Okay, so after yesterday’s rant, I am very, very happy to share some good news that came out of that call with the shelter.
Depending on how things go, many of these cats will have forever homes! How many… we’ll see. I counted a total of 18 this morning.
I did have an unpleasant surprise this morning, though.
Chadicous has blood all over his chest and front legs!
It looks fresh, but I didn’t hear any fighting. I also could not find an injury, nor did he seem to be favouring any part of his body. It could be he has a small puncture wound somewhere that just happened to bleed a lot, but isn’t bleeding now. Or it’s from another cat, but none of the cats appeared to be injured.
There was nothing different in his behaviour, as he did his usual flinging himself bodily to the ground in front of my feet, asking for pets.
We will be monitoring.
I was just finishing off my rounds when I spotted Agnoos in the bird bath-turned feeder.
Many he’s hoping a bird will just fly into his mouth? :-D
Now, the good news.
I got a call from the woman I was told about during the shelter call. She is connected with the larger organization that the vet had told us about. They have a donor program that allows them to get females fixed for only $75. !!!!! That includes shots, too. Plus, through this larger organization and their foster volunteers, they can adopt cats out. She told me of the number of cats she did last year (I am remembering 150, but I’m not confident that it’s right), all have been adopted out.
Best of all, we don’t have to pay right away. As long as we make payments and pay them off by the end of 2022, they’re good.
At only $75 per female, that will not be a problem.
After talking for a while, we worked out that Butterscotch will be done first. Plus Nosencrantz, if she can get access to the surgery for both of them.
Oh, that’s the other thing. She does the surgeries at the vet clinic we are already using! She’s got a deal with them to use their operating theatre when they aren’t using it themselves. Tomorrow, she will call me back with, hopefully, a date for Butterscotch, possibly as early as next week!!!
Once those two are done, we will shift focus to getting the inside cats done. Then, the outside cats that we can easily catch, and finally, focus on trapping the cats we can’t touch.
If they are up for adoption (on learning more about Butterscotch, she immediately recognized that she was not an adoptable cat. I really appreciated that she caught that), they may not even need to wait for the local surgery. We might be able to take them to the organization’s facility in the city, where they will get the necessary treatments, and get adopted out from there, instead of having another trip back here.
Once I’m done with this post, I will start sending her the information she needs about me, including an emergency contact number if they can’t reach me for some reason, and information about the cats, starting with Butterscotch and Nosencrantz.
My plans for the day have just changed dramatically.
I was returning to the house at the end of my morning rounds, when I found we had a visitor!
My brother’s dog had come by, and he really wanted to play with the kitties!
Nosencrantz set him straight with a half-hearted swap to the nose, while all the other cats stayed away. :-D
My brother’s dog wasn’t the only visitor. When I first came out with the kibble, I startled a deer that was in the south yard. It bounded through the snow a bit, then stopped to watch me for a while. Later, there were two of them that ran off as I went to empty the kitchen compost onto the heap.
They are so pretty!
As for out cats, we have still been trying to adopt out as many as I can, with no success. This morning… well, let’s just say I’m quite frustrated, but I’ll save that rant for my next post!
Doing the morning rounds is much more pleasant! We’re at a mild (relatively speaking) -15C/5F right now, though the wind chill of -21C/-6F made it a bit nippy. The wind was coming from the south, so it’s basically funnelling between outbuildings.
Not that it stopped the cats, any!
I counted a total of 17 this morning.
I’m happy to confirm – now that there so no longer frost on the windows – that the cats are using their house. Yesterday, I’d seen about five faces watching me from the main window. This morning, however, I saw something different in front of the window.
Something shiny.
It was the disposable aluminum pan that we had mounted above the fixture holding the heat bulb. The cats had somehow knocked it down!
I had been wondering for a while now, if the heat bulb was still working.
It is.
You can see that cats have been sitting on the warm spot above it!
