!
It has already been shipped, and should get here in about a week. Our septic pump should be working again well before then – I hope!!! – so this will be for the next time we have septic or plumbing problems!
With the way things have gone since we’ve moved here, I’m resigned to having some sort of septic or plumbing problems pretty much every year.
Another thing on my to-do list was to call the home care case coordinator. After talking to my mother on the phone on Monday, and finding out that no one showed up for two of her med assists on Saturday, I had left a message with the case coordinator. Today is Friday, and I hadn’t heard back yet, so it was time to call.
The case coordinator was in her office, so I got to talk to her right away, rather than leave another message. When I told her why I was calling, she was right on top of it, and had been looking into it.
According to my mother, when the person who was supposed to show up on those two med assist visits on Saturday showed up for the Sunday med assists, she told my mother she didn’t go to her place because she thought my mother was still in the hospital.
The case coordinator had confirmed she had visited my mother on the Thursday previously, so clearly, she knew my mother was home. There was nothing on the files to say that she did not visit my mother on the Saturday, either.
If my mother had been in the hospital still, she would never have been on their list to visit at all, but she was. There is no reason for the home care aid to have not shown up at my mother’s on that day.
The incident has gone up to someone higher up on the authority chain, and we should be hearing from her soon.
Since I had her on the phone, we covered a few other things. I let her know about the monthly bloodwork requisition forms I got yesterday, and that these would be stored in the lock box, so the care aids will know there will be something extra in there that they don’t have to deal with, other than leave them there.
I also asked if there was any progress in getting my mother into supportive housing or long term care. When it comes to the paperwork part of things, the case coordinator I’d started this with, who now works in the town the hospital my mother was in, had done as much as could be done at their end. Her file is just working its way through the system. It’s just really hard to get someone into long term care from the community, rather than from a hospital.
She did, however, talk to me more about the things to look out for that could help the process out. Basically, anything that makes it unsafe for my mother to be at home, both physical and cognitive. Physically, my mother is very concerned about falling, because that wrecked knee of hers now sometimes gives out. Frustratingly, the fact that she hasn’t fallen, and has managed to catch herself, means that they consider her okay to be on her own. With cognitive issues, my mother isn’t one to wander off and not know where she was going. Even if she did tend to wander, she physically can’t go very far, so that’s almost a moot point. There is her memory failures, though. Something my mother is noticing herself and quite alarmed by. So far, though, they have not been the sort of memory failures that would endanger her. She couldn’t remember until I questioned her, what day the home care aid didn’t show up, for example. She wrote it down, which is good, but then she couldn’t remember where the paper she wrote it down on was. None of this is endangering. Forgetting the stove on would be an example of endangerment – but my mother is aware enough of her own increased forgetfulness that she is super careful about that and constantly checks to make sure the stove is off (she does not use the oven at all).
Still, she gave us more things to keep an eye on that could help get my mother into the long term care she wants to be in.
The call done, it wasn’t much longer before I had to start heading out. By the time I got to the post office, a second parcel had been processed, which was nice. If it hadn’t been, it would have had to wait until Monday.
From there, it was to my mother’s town, early enough to go to the feed store and get a 40 pound bag of kibble, in the brand that cats will eat. While there, I asked about my order for 4 pounds of lysine (they come in 2 pound containers). I’d ordered some a while ago – before we had run out – but it still wasn’t in, the last time I was there. I had asked for it to be ordered again. This would have been at least a couple of weeks ago.
I’ve been there often enough that the guy is starting to remember me, but he couldn’t remember anything about lysine. He looked my file up but couldn’t find any order made. He was going to order it for me again when I happened to see something tucked into the shelf on the other side of the reception area that looked about right.
Sure enough, there were two 2 pound containers of lysine there! They don’t carry it normally, he knew nothing about it, and never noticed tucked into the shelf until I spotted it.
I bought the lysine, and he cancelled the order he had started, since this will last us a few months. I’m glad I spotted it. We’ve been out for a while, and I’m starting to see more coughing among both the inside and outside cats.
That done, it was off to the gas station to top up a bit, and pick up my own lunch of fried chicken and wedges, as my mother was getting her Meals on Wheels today. From there, I could finally go to my mother’s – and was even earlier than I told he to expect me!
Which gave us a chance to chat and visit while we waited for her meal to arrive. I was able to go over the bloodwork requisition forms with her, and she was happy with the idea of putting them in the lock box for safekeeping. I also updated her on my conversation with the case coordinator.
When it came to keeping an eye on things with her, I made a point of saying (again, though I doubt she remembers) that if someone like a doctor or nurse asks how she is feeling, this is the time to tell them the worst of how she if feeling! Not to brush things off by saying, “I’m doing all right”. My entire family is horrible for this. We could be sitting there with blood gushing out of a wound, and if someone asked how we’re feeling, we’ll say we’re doing just fine! It has taken me so many years of effort to get out of that habit, and I still fight it at times, so I totally understand what my mother is doing, and why. My mother’s response was, nobody wants to hear the bad stuff. I told her, when it comes to the doctors, they NEED to hear the bad stuff!
I honestly don’t think she got it, but at least I tried!
Meanwhile…
As I was getting some things from the cupboard for her, I took a look to see how stocked her fridge was, and noticed a container of what looked like soup, that looked out of place. I had immediate suspicions.
As we were sitting and chatting some more, my mother suddenly started telling me that our vandal has not been doing well, that he’d had to go to the hospital for a second time after his surgery, and that he was scheduled for more chemo today. She knew so much, I asked if my sister had been telling her this, since my sister is sometimes still in contact with our vandal (we all used to be very close to him). My mother immediately started to look sheepish.
No, they (he and his wife) visited.
Yesterday.
*sigh*
There is just no use in telling my mother she needs to cut ties with him. You’d think all those years of horribly abusive messages he left on her machine would be enough, or all the things he “borrowed” from this property when it was empty, and never returned, to the point she asked us to move here, but nope. Apparently not.
They had left her the mystery container of soup I saw in her fridge. My suspicions were correct.
I didn’t bother saying anything, though. There was no point.
Then her meal arrived, and we had our lunches together. I had suggested we go through her shopping list before hand, but it turns out she hadn’t made one! That is a first. She had gotten into sorting through her papers yesterday – she has a terrible habit of keeping way too many things that should be thrown out – until 1am, and never got to doing her shopping list!
