This box had one side completely covered in stamps, plus two ends! This was the alternate chair my husband ordered to replace his broken one, after his last order completely failed. It’s more of a frame that holds and exercise ball that acts as a seat. It came with one that was remarkably small. We didn’t expect one to come with the chair, and my husband already had an exercise ball – a larger one, more durable one – to use on it.
So far, he’s quite happy with it. He replaced the wheels with the heavy duty ones he’d put on the broken chair, right away. The new chair has 4 legs, though, and the broken office chair has 5, so we have a spare. For now, the new chair’s wheels are on the broken chair. Once we wrangle it to the junk pile for hauling to the dump, we will keep all the wheels. The ones from the new chair can be locked, which is nice. I’m sure we’ll find a use for them at some point. For now, the old chair is waiting in the dining room.
I got a picture of Big Rig on it, but several cats have been taking turns napping on the seat! 😄
After we got home from the post office, and my daughter refilled the kibble bin for the outside cats, she headed straight for the food forest to start digging. By the time I joined her, she had dug another 5 holes for the 10 large potted transplants. While she continued digging, I watered the finished holes, then started getting the haskap out of their pots and setting them into the watered holes. After a while, my older daughter came out and she buried the root balls, and we kept that up until all 10 were in the ground.
While my older daughter finished burying the root balls, my younger daughter started to water them. With the remaining marked spaces, I raked the spaces that were deep tilled level again. That done, I grabbed the largest, strongest looking plants from the trays and laid them out at each spot before digging small holes with a hand trowel in the leveled spots for them.
There wasn’t enough for all three of us to do at that point, so my older daughter went back inside to work on commissions while my younger daughter kept watering, including the smaller holes I’d dug. While she did that, I started sorting through the remaining plants, pulling pots with larger live ones out of the trays until I could start putting them all together again, with no empty spots. There were quite a few empty pots, empty spaces and a few small plants that were beyond saving.
Before I finished that, my daughter finished watering the holes, then went inside. She was already in pain before she started digging, and simply could not bend to work with the smaller plants at all. Which was fine. I was feeling well enough to do it, and got the last 13 spots planted, then finished sorting the trays. The remaining plants needed some very serious watering! In the end, I was able to refill three trays of 18 plants.
I also brought over some taller bamboo stakes and set out one for each smaller transplant, except for the corner that got a stake with a pinwheel on it. The bamboo stakes got water bottles added to their tops to make them more visible, then I used garden wire to secure the stems to the stakes. Being the size they are, this will not only keep them growing straight, but will protect them from snow load in the winter.
A grid of 90 haskap planted in rows 6′ apart, with each transplant 4′ apart in their rows.
Ninety.
Plus another 54 transplants in the trays. I moved those in between some of the rows, out of the shade of the crab apple trees, which you can see in the second image above.
We have spaces to plant some of them, but not another 54!! I don’t know what we’ll do with the extra!
Then there are the little spruces left over. I have no idea what we’ll do with those!
The trays all got watered well. They had so little soil in each pot, they will dry out quickly. A lot of roots escaped their pots and grew along the bottoms of the trays that are now exposed, which is not a good thing. Nothing we can do about that unless I can find a way to just cover them all with soil until they can be transplanted.
All the pots are garbage. They are too brittle from exposure to be used again.
I was cleaning up when my alarm went off for my afternoon painkillers, which I was starting to need by then. I over did it a bit and, as I write this, several hours later, I find I am having difficulty sitting or standing up straight because of it. It’s been worse, but it’s not at all comfortable, that’s for sure!!
Aside from seeing how many more of the little ones we can transplant, we have more to do around the 90 that are in the ground now. We’ll have to go through with the wheelbarrow and pick all the bigger rocks. Once those are removed, we’ll need to rake the loose soil from the digging and level things out. The larger ones will all be getting a water trench made around them. The smaller ones don’t need it, as they are properly below grade in an area large enough to create drainage towards the roots, rather than flowing away into the paths. They will all also need to be watered regularly for their roots to start growing out from the root balls before the ground freezes.
Looking up on how to care for these, one of the biggest issues we can expect to have is problems with birds eating the berries. We won’t be able to set netting over the bushes, which would be the most effective protection. Instead, we will look into setting taller stakes set up all over the area to make “scarecrows”. Most likely with lots of reflective pinwheels and whirligigs, or other reflective things to flap in the wind.
For now, the main thing is done. All those big pots are now transplanted and the marked out space is full. Any other transplants after this is bonus, though if they don’t get in the ground soon, they’re going to die.
I’m definitely paying for it, though. Pushed things a bit hard. Hopefully, things will be better for tomorrow, when I go in for my appointment at the cancer clinic. With my SIL’s offer to drive us in from their place and dropping us off, so we don’t need to hunt for parking, we don’t have to leave quite as early in the morning.
It’s barely past 4pm as I write this, and I am so ready to go to bed right now.
I would love to have the life our cats are living. 😁
Today, the plan was to do the Costco shopping trip.
Last night, my older daughter let us know she was feeling like she was coming down with something and would be avoiding contact as much as possible to avoid spreading something.
Then my younger daughter also started feeling ill.
Which meant I would be doing the Costco trip alone.
Okay. Risky, but okay.
This morning, I found myself feeling like I was coming down with a cold, too. Very mild. Could have been something else. I decided not to take a chance, so when my younger daughter came in after doing the outside cat feeding, I told her Costco was out. It turned out she was working up to coming along with me, even though she was still not feeling well. Once I told her I was staying home, she went back to bed and crashed for several hours.
I tried to do the same but as soon as I started showing signs of being awake, I got covered in cats wanting attention, so that didn’t work out well. My husband was the only person feeling well enough to throw something into the oven for breakfast, which is saying a lot.
I’m glad I didn’t take the chance of going to the city. Before I was finally able to get up, I was no longer feeling like I was coming down with a cold. Instead, the pain levels started kicking in and the bleeding suddenly increased, after several days with no bleeding at all. It kept getting worse, even as I was just sitting at my computer, until I finally had to lie down. If I had done the drive to the city, then tried to walk around a Costco, without my daughter to take over with shopping and driving, I would have gotten much worse and would have had to wait it out before I could safely drive myself home.
When I did finally lie down, I figured I should phone my mother. I haven’t been able to visit her for quite some time, though my brother has, and kept me up to date. He had been able to set up internet in her room that allowed him to get her an internet radio that he programmed for all Polish radio stations, plus the one local multi-cultural station with a Polish hour that she used to always listen to. He was also able to set up a regular large button telephone for her, instead of the senior’s mobile phone, with an internet phone number. With that one, he programed the phone numbers for himself, our sister, plus two for me – one the land line, one my cell phone – all with photos of us on the buttons. My mother would only need to push a single button to call us.
When he got there, neither was working. Someone had taken away the device he’d set up that allowed both to connect through Wi-Fi. The phone and radio were working fine, but had no internet to connect to. He talked to someone at the front desk and they did find a note in the maintenance log about it, but nothing about why it was taken away. They found another one for her, so he got that set up again and working.
Which is when he discovered that all the pre-programmed buttons on the radio had been re-programmed, all to the one multicultural radio station. My mother had been button mashing again. She also had trouble understanding which knob to use to turn on the radio, which is also the volume button, and was instead using the knob to manually change stations.
*sigh*
While talking to my mother on the phone, she told me about her radio only having one station. I asked her if she was pressing a button and holding. She very proudly said yes.
That’s how the buttons get programmed. Instead of simply pressing a button and letting go when trying to change stations, she pressed and held and programmed the button for the radio station she was trying to move away from – and did it with all the buttons, then couldn’t understand why all the buttons had the same station.
I explained it to her a bit, but it will have to wait until my brother visits next for it to be reprogrammed, and he won’t be able to do that until after Thanksgiving weekend.
She wondered about my sister not visiting and I reminded her my sister was still out of province for a festival with their church. She did not ask me when I would be visiting next, though, and instead asked how I was doing. Nor did she say any of the other things she usually goes after me about. Which is quite unusual. I guess that’s one benefit to having cancer. My mother is behaving better towards me! Sad that this is what it took.
