A mostly quiet day, mother issues, plus, cats. 😄

November 21, 2025November 21, 2025 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today was expected to be chillier, with the forecasted high covering at, or just below, freezing, depending on what app I looked at and when. The next two days are supposed to be much warmer, and likely the last warm days of the year, so I’m planning activities accordingly.

Since moving out here (I forgot all about our 8 year anniversary here, almost a week ago!), our plans tend to very much revolve around the weather and the seasons!

The day started out with my usual routine, which always starts with tending to the yard cats.

Furriosa looks hilariously furious! Pinky is healing well and seems absolutely indifferent to her surgical site. I supposed her shaved belly must feel at least somewhat cold, but being in the heated isolation shelter is probably enough to make up for that. Especially when she has three kittens to cuddle up in the bed and keep her warm!

We’re going to have to do something about the second bed in the lower level. The litter box has been kicked around, and it is being used – somewhat – but they’re also using the lower level cat bed as a litter box, too! The trick will be to open up the ramp door to reach all that, without letting Pinky escape. The kittens have zero interest in leaving, but there’s still a chance she might. I believe she’s been trying to scramble through the roof. The rigid insulation above where the extension cord comes in is now very torn up!

Things that we’ll need to deal with, during the next few warmer days.

The first unexpected part of the day was an early phone call.

From the Home Care coordinator.

She got a report about my mother yesterday.

My mother had called me last night and, at one point, she started going off on how the home care workers, these “educated people”, didn’t know how to use her microwave. It’s so simple! I’d explained to her that her microwave is so old, none of them would have seen one like it before, and to give them time to learn how she wants things done, now that they are doing meal assists on top of her med assists.

Now I know why it was on her mind.

It turns out that when one of the home care workers went to use the microwave, my mother suddenly said NO! very loudly, grabbed her arm and sort of slammed it on the counter (not sure how that would have worked considering how things are laid out in her kitchen), then did the microwaving herself. The worker told my mother not to touch her like that and my mother did apologize.

Still, this is the sort of thing that could get her home care cancelled outright, and between my siblings and I, none of us are in a position to take over if that happens.

We talked about it for a while. One of the things that is part of the issue is how my mother is having more difficulty finding her words and gets very frustrated and angry. She expects everyone around her to just know what she is trying to say, what she wants, what she means. There’s no excuse for taking it out on people – especially not physically! I explained about my mother not understanding why people don’t know how to use her microwave and how, with her, she leaps to thinking people are stupid for not knowing things she finds obvious. This is not a new thing, by any means, but it is getting worse as her ability to communicate declines.

I assured the coordinator that my siblings and I would have a talk with my mother about it, and extended my apologies.

Then I updated my siblings in our group chat about my mother. I just finished doing that when my younger daughter came over and asked me what my plans were for the day. She and her sister had been talking, and were hoping to be able to go hunt for some energy drinks. More specifically, Monster energy drinks. They’re out of stock or of limited stock lately. We’ve tried other brands and have not been impressed by them.

I really miss Beaver Buzz! No one carries those anymore though, according to their website, places like both grocery stores in town still do. Maybe in other provinces, because I’m not even finding them in the city.

We decided to go into town and see what was available at the grocery store and, if that didn’t work out, we could at least try a gas station. They tend to have the individual cans at much better prices. We left early enough that, after checking the budget, we were able to grab a late breakfast, too.

Once at the grocery store, I picked up a few things as well, taking advantage of the trip, while my daughter did a much larger shop. Including energy drinks. She found 4 packs of Monster, on sale, and got the last three.

That done, we were soon on are way home. I considered stopping at the post office to see if any packages came in, but our timing was off. It was still morning, but they close at 11:30 for 2 1/2 hours, and we were just leaving town as they would have closed. When we got home, I checked tracking and found that yes, we did have two “attempted deliveries” (which means, there’s a card in our mail box). A third item is now in the city, though, which means it’ll show up on Monday morning. I decided to wait until then, since one of the items that came in today is the micro SD memory card to go with the security camera I got to monitor the isolation shelter.

I just realized something else this camera could be used for. We will have to trap the more feral cats and, with the females, we’ll have to do this in the winter, before they go into heat in the spring. The problem is, we aren’t able to monitor a trap and don’t want to risk a cat (or raccoon, or skunk…) freezing to death before we can check the trap. If we have this extra outdoor, solar powered security camera, we can set it up and we should be able to get notifications, and check the live feed.