So after we finished eating, we worked on her list, and even had a recent flyer to check out some sale prices.
That done, I was soon at the store, and even took advantage of some of their sales to get stuff for ourselves. We are still avoiding dirtying dishes as much as possible until we can use our plumbing again, so I wanted to pick up more sandwich meats at the deli. There are a few cuts that they have at the best prices I’ve seen anywhere. When I got there, I saw that most of this group had actually gone up in price – but they were still well below even the sale prices I’ve seen elsewhere. One type didn’t go up in price at all. So I could basically get twice as much meat as what I got at the other store – at sale prices – and still paid less. There were a few other things at sale prices I was able to take advantage of, though this being close to the end of the month, the budget is pretty low.
The good thing is, our temperatures have warmed up enough that I could leave the bags of my own purchases in the box of the truck without using insulated bags, and not worry about things freezing for quite some time! In fact, as I write this, it’s past 7pm, and we are still at a lovely -13C/8F right now! Granted, the wind chill is -21C/-6F, but after getting hit with the polar vortexes, that isn’t too bad at all!
Which meant that I didn’t have to hurry off after putting away my mother’s groceries. I was able to do some light housekeeping for her before heading out.
Before leaving, I messaged home to ask one of my daughters to meet me at the garage to help carry things in, so I wouldn’t have to pull into the yard or make two trips. Since I was the one carrying the 40 pound bag of cat food, I went ahead and did their evening feeding and warm water top up, while my daughter put away the groceries.
I am absolutely convinced The Grink has not left the isolation shelter even once, since the ramp door was opened!
Then, since we have lysine again, I broke out the Bullet. The lysine powder is pretty granular, so I grind it to a fine powder that will stick to the kibble. The first couple of batches were ground with raw pumpkin seeds until I ran out of seeds. That jar went for the outside cats, as the pumpkin will help them combat worms, and I’m sure the smallest cats are small because they have worms. Putting something in their food is pretty much the only way we can treat them, since most of them are too feral to catch, even if we could afford to take them to a vet.
The inside cats got cat soup with lysine in it.
Of course, there were dishes to be done. Since the septic tank is full and can’t be drained until the pump is fixed, we can’t drain water down the sink. That means doing dishes in one basin, rinsing in another, then tossing the dirty water outside. We keep pots and bowls in all our sinks right now, so we can still run water before we fill a kettle, wash an item or two, wash our hands, brush our teeth or sponge bathe, then take the containers outside to dump out the dirty water.
Inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as not being able to use the toilet!
Hopefully, this will only be until Sunday, when my brother comes out. I’m really, really hoping the pump can just be fixed, and we won’t have to find somewhere to buy a new one. There’s only one place that I know of that carries the one brand that still makes these pumps, and I have never seen them in stock. The city locations don’t seem to ever have them in stock, which makes sense. City people aren’t on septic systems.
Well, it is what it is. We deal with the hand we’ve got!
What else can we do?
Today, at least, I’ve managed to get quite a few things done while also being able to help my mother out, which saves on multiple trips! Tomorrow, if all goes well, we’ll load up the truck and I’ll finally make a trip to the dump. We’re supposed to reach a high of -4C/25F tomorrow!
Just before I was able to take this picture, I watched as Freya slithered her way into the cat bed, on top of Beep Beep. They spend a lot of time, snuggled together in there!
Butterscotch being where she is on my bed is a big deal. She has expanded her range by about three feet to be there. Butterscotch, one of the originals, still refuses to leave my office/bedroom/craft room. In the mornings, I have to chase most of the cats out and close the door so she has a chance to use the litter. There have been times I’ve seen her go for it (she will only use the one under my computer table), and stopped what I was doing to stand guard. Out of nowhere, one of several cats will teleport from somewhere and start stalking, if not outright attacking, her when she tries to use the litter. Most of the time, though, she will stuff herself into the shelf above my pillow to snarl and growl at other cats, even if they’re just walking by some distance away and completely ignoring her.
Beep Beep, on the other hand, has no issues getting along with the other cats (except Butterscotch; they don’t like each other). She has become downright kittenish in her behaviour since moving indoors. You’d never know that she (and Butterscotch) is more than 10 years old. Probably closer to 15, but we just don’t know their exact ages.
Freya, on the other hand, showed up on our balcony in the city in 2010, and we estimate she was barely a year old at the time. She is really showing her age these days. We make sure there is softened kibble for her in a tray in my room. It’s easier for her to eat out of a shallow tray than a deeper bowl. Usually, the kibble is softened with plain water. When we do their afternoon cat soup, I make it extra thin and use it to soften the kibble for her, too. She spends most of her time in my room, these days, snuggled up and sleeping. At night, she will sometimes come over to cuddle with me, too. Every day that she is still with us is appreciated.
As I was outside this morning, doing the morning rounds after giving the outside cats their food and warm water, I was really thankful I don’t need to go anywhere today! There was almost no wind, but it was cold enough to be quite painful. The gate cam is having issues. It is fully exposed so, while it does get plenty of sun to both warm it up and power the solar charged batteries, it’s too cold for the batteries. While changing the memory card yesterday, the display would shut itself off almost immediately. Today, it stayed up long enough for me to read “low battery”. The solar batteries will charge up during the day, but the back up regular batteries were too frozen to take over powering the camera. I haven’t checked the files yet to see how much it manage to capture during the day. The sign game is more shade, as it’s under a tree, but it has enough to shelter it that the camera’s batteries didn’t completely freeze.
As I write this, we’re coming up on noon and have warmed up to -26C/-15F We don’t have a wind chill right now, but the region is under a several cold warning. Tonight’s low is expected to drop to -30C/-22F, but the wind chills are expected to drop it to -40C/F
Looking at the long range forecast, it seems we’ve got about another week of these temperatures before things start warming up a bit. By the end of February, we’re even supposed to get highs above freezing. I don’t hold much stock to that, though. It wasn’t all that long ago when the long range forecasts were saying we’d be warming up and even going above freezing right now.
My husband popped by earlier asking if I could go to the post office to pick up a parcel.
I told him we were at -27C/-17F.
He said, tomorrow, then. 😂
The down side is, I have to take the truck in to the garage tomorrow morning. I have a 9:30am drop off time. At the time I will need to start heading out, we are expected to still be at -29C/-20F Thankfully, the truck is in a garage and plugged in, but it’s still going to be wicked cold. There is no heat in the garage. I’m told there used to be a kerosene heater in there, for when my late brother was working on my parents’ vehicles, but that’s among the things that disappeared in the two years it was empty before we moved in.