I did tell her about the huge number of trees we ended up getting through my brother. She was curious about how this happened, so I briefly explained. She was pretty thrilled about the idea that we might eventually have enough berries to actually be able to sell them, like she used to do with her raspberries.
In the end, it was a rather short call, and my pain levels were still spiking and I had to say good bye, which got no argument from her at all.
As difficult as things can sometimes be with my mother with her not being able to understand some things – things she used to have no problem with, like phones and radios – we are grateful that she is doing remarkably well overall. My FIL, who was in supportive living since my MIL passed away, had a fall a few weeks back and is still in the hospital. Physically, he’s doing somewhat better, but his cognitive decline increased substantially. He won’t be able to go home, has been diagnosed with dementia, and they are going through the process of getting him into a personal care home. The frustrating thing is that we are completely unable to go visit him. My husband simply can’t do the trip anymore, without being incapacitated by pain just from the drive. My FIL is more than a decade younger than my mother, but is in poorer physical and mental condition than she is. A reminder that, in the end, age has nothing to do with it.
I’m happy to say that my own pain levels did eventually recede, and I’m now feeling much better. I was even able to take a walk outside, and I did the evening cat feeding. Which had an unfortunate surprise for me. My daughter had noted this morning that we were out of kibble, and I told her there was another 40 pound bag of donated kibble left.
I was wrong.
Looking at the stack of bags where I thought there was kibble, there was only litter pellets. No kibble bag left at all.
So I “stole” some from the inside cats’ kibble bin. Enough to last until tomorrow morning. After that, we’re going to have to go out to get more kibble. Thankfully, we can do that at the general store the post office is in, and not have to drive to another town.
The girls were feeling better by the end of the day and considered digging more holes for those last haskaps, but we were starting to lose the light by then, so they will work on it tomorrow, instead. Ten more large pots, then as many of the little ones that we can find space for. We should at least be able to fill the last measured out spaces my brother had tilled, tomorrow.
My daughter and I are then going to have to go to bed early tomorrow and, hopefully, get a full night’s sleep, because we’ll be getting up quite early to get to my brother and SIL’s place to leave the truck while she drives us to my appointment in the city.
Today, meanwhile, was very much a non-day for all of us. We all felt unwell for one reason or another, and got next to nothing accomplished.
In the second picture, you can see him enjoying pets.
Midnight still has a mark on his nose. For most of the summer, he had an odd wound there that would get bigger, burst, start going away, then get bigger again. Which was rather gross because he kept trying to rub his nose, wound and all, against us while demanding attention! At some point, it simply started to heal and now there’s just a bit of bald skin where it used to be.
Fluffy lets us pet her regularly now, and is often found lounging on various beds and blankets.
Today, I finally got progress done in the sun room, which meant taking all the beds scattered on the floor out, as well as the food trays and water bowl, so clear the half of the room so the floor could be scrubbed. I put all the beds and blankets into the wagon and set it outside. It was always either Fluffy or Midnight in the wagon, enjoying a nap in the sun.
Once the floor was clear, I unhooked the shop lights from one end, then cleaned all the windows on the inside.
Then I did the outsides.
Then, since I had the bucket with glass cleaner and long pole window washing tool out anyways, I did the outsides of all the first floor windows.
Then I did the windows in the isolation shelter.
Plus the roof.
That done, I got the bucket refilled with all purpose cleaner to start on the floor in the sun room. I’ve got a broom with super stiff bristles on it and I used that to scrub the floor, because there’s no way a regular mop can do the job. It was a very dirty job, but I got a little more than half the floor in the room done. Then my daughter brought me a mop bucket and I used a mop to rinse the floor – which required several changes of water.
It’s going to take quite a while for the floor to dry. Once it’s dry, we can clear the other half. Most things will go outside, but the counter shelf will be moved to the cleaned half, since it’s easier than trying to fight it through the door.
I did get the lights set up again before doing in, and the wagon with the beds was tucked into the other half for the night, in case it rains. The cats are going to have to find other places to sleep tonight!
They have lots of places to choose from.
Through the window of the above photo, you can see the beds with the self seeded tomatoes. That got covered for the night. The other beds in the main garden area did not get covered again. Instead, I harvested.
There are a few California Wonder bell peppers and the Chocolate Stripe tomatoes that will be left to ripen indoors. The single Caspar eggplant is about as ripe as its going to get, so we can try that out at any time. It’s unfortunate that we got only one one successful eggplant, and even that is smaller than it should be.
This morning, my younger daughter and I made a dump run. When we got back, she went straight to the food forest to keep working on the transplants. Her sister took a break from working on commissions to come out and help. Even I was able to help out. With the 18 holes my daughter got done last night, I started by watering each of them – something that would have been good to do with all of the transplants, but there wasn’t the opportunity. Then we worked assembly line style, getting plants out of their big pots, then my younger daughter brought them to the pre-dug holes while her sister went along and put soil back around them.
I found more pots with self seeded willow in them.
Some, like in the photo above, showed signs that someone had already cut away willow earlier, and new ones had started to grow from the same stems. We tried to cut away as much as possible, but there’s just no way to separate their roots out. In the second image, you can see the pile of most of the willows I’d cut away, including from haskaps that had already been transplanted! The leaves are quite similar, but the stems are very different, which helped in finding where to cut them away.
Then my alarm went off for my afternoon painkillers (just T3s now), so I left the girls to it and worked on other things. One of those was doing a scan of the truck. The check engine light had turned itself off a couple of days ago, but turned on again while we were driving to the dump. It was the same code as before, that our mechanic says is likely the gas cap. The other possibilities are all things we’ve taken care of already. I cleared the code, then sent our mechanic screen caps of the scan results, asking for suggestions. We’ll be doing our Costco run tomorrow, so it should be interesting to see if the light is still there.
By the end of the afternoon, this is how far the girls got.
They got 18 haskap into the pre-dug holes, then dug and planted another 7, making for 25 transplants done today. There are still another 10 large pots waiting to go into the ground that will need larger holes dug, before we can switch to the ones in the trays that don’t need such deep holes. In the third photo of the slideshow above, you can see what’s left.
It’s unlikely we’ll have a chance to work on them tomorrow, but we might be able to finish getting things in the ground on Monday. At least for the pre-measured area. Once that’s filled, we can start sticking more of them wherever we can find space.
After that, we go back to clear out the rocks that got dug up. Then the soil around each one will get raked smooth, and finally a water trench will be made around each one.
Then we can start hauling over wood chips and start mulching.
Meanwhile, we have various garden beds that need to be cleared out. The carrots need to be harvested, but those can wait, since they handle frost just fine. At the very least, a bed needs to be prepared for the garlic, which needs to be planted this month.
On the plus side, we should have a couple more weeks of relatively mild weather before overnight temperatures start consistently going below freezing. Which I am grateful for. Today I saw one of those Facebook “X years ago today” photos come up. It was a photo taken out of the living room window, 8 years ago, and there was snow on the ground. I think we even had a blizzard on Thanksgiving weekend, that year. So I am quite happy with the weather we’ve got happening right now! In fact, it was a perfect day to be working outside today, and not get too hot while doing it!
I’m also happy that I was feeling well enough to be outside most of the day, and finally work on the sun room, too. We’ll see how things are with our Costco trip tomorrow. I’ll definitely bring the walker along and have my daughter push the cart, instead of using the cart as a walker, just to be on the safe side.
Well, we most definitely dropped to freezing last night, so I was expecting to see much of the garden finally killed off for the season.
I didn’t make it outside for quite some time, though.
I was doing great in the wee hours when my alarm went off – so much so, I skipped the painkillers and fell back asleep. I was still feeling good when the morning alarm went off and I took my meds and supplements as usual, then promptly fell back asleep again.
Then the phone rang. I was expecting a call back from what I missed yesterday, at 10am. The call came at about 9am, and I was still hard asleep.
It did turn out to be the cancer clinic calling. Finally! I have a date to come in on Tuesday next week. I had thought I’d be getting a procedure done – another biopsy and testing of my lymph nods – but she said the appointment should be only half an hour. So it sounds like I’m just talking to a doctor? I will find out when I get there.