That spot is there, even with the heat shield in place. At least it is, if it isn’t so cold out, the bulb can’t make a difference to the outside.
I am not too concerned about the shield being down; it was more an extra layer of protection, and to reflect heat back downwards to the cats. Like the smoke detector we also installed in there, it’s more just that one extra “just in case” bit. The bulb itself has a limited heat range, and the fixture has a steel “cage” to protect the bulb itself. The girls and I will still go out and fix it. In the summer, I could do it myself, thanks to the counterweight making it easier to lift the roof, and keeping it from dropping down again. This time of year, it’s a 3 person job; two to carefully lift the roof and hold it open, since the snow prevents it from being opened completely, and one to climb in and put the shield back.
Until then, it remains unshielded.
In the summer, we’re going to have to give this a thorough check and repair. It’s getting old, and when we lift the heavy roof, I can feel it twisting and cracking. The down side of the heat bulb is, it’s very dry in there, and I found the wood of the frame, at one of the roof hinges, has already split. It’s been screwed together again, but that was just a stop gap measure until we can work on it later. Once we do as many repairs as we can, I want to at least give it a new paint job on the outside. Hopefully, we’ll also be able to replace the shingles. They’re getting a bit beat up and worn out.
I’m so thankful to my brother for giving us their old dog house. He really went all out, with all the windows, as “porch”, the power outlets inside, the light fixture, and so on. The cats just love it, and it may well have saved a few lives. Farm cats tend to have short life spans, but at least we can keep the cold from getting them!
Oh, how lovely today it feels outside today! As I write this, just before evening, we are at a lovely -8C/18F. the wind chill is -13C/9F, but the wind is from the north west, so the yard is well sheltered from it.
The outside cats were quite enjoying the warmer temperatures!
Creamsicle Baby even followed me when I went to change the memory cards and frozen batteries on the trail cameras.
With the cold and snow, I hadn’t gone to the corner camera in a while, but today was nice enough to finally get out there.
Oops.
Well, that wasn’t going to be much use.
The last time I’d changed out the card and batteries, I’d noticed the nut at the plate was getting loose. I also noticed a lot of thread showing. The fixture has a nut on the inside, which is supposed to be threaded as far as possible, but these are not lock nuts. Every time I had to tighten the nut on the outside, that meant the nut on the inside was getting closer to the end of the threaded post. With that in mind, I made sure I had the tools I needed to fix it. After removing the camera, I had to take the plate off completely, tighten the nuts as they needed to be, then put it all back together.
Before I could check the files, though, I had some errands to run. I discovered the end of the driveway not only had a plow ridge at the road, it was drifted over from about the gate to the end of the road. I knew I’d have troubles if I stopped in the driveway to lock the gate behind me, and I didn’t want to stop on the road, so I asked the girls to shovel out the end of the driveway while I was gone, and just rammed my way through with the van!
The dump is open only for a few hours on Tuesday mornings, so that was my first top. We were also running out of dry kibble. The outside cats are going through it a lot faster, and I was only able to get three big bags the last time I bought any, so a trip to the smaller city was in order. The difference in price is enough to make the drive worthwhile, even though gas prices jumped 12 cents per litre since the last time I was out!
Dry kibble is still in short supply. It’s been like this for months, now. I got the last two big bags from these shelves, but even the smaller bags were getting low. The really expensive brands in the big bags were almost out, too. There’s lots of wet cat food, cat treats, etc. in stock. It’s just the dry kibble that’s low in inventory.
My sister works at this Walmart. I think I should ask her to keep an eye on the inventory and, the next time a shipment comes in, maybe pick up a few bags for us!
After the shopping was done, it was one more stop to pick up some packages at the post office – and my letter from the Court of Queen’s Bench, with the conference call information I need for our vandal’s vexatious litigation against me – before I was finally able to settle in and check the trail cam files.
The corner cam had 160 files on it. Only the first 4 were right side up! Most of the others were triggered by moving shadows and branches blowing in the wind.