Tomorrow we are finally getting that slow leak in the tire fixed. Hopefully, that will also get rid of the “service tire monitoring system” warning I get, every time I start the truck. Next month, we will take it in for the engine flush, sensor replacement and oil change, which should get rid of the check engine light and get our oil pressure gauge working again. I really wish we had to budget to do that first! As it is, I’ve just messaged to ask if they could replace one of our windshield wipers as well. I could do it myself, but wouldn’t be able to get a new blade for a while, and sure as heck don’t want to be figuring out how to replace it while standing on a stool to be able to see and reach, in the bitter cold!
Then, on Thursday, my daughter and I are taking Fluffy to the vet for a follow up appointment, though at least that appointment is for later in the day. This will be Fluffy’s last day in the isolation shelter, and we will be able to open it up to the other cats again. My daughter is coming with me so she can stay in the truck with the carrier while I go into the Walmart to take care of the overcharge from a couple weeks ago, and pick up a few things.
The daytime highs over the next while won’t be too bad, but the overnight lows are expected to be brutal, and last through most of the mornings.
For now, I’m going to enjoy staying at home. I’m not looking forward to more driving over the next couple of days! I’m really hoping things warm up faster. I have to take my mother to the eye clinic in the city on the 19th. It’s going to be hard enough on her without having to also deal with the cold!
I keep wanting to basically hibernate over January and February, and avoid going out as much as possible. Somehow, it just never seems to work out, but this year has got to be the worst for appointments and errands in a February since we have been living here! I’m just thankful we have the truck and that it handles the cold as well as it does. Our first couple of winters, we got hit with far worse temperatures and our van and my mother’s car froze.
I know it could be worse, but gosh, I’m getting really tired of winter.
We are going to have a lot of running around over the next while! Thankfully, the weather looks like it’s going to be pretty good, even we are expected to have chillier days for the next while.
Clarence does not approve. I’m supposed to be available to cuddle him at all time, after all!
Today, I needed to run into town for several errands. The first was a trip to the pharmacy, to get refills for myself and for my daughter. Thankfully, her Pharmacare was processed, and she only had to pay under $5 for something that would have cost over $150! My pain killers, however, did not have a refill. I’m not out, yet, so they will send a fax to my new doctor, and they will be included win my husband’s prescription delivery, next week.
I need to remember to call the clinic and see if I can book an appointment for myself, piggy backing on my daughter’s appointment next week, to talk about the painkillers. They help, but not quite enough. Especially since I can take them only once a day.
The pharmacy needed time to get our refills together. Enough for me to hit the grocery store while it was being done. The main thing I needed to get was distilled water for my husband’s CPAP humidifier. I’d forgotten to pick some up, the last time I was at Walmart. Locally, the price at the grocery store is almost double, so I just got one gallon. The pharmacy has distilled water, too, but it’s even more expensive than at the grocery store. I’ll pick up several more gallons when I’m at Walmart, later this week.
While I was at the grocery store, I spotted a new display with an amazing sale on bagged avocados, so I grabbed a couple of bags. Their sale on whole chicken was still going, so I grabbed another for the freezer. A whole chicken, by weight, cost around $10. Normally, these days, they are around $18.
I also grabbed something I could eat in the truck for breakfast, before going back to the pharmacy. I was early enough to pick up a couple more supplements I was running low on. I had intended to get those at Walmart, but the house brand’s price was very good, plus they also happened to be on sale, so it was actually cheaper to get them now.
Once done at the pharmacy, I went to visit with my mother before she had her lunch delivered. While there, I updated her on the plans we worked out last night, to get things ready in her apartment. My brother and SIL and I will meet at my mother’s apartment, and we’ll go through her fridge and cupboards to get rid of anything that should be. I gave my SIL a typical shopping list and she will be picking up fresh groceries for my mother. As I told her this, it gave me a chance to ask her if there was anything specific she wanted, and was able to pass that on to my SIL.
I told her that they were getting a lock box for her medications that should be in tomorrow morning, so we are meeting in the afternoon. I explained again that the home care aides would be able to get into the lock box but, if they don’t have someone available, they will call me and I will have to come over to give her her medications. She didn’t seem too happy with that, or the idea that she wasn’t going to be able to access her own prescription medications. I had to explain again, why her medications were going into a lock box, adding that she has said herself, that she’s starting to forget things. I could see she wasn’t impressed, but was going to let it go. She started to tell me something else…
… and forgot what she was going to say!
Once she realized what had just happened, we had a good chuckle over it.
My mother had one of her bubble packs with her that was almost full, and I know she has some partial ones at home, too. I took the one she had with her, so that I could take it and the ones she has at home, to the pharmacy, tomorrow. Most of her medications can be repacked into new bubble packs. The Home Care coordinator was going to deal with the pharmacy in regards to my mother’s medication changes, and get her file active again for Monday. Hopefully, they will have her new and up to date bubble packs ready, tomorrow, so I can take those for the lock box.
I explained to her again that she will be getting home care three times a day again, but the first visit of the day will be longer. She will have help with getting dressed and they can empty her commode for her, too. Her troubles with the commode was one of the things we remembered to bring up during the meeting with the doctor and the home care ladies.
I told her again about the Life Line she will be getting. She had forgotten entirely about that. Basically, I assured her that we will get everything at her apartment ready for when she comes home on Monday.
As for Monday, my SIL will be picking me up with one of their cars to get my mother home, which will be much easier for my mother than having her climb into my truck! Discharge time is at 11am, so we plan to be at the hospital for around 10am, so we have plenty of time to get her ready and pack up her things.
We then had time to just visit and chat. It turns out there are two other patients that she knows that are also in the hospital, and she was able to visit with them today. I’m glad she did. First, because it showed up much better she was feeling. Second, because the visits made them happy. An unexpected third is that it made my mother realize just how good she is actually doing. She is more than 10 years older than one of the ladies, and probably another 10 years older than the other. I know for sure that one of them will not be coming home. I don’t know why the other was is in the hospital. Then there’s my mother, who’s in her 90’s, and they’re sending her home, where she lives independently!
I really hope they can find an opening in supportive living for her, soon.