Hhhmmm… that could work.

But first, it needs to be set up to monitor the isolation shelter, so we can tell when the raccoons are trying to tear their way into it again!

Hopefully, we’ll be able to get that done next week.

As soon as I was able to, I called my mother to have a talk with her. When I brought up that the Home Care coordinator had called me this morning and why, my mother immediately said that she realized she’d done the wrong thing and apologized. From how she described it, the home care worker had her hand on the dial of her microwave (which has a dial for the timer and a start button; that’s it) that my mother had pushed away. That actually makes more sense than what the coordinator described to me on the phone. We talked about it for a while and my mother went off again about how they didn’t know how to do things, like use the microwave. I had to keep repeating that her microwave is nothing like modern ones – and even with modern ones, there’s still a learning curve, because they’re all different. To her, not being able to use her “so simple” microwave means they’re all stupid. It took a while to talk her through that.

Then she started going on about her upcoming MRI. She is clearly working herself up about it and was trying to get out of having it done. She doesn’t need it. There’s no reason for it. It’s so late on a Sunday night…

We already went through this last night, but we went through it again. It’s Home Care that needs it, in paneling her for a nursing home. She had some difficulty separating out that this isn’t about her thinking (cognitive decline), but about her physical brain. I finally said that, if they found a tumor or something, they’d be sending her to a hospital, not a nursing home. Not quite accurate. In the end, she fell back on the “it’s a scam”, and starting talking about how they just want people to die. Especially old people.

I had to distract her from that one but I have to admit, she’s not wrong about that last part. Considering the insane rise in MAiD killings, what was done to seniors during the illegal lockdowns resulting in thousands of deaths, on top of the thousands of people in Canada dying every year on waiting lists for tests and treatment, she’s got a point. Some areas – major cities, mostly – are far worse than others. One thing is for sure. Once she does get admitted into a nursing home like she wants, my siblings and I are doing to have to be on top of everything going on with her treatment. If she gets in to the one in town, where she wants to be, I’ll still be the closest and can check on her, but also, that particular nursing home did very well by my dad and my aunt, so I think she’d be okay there. It’s hard to say, the way things are changing these past few years, though. Especially with our current provincial government.

But I digress.

Towards the end of our conversation, I reiterated with my mother on making sure to treat everyone nicely, and she started telling me how much she loves all the girls, how beautiful they all are (it seems some of the new girls are very pretty) and how nice they dress (one of them wore a shirt with flowers my mother really liked). She said some of them stop to chat with her as well, and she really appreciated that. Lately, she says she hasn’t been going to the common room of her building, as it’s getting so hard for her to move around and she doesn’t even get dressed for the day, so having someone to talk to helps her a lot.

She so needs to be in a care home!!

After talking to my mother, I updated my siblings again, then started to send an email to the home care coordinator to update her as well.

Which is when the phone rang.

It was Home Care.

This time, the scheduler.

They are short staffed and don’t have anyone for my mother’s Monday med assist, at 9:15am.

We’re already doing her two Sunday evening assists ourselves, as my brother and I get her to her MRI.

*sigh*

We’ll see how it goes, but we might be able to just leave her morning meds in her little covered bowl for her before we leave her place on Sunday night. Her morning assist is the longest time slot, though, as they also help her with breakfast, empty her commode, apply the Voltaren to her back and hip and help her get dressed, if she needs it. It’s not just about getting her her medications anymore.

We’ll make that decision when the time comes. For now, though, I’ve got it in my calendar and I’ll be ready to do it, if necessary.

I did let her know about the call I got about my mother from the coordinator. She remembered the report and commented that she doesn’t usually see reports about my mother and figured she was just having an off day. !! I made sure to let her know my mother was very apologetic about it, and the lovely things she said about the ladies at the end of our conversation. Home care workers put up with a lot of crap (sometimes literally), so I wanted to make sure to pass on something good!

That done, I sent my email updating the coordinator. I did remember to mention this time, that my mother has been commenting about how her vision is getting worse. Which means her macular degeneration is getting worse. Normally, I’d be getting her to the specialty clinic in the city for treatment, but she physically can’t make that trip any more. Just getting her in to do the MRI is going to be hard enough on her, and that’s about half the distance away!

All that done, the rest of the day was pretty routine.

When doing the evening cat feeding, I changed things up a bit for the isolation shelter cats. I’ve got some ground pumpkin seeds again, so this time their can of wet cat food got made into a cat soup that included the ground pumpkin. If any of them have worms, that would help, but just be good for them in general.