There is a slight down side to having the camera set to take three still shots, then video!
Still, I did find some fun shots. I flipped the images to make it easier to see. This camera goes pink when it gets cold.
I think that’s a chickadee that triggered the camera in this shot.
The internal thermometer in the above shot reads -25C/-13F, which would be a few degrees warmer than outside.
Squirrel butt!! :-D Too funny!
The camera even caught it in mid jump. :-D
There were a whole bunch of files of the squirrel moving around on the ground before it finally ran off. The next files were of me, moving the camera around to fix it. I’m actually surprised it was still recording. The frozen batteries were so low, there were many files that were completely black, except for the red text saying the batteries were too low for the infrared flash.
Oh, sweet. In the time it took me to write the above, we actually warmed up another degree. Nice!
Well, yesterday, my daughter did a whole bunch of bread baking. Now it’s my turn.
I delayed heading outside to do my morning rounds, to warm up a bit before having the outside cats come out of their shelters for kibble.
I finally gave up and just headed out, because I knew they would be hungry. I was inside for a while before I took the above screencap. Yup. Almost noon, and we were still at -28C/-18F with a wind chill of -38C/-36F The wind was from the south west, though, not the south east, so the yard was protected.
I didn’t see as many of them this morning, and there was even kibble still in the tray under the shrine, from being topped up yesterday evening, so they were not too hungry. :-)
The Distinguished Guest is looking rather disheveled! She could use a good brushing. Not that we’d be able to. She lets me pet her while at the kibble house, but that’s as far as it goes. Mind you, that’s still more than we get with most of the outside cats that were born here!
Chadicous was quite happy to get some loving!
Such a handsome boy!
Once inside and putting a kettle on, I saw a flash of movement through the dining room window.
These two had come bounding through the yard to the feeding station! They looked so very excited. :-D It’s funny that they come running, and these same two deer come back several times a day, for that little bit of feed I put out. Especially since we’ve got chickadees, Blue Jays, Pine Grossbeaks and probably squirrels, going at it, too.
The good news is, we will keep warming up through to tomorrow.
They’re again telling us we’ll hit -4C/25F – the forecast changes frequently, of course – and we’re supposed to stay warmer than -20C/-4F for about a week. Even after that, we’re supposed to be just a degree or two colder, for the rest of the month.
Helping my mother with her errands turned out to be timed just right. Chilly as it was, there was almost no wind, making it pretty easy to handle.
Not today!
I took this screen cap shortly after noon, and we were still at -31C/-24F. I somehow doubt we’ll reach the high that is in the forecast! The wind chill, at least, had improved from -41C/-42F to -38C/-36F. The problem is, the wind is coming from the southeast, where we have almost no protection from the wind at all.
Today was our day to do the meter reading. The meter is mounted fairly high on the pole, and I’m short, so what I do is take several photos and hopefully have something I can read once I’m at my computer and can submit the reading. Since I was taking pictures, I wore my fingerless gloves. I couldn’t believe how fast my fingertips started hurting from the cold wind! It’s always a surprise, no matter how many times I’ve had it happen. I’ve done this on colder days, but with no wind, it doesn’t happen anywhere near as fast as on a day like today.
Right now, we have two weather alerts; the snowfall warning, and an extreme cold warning.
And yet…
… in less than a week, we are expected to reach -4C/25F!! At that temperature, some things can actually start melting.
The outside cats will, I’m sure, enjoy it! Today, as I first opened the door to put out the kibble, Agnoos slipped into the sun room and did NOT want to come out again! As I was finishing up, Nosencrantz dashed in, too.
Gotta love Chadicous rolling in the snow, there. He is constantly doing that!
Usually right in front of my feet. :-D
If the forecast is accurate, tomorrow we should reach a much more pleasant -15C/4F. It’s Saturday, so the dump is open and we’ll finally be able to do that. We’ve had garbage and recycling bags already in the van for a few days. At least they’re frozen, so there won’t be a smell.