The clinic is in the same hospital the cardiac clinic is in. The cardiac clinic that would not accommodate my husband’s disability while always being very late calling him in and making him wait in painful waiting room chairs, then ghosted him when he refused to put up with it anymore.
Hopefully, the cancer clinic is better.
What isn’t better is the length of the drive, downtown driving to cross the river to a sort of second “downtown” of the French part of the city, and endless parking issues around the hospital. The woman that called me even brought up the parking as a potential issue, and I told her about taking my husband in and having to park several blocks away. She completely understood. I appreciate that she brought it up. It is clearly a major problem.
Oh, and the appointment is for 9:15am. The drive, with heavy downtown traffic, is about an hour and a half. More, with construction issues. Then we’d need the time to find parking, then walking however many blocks it’ll take to get to the hospital. We’d have to leave at around 6:45am to be sure to get there in time.
I passed on to my brother and SIL about the appointment. While chatting with me SIL, I mentioned that the parking issues was brought up.
She had a suggestion. We could drive to their place, just outside the city, and leave the truck in their driveway. She would drive us to the hospital, drop us off, then come back for us later.
!!!!!
My SIL is such an awesome person. I very gratefully accepted the offer.
By the time that was all worked out, I’d had breakfast and was getting ready to head outside. Unfortunately, pretty much right from when I lurched out of bed to get the phone, the pain started kicking in. It kept slowly getting worse so I held out until my afternoon meds, using the topical painkiller lotion in between, hoping that with the two of them, things would improve.
It never really did. I’ve just taken my evening painkillers and it’s only now starting to get better.
My younger daughter, meanwhile, had gone out to start working on the transplants. She had come in briefly in the mid afternoon when I remembered that I wanted to go to the post office. I had a thumb drive to drop off for someone, care of the store’s owner, as well as getting the mail, in case there were more medical letters in.
My daughter came with me. I drove but stayed in the truck while she did the running around. By the time I was driving home, I had to hunch over the steering wheel, as the angle helped ease the pain a bit.
Once home, I decided to stay outside and finally look at the garden as I’d planned to do earlier. My daughter offered to bring my walker over – she had set it up under the crab apple trees as somewhere she could sit to rest and hydrate every now and then. I said no and just took my time over things.
Of course, I couldn’t NOT do stuff while out there.
The winter squash vines all seemed to be frost killed, even with the frost cloth I had over it. Which I’d left, because it’s white and still lets light in. Plus, I wasn’t up to moving it. The vines looked damaged, but the developing squash did not seem to have damage to them. So I left them.
The bush beans, in the first photo above, are all killed off. The Cosmos and Crackerjack marigolds in the second photo seem to be killed off, too. Looking through the plastic over the melons, they look dead, as well. I did not try to uncover the peppers, Chocolate Stripe tomatoes and eggplant. The celery, which I have not been able to harvest to dehydrate as planned, looks just fine!
The summer squash, in the third picture, were completely frost killed – revealing a few squash that looked big enough to harvest and not very damaged by frost!
So, I harvested them. Two Lemon squash, some Prolific Longneck, and some yellow zucchini.
In the other images, you can see that some zucchini flowers look surprisingly strong and like they might still bloom!
After that, I checked on the tomato and bean beds by the compost ring. The self seeding tomato plants in the old kitchen garden, which is still covered, seem to have survived, but the ones in the tomato bed did not. After checking on the state of the tomatoes still hanging on the vines, I decided they were worth picking, with the split ones going into the compost ring. Only the larger tomatoes. The Orange Currant tomatoes are so small, there was nothing salvageable there.
I was being haunted by cats while doing this, so I did the evening cat feeding. Which is when I got to love on this beauty.
Colby SO loves attention now! He’s such a gorgeous kitty!
That done, I finished picking tomatoes and set them in the cat free zone, aka: the living room, to see if they will ripen, then decided I was up to doing at least some clean up work on the tomato bed.
I basically just took off all the plant ties and clips, then pulled the stakes out. With the green stakes, I was able to make a bundle of 10 but, since we stole some to use for the haskaps, I didn’t have enough to make a second bundle of 10, so those will just wait there for now. The bed is at the stage where the protective collars can be removed, but that was more than I was able to do today.
The deer ate the entire row of Swiss Chard, but it’s trying to grow back! Chard can handle frost quite well, and the little leaves have no frost damage at all.
After that, I felt I had enough energy for one more thing. I measured inside the water bowl shelter, then cut a narrow piece of plywood to length.
The first image shows the new board, which is in the middle, plus I added back one of the other narrower boards I’d tried adding to make it wider, previously. Originally, it was just that white board in the back (there’s a spare piece of wood I’m just storing there for now). I set the self-warming shelter back, and it now has enough space to be set sideways, with the peak matching the angle of the roof. Hopefully, nothing will try climbing on top of it and crushing it again!
Under the shelf, you can see the last beds and blankets that need to be cleaned for the winter, but in the second photo, you can see I’ve added another bed, already cleaned, to the second floor. As the season progresses and we plug in the cat house, there will be power to the heated water bowl for the winter. We still need to pop the roof on the cat house to clean it for the winter, and check the heat bulb and smoke detector.
That was about it for me, by then. I did go over to see how my daughter was doing. She’d been at it almost all day. She had planted 6 more haskap, but then switched to just digging holes. While she was doing that, I gave all the pots and trays a watering. I hadn’t realized until then that my SIL wasn’t able to take all the spruce trees! There are still about 5 trays and a few loose pots of them!
My daughter dug another 18 holes before calling it a day. Digging the holes is actually the “easy” part of the job – getting the root bound haskap out of their pots is far more difficult.
Unfortunately, as she moved her way down the tilled rows, the top soil was getting shallower in places, and she was digging up a lot more gravel and rocks. Including hitting some rocks too big to dig out!
You can see the edge of one in the first photo above. The second photo shows some of the “smaller” rocks she’d gotten out of another hole. As for the third picture…
Yeah… that’s a crack in the spade’s wooden shaft. It finally broke while she was digging around that rock in the first photo.
Thankfully, my brother had brought a couple of his spades out and left them for us to use, too. We have another one that has a metal shaft that my daughter doesn’t like to use. She’d started using one of my brother’s that had a wooden shaft, but the top was some sort of ergonomic handle that she found actually caused her more pain. Which left only one last shovel available that she could use! Another wooden shaft, which she prefers. Hopefully, no more big rocks will become an issue.
Here, you can see the day’s work. Six more haskaps transplanted, on the left of the photo, and 18 holes dug. That leaves another 30 holes to dig, but the last ones won’t need to accommodate the big pots. The last ones could be done with a hand trowel, for the haskap in the trays.
You can see the piles of soil that have more gravel in them, too.
By the time she was done, my daughter fully needed to use my walker to go back to the house! The poor thing could barely walk by then.
While all this was happening, I got a message from my sister saying they might be swinging buy to drop off some tires, then head back out again. We’d been inside for a while when I checked the cameras and saw they were here! So I went out to talk to them.
Oh! I completely forgot to mention last night!
A few years ago, someone had come out here to buy several old vehicles out of the car graveyard. Two years ago, he came back wanting to buy a couple of little cars parked by the old threshing machine. They’ve been there so long, they sunk into the soil right to the undercarriage, and there were caragana and red osier dogwood growing around them.
We made arrangements and he just needed to figure out how to get them out and take them home.
I never heard back from him. I thought he might have changed his mind but, last night, I got a call. He was at the gate!
It turns out he had started a new business this spring, and now has a crane truck. He was able to use it to lift the cars out and tow them to an open area closer to the gate, where they can be easily accessed to load onto a trailer, which will happen another day.
Of course, I let my brother know and kept him up to date, then sent him video I took of the crane work. My brother, however, was visiting my mother at the time and didn’t see all of it; all he saw was that someone had come for the cars – and he completely forgot about the arrangement made, two years ago. Not a surprise. At the time, they were frantically trying to get their own stuff off their property they’d sold to bring here, before the possession date. He ended up phoning me after visiting my mother and had seemed very confused and anxious about it.