When my mother’s lunch was delivered, that was my cue to go. I just made sure all the lids were off her containers, and set everything up for her, before heading out. There was just one more stop for gas – one gas station was at $1.559/L, while the other two were at $1.579/L – then home.
My daughter was happy to get her medication, as she was almost out. The funny thing was, she had to get me to open the child-proof lids for her! She’s having to wear a wrist brace again, for having the audacity of using her left arm, yesterday. She has issues with ganglions. Something else she wants to talk to her doctor about! They’ve increasingly been a very painful problem. I remember that my sister used to get them, too. She ended up getting surgery, and never had a problem with them again. My daughter would really prefer NOT to have surgery, though! Ah, well. We shall see!
For today, at least, I’m done with running around. I’ll be out again tomorrow, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday is when we take Fluffy back to the vet. That is when her 2 weeks in isolation are up, too. We have not been able to touch her at all while she’s in the isolation shelter. Not even The Grink will let me touch him, though he does sometimes sniff at my fingers.
I have noticed something about them in the mornings, though. After I’ve finished my morning rounds, the last thing I do is pop back outside again with a can of wet cat food for them. I have noticed that after I’ve given them their kibble in the morning, they actually sit and watch me, in open anticipation, waiting for their wet cat food! We can only do this for the cats in the isolation shelter. Not only because there are just too many cats outside to regularly give them wet cat food, but also because anywhere else, the food would freeze. In the isolation shelter, the food area is in front of the heat lamp.
Midnight doesn’t know what he’s missing, by escaping the isolation shelter when he did! I did see him today, but not until this afternoon, after I got home.
I did have an unpleasant surprise in the garage when I got home, though. Thankfully, I did NOT drive over it. When I pull into the garage, there is a a moment when I am blinded, so I did not see the empty paint can and broken glass on the ground. !!!
We now have long wooden crates attached to one of the garage walls to create shelves. On top of one of them was one of our tool kits. That somehow got knocked off, and it hit some things on the way down, before landing upside down on a makeshift shelf we have on the ground. One of those things was a bin with light bulbs in it. That was upside down over the tool box, with light bulbs scattered all over. Some broken on and around the tool kit. Others were on the ground, right near where we give through to park! The empty can of isolation shelter paint was also knocked to the ground, along with odds and ends, like our paint stir sticks.
I was able to message the household about it, and my husband brought over a dustpan and hand broom for me while I picked things up and got rid of the broken bulbs and biggest pieces of glass. I was able to sweep the glass off the makeshift shelf, but the tiny pieces of broken glass in our dirt floor could only be swept aside, under the makeshift shelf.
If it weren’t for my habit of trying to part further to the right, so I have more room to open the driver’s side door all the way, I would have driven right over that paint can, the broken glass and probably at least one light bulb, and never seen it until after I got out of the truck.
I sure would have felt it, though!
There are definite issues with some of the yard cats using the garage as shelter. They go up into the rafters, where I’m sure it’s warmer.
We really need to go through the garage to sort and organize. It’s all pretty overwhelming, though. I’m not sure what half the stuff even is, or what might still be salvageable! Once we build more shelves into the walls, though, we’ll be in a better position to get things organized and cleaned up.
That’s a job for the summer, though!
We’ve got plenty that needs to be done between now and then, though.
It would be a huge help of the gas prices could go back down again. 🫤
As I write this, we’re at -9C/16F, but the wind chill is at -25C/-13F
Around the house, we are sheltered from the wind direction for a change, so we’re not getting quite that wind chill effect in our immediate area. Which I am happy for, since we have to keep the isolation shelter closed, and there was only two cats in it.
I’d given them their wet cat food this morning, and Fluffy stayed well away from me. Even when I was about go go inside the house, saw her sharing the food bowl with The Grink and paused to get my phone out to take a picture, she saw me stop and moved away.
Clearly, she has not forgiven us for her trip to the vet! There’s no way I can check her incision, but at least we can tell how she’s feeling by her behaviour, at least somewhat.
The Grink, meanwhile, seems quite happy to stay right where he is! We see them cuddling together in the cat bed pretty regularly now.
At least I think he’s a dude. My daughters tell me he is, but I haven’t been able to see, myself, with all that long fur. He does not allow us near him. I had to zoom in to get this photo. He looks so much like Fluffy! She doesn’t have any white fur, other than inside her ears, so we can at least use that to tell them apart. This fluffer is one of this past summer’s kittens, so there’s almost a year between them. Fluffy is pretty small for her age, though, so there isn’t a lot of size difference between them.
The snow in our area started last night. It started coming down pretty hard at one point, but mostly it was light and constant, so there’s a few inches accumulated already. We’ve got a break in the snow right now, but it’s supposed to start up again tonight and keep snowing until about noon, with only a couple of hours break at about 7am. From what I’m hearing and seeing on the highway conditions group, the roads were getting pretty snow covered. The road between us and town was pretty bad, which is typical when the winds are blowing this way. The east-west roads are almost always the worst.
Tomorrow afternoon, we’ll have to break out Spewie and do the driveway.
Needless to say, I did NOT head to town to see my mother. I did phone to ask how she was doing. I’d called shortly after shift change, though, so the nurse had only been there for 15 minutes. She knew my mother was doing well, and was feeling better, but that’s about it.
Then she asked if I wanted to talk to her on the phone. They could bring a phone to her room and she could transfer me over.
Yes, please!
It was good to be able to talk to her directly. Not that she could tell me much; she doesn’t understand much of what they are saying or doing in regards to her treatment, but she could tell me how she felt and we could just chat for a bit. My cousin had visited her today, so she was happy about that.
Little by little, I’ve been remembering different places to call that needed to know about my mother. Home care. Meals on Wheels. Today, I remembered to call her pharmacy. They would normally have delivered her bubble packs for the month, yesterday. Now that they know she is in the hospital, they can suspend her prescriptions until either we let them know she’s home, or a doctor calls to tell them her prescriptions are cancelled with the pharmacy, which they would do if she goes into long term care or assisted living.
I think that’s the last place that needs to know about my mother! Her church would already know, since the guy that took her to her appointment is from the church and has been bringing her communion since she hasn’t been physically up to going to church lately, and the church next to the hospital knows, as the priest has already come to give her communion since she was admitted.