As for today, we finally have a day where we can just stay home!
Happy Christmas to those who follow the orthodox calendar. :-) Happy Three Kings day. Today is our last day of of the Christmas season, and what a lovely day it turned out to be.
It was another cold one, but there was almost no wind chill, so it was quite bearable.
This morning, we had one deer at the feeding station, while this one just hung out at the gate for a while. I was able to get this picture through the kitchen window.
The deer and the cats are quite used to each other.
I even caught a flash of deer tail going past while I was setting out kibble and warm water for the cats. The deer didn’t run off until I came around with more feed.
Potato Beetle was quite content to enjoy the sunshine in his insulated corner, while the other cats ate. :-D
I found this interesting! One of the selling features of the Starlink system for more northern areas like ours, is that the dish keeps itself warm. You can see the icicles that show it’s working!
I hope the dish won’t need to adjust itself, because it’s quite attached to the roof at the moment. :-D
The roads were plowed yesterday evening, so before taking my mom’s little car out to help her with errands, I opened the gate and began to shovel away the plow ridge at the end of the driveway. While I was shovelling, a familiar looking front end loader came around the corner and headed my way. The driver stopped on the road and motioned to me, but my glasses were frosted over and I couldn’t see more than an arm waving around, so I came over as he opened the door – and offered to clear the driveway for me!
Of course, I said yes!!
This shot was taken after he was done and was backing out to the road again.
Now, I’m pretty sure that’s the renter’s front end loader. I don’t know of any others like it around. However, I did not recognize the driver. It could be they have a new hired hand? I don’t know. Whoever he was, I made sure to thank him enthusiastically, and I was soon off to my mother’s.
My mother had a few errands to run this morning, including a stop at the credit union. With all the restrictions still going on, and so many places that don’t recognize medical mask exemptions, even when I wear the Mingle Mask, I would just open the door for her and wait outside. Today, I used the wait to pop over to the mail box – I finally was able to print out the photo I needed, and have sent off my forms to get my PAL (Possession and Acquisition License), after passing my Firearms Safety course at the end of November. My mother was faster than I expected, and came out while I was about to top up her washer fluid. One of the staff came out with her, to help with the doors. As I helped her back into her car, she told me that the lady helping her saw me outside, and asked my mother to tell me that I was welcome to come in with her. I used to come in with her all the time, but as the restrictions got more draconian, and more warning signs popped up on doorways, I stopped. It’s good to know that they are reasonable.
Unlike our next stop at the pharmacy, which doesn’t recognise medical exemptions, so I can’t go to help my mother at all. You’d think, of all places, a pharmacy would get that some people just can’t wear masks; especially since the (illegal) mandates specifically mention exemptions, but some places really seem to enjoy our medical apartheid. At least they don’t harass my mother about covering her nose. She shouldn’t be wearing a mask at all, and can’t breathe if both her nose and mouth are covered.
The grocery store was our last stop and they are always good, there. My mother was able to stock up quite a bit, and will be set for a while. Between the beef I gave her, and the venison my sister gave her, she didn’t need to buy any meat at all. Which is good, because food prices are getting insane.
Aside from that, I was able to visit with my mother, and we had lunch before heading out for errands. Which is when I was able to show her pictures of her new great-grandson, who was born this morning! My SIL also sent birth pictures of his big brother from a couple years ago, and my goodness, they look so much alike! So far, their mother seems to be doing okay. She has some medical issues that they are keeping an eye on, but she should be home after 48 hours. Meanwhile, my brother and his wife are still there, helping out.
A new baby in the family was definitely the highlight of a very good day!
Well, I’m certainly glad I did my extra shopping trip yesterday! A storm that was not in the forecast showed up overnight.
“Thank you for the warm water!” Nosencrantz says.
While it is still “warm” at -16C/3F, once we move out of the shelter of the house or trees, we got hit by the -36C/-33F wind chill!