By the time they got here tonight, though, he had had a chance to see everything I’d sent them. When I realized they were here and I came out to see them, my brother was just coming back from the main garden area, where they’d checked out the progress. Then I saw my SIL come around the trees on her phone, look up and laugh, because she had just messaged to tell me what a great job was done with the digging! I told them, it was all my younger daughter! They were very impressed.
Then we had a chance to talk about the vehicles, and about the lack of paperwork for them. Even scrap yards need proof of ownership when it comes to old vehicles. That’s all gone, and the people who would have had them have passed on. Most of them have been there for so long, they would be considered abandoned, anyhow. We’ll need to figure it out.
I mentioned the guy is still interested in some of the other old vehicles, and my brother wants to talk to him about that. They’ve taken two trailer loads of stuff from here to the scrap yard and for the last one, they barely got enough back to cover the cost of gas to take them there. Selling the individual vehicles to someone who wants to rebuild them, and can pick them up himself, would have a much better rate of return. Plus, my brother is also now looking to sell more of their farm equipment, because he’s not going to be farming with them after he retires in a couple of years.
They weren’t able to stay long, though, but thanks to her generous offer, I’ll be seeing my SIL next week, when she drives me and my daughter to the cancer clinic.
Which means we will need to do our Costco trip on Sunday. Tomorrow, the dump is open so we’ll be doing that, then planting trees before more holes are dug. I know myself well enough to admit that I wouldn’t be able to do a Costco trip on Monday, without putting myself in a physically bad situation for the cancer clinic appointment on Tuesday, which leaves us only Sunday to do the Costco stock up trip, leaving Monday to do any recovering I might need. Particularly since I am now out of the Tramacet and am back to using only T3s for pain.
So, that’s where we are at now. Thanks to my daughter, much progress was made on the digging, and I was even able to do some stuff in the garden to prepare it for winter. I continue to pray for a mild fall, because I will need the time. I’m going to be severely limited in what I can do to prepare the beds for winter, and the girls aren’t that much better than I am, until they get their surgeries. Which won’t be for months, while I should get mine within October.
Meanwhile, with the weather changes, my husband is getting hit with a lot of pain, too.
What a broken and battered household we are right now!! 😄
Ah, well. It is what is it, and we do what we can. What else is there to do?
$513.19, to be exact, but that’s not the total for the day. Just the two I got pictures of.
My younger daughter and I headed out for the city shortly after 10. Normally, we would have taken the highway that, once reaching the city, because the street that goes past all the places we were planning to hit. There is still major construction there, so we took the highway closer to us. This one passes through one town along the way, so we stopped for gas. I put in $30 in gas from half a tank, then went in to pay and gets some drinks and some beef jerky to snack on until we reached the city, since neither of us had had breakfast, while my daughter cleaned the windows. Total was about $50. The $30 of gas, at $1.729/L, brought us to just under 3/4 of a tank. The last I’d heard, gas in this town was $1.809/L, which was a drop of 9¢/L, so seeing another 8¢ drop was good to see – even if the prices are still insanely inflated.
My daughter was cleaning the passenger side of the windshield as I came back to the truck when the squeegee caught on the driver’s side windshield wiper, pulling it off the arm.
She spent several minutes trying to get it back on, but it simply would not stay. The passenger side wiper was already being held on by the pressure of the arm alone, and she finally got the driver’s side wiper to stay the same way.
That changed where our first stop was going to be. We’d intended to go to the Walmart first, this time, since we pass it before we pass the Canadian Tire, and I wasn’t planning to get anything that needed refrigeration while there.
We went to the Canadian Tire, first.
I’d meant to get only the litter pellets there, originally, but of course we had to get a pair of windshield wipers. I ended up getting a staff member to help us find the right one for our truck. We’d tried using their computer tablet by the display and got several options that didn’t make sense. While the staff member was looking it up on his computer, I got a message from my daughter saying she’d found it, based on what came up on the tablet. Which turned out to be the wrong one – a couple of inches too short, to start with! It was also a single blade in the package that cost almost $50 by itself, and we needed two. We found the one the guy had found in his system, and it was a two pack at pretty much the same price. !!! I’m glad I asked the guy!
Along the way, we spotted some AAA batteries on sale, so I picked it up. It’s just a small package and I expect to pick up a bigger one when we do the Costco shopping, but we were out at home and I needed them.
Since the wipers were an unexpected purchased, I used some of my Canadian Tire dollars against the bill. I didn’t want to use too much, as we are saving it up, hopefully to be able to use against a new pressure tank. To get the same size as what we have now would cost about $500 after taxes, so every little bit will help.
Total at Canadian Tire, $57.79
This location is attached to a mall with a food court, so we went there for “breakfast” (it was past noon by then). I ended up getting some Pad Sew at Thai Express – something I haven’t had in years – and they even gave me a 15% off coupon to use, so the total with a drink was just under $14. My daughter ended up going somewhere else and paid for her own lunch, so that didn’t come out of my own budget.
Sadly, my lunch was not as good as I remember it being, the last time I had it. It certainly wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good enough that I’ll want to get it again.
On the way out, we passed a Dollarama and went in. I’m still looking for larger mirrors to go with the small ones I got through Amazon for the decorations with shisha embroidery I want to make.
There were zero mirrors.
In the end, I did get some gold and silver glitter felt, plus we picked up some more votive candles for our stash, plus found some taper candles that would fit the church candles we brought from the old church that was burned by an arsonist a few years back, before it was torn down.
I never did go back to bring home some pews or benches. I do regret it, but had nowhere I could store them until we could clean them up and find a place for them. I hope someone else was able to take them. To properly dispose of anything in a church, what can be burned is burned, and what can’t be burned gets buried. I would hate for those beautiful, it soot covered, pews and benches got burned! I did, at least, get a pair of candle holders with red glass globes. The candle is put inside the stems, where a spring slowly pushes it up as the candle burns down. Until today, I hadn’t found straight candles that would fit inside the stems, so I made sure to pick up a package.
I got something else as well, but my mind is drawing a blank right now. 😄 Grand total was just over $12, though.
Next stop was back tracking to Walmart. This is what we got for $163.
The stuff in the smaller basket is stuff my daughter picked up herself. Originally, I only planned to get cat supplies, but got a few extra things.
The cat kibble, wet cat food and large box of XXL pee pads where on my list. Between this and what we have left from last month, we won’t need to get any more for October. We’ll be getting toilet paper at Costco, but when I saw large packages on sale, I grabbed one. Because in our family, we can never have too much toilet paper!
My daughter remembered that we were almost out of conditioner, so I got a large bottle, plus some antiperspirant – the cheapest brand – for myself. The orange yarn is for some ear warmers that fit over a baseball cap that I want to make to sell.
Grand total (including a donation to round it up) was $163.
*sigh*
My phone’s alarm went off for my scheduled painkiller while we were finishing up and I almost forgot to take it. I had my T3s with me, not the Tram-acet I’ve got only a 2 week prescription for, and my daughter got that for me while we were driving to our next stop.
Superstore.
Normally, we would go to the international grocery store, but I wanted to make it a bigger trip today, just in case our Costco trip got delayed. I was supposed to be going for surgery by the end of the month, but still haven’t heard from the cancer clinic in the city. I’ll be calling my specialist’s clinic again to see if I can find out what’s going on, since I have no idea who to call at the cancer clinic.
Plus, Superstore has some things we wouldn’t get anywhere else, including Costco.
Today, that included a free turkey. !!
This is what $350.19 looks like.
You can just barely see the frozen turkey under the cart. For the promo, the cashier apparently didn’t need to even scan it, so it isn’t on the receipt.
I do like that their receipt prints out sorted by category.
First up, under “grocery”, we got a can of roasted, salted cashews for the truck, as we try to always have some sort of food in the truck for emergencies, or for those days we have to drive around and don’t have time to stop for a meal.