It will probably be a couple of days before I can go and visit her again. While the roads might be clear earlier, it’ll take us some time to get our own driveway clear. In particular, I need to get the end of the driveway done. With what’s already there, once the plows go by, we probably would get stuck trying to get through the plow ridge. It’s going to start getting cold again, though. Today and tomorrow are going to be relatively warm, and then we’re getting highs of -19C/-2F, with overnight lows of -27C/-17F
I worry about the outside cats, but they know how to take care of themselves. The cats that used to hang out in the isolation shelter now hang out in the cat house and the sun room. Usually in big cuddle puddles.
We did get a big stinky kitty visit the sun room last night. I didn’t try to chase it out, after watching it on the camera for a while. The big heated water bowl that stopped working is set to the side, near where the heat lamp is. It’s full of ice, but on less frigid days, the heat lamp is enough for it to start to melt, and the cats seem to really like the melted ice water.
So goes the skunk, apparently. On the camera, I could see it sitting on top of the ice, doing something. It looked almost as if it were chewing on the ice, where a gap forms between the ice and the wall of the bowl. When I headed out this morning, I made sure to look. I could see a deeper spot in the ice, with smooth sides. The skunk had been licking the ice enough to create a hole!
By the middle of the month, I’m hoping we’ll have a new critter cam in the sun room. I’ve just ordered a small security type camera. It can be rotated 360° remotely, while the one in there now is stationary. The cats regularly knock it out of position. The main thing, though, is that it does not require a subscription to record and save files. We can add a micro SD card to record locally. As long as it can connect to our WiFi, that should be good. The last camera I tried simply would not connect to our WiFi, and we could never figure out why. If this one works out, I might try to get a lightbulb camera again, for the basement, to monitor the septic pump.
If I had the funds, I’d be like my brother with their old place. He had cameras everywhere! The buyers actually paid extra to keep his camera system. 😄 In the summer, I expect he will start adding more cameras around the property, since he moved his farm equipment here.
I have no problem with more cameras around!
But that will wait for when things are much warmer, and the snow is all gone.
It’s only February, but I am so done with winter already!
Oh, how lovely it feels outside right now! I did my morning rounds and even remembered to wear a lighter coat instead of my parka, so I wouldn’t over heat.
What I didn’t do was break out little Spewie to clear the rest of the driveway. Not today!
As far as the pain levels go, I could do it, but I know myself well enough by now to know that if I did, I would be useless for the next couple of days – and we’ve got too much going on in the next while!
One of those things is to hopefully be able to snag this fluffy lady and get her to the vet on the 30th.
She needs a name, still. So far, no name seems to stick, other than “fluffy lady”, and we have several of those!
After I took this picture, I tried to reach out to pet her, but she kept backing off. I was able to move around and reach her more from behind. Once I started to pet her, she was good with it. She does love to be pet, and I was even able to give her double handed skritches on either side of her head. But we can’t just walk up to her, or reach out to her. We still have to sort of sneak in to pet her.
I am 99% sure she is pregnant right now. Last year, she’s the one who dropped her litter all over the yard and abandoned them, leaving me to have to euthanize the survivors. She got pregnant very late in the season. This year, she went into heat so early, there is almost no chance of survival for her kittens. Especially if she drops her litter again, like last year. So getting her spayed is a higher priority than getting Brussel spayed. We know Brussel knows how to be a mother. The chances of her kittens surviving is still really, really low, just because of the time of year, but we do know she has a safe nest somewhere beyond the inner yard.
As for which male we are able to catch, it could be any one of several friendly males. It might even be this one.
I was actually petting both Magda, when she was up on the shelf, and Kohl (you can just see Magda’s face beside Kohl, near the window) when this tabby pushed himself in, demanding pets. I believe this is the male that was pretty sick for a while, and allowed us to tend to him. He’s grown quite a bit since then!
It was interesting to see these three, plus a couple more kittens on the cat bed inside, and realize they are all almost the same age. There would be only days or, at most, a couple of weeks age difference between them. Magda, another grey and white, and a black and white cow baby the girls call The Grink, are all really, really tiny. Then there’s this tabby, Kohl and her brother, Rabi, who are all so much bigger! Kohl and Rabi were the first litter last year, so they are the oldest among the kittens, but by this time, the others should have caught up.
With things freezing in the snow and being visible that would normally not be seen in the summer, we have a pretty good idea of why some of these kittens are really small. At least one of them has a serious case of round worms. I was very perplexed when I found what turned out to be frozen throw up. There was nothing in the ice but these worms; no partially digested food or anything like that. I’ve seen tape worms before, but I’ve never seen roundworms before, so I was quite perplexed by what I saw. They are very curly!
I’d sent a picture to the Cat Lady (it’s a good thing we’re such friends! 😄😂) and she identified it for me. These are the worms that Button had. He needed to be treated for worms three times before he was clear of them. During treatment, she said it was like he was pooping spaghetti, it was so bad! Once he was clear of them, though, he started growing again, and is now almost normal size for his age. Still on the small side, but not abnormally so.
The question is, how do we even begin to treat yard cats for round worms? It’s not like we can give them a pill. For starters, we have no idea which cat had those throw ups I found. We’d have to basically treat all of them – yesterday, I got a head count of possibly 36 – and just hope we get the infected ones. I lean towards thinking it’s The Grink, a cat we can’t get close to, but there are the two other very tiny cats that likely also have them.
One of the recommendations is to feed them pumpkin. Which would be great if we could do cat soup for the outside cats. Without heated food bowls, though, we had to stop giving them the kibble we softened with warm water we’d been doing in the fall. We could mix in the lysine and ground pumpkin seed with that. When the softened kibble started freezing before they could finish eating it, there was no point in continuing. Once we start consistently getting temperatures above freezing, we can start softening the kibble for them again. That makes dosing them with supplements easier. Not that there’s any way to control the doses this way, but at least they’d get some.
The jury is out on how well pumpkin actually words for this. It might be worth getting more of the Happy Poops stuff as a supplement. Looking up the ingredients – pumpkin, flax seed, coconut, chicory root, turmeric, ginger and banana – I found that several of them were noted as helping against worms. The larger jar would be pretty expensive, though. It’s one thing to buy it for the inside cats, where we at least know that they won’t just get infested again. Quite another to get something like that for yard cats.
There’s only so much we can do for them, but we do the best we can.
Well, we did reach our high of -17C/1F today – at about 6-7am. By the time I headed outside to do my morning rounds, it was down to -19C/-2F, which isn’t too bad, except the wind chill was -32C/-26F It was coming from the north- northeast today, so the house acted as a wind break for the most part. I made a point of checking the ejector this morning, where I found myself getting hit by the wind, full blast.