My morning rounds today required doing some shoveling, which included shoveling out the driveway cam, so I could change out the frozen batteries, reset the time and date, and switch out the memory card. With the temperatures being what they have been, the chances our vandal would do something stupid are somewhat lower, so I didn’t switch out the memory cards during the deep freeze.
When uploading the files from this camera, however, it got very strange! The card supposedly had only 8 files on it, but when I tried to look at them, I saw this.
This has happened before, but just a few files, not anything to this extent!
Check out the “date modified” list. Apparently, our driveway camera is a time traveler! The dates range from 1980 to 2103!!
I have no idea what those files are, because I couldn’t even transfer them from the card, never mind look into any of those folders. There should be nothing but AVI video files on here.
Curious, indeed!
The corner cam by the new sign at least had some files I could check, before it froze and stopped recording.
While on the subject of our cameras, I got some news about the court date at the end of this month, about the suit our vandal filed against me in retaliation for my applying for a restraining order against him. The court office called and left a message; civil suits fall under the federal courts, so we get letters and phone calls. They don’t do that for provincial matters, which is what restraining orders fall under. I had to call them to find out anything. Anyhow. The court date is still on, but because our province has once again stepped up the police state we’re still under, the time has moved to the morning and it will be by teleconference. The dates will be rescheduled until our provincial dictators lift their boots off our necks a little bit. So who knows when this will get resolved.
Well, at least I don’t need to make the drive out at the end of the month. :-/ It’s supposed to get milder by then. We’ve got extreme cold warnings again, for the next couple of days. After that, we’re even supposed to get a day or two above -10C/14F!
When we decided to go ahead and cancel our old satellite service outright, instead of waiting until the end of the month, after finding how excellently the Starlink system was working, I was working on the assumption that we’d have all sorts of cancellation fees. So, just in case, I budgeted more than what we would normally expected the bill to be, on top of adding on the new Starlink bill.
We were in for a pleasant surprise. We’re actually going to get a couple hundred dollars for a credit. We do still have to send back their transceivers (not the entire dishes, as I was mistakenly told) and their modems/routers/whatever they’re properly called. The packaging should be here when the post office is open again starting tomorrow. I figure we’ll get our credit once they get their items back. Until then, it still freed up a large chunk of our budget.
What a wonderful sense of relief that gives us!
While we did try to stock up as much as we could, the outside cats are going through the kibble a lot faster than usual. Which makes sense. There isn’t much for them to hunt these days, and they will be burning a lot more calories in the cold we’ve been having. Tomorrow was expected to be a warmer day, so I was going to make an extra trip into the smaller city to stock up on more cat food.
Today, however, turned out to be warmer than forecast, and already we’ve reached the high that we were supposed to hit tomorrow. So I decided to make the trip today. At -17C/1F, it feels like summer! Even with the -26C/-15F wind chill, which is coming from the north, so we are well sheltered from it.
The outside cats were practically having a party!
I had a surprise this morning, too. As I was coming back from leaving kibble in the tray under the shrine, I was startled by deer running through the gate in the chain link fence at the south side of the yard! This is the first time I’ve seen the deer going through, while I was outside. Then, when I came around the house with seeds for the feeding station, the doe and her little one were there. They hung back near the compost ring, before finally running off into the spruce grove, but they stopped and looked back repeatedly.
When I was finally ready to head out, I took a peek around the corner of the house and, sure enough, they were back and eating the seeds! They saw me and watched for a while, but didn’t run off until I crossed the yard to the garage.
I’m okay with them being used to finding food at the feeding station. I want them to associate that spot with food, not our garden beds!
Speaking of which, the new wiggle room in our budget meant I could get a few extras along with the cat kibble. Though I didn’t get as much kibble as I intended. They were almost entirely out of stock of the affordable big bags. I only got three. If I’d bought the six I’d intended, there would have been maybe one bag left, and I wanted to leave more for others.
