Critters

Snowy morning

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This morning, we had snow coming down with flakes so big, I could see them without my glasses! :-D

They even triggered the motion sensor on the security camera during daylight. That happens all the time at night, with the infrared flash (and I wake up to hundreds of emails with images of snow or rain streaking across… :-D ), but almost never, during the day.

The outside cats are completely unphased by this little bit of snow. :-)

The future tomato bed got some much needed moisture! The more the better, to help break down that cardboard and straw.

The garlic sprouts don’t mind the snow at all. :-) The snow actually made it easier to see how many more have sprouted since I last checked them out.

It was interesting, going through the maple grove and checking out the areas we planted bulbs and corms in. There was a void in the snow, under every single spruce tree. This is a good visual to ID which areas are getting the least moisture, so if/when we do water where we planted, we know which areas need it more. Of course, once the other trees and bushes leaf out, there won’t be any difference, but that’ll be a while, yet.

There are still only two tulips showing, and that one onion that’s managed to survive from when this was my mother’s garden, in the areas my daughters planted their bulbs. They don’t seem to mind the snow at all!

In the sun room, while it was still just below freezing outside, the thermometer was reading 10C/50F. That is more than adequate for the onion seedlings. The light and heater bulb kept the tomato and luffa seedlings nice and warm through the night.

By the time I finished my rounds, much of the snow was already melted away, and from what I can see on the security camera live feed, there isn’t a bit of it left.

I don’t know that we’ll have a nice enough day to continue working outside today, but we’re supposed to get warmer over the next couple of days, then cool day with rain. As much as it slows down how much progress we can make on the garden beds, I am thankful for every drop of moisture we’re getting right now! After one hot day, the temperatures will drop down and basically flat line at around 8C and 10C (46-50F) for highs, and hovering at or just above freezing for the overnight lows, for the next two weeks. We might even get a bit more rain in there, too!

The weather for today is still saying we’ll have a high of 7C/45F, but that it’ll feel like 4C/39F. I’m hoping to be able to get some more progress outside, but we shall see. The melted snow might actually make it easier to dig more post holes for the other pea trellises we’ll be making. If we can’t get to that, there’s plenty of other things we need to work on! :-)

What fun! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Morning spice

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Ginger says “good morning!”

And then he attacks my phone. :-D

Ginger continues to settle in. With so many cats in the house there are, of course, moments of aggression. He has no problem standing his ground when one of the other cats decides to take out their bad mood on whichever other cat happens to be nearby. I’ve even seen him running around and tussling playfully with the spice girls.

He does have a habit of squirming around too close to the edge of the bed and sliding right off. :-D

His fur is growing back in the shaved area, but not evenly! He’s got patches of longer hair that’s surprisingly dark. Being right next to the corner where the incisions meet, it looked like he somehow got the area very dirty. :-D

Best of all, he’s now starting to actively seek out people for attention. :-)

He is such a sweetie!

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties!

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I managed to get a picture of Ginger this morning.

This was just a moment before he leapt up and tackled my phone! :-D

He was very fierce-some this morning!

I got this picture of David the Magnificent, yesterday, and just had to share.

He is such a pretzel!

Meanwhile, I had a whole crowd, outside!

The Ghost Baby was peeking between the shelters to see if it was safe to go eat!

She finally dared!

My daughter told me that she sometimes shows up at their second floor window, describing her as a ghost baby. I figure that’ll do just fine as a name. Better than “that sort-of calico cat…”.

My daughters have also been telling me about another grey and white tabby. I honestly can’t remember (I’m losing track!), but they say it’s Junk Pile’s baby from last summer, and it looks like here, except thicker. So they call it Thickilous.

:-D

I may well have seen it and thought it was Junk Pile, but until I see them both at the same time, I have no way of knowing.

So we have these 7, possibly Thickilous, and Nicky the Nose, hanging around. We have more cats inside than outside right now!

Well. At least until the kittens are born. Only Butterscotch looks pregnant, but that doesn’t mean the others aren’t!

The Re-Farmer

Ginger Squid and general update

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Last night, I introduced Ginger to a new toy.

I’d crocheted an amigurumi squid, years ago, trying out a new pattern. When I realized we’d closed the other cats out for the night and Ginger had no toys in the room, I decided to see if he would like it.

He did.

Squidly is now Ginger’s favourite toy! The other cats like it, too. :-D

Speaking of other cats…

His sister, Cabbages, and Keith were pretty adorable, cuddling together! :-)

This morning, as I put kibble out for the outside cats, most of them eventually made their way over.

I did not see Butterscotch.

I have my suspicions that she’s tucked away with somewhere, with new babies.

If my suspicions are correct, I hope her nest is nice and cozy, because they’re now predicting another 7 inches (almost 18cm!!) of snow on Sunday! We’ll have more snow in April than we’ve had the entire winter.

The slow melt we’re having now is perfect, except with the overnight temperatures going below zero, the freeze-thaw cycle is destroying the roads! I had to run some errands today, picking up our newly sharpened and tested electric chain saw while dropping off a lawn mower for servicing, then going to another town to drop some stuff off, and the gravel roads in particular are just awful. The paved roads and highways are going to be crumbling even worse than usual in the next while.

I don’t mind the snow while we’ve got these milder temperatures. I think most people on the farms out here will happily put up with rough roads, if it means they will have enough moisture when planting their crops.

I must admit, though, it’s rather disjointing to read other people’s blogs where they talk about all the stuff growing in their gardens, or their latest transplants. :-D

Speaking of which, we did decide to start one of the squashes we’ve got now, rather than later. The Crespo squash is the only one of them that grows large fruit. In trying to find the “days to maturity”, all I can find is “harvest the the skin is very hard”. Which doesn’t tell me much at all! I’ll just assume large fruit means longer time needed to grow them, and will give them a bigger head start. I set the seeds to soak last night, and will plant them later today.