Not fun.
Ejector is fine, though. I checked the heat tape and could feel warmth.
As I write this, it’s just past 5pm, and we’ve cooled down to -20C/-4F, but the wind chill is still -32C/-26F
This afternoon, I made sure to check on the truck, get it running for a while, then hooking up the OBDII to do a scan. The same sensor code is coming up; nothing else, so that’s good.
While letting the engine run and warm up, I took advantage of the sunshine and relative shelter from the wind and shoveled out the paths. We didn’t get a lot of snow, but the winds blew drifts into all the paths, with some not even visible anymore. Just flat snow. The kitties will be much happier, now that they can get around the yard more easily!
The first one is the fluffy girl that we can sometimes pet while she is eating. She lost her first litter last year. Unfortunately, she is now in heat. Brussel is being left alone, so I have to assume she’s pregnant, but the boys are all over this one.
This is a really bad time of year for a cat to go into heat. They’d both be having kittens at the end of February or so. Chances of survival are pretty much nil.
I’m really hoping we can catch her, or Brussel, for the spay next week. We’re booked for one male and one female, and I don’t expect to have any problems catching the males. They are far less feral than the ladies.
If you click through to the next photo, you can see another of our fluffy beauties; one of last year’s kittens. Totally feral. No idea if it’s male or female. We have at least one, maybe two, more fluffy ones like that that are completely unsocialized, and won’t go near us. I had to zoom in quite a bit to get that picture!
I had a chance to talk to the Cat Lady today. Yesterday, I’d connected with someone in a feral and stray cat group on FB. I normally am not active on there, after being burned by similar groups in the past. Someone was offering donated cat food, though, so I contacted her. I told her outright that we’ve been having difficult getting help, and only one rescue has been willing to help us. We messaged each other privately, and ended up arranging to connect when I’m in the smaller city, waiting for the spay and neuter to be done. I will be meeting the Cat Lady that day, too.
After, I let the Cat Lady now that I’d connected with someone about possible food donations. Today, she phoned me and asked if it was a particular person by name.
It was the same person.
She then warned me to watch out for her. She says, her heart may be in the right place, but she has… issues. Issues that have resulted in her calling the provincial vet on people she had been “helping”, which then resulted in a whole lot of cats being euthanized instead of TS/NR’d. More alarming is that she has been sending cats out of province with “brokers”. The cats get picked up by people in unmarked white vans, and are never heard from again. She apparently is full convinced that these “brokers” are adopting the cats out to good homes in the other province – a province that is just as overwhelmed with cats as rescues are out here (we’ve lived in that province a couple of times, over the years). The Cat Lady suspects the cats are actually going to a lab, based on her own observations before leaving the big rescue she had been connected with when I first met her.
Basically, she said that if we can get help with cat food, getting cats fixed or getting them adopted, that could be fine, but not to give any personal information, not to say where we live, and especially not to send pictures, as those will get shared all over online without our permission. It’s people like this woman, and the rescues she’s connected with, that have resulted in the Cat Lady backing away from her own rescue, and basically working with just a couple of people like us, and that’s it.
As she was telling me this, I remembered some of her past stories she’d told me, about how and why she left the big rescue. No names were mentioned, so I hadn’t known this person was one of the people she’d had issues with.
Well, we just have to be careful, which I try to be, anyhow.
One of the things that came up was how many cats we’re feeding right now. With how cold it’s been, I haven’t done head counts in a long time. The last time I did, I think I counted about 36, or in that range.
Today was nice enough that I tried to do a head count after doing their evening food and water. I counted “only” 23! That’s a huge drop. I had been seeing as many as 15 crowded into the top of the isolation shelter. Today, I counted 5. Looking into the sun room from the bathroom, I’ve counted as many as 20 that I could see, most bunched together under the heat lamp. Today, I counted 8 in the sun room. The rest that I counted were running around outside.
Twenty three cats is still too many, and I know that there is likely cats that just hadn’t come to the house for food yet, but that’s still a big change.
Well, we’ll see how much they change again, as the weather warms up.
Tomorrow, we’re looking at a high of -15C/5F, which is supposed to happen at about the time my daughter and I will be at her doctor’s appointment. We will take advantage of the trip to pick up a few groceries and some more kibble. Our first stock up shopping trip is a week away, so we won’t be getting much.
Man, I really hope the long range forecast into February is somewhat accurate. I’m now seeing forecasts for highs of 8C/46F!
The power is back on again, and stayed on long enough that I turned my computer back on and will try posting this.
We’ve got another brutally cold morning. While doing the morning routine, after feeding the cats, I took the litter buckets out to their compost pile behind the outhouse. They had been in the old kitchen, which is not heated. I couldn’t empty them completely, because of the damp sawdust frozen to the sides of the buckets! Normally, I’d knock the buckets against a tree, but I didn’t want to shatter the plastic.
By the time I got back inside, it had warmed up to -25C/-13F, with a wind chill of -34C/-29F. I just checked again now, and I have three different weather apps telling me three different temperatures! I’ve got one saying it’s -24C/-11F, another saying we’re still at -25C/-13F, and another saying we are at -26C/-15F. Only two of them give me wind chills, with one saying -30C/-22F, and another saying -33C/-27F
I was supposed to pick up our beef share today, but I had already tried to reschedule last night, on seeing the temperatures expected for today. We haven’t replaced the cord on our block heater yet, so I don’t want to try driving the truck. It’s not cold enough to crack the engine block (yes, we’ve had that happen before), but I still would rather not take any chances.
With there being power issues today as well, that’s even more reason to stay home.
In the second photo of the above slide show, you can see the ice and frost accumulated on the inner door of our main entry. There’s frost on the bottom, too.
The next photo shows Caramel in the bigger cat bed inside the shelf shelter, with frost on her face. She could go into the sun room (the thermometer on the wall was reading -15C/5F), or the heated cat house, but she chose the shelf shelter.
In the next photo, you can see that even Kohl has frost on her face! The other fluffball didn’t have any frost on him at all. The insides of the windows were frosted, though. Even the heated water bowl was starting to show ice freezing near the top. After giving them their wet cat food, I scooped out most of their water bowl (the power cord is wrapped around the support on the top, so I can’t take it very far out of the shelter to spill it out) and replace it with warm water.