The honey Dijon is for my husband, as he likes to use it as part of a dip with mayo. Normally, we get mayo at Costco, but we’re almost out, so I got one here, too. They had large bags of cornmeal at a very good price (almost $4 less than local, for the same size package). The stuffed olives are mostly for my husband, too. They had Monster energy drinks at a very good price compared to most places, so we picked up two cans each for myself and my daughters, until we pick up a case at Costco. Then my daughter spotted some Beaver Buzz. Yay! They have it again! Two flavours were on sale, so I got three cans in two flavours. We also got my husband’s favourite soy sauce, and the drink in that list was something my daughter picked out of a fridge as we were in line, for the drive home.
Under dairy, I picked up some Old Cheddar and Mozzarella cheese, some butter to last us until Costco, and an 18 pack of eggs.
I’m not sure why eggs is listed under “dairy”.
Under “frozen” (which doesn’t include frozen meats”, we’ve got some mixed berries (mostly for my husband), plus a big package of perogies.
Under “produce”, there’s a bag of Ambrozia apples that were on sale, as were the Mandarin oranges and a bag of avocados.
Next is the “meats” section. My older daughter specifically requested a sausage she wanted to use in a soup. For my husband, we got several different types of frozen chicken pieces – something he is able to cook himself, when he is able to, since his pain levels often leave him unable to eat at regular meal times. I also got a piece of frozen pork loin, plus a package of pork tenderloin.
For my seafood loving daughters, we got some frozen popcorn shrimp, frozen tilapia fillets, and fresh rockfish fillets at a “use tonight” discount price.
Under “bakery”, we got two big bags of torpedo buns, one for the freezer and one for right away, a couple of loaves of 14 grain bread, plus a tin of mooncakes as a treat.
Under “deli”, there’s just a wheel of double cream brie, at a “use right away” discounted price.
Then, there was supper for when we got home, under “home meal replacement”. A massive sandwich for my husband that will be good for at least a couple of meals for him, some teriyaki chicken sushi for myself, and my daughter picked a couple of “family size” sushi platters (one is labeled as a bento) for herself and her sister, plus three taro bubble teas for the three of us (my husband has zero interest in bubble tea).
There we have it. $350.19 after tax. Since the total was over $300, we got the free Thanksgiving turkey, too.
By the time we were done with the shopping, my poor daughter was really starting to struggle. She’d brought her cane and was needing it, badly.
Thankfully, along with my T3s, I also keep some extra strength Tylenol in my purse, so my daughter took some after we loaded everything into the truck.
I was actually doing way better than she was. My lower back was starting to go, but nothing out of the ordinary for all the walking we did, and nothing I couldn’t deal with easily. Usually, by this time, my left hip starts to give out, too. It barely ached. No cancer related pain (just some extra bleeding) at all.
Meanwhile, my poor daughter struggled just to walk to the truck!!
Thankfully, that was our last stop, other than getting more gas. I’d thought to get more in the city, thinking there would be a better price. The prices we saw in the city, however, were all $1.799/L So we skipped it until we reached the same gas station we went to this morning.
I was just under half a tank by the time we reached the gas station – from the gas station, through all the city driving, then back to the same gas station, taking the same rough, used up that $30 I put in this morning.
*sigh*
This time, I put in $40, and we got nothing else. I did, however, use some of my points to get 10¢/L off when I paid for it, so I actually paid $37.69
That put me just above 3/4’s of a tank. That extra $10 made very little difference!
I’ll do a complete fill when we do our Costco trip, and reset my trip meter for the month.
Once at home, I back up to the house and my daughters and I unloaded the truck, assembly line style, then I left them to put things away while I parked the truck in the garage. As I drove out of the yard, however, I spotted something dark, moving in the grass behand my brother’s parked trucks.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen one! We had one year, back when we could still afford to buy black oil sunflower seeds to set in the bird feeders outside our living room window, where we had several of them. They would come eat the bird seed, along with a cat or two.
Yes, we had a couple of cats that would eat bird seed.
The groundhogs caused some problems with their digging, and eating our garden vegetables. The next spring, we had massive flooding, and I think the dens they were hibernating in got flooded. Especially if there was one under our outhouse. Even in a normal spring, it floods under there. In the years since, I think I’ve seen only one or two, in about the same area as this one.
They are so cute. Destructive, but cute!
So that’s our first stock up shop for October. The grand total, give or take some change, is $684.67 That includes gas, food, the Dollarama purchases and the extra expense of having to get windshield wipers, though most of that was covered by my Canadian Tire points.
Considering what we were able to get, that’s not too bad for these days.
It also means our Costco trip shouldn’t be as big. I’ll probably get only one more bag of kibble (we still have donated kibble) for the inside cats, while for the outside cats, I expect to be getting 40 pound bags from the feed store.
Speaking of outside cats…
When doing the morning feeding, my younger daughter has been able to give the Shrine Lady kitten all sorts of skritches! She still allows it only when food it around – especially the cat soup – but she is becoming more tolerant of it.
She has the softest fur imaginable!!!
While we were heading home, my older daughter did the evening feeding – and she was able to pet the Shrine Lady, too!! Just a bit, while she was acting very offended that there was no cat soup.
When I do the evening feeding, I have started adding a couple of cartons of cat milk to the food trays in the sun room (my older daughter does not do that). I want to encourage the kitten into there, and it has apparently been working. She does have a favourite tray to eat from, outside the sun room door, but when they’ve gone out to feed the cats lately, she has been inside the room.
Progress!
Hopefully, we will soon be able to get her into a carrier, and off to the rescue for spay. They are overwhelmed and aren’t doing intakes, but she is younger and they might be able to find a space for her. Otherwise, she will come back to us.
We shall see.
Meanwhile, our next stock up trip at Costco should happen on Wednesday, the last day of the month.
Oh, and I’m happy to say that the truck was behaving – and I think we got a confirmation that the cause of that check engine light is dust in some lines. When putting gas in this morning, I used the hold-open latch that lets you let go of the nozzle until it’s either full, or the pump reaches the pre-set amount. Right away, it started clicking off, as if the sensing port was reading the tank as full. After a couple of times, I had to manually hold the lever for it to fill without stopping itself. When we had the 2007 Uplander, before getting this truck, it was doing that constantly not long after we moved here. Driving on gravel roads so often means dust gets into spaces that triggers this. The person I was talking to about it added that getting it fixed is really expensive, and it’ll just happen again, so it’s not worth the cost. It affects nothing else.
I’ll bring it up with our mechanic when I have the chance, but that seems to be the most likely thing. The only difference now is, in this truck, it triggers the check engine light. Which also means it probably won’t turn off, even if we clear the code.
The main thing is, the truck is running well. We’ve got a lot of trips to the city for medical appointments coming up over the next couple of months, and really need to be able to rely on it!
Today came in densely foggy. Enough that we were getting fog advisories from the weather department. While the girls were out doing the morning cat feeding, they heard was sounded like rain, but it turned out the fog had condensed on tree leaves so much that it started to “rain”, but only directly under trees!
I was feeling good today, and my plan had been to get some more progress on the sun room. It was too damp out for the things that needed to go outside. Instead, I decided to focus on jerry rigging a tool to finally work on the eavestroughs. We have three areas where it is too dangerous to get up to the eaves without proper safety equipment, which we don’t have. I’d bought a bristle brush tool to clean them from the ground, but both heads that came with the kit broke off. I also got a hose attachment. We can’t see it, but there was obviously too much debris for the hose attachment to accomplish much, plus the elbows on the downspouts kept clogging.
The brush tool’s head might be broken, but I was left with a useable handle. I repurposed some heavy gauge wire from the mesh garden bed row cover hoops that the cats bent up by jumping on it. A hoop got folded in half with the ends secured to end piece the bristle brush had been attached to, with the loop formed by the fold bent to make a hook. It’s only held with tape, but it’s the heavy duty repair tape I picked up. I figured if it worked, I could find something more permanent to use another time. Until then, this stuff is strong enough to hold it.
It worked surprisingly well. Two of the eavestroughs were particularly bad, as it’s been quite a long time since anyone has tried to clean them. There was basically compost at the bottoms of them. As well as the modified tool worked, there was only so much I could flick out with the wire hook, but I was at least able to loosen things a bit, too. Hopefully enough that the hose attachment could finally wash it away.