I’m not finding a lot of information about this specific variety at all, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens with these.

And now I have to de-cat myself (hello, Susan) and get some work done! :-D

The Re-Farmer

What a crowd!

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This morning, I walked into the living room and found seven deer outside our window!

That is the most we’ve seen, all at once, since our first spring here. :-)

Then I spotted them on the trail cams!

I never saw all seven on the trail cams at once. They kept streaming across the road from my brother’s place. :-)

I love the action shots! :-D

The Re-Farmer

It’s crowded out there!

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I found quite a surprise at our gate when I checked the trail cam files!

Four deer, hanging out on the driveway and road! They stayed there long enough that I found about a dozen files (stills and video) of them!

Looking at the time stamps, they came to the driveway after visiting the house.

They weren’t very nice to each other!

One of them stayed in the trees and never came to the feeding station. What I found interesting as I watched it, is that it completely avoided the area closer to the feeding station and went around to the side.

The area I cleaned up recently.

They definitely prefer to go through the cleaned up areas in or under the trees, rather than out in the open.

This next image from the trail cam isn’t very good, but it is dramatic!

I almost didn’t see it at first!

In the next few files, I could see that there were actually two deer out there, just on the edge of the infrared flash.

Very cool!

Also very cool was having Rolando Moon show up yesterday, and still being here this morning when I went out to feed the outside kitties. It almost gives me hope that Nostrildamus and Potato Beetle might still show up again, though I realize the chances of that are very low.

Their food bowls were completely empty again – even the heated water bowl was completely dry – which suggests the skunks came to visit, too.

It gets pretty busy with critters out there! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Ginger and his big sister!

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Ginger finally got cooperative enough for me to get some photos of him. :-)

He was very squirmy.

He’s like a weird, twisty rubber band!!! How the heck did he get his front leg like that?? :-D

Nicco wasn’t too sure what to make of him. :-D

Can you believe she’s about 2 months older than he is? She looks so tiny in comparison!

:-D

The Re-Farmer

Some morning Ginger spice. :-)

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Oh, we had a snuggly boy this morning!

The snuggles were after he aggressively attacked both my feet through the covers! :-D

But how could anyone be upset about potentially bleeding toes, when THIS face is looking at you?

Aaawwww….

*melt*

The Re-Farmer

Ginger and the orange boys

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I missed my morning ginger cuddles, but that’s okay. He got other cuddles!

That’s Keith on the left, and Cheddar at the top. Cheddar is the one that came indoors after we found him walking strangely, and could feel what we at first thought was a dislocated rib. It turned out he had somehow impaled himself with a stick, at about his armpit. It was surgically removed, and he never went back outside.

I still have the “cheese stick” in its vacuum sealed tube. And yes, the vet actually labelled it “cheese stick”. :-D

Keith came indoors some months after Cheddar, so all three of these guys are “rescued” yard cats.

Ginger is very close to Keith in size and shape, though Ginger isn’t even a year old yet – and Keith is not a small cat! You can see in this photo, a bit of why we would sometimes look at Ginger and think we’re seeing Keith!

There’s no mistaking Cheddar, though. He’s a big, hulking block of cheese, that boy!

I have a shelf against the wall next to me, when I am sitting in my office chair. The chair has a high back and rotates/tilts freely. Parts of the shelf are kept clear for the cats to use, including the very top, so they can take naps next to the ceiling. They’ll sometimes use my chair to get to the top of the shelf but mostly they get down from the top by jumping into the padded headrest of my office chair, then down to the floor.

I gotta say, when Cheddar is the one jumping down, and I’m sitting in the chair, I practically get whiplash! It’s amazing how much force that boy has when he lands, and the chair slams back as far as it can tilt!

Beep Beep even hopped up to check out the new boy.

She doesn’t like him very much, and ended up driving both Ginger and Cheddar away, so she could snuggle up to Keith and start grooming him. :-D

Also, this is why my bed is so hairy all the time. It’s constantly covered in cats!

Having brought Beep Beep indoors to have her babies last spring, this will be her first year of NOT getting pregnant. She seems quite content with that! She also seems quite content with her new life as an indoor cat. Even when she went into heat, she showed no desire to go outside to visit the (intact) boys in the yard. We don’t know how old she is, but I have pictures of her from when we made the drive out and stayed here with my dad, back in 2015, and she was definitely an adult cat at the time. That makes her a minimum of 7 years old. I would guess she’s closer to 10, and she would have had a litter of kittens every year of her adult life, until now. She is a wonderful mama, but I’m sure she’s more than done with the babies by now! :-D

Meanwhile…

Ginger’s surgical site is looking really good and healing well. He displays no sign of pain or discomfort, and it’s not slowing him down at all. Which is starting to be a problem, as he is exploring more and trying to get into things he shouldn’t be! We’ve been able to train most of the cats to stay away from/off of certain areas and, of course, he hasn’t learned that yet. :-D

There is some tension between him and some of the other cats, but not in any out of the ordinary way. Some of our cats are just more ornery than others, so it’s not just him.

He’s such a sweet boy!

The Re-Farmer

Ginger baby

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It is pure joy when the baby boy comes over for morning cuddles.

He doesn’t want to be picked up, and he doesn’t want to be held, but my goodness, he wants pets and scritches and snuggles, and he loves to roll and stretch and squirm on the soft, soft bed. :-)

If only we could get the outside cats even half that friendly!

This was the crowd that greeted me this morning. After I took the picture, I looked up and saw the sort-of-calico cat come running under the fence into the yard.

The Re-Farmer