I noticed a corner of the plastic wrapped around the bottom was coming loose. When I checked it, I found that cats had pulled the plastic down, all along the back of the isolation shelter. So I got a cardboard box and opened one corner, to make one long, flat piece. Three sections were just long enough to cover the entire back, with one section was enough to cover the side of the shelter. I quickly tacked the cardboard in place, but after taking the picture, which is the last one in the slide show, I secured it a bit better and bent the flap, so it wasn’t overlapping the sliding door.
The water bowl in the sun room was frozen solid. It was also completely full. Normally, it just top it off with the warm water, which melts through the layer of ice to reach liquid water below, but that was not going to happen. I ended up taking it outside and chopped the ice out with a hatchet, being careful not to hit the bowl itself. The heated water bowl in the water shelter is still working fine, so they at least had that.
There was still quite a lot of kibble in the outside food trays. No surprise there, really. They would have had to be incredibly hungry to go out there in last night’s cold for food! I know for sure we hit -29C/-20C before I’d gone to bed last night.
With the power going out, we needed to keep tabs on how long it was out. With the heat lamp in the isolation shelter off, it would get dangerously cold in a very short time, and it would be hard for two small cats to keep each other warm, even with the cat bed in the most insulated corner. The cardboard would have helped some, but not enough. We would have had to take them out to join the other cats in their cuddle puddles to stay warm, as there is no way we can bring them inside the house.
Thankfully, the power seems to be staying on, now.
It did get me thinking of alternatives.
If we really needed to, we could use the fire bricks we’ve bee slowly accumulating for our future outdoor kitchen to create a radiant heater in the isolation shelter. A brick or two on the second level floor, more bricks to form a wall around, tea lights inside, and bricks on top to make sure no kitty could touch the flames. The bricks themselves would absorb heat and continue to radiate heat out, even after the candles burned out. For a small space like that, it could work.
We have the ability to do things like cook if the power goes out, but that’s all outside. With temperatures like today, it just wouldn’t be feasible.
Another reason to put a priority on building the outdoor kitchen. Even if we just had the structure up, it would give us a sheltered space for a fire pit to cook over. I’d love to find a way to have it closer to the house, but there just isn’t a good space in the inner yard for that. Too many trees and other structures. As it is, we’ve changed our minds on the outer yard location a few times before settling on the space between the pump shack and the old chicken coop.
Things to think about!
In other things…
I was so happy to get that call from the new pain clinic. They have just opened recently, and my husband’s new doctor had referred him to it already. They needed to send him a questionnaire, which they normally would have mailed, but the postal strike is still going. So they wanted an email address to send it to, instead.
This is why having a corded phone on a land line is still important. We don’t get enough signal to get phone calls on our cell phones – I’m amazed I was able to make my earlier post, with how poor our signal was at the time. Far less signal strength is needed to send things in text, thankfully. At least there was a signal. Usually, there’s nothing.
Hmmm… I’m going to try something here. My current computer with the current OS has features my old one didn’t. One of those is the ability to do a video screen capture. Check this out…
This is the animated weather on my desktop app. From the colours, you can see that large swaths of Canada and the US are as cold as, or almost as cold as, the Greenland glaciers!
Thankfully, days like this will apparently be few and far between, this winter. We’ll have some cold days in the week before Christmas, but the long range forecast is now saying to expect 3C/37F on Christmas Eve, 1C/34F on Christmas Day, and 5C/41F on Boxing Day! Then stay with highs above freezing, through to New Year’s Eve!
Of course, I expect those forecasts to change, but so far, we’re not going to be getting weather like today very often. Quite the change from our first couple of winters here, when we saw entire months much like what we’re getting right now.
Funny. As I get older, I’m finding I can handle the cold a lot better than I used to, physically – but mentally, it’s the other way around!
I did the morning routine today. We were under weather warnings yesterday for snow, but from what I could see, we didn’t get much of any, overnight. Or, if we did, it melted right away, then froze by morning, because it was SO slippery! It’s snowing now, though, so we’ll see how that works out.
Of course, the isolation babies got their extra treat of wet cat food. The cat beds we washed last night were returned, so they now have two in their shelter again. Unfortunately, they seem to be ignoring the freshly cleaned litter box and just using the floor on the bottom level. At least some of it will be easy to clean up once they are frozen. 🫤
Kohl really wanted attention! I spent quite a bit of time petting her through the sliding windows. She made no effort to get out! The closest was when she rubbed her face against my arm so far, she almost fell through the doorway.
Her partner in crime deigned to sniff my fingers a bit, but Kohl was so aggressive for pets, she got in his way. When I saw him at the food bowl, I thought I might pet him while he was eating, but as soon as Kohl saw me at that sliding door, she came right over. She was pushing her way through to get pets so aggressively, she pushed him away from the food! So I stopped, to give him a chance to eat. He, also, made no effort to leave the isolation shelter. Other cats, however, saw the open sliding doors and wanted in!
Later on, I got to enjoy another bit of adorableness. Our elderly grandma managed to get access to the new cat bed again. With the other cats, we’ve found as many as three of them squeezed into there, all at once!
There’s barely room for Grandma in there, never mind three cats!
After yesterday evening, I’m happy to say that today really has turned out to be a day of Peace, for the Second Sunday of Advent.
I got a call from my mother “late” last night. It actually was pretty early, but had been dark for so long already, I thought it was closer to midnight, not early evening!
She had clearly called for a reason, so I asked what was going on.
Very long story short…
She was dying and needed to go to the hospital.
Of course she did. It was a Saturday night. *sigh* It’s always on a Saturday, or Sunday on a long weekend.
I really don’t want to be so jaded by this, but she does it so often!
I told her, we’re under a weather watch. If she really felt she needed to go to the hospital, it would be safest to call an ambulance.
Then I had to keep asking questions to get some idea of why she felt she needed to go to the hospital.
Her cold was getting worse. She was coughing lots. There was pain in her stomach. She had a headache, which she thought was connected to her stomach.
Even the pain in her stomach took quite a while to get straight. About all I could get out of her is that she felt pain directly below her sternum. Every time I tried to get a clearer description, she’s start to tell me, then launch into something else, like did I know where her important stuff in her apartment was hidden (in case she dies or is in the hospital, and people go into her apartment to snoop).
She didn’t want an ambulance, because she wanted someone with her to watch her purse for her; she has important stuff in her purse, and she didn’t want people going through it while she was getting tests done.