Along with a couple of bags of seed starting mix, I got a heat mat. One of the big problems we had with starting seeds inside the aquarium greenhouses (besides the cats constantly trying to get at them!) is that the house is just plain too cold. Using things like heated rice bags or small water bottles filled with hot water helped, but some things just never germinated. I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers didn’t germinate until so much later.
I went through our seeds to look at what needs to be started indoors and when. Actually, there’s two ways we can look at it. Most seed packets go by number of weeks before the last frost date. The other way is to look at how long until harvest, then count backwards from the first frost date in the fall.
Our first frost date, on average, is Sept. 10. For anything that requires more than 100 days to harvest, the latest we should have germination is about May 4. If we want to give up to 150 days, we’d need to have germination by April 30. I would calculate when to start the seeds from there, using the days to germination information on the seed packages.
Which isn’t too bad.
If we go by the package instructions using our average last frost date of June 2, we have several dates to go by. Four weeks puts us at May 5, six weeks at April 21, eight weeks at April 7, and ten weeks at March 24.
Having worked that out, however, there are still going to be things I plan to start earlier. Some of these, people on my Zone 3 gardening groups have already started!
The main one will be onions and shallots. With so many varieties and so many onions we want to plant, space would be the biggest issue… except maybe not. I found this, from MI Gardener.
Based on that method, we should have no problem planting all our varieties in just the big aquarium greenhouse.
The problem with that is, it’s currently housing several aloe vera plants to protect them from the cats, plus my daughter’s two remaining orchids. She’d had them safely hanging in front of the living room window, only to discover it was too cold for them there, and a couple of them died.
There is still the small aquarium greenhouse. Depending on what I have for growing trays, I could fit all the onions in there.
There are a few other things that need to be started very early, too. Among the things that can be started at 10 weeks are the eggplants and peppers (we will be starting just a few of those, since only 2 people in our household like them), the Sophie’s Choice tomato (just a few of those), the Cup of Moldova tomato (lots of those, since they are for processing), the Wonderberry (just a few of those) and the luffa (probably all the seeds we have left of those). All of these are things I’m seriously considering starting much earlier. Especially the luffa.
With those, we might be able to fit them all in the big tank, and still keep the orchids with them, but I have no idea where we can put the aloe vera pots that will be safe from the cats!
Among the things we can start at 8 weeks are the rest of the tomatoes, ground cherries, Crespo squash, Tennessee Dancing Gourds, and the Ozark Nest Egg gourds.
I think at 6 weeks is when I will start the kulli corn seeds which, according the the tracking information, has arrived in the city and should arrive at our post office in the next couple of days.
At 4 weeks, we need to start the cucumber, all the squash and melons, the rest of any gourds we will be trying this year, and the hulless pumpkins. It would also be the time for me to start the kohlrabi, if I decide I will try those again this year, since direct sowing them has been a complete fail for the past two years.
Everything else we’ve got can be direct sown, some as soon as the ground can be worked, and others after the last frost date.
I’m going to need more soil, but that’s something we can pick up little by little, as we need it.
I have to admit, I’m really torn right now about starting things too early. I know there are people in our zone that do it every year and have no problem, and others have started winter sowing outdoors, using this method. We don’t have a lot of milk jugs, but I’ve been keeping jugs from the distilled water for my husband’s CPAP, which would do. They are that blue, transparent plastic. Theoretically, we could set this up in the sun room, which does get below freezing, but still stays a lot warmer than outside. That would actually be a good experiment for the kohlrabi, now that I think about it. With so many yard cats, plus the deer, I’m not sure putting the containers outside would be wise, unless we can put some sort of protection over them. In theory, we could drag over the covers we made for the raised beds. They’re covered in snow right now, and probably frozen to the ground! :-D
For any experienced cold-climate gardeners reading this, what do you think? Would I be severely jumping the gun if I start our onions seeds this early? Or some of the tomatoes, the eggplant and peppers? What do you think?
The Re-Farmer 