It was a very messy job.
I started working with the hose attachment on at the eavestrough that runs along one side of the old kitchen, then over my bedroom window, with a right angle turn where the two roof sections meet. The roof sections form a sort of channel where everything drains or falls into that corner, so it was seriously built up with debris. Being a corner, it was also very difficult to use the hook tool in the space, but I got a fair bit out.
Once I switched to the hose attachment, the first thing I focused on was the opening to the downspout to try and clear the elbows. Thankfully, I was able to get it fairly clear. The next while was spent trying to drive debris towards the opening, then forcing it through the elbows when it started jamming up again. Every now and then, I would hear a thunk as the debris would finally come free and drop down to the elbow at the bottom before finally getting washed away. I had to stop regularly to clear debris away from the opening at the bottom.
It was slow going.
I could only work small sections at a time, and had to stop to scrape with the hook tool again, several times. After about an hour of that, I got the old kitchen section – roughly 10 feet – mostly done, and had started around the corner. That corner is going to be particularly difficult to clear!
Then my alarm went off for my scheduled painkiller time. By then, I was actually start to feel it, so I knew I would have to call it a day and come back to it later. Still, I’m pleased with how much I was able to clear.
Meanwhile, I started getting messages from my SIL. They were on their way over to take the trailer of hot water tanks to the scrap yard, then use the trailer to get and bring back a water tank for their caravan. Water suitable to use for showering as well as the toilet and sinks. They’ve been using an outhouse all this time! There was already one against the storage building that they had cleaned up and put a new door on, as well as using the one in the inner yard that we’d made all pretty inside, several years ago. Definitely not something they’ll be wanting to do if they come out in the winter!
Once inside, cleaned up and medicated, I ended up helping my daughter in the kitchen.
She was trying to butcher the Arikara squash. It was fighting back.
The outer skin on that thing was definitely well cured. 😄
She managed to get it cut in half crosswise, with me helping keep it steady on the cutting board. It took a lot of strategic stabbing, then it took both of us to break it open. We made sure to collect the innards in a bowl, and I started collecting seeds while she tried to split the halves lengthwise. The knife would only go so far, and then it took the two of us pulling to break them apart.
The second image in the slide show above is the collected seeds, rinsed and set out to dry on parchment paper.
We are wanting to get a taste of this to know if we even like it, so the pieces are being roasted plain. My daughter will be using half of it for a soup that I will not be able to eat, as it will be spicy and full of fish. I prefer to eat winter squash on its own, seasoned with butter and brown sugar. My husband doesn’t like winter squash, so I’ve basically got an entire half of the squash to myself!
While my daughter was getting things into the oven, I headed out to the compost pile and found a surprise at the door. My SIL had left a bag with some items she had brought for us! I called back to my daughter to tell her that my SIL had already come to the door, then went to the compost ring. She was still close enough to hear me and came back. It turned out she had knocked on the door, but we were so buy wrestling with the squash, we never heard it. She thought I might have been resting and didn’t want to disturb us, and just left the bag.
So we had a chance to talk, and walked over to where my brother was struggling to hook the trailer up to their truck. It was not cooperating! Since I wasn’t going back in right away, I messaged my daughters about the bag by the door, so they took it in and my older daughter came out to return the bag. We talked for a while longer and got caught up on things. They won’t be staying overnight, and likely not come back during the weekend. They’ll just be coming back tonight with the water tank, dropping it off and leaving, and it might be full dark by the time they get here.
After that, it was late enough to do the evening cat feeding, so I headed in through the sun room, where I spotted this guy, tucked away in the shelf shelter.
This is Bobert. He is not very friendly, but not feral, either. He and Larence, another grey tabby, with no white on the nose, used to both hang around together a lot, but Larence seems to be among those that have disappeared. I saw very few cats around when I did the evening feeding. More show up during the morning feeding. I think I’ll try to join my daughter tomorrow morning and do a head count while she’s setting out the cat soup.
My older daughter just came by to let me know that the squash is done roasting.
Time to go and find out how it tastes!
The Re-Farmer
addendum: I almost made it – then got a message. They got to the scrap yard and almost got turned away, because they’re on strike!!! My brother explained they drove 80 miles to get there, and how where they do know about the strike? They were eventually allowed in, but only if he unloaded the trailer himself. For the amount they got back, with him having to do the work himself, it’s no wonder most people just send this stuff to the landfill. It’ll barely cover the cost of gas for the trip in that truck! That’s why I’ve been just collecting aluminum. Ferrous iron just isn’t worth much.
My daughter and I headed into town this morning, hoping to get the truck worked on, even though I hadn’t received a message back from the garage with a time. I had my suspicions, but my daughter had something to do in town after, so I knew it wouldn’t be a wasted trip.
Oh, my. I really feel for the owner of the garage.
When we got there, he was outside, on the phone. My daughter stayed outside by the truck while I went into the office and waiting for him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying on the phone, but I could hear his tone, and it was a lot tenser than his usual laid back manner.
When he came to the office door, he was furiously texting while also apologizing. He had meant to text me back with a time, but had never had a chance to look at his schedule to tell me when. He was finally able to set his phone down on a shelf just outside the door, telling me how, after he’d had to go home yesterday, unable to work on our truck, things ended up taking hours longer than it should have. Of course, that absolutely screwed up his schedule completely.
He had just sat down at his desk and started getting his schedule out when his phone started ringing again. From where he’d left it just outside the door! He had to answer it and went outside again to talk. When he came back, he looked absolutely frazzled.
He was, of course, needing to catch up on things, and I could already see his bays were full, so there was no way we’d be getting in anytime soon. He had no openings today and, at best, could squeeze me in between other scheduled jobs. Of course, that would me us waiting in his office, since there’s nowhere else to go in the industrial park his shop is now located in. Alternatively, he had openings tomorrow.
We’ll be back tomorrow morning.
Poor guy. Yes, there was another mechanic, but there are things only the owner can take care of and, when it comes to our truck and needing to figure things out, he had taken that on himself rather than delegating.
That arranged, my daughter and I headed into town. I had forgotten our water bottles to refill, but we’ll be back to do that tomorrow. My daughter ran her errand and we were soon home.
I was feeling really good today – left the walker in the truck and didn’t even need a cane. After we had lunch at home, I headed outside to see what I could get done, as we are expecting rain.
I got the cat beds soaking in the tub finished and set out to drain and, if it doesn’t rain, dry. Floor mats got hosed down, which will need to be done again another time or two. I got the cat cage dismantled and the interlocking mat under it set out for soaking, then hosing down.
With the cat half of the sun room finally empty, I swept as best I could, but the floor washing and window washing will have to wait. Instead, I brought out all the cleaned cat beds and blankets and set them on one side, then brought all the food trays that had been removed and laid them out on the other, along with a water bowl. This way, the cats will at least have someplace warm and dry to hang out in, should the weather get wet. The wind, at least, seems to be dying down.
By the time all that was done, it was time to do the outside cat feeding. The singleton kitten would not let me touch her today, but she kept calling at me. She looks so sad without the little kittens to play with! I’m glad she’s staying close to the house now, though. Hopefully, with all the trays returned to the sun room, she will start hanging out in there more often, and the other cats won’t chase her out.
Before heading in, I did my evening rounds and checked on the garden. I watered the muskmelon, since they are under their own mini greenhouse set up. Then I noticed a strange bit of colour among the yellow leaves of the red noodle beans in the other bed.
There it is. Our single, sad, floppy little red noodle bean! I couldn’t see any others. Which I found funny because the same thing happened the first time we tried growing this variety during what turned out to be a drought year. We got just one sad little bean that year, too.
I would really like to successfully grow this variety, but I think I’ll wait a year or two before I try again.
I was still able to get a little harvest for today, though.
I got a handful of beans from the ones planted later in the season, with the Arikara squash. My pain levels started to kick in, so I asked a daughter to make supper, and I now have those beans on my cooling plate as I write this. I also grabbed a few of the Blueberry Tomatoes for the girls.