She didn’t want to go to the same ER as last time, because that hospital is run by Muslims now. The last time she was there, when I went to pick her up, she told me she had a Muslim doctor (a hijabi woman), and that she had “stolen my heart”. She’d had a very positive experience with her, but has since rewritten her memory again. Now, because there was one Muslim doctor, she has decided that means the entire hospital is run by Muslims. *sigh*
Then she didn’t want to go to that ER because last time, she was in the waiting room for 15 hours (she did get called for tests in that time frame, but I had to explain triage to her again).
I ended up going online to see which hospital ERs in our region were open. The one nearest us was still open, but closing at 9pm. The other, in the hospital her doctor’s clinic is in, was open for the night. Did she really want to go to the ER? We talked about how, every time she’s gone, they would do tests, find nothing wrong, and send her home.
Oh, they found something, but they won’t tell her, because they want her to die. They take advantage of old people. They don’t care. Etc.
It was while I was looking up to see where there were any open ERs in our area, and talking about how busy they get on the weekends, that my mother even commented on how this always seems to happen on a Saturday! I wonder why? she asks. 😄
Then, because I wasn’t leaping to drive her to the ER immediately, she launched into how her children didn’t care about her, either. When that didn’t work, she shifted to, “oh, you are already dealing with so much. I’m sorry I called you. I shouldn’t have called you.” (a regular passive aggressive dig about my disabled husband)
*sigh*
After straightening that out, too, she started talking about how she needs to be in a nursing home, she can’t take care of herself anymore, she needs help.
I told her (again), you can’t just walk into a nursing home and get accepted. We are working on it. There is a process that has already been started, but it can take a while. Nursing homes are for people who are a lot further along than she is, and we would basically be waiting for someone to die for a bed to open. She forgets how my dad was before he went into the nursing home. By then, he was getting home care visits for personal care three times a day, and had declined to the point that they could not longer meet his needs. Very different from my mother getting three med assists a day, to make sure she takes her pills properly.
I was finally able to calm her down and told her that I would talk to my siblings and let them know what’s going on, suggesting she have herself some hot tea and rest. Which she agreed to do.
Once off the phone, I created a group chat to message my siblings, thinking it would be faster than email. My sister turns her phone off when she’s at home, though, and didn’t respond until well past 1am. I was finally able to reach my brother in a side chat, and he only had time to ask if Mom had been eating those mandarins my sister had picked up for her. I completely forgot about those. My mother isn’t supposed to eat anything citrus, as it triggers her acid reflux, but my sister got them for her because she felt they were mild enough *sigh* and because my mother had a cold and needed the vitamin C.
For someone who was really sick with a cold, my mother had sounded really great on the phone. Just some mild coughing, towards the end of the conversation.
So I finally went to bed and didn’t see my sister’s response until past 6am.
After doing my morning rounds and having breakfast, I figured it was a good time to try calling my mother. Her morning med assist should have come and gone by then.
I’m happy to say that my mother reported feeling much better. The “pink medicine” (the Pepto) helped so much. Her stomach was hurting much less and her cold was getting better.
Her voice was sounding hoarser this morning, though, and she was coughing more throughout our conversation, but overall, she said she was improving.
I remembered to ask her if she’d been eating the mandarins. She bounced around the answer, saying things like, not this morning, or, let me check, and, only during the day (since she insists on eating foods that will trigger her acid reflux, I’ve suggested that she at least tries to eat only a small amount, early in the day, since it’s when she lies down to sleep that it really bothers her) and so on. So I concluded that she probably did have several of them before all this started, but wasn’t about to admit it.
We talked a bit about the list of foods I gave her that could cause her problems, and which were okay. I think the printout I gave her might still be taped up on one of her cupboard doors. I brought up tomatoes, because I knew my sister had been giving her tomatoes from her garden, first fresh, then canned, over the past while. She said, no, she’d already finished those off. My mother even had given me one of my sister’s jars of tomatoes a while back, because it was just tomatoes; my sister didn’t even put salt in it. 😄 I forgot to bring up onions, though. I think she does still have some of those. So anything citrus, anything in the onion family, and tomatoes are the things she most commonly eats that are causing her problems. She is on acid reflux medication, and I’d hate to see how bad it would be for her if she wasn’t! The Pepto helps her for these short term problems, though.
At one point, when I was asking her questions about how she was feeling and what she had been doing, she brought up dry mouth again – this time, blaming the mandarins. We talked about her need to hydrate, but she just doesn’t want to drink water! As she put it, her mouth wants water, but her stomach doesn’t.
I do get that, so we talked about other ways to hydrate, including through some kinds of foods.
With her voice being so rough and her coughing, I didn’t want to keep her talking on the phone for too long. I tried to say good bye a few times, but she kept finding other things to talk about, like how she had “forced herself” to change her bedding, and mopping her bedroom floor with disinfectant while her bed was moved away from the wall, and how she was so sick, she never even got out of her nightgown, all day…
Honestly, my mother has no idea how strong she is, and how well she’s doing. She’s practically indestructible, but constantly complaining about how sick she is and increasingly talking about how she is dying.
Today, though, she was able to recognized that yesterday was a combination of things that made her feel so much worse, and now she’s glad she didn’t go to the hospital.
I really do hope they are able to get her into some sort of assisted living soon. It’s so hard to know what’s going on with her, how much is real, how much is her deciding things are worse than they are, and so on. She really does need someone around that can monitor her. Between me and my siblings, none of us are in a position to be that for her.
After I was done talking to her on the phone, I updated my siblings. My sister later reported on her own phone tall to my mother. It seems she’d picked up some cup-o-soup for my mother when she did her grocery shopping for her – something my mother would never had bought for herself – and that Mom was going to have some for lunch.
So all is improving with my mother.
Meanwhile, it has been slowly snowing throughout most of the day. We have another ongoing weather warning for “snow showers” right now, because we’re at only -3C/27F, though the wind chill puts us at -12C/10F. It’s supposed to keep snowing, heavily, at times, until about 3am. It’s also supposed to slowly keep getting colder overnight until we reach about -11C/12F by about 7am, and stay that temperature all day.
Hopefully, the roads will be cleared and no longer slippery, by the time I have to go to my mother’s, tomorrow, for her telephone doctor’s appointment.
For now, though, it does look all peaceful outside, and I’m much relieved that my mother is doing better today.