Sept. 23, and we still have a few things we’ll be able to harvest. If the long range forecast is at all accurate, we will have no danger of frost at all for at least the next 10 days.
I’m appreciating every frost free day we’re getting as a gift right now!
Okay, main goal of the day: getting the truck to the garage for our afternoon appointment.
As usual, we planned on leaving early. My daughter was really struggling this morning, unfortunately. She’d had a bad night. We’ve had more outings than usual that she came along with to help me out, and it’s starting to wear on her.
This time, it was Gouda, parked on one of the inside out cat beds under the canopy tent. So adorable!
I was having a good day, when it comes to pain levels, and started off driving but right away realized I was feeling unusually sleeping. A down side of having to take painkillers every 6 hours. I never get more than a few hours of sleep at a time, if I manage to fall sleep at all.
We got to the garage about half an hour early and settled in the waiting room chairs. We could hear the owner working on something in the back and he didn’t see us, which was fine. We were in no hurry. I actually started to fall asleep in the chair.
Then he walked by the door to the office, focused on his phone, stopped and did a double take when he realized we were already there and waiting. He greeted us then continued outside, going back to his phone.
Shortly after, he came back and apologetically asked us if we wanted to go into town for lunch or something; he needed to go home to take care of something. We were okay with that and he said he would text me when he was back.
I got my daughter to drive and we ended up going to the Dairy Queen, because I had some coupons. My daughter was a sweetheart and insisted on paying for it, too.
We took our time about it, though I wasn’t that hungry and ended up saving my burger for home. I just snacked on some fries. I don’t really like fries all that much, and gave the last of them to my daughter, since she hadn’t eaten before we left. After a while, we decided that we could just as easily go back to the garage and stay in the truck, where I’m sure I would have fallen asleep. We were getting ready to head out when I got a text.
The thing he had to take care of at home was taking longer than it should have, and he had no idea how long it would be. Rather than have us wait, he asked if we were willing to come back tomorrow.
I answered yes, then asked if he wanted us back for the same time. By that point, I don’t think he was able to keep checking his work phone. I’ll just assume the same time if he doesn’t respond.
So we headed home, instead, stopping only to pick up some gas.
$1.899/L
Ouch.
At least I got my 3¢/L CAA discount, so we paid $1.869/L instead. Every little bit helps.
Once at home, I sat at my computer for a while, but was still so sleepy, I couldn’t actually accomplish anything useful. My husband came over to talk and the first thing he said was that I looked really horrible! 😄😂 I did consider just going to bed but, by this time, it was past 3 and I knew that would screw up my night.
After a while, though, I started feeling better. Well enough to go outside to do the evening cat feeding. The singleton kitten, I noticed, is no longer a junk pile cat. She is now and under the cat house cat! The sun room trays are all outside right now, as we’ve made very little progress on clearing and cleaning the sun room, and spread out on the ground near the cat shelters. As I was topping them up, the little one was peeking out from under the cat house, meowing at me. I could see she wanted to come out so badly, but was also too scared to actually do it!
She did come out eventually, though. Especially after I started to add cat milk to some of the trays, too.
I was still feeling good, so I decided to do some yard stuff and garden watering in between topping up the cats’ water bowls a bit at a time, so as not to scare them away from the food. I checked the drying cat beds and stuff, and they were finally all dry, so I tucked those into the wagon and under the screen for now. I’ve got other pieces soaking with detergent in the tub, so I agitated them for awhile. That water got quite brown in the process! They are still soaking, as I wasn’t up to scrubbing them today. Then I started watering the garden.
Yes, the garden is still worth watering! Not all of the beds, but some of them. The strawberries, squash and sunflowers at the chain link fence all got a watering. I’m really impressed that the squash – winter and summer – is still surviving and blooming.
The old kitchen garden got watered and I found a surprise. In the beets and parsnip bed, the parsnip greens have gotten so tall, their leaves were sticking through the wire of the cover. Some of the beets are also quite tall and the only reason they aren’t going through the wire is because they’re in the middle of the bed, under the highest part of the curve.
About a third of them were gone.
Not completely, but at one end, there was a substantial empty spot that had been full of leaves.
My first thought was deer, but that seems so unlikely. The deer don’t typically go through that garden; too many paths and obstacles. Plus, my daughter added more wood chips to the paths yesterday, and that’s not a surface a deer would want to walk on. The alternative is skunks or racoons, and they would have cause more damage than just a bunch of leaves eaten. So it must be from a deer.
The wire cover did protect the plants at least somewhat, as they were not completely eaten down to the ground, like the Swiss Chard all was. So frustrating!
The tomato bed in the east yard got watered, but I didn’t bother with the other two beds. Since our single Arikara squash has been harvested, I cut away the vine, so that bed is now just bush beans. The leaves do have some minor frost damage, but I could see there are still beans developing. I probably could have harvested some, but didn’t have a container for them and didn’t want to push my limits.
In the main garden area, I did some more selective watering. I was doing the very last bed when my older daughter came out. I asked how her sister was doing, and she said not very good. She’s dealing with with increased pain levels now, so she’s settled down in the cat free zone to have some movies playing while she continues knitting my ankle socks for me.
While I finished watering the last bed, my daughter told me her plans for roasting the Arikara squash and to use half of it to make a squash soup. Personally, I look forward to having straight up roasted squash. I want to get a good taste of it to see if this is something we want to keep growing in the future, other than to keep collecting seeds for a rare squash variety.
I started telling my daughter how surprised I was with how little frost damage there was, and that I could probably harvest some things – then asked if she wanted some peppers. We had two California Bell peppers that are fully red now, plus a couple of Sweet Chocolate peppers that were ripe. She happily took them and will be using them in her soup. There are still some green peppers on the plants that will hopefully do all right. With peppers, though, we can also harvest them early and let them ripen in the house.
I did remember to look up what colour the California Bell peppers get, since they are bright red and, for some reason, I thought they would be yellow. I found images of both red and yellow peppers. 😕 I got them from MI Gardener and looked at their page, and their image is of green peppers!
So… red it is.
I headed inside soon after, as I didn’t want to push myself. At this point, I might head into town tomorrow on my own, rather than dragging my daughter out with me again. This time, I want to remember to grab a couple of 5 gallon water jugs to refill in town, after the oil change and whatever else needs to be done.
For now, I’m coming up on my schedule evening painkillers time, and I think I’ll try to go to bed after that and get a few hours of sleep before the next set. I tried that last night and it didn’t work. I ended up awake until somewhere past 4am. That might actually help me finally get some sleep tonight, though!
An odd thing about taking the painkillers every 6 hours. I’m not entirely sure how much it’s making a difference. I still get hit with the lower abdominal pain, enough that I’ve used the topical painkiller to help with that. Yet even when I’m not feeling the abdominal pain, I’m still feeling other pain. Particularly that left shoulder’s rotator cuff. The painkillers don’t seem to be touching that at all. Which makes me wonder; if they’re not helping with something as relatively minor as the shoulder pain, how much can it be helping with the abdominal pain? Granted, my shoulder has never hurt badly enough to warrant a trip to the ER, but you’d think a dose as strong as what I’m taking now, 6 times a day, would reduce the shoulder pain too, wouldn’t you??
Ah, well. It is what it is. At least I’m not getting side effects like that violent dizziness I was getting with the Percocet.
So… that’s how the day went today. We almost got the truck done! Our mechanic had told us what he’d needed to go home for, and I really hope it all worked out for him and his family.
If all goes well, the truck will finally be done tomorrow, and it’ll be ready for the winter, as well as all the trips to the city we’ll be needing to do over the next couple of months!
Okay, we are back from town, and were done with the truck way earlier than expected.
As we pulled into the parking lot at the garage, we saw a truck pulling out and leaving. Then we found the doors locked! It turned out we had just watched the owner leaving to drop someone off. Which was fine. We were about 40 minutes early for the appointment.
I messaged our contact with the rescue to let her know we had arrived and were waiting for the owner of the garage to come back. She messaged back right away, suggesting she come over right then. She had just arrived at work and was only 2 minutes away.
Of course, I said yes!
Then the owner returned. I went in to talk to him while my daughter waited outside, then helped the woman from the rescue load donated cat food into the truck box. None of which I could see from where I was standing inside.
I described to the owner what I was seeing on the gauge, even as we drove to the garage, compared to what we were seeing for weeks after our last oil change, which included an engine flush and the third oil sensor replacement. It had been working just fine after that. I explained how the readings started changing after a while, first only when we made a trip to the city, little by little. There was the direct correlation with engine temperature, which I monitored during the drive in.
After they were done loading the truck, he drove it into the shop and started testing it – well before our actual appointment time.
While he was getting ready to hook up his physical mechanical oil pressure gauge to test it, my daughter told me about the ear mite medications and where she tucked them away, and that she’d made sure to set the biggest cat food bags centered over the axle to distribute the weight. I quickly popped open the tail gate to take a look and was totally amazed!!!
Of course, I messaged the women from the rescue to thank her again.
It wasn’t until later that I realized the larger bags my daughter was talking about were not the 9kg size we typically see, but two 40 pound bags of a brand we buy from the feed store in the town north of us. !!!!! You can just barely see one of them in the shadows in the first photo above.
We had expected that the garage would hang on to the truck for a while, and we’d get a ride into town, but that didn’t happen. We sat outside in the sun for a while, then popped into the waiting room when it started getting too hot. My daughter had brought her knitting bag and worked on one of the ankle socks she’s making for me while we waited.
They worked on the truck, revving the engine at times, testing it out. After a while, the owner came back and got on his computer for a bit, then got a printout to show us, which I got to keep.
What it came down to is that yes, our oil pressure is slightly lower than “normal”, however, it is within range. I told him flat out that, after all the problems we’ve had, I don’t know what “normal” is anymore, so he told me where, on the gauge itself, I should expect to see it. Then we talked about how that can change based on things like temperature (winter is going to show higher than summer), and even just age and wear and tear on the engine.
There is nothing else to show why that pressure would be that small amount lower, so he wants to change our oil to something thicker. He asked if I could come back tomorrow, and we can, so that’s now booked for tomorrow afternoon. As he was starting to remove his pressure tester, I remembered to ask him to change out our burnt headlight bulb – I’d bought a new bulb weeks ago, but we were never able to get it done ourselves, for various reasons. So he quickly did that for us.
The whole thing was done, and it wasn’t even noon, yet.
When I asked about paying, he told me he’ll give me a total after I come back tomorrow and he does the oil change. We both forgot about the check engine light, but the oil change with a new filter might actually fix that. I did remember to text him about it shortly after we left.
My daughter hadn’t had breakfast before we left, planning to take me out for breakfast after being dropped off in town. So the first thing we did was go for lunch. After that, we walked over to the dollar store, as I was looking for some specific things for the Christmas ornaments I wanted to work on. I ended up not finding anything, but my daughter found several small things she picked up.
From there, it was a stop at the pharmacy, where my daughter was a sweetheart and quickly ran in with the signed consent form they needed for my new pain meds. My husband had asked me to pick up a couple of things at the grocery store, and my daughters had their own shopping list, so that was our next stop.
Normally, I would have put some gas in the tank at that point, but I didn’t want to do that until after the truck was done and paid for. So that will wait until tomorrow.
By the time we were heading home, I remembered that we needed to stop at the post office, too. We are expecting several important letters, and one of them was there today. My older daughter now has a time for her appointment that was rescheduled to early November, along with the date they were able to give her right away.
I still haven’t received a call about my own biopsy I was supposed to get at the end of the month. The one I was supposed to receive before the weekend. If I don’t get a call by tomorrow, I’ll call the clinic that referred me and let them know.
That done, we got home and unloaded at the house. After bringing in the groceries, assembly line style, we started bringing in the donated cat stuff.
Then I got some pictures of what we got, which are the rest of the images in the slide show above, though I had already emptied two small bags that were torn, into the kibble bin for the inside cats. The 40 pound bags and two boxes of cat milk went straight to the old kitchen, so they were not included in the photos.
One bag had nothing but cat treat. So many cat treats!!! Another had more cat treats, plus three small bags of freeze dried chicken catfood, plus several loose little cartons of cat milk. There was a freezer bag of loose kibble, plus a slightly bigger bag of kibble that were on the side.
The last bag I went through had a couple of larger bags of kibble, a smaller one that was partially used and taped shut, and some canned cat food – and even more bags of cat treats!! I also started finding some strange little individual packets that were loose among the treat bags. I found the package they’d fallen out of and found out they are pill pockets.
With so many bags of dry treats like that, we should start mixing some in with their kibble feedings.
Which is what I can do next, as it’s getting time to feed the outside cats.
We did come home to a problem, though. Something is wrong with our toilet. It had gotten clogged, which seemed to be cleared, but now it’s slow flushing. We’ve checked the basement and there’s no sign of problems at the drains to the septic tank, though we’re due to run the hose through and flush it, anyhow.
My daughter came in from doing the morning feeding of the outside cats, so very excited!
She was able to pet the shrine baby. The single older kitten – who has started to come to the house, not just eating at the shrine feeding station!
What my daughter noted was that if she made eye contact with the kitten, it ran away – but if she faced another direction, it came back to the food bowl. Then she came back with the cat soup. It moved away, so she just crouched down near the bowl, looking in another direction.
While the kitten was eating, my daughter was able to reach out and pet it – and she let her! She even got an elevator butt response, while the kitten kept eating soup.
The kitten’s fur, my daughter told me, was astonishingly soft.
I was not doing very well today and ended up going back to bed. While I was down, my younger daughter headed out to start clearing and cleaning the sun room. This is something that needs to be done in stages, and it a huge and filthy job, since we were never able to get a spring cleaning done. She got some cat shelves out and cleared about a quarter of the room to bare floor, before she stopped for the day.
Unfortunately, I never got to see my brother and SIL before they had to leave. It turned out to be a good day for repairs. When he went to move his old pick up truck to move it and the trailer still attached, it wouldn’t start. After checking it over, he thought it might be the starter and was prepared to have it towed to our usual garage. Today, however, he thought of something else to try and it worked. He was able to do some other repairs, move the antique dump truck back onto the concrete blocks it had rolled off of, and even was able to check on the riding mower and get it working. It turned out that something was stuck, and nothing had actually broken. phew!
This evening, I decided I was well enough to do the outside cat feeding. Mostly because I needed to get outside and get some fresh air. Today is the 20th, so I was also hoping I’d be up to doing garden tour videos.
All the food trays that had been in the sun room are currently spread out on the grass near the cat shelters, since the sun room is being cleaned out. While setting the kibble out, I spotted the lone kitten.
So I tried what my daughter tried. I can’t crouch, but I could stand nearby and look the other way, until the kitten came back to the tray to eat. Without looking directly at her, I was able to slowly bend down and touch her.
She let me!
I didn’t stay for long, though. We don’t do cat soup for the evening feeding, but I do add a couple of little cartons of the donated cat milk (we’re on the last case that was given to us) spread out among various trays. I did only trays near the house, since we want to encourage the little one to stay close by.
She came back to the tray with Fancy Pants, whom she seems to get along with, and started eating again.
After a while I went to put things away when I heard a noise. A little skunk had come running and pushed itself onto the tray, shoving the kitten aside, startling Fancy Pants away, and started eating greedily. I scooted it away a couple of times before it left. I don’t mind them finishing off the kibble, but I want the cats to have a chance to eat, first!
After the cat feeding, I walked around a bit before going back inside and weighed in on how I felt. I decided to go ahead and do the garden tour videos. I haven’t gone over them yet, so I’ll see if I end up making new ones tomorrow or not.
Tomorrow, we take the truck in and I will be away until it’s ready to take home again. That’s partly way I made sure to get as much bed rest as possible today. My husband will make sure to keep the phone handy, as I never got the call from the cancer clinic in the city on Thursday or Friday, as we were told to expect. It means not much will get accomplished. My daughter will be coming with me, just in case I need help or need her to drive home when we get the truck back.
For now, I’m just happy we finally got to pet the lonely baby!