I have got to remember to order more lysine. We’ve been out for a while.

After feeding the cats (I counted 27 this evening) and doing my evening rounds, I had a while crowd following me. A dozen, to be exact.

Fancypants, in the first picture, won’t let me come near him, but does like to follow me around!

In the next picture of the slide show above, you can see the three of them that were trying to trip me up while I walked!

Once back in the inner yard, I spotted that big tom again. I have seen him all of twice before today.

While in and out of the sun room, I was able to pet one of the little tuxedos. There is one confirmed female that lets me pet her, though she is still nervous about it. When the next two are to be brought in for spays, I think this one is big enough to be an alternative if we can’t get two adult females.

Pinky (last photo) not only allowed me to pet her but, while I was walking around, followed me and meowed for attention. She’s still a bundle of nerves and skittish, but she was purring up a storm and allowing full back pets, and even some neck and ear skritches. If we can keep this up, we should be able to get her into a carrier for spay on the 28th. If not… well, we’ll grab whichever ones we can! We’ll just have to make sure not to put food out until after we’ve got two into carriers.

The outside stuff done, today I decided to use up that bone broth I made recently, it a great big pot of pork stew. Normally, I’d use beef broth in a beef stew, and even looked at beef in the grocery store this morning, but it’s just too expensive. So I just cubed one of the pork roasts we had.

When it came time to add the bone broth, I was very impressed with how thoroughly gelled it was. I even gave it a taste while it was still cold, and wow! Talk about concentrated flavour! It worked really well with the pork, too.

Here we have pork stew with fluffy baking powder dumplings, which get cooked right on top of the stew at the end. Those dumplings are one of our favourite things about making a stew! I got the recipe from an old Whole Foods for the Whole Family cookbook, from La Leche League – the 1981 edition – that I hung on to. I got it used and kept it for about 30 years. Then had to throw it out because a cat peed all over it when it was left open on a table. *sigh* I know I wrote the recipe down somewhere in an old blog post, but on an old blog that I can’t even log into anymore (thanks, Google). I think. Still can’t find it, so I went by memory. Seems to be very close! I’ve tried looking online, but all the baking powder dumpling recipes I’m finding seem different.

So I’ll write it down here, so I can find it again, when needed!

Fluffy Dumplings

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
about a 1/4 tsp salt
(optional: dried parsley flakes)
1 egg, beaten
water

Mix the dry ingredients. Once the soup or stew is done and still simmering, add the beaten egg to the dry ingredients with enough water to make a very sticky dough. More like a very thick batter. Drop by spoonful’s onto the top of the soup or stew. Cover and leave to simmer for 10 minutes. No peeking!

One of the things I can’t remember is if the original recipe used one or two eggs. Also, was it 1 tsp or 2 tsp of baking powder? Whatever the original was, this version here cooks and tastes very much the same as I remember. Delicious.

And… that’s pretty much it for today!

Until next time…

The Re-Farmer

I am so tired

November 14, 2025 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

The day feels way longer than it should have.

Today was set aside for me to go to my mother’s to do her shopping and errands and household stuff. I’ll start off by saying, she was actually on really good behaviour today, comparatively speaking. Things did go well.

The morning started off with the feeding of yard cats and doing my morning rounds. I tried for a head count this morning, and got 30. Last time, it was 35, including a cat I didn’t recognize. I haven’t seen it, since.

As I was heading in, I found this little crowd.

I moved both heat lamps lower, but this one is a 150watt ceramic heat bulb. The other is 200watt. I thought it was 250w, forgetting that I wasn’t able to find the ceramic heat bulbs at 250w. The lamp is rated to 250w, and there’s an incandescent 250w heat bulb in a matching lamp in the isolation shelter.

Speaking of which, that’s going to be used for its original purpose soon!

This morning, I got a message from the rescue. We have two dates to spay two cats each. I was sent a screen cap of a texted confirmation with two dates, one of which was for 3 cats. I was told I had two slots and someone else had the third, so I thought that was my date. I didn’t think the earlier date was also for me until I got a call while I was at my mother’s from the vet clinic to confirm the earlier date! It is straightened out now, though I did tell the woman who called me that, while we have two females we know we can catch for the first one, with the second one, we might have to just catch what we can, and see what they turn out to be! This isn’t very uncommon when it comes to strays and colony cats. I’ve brought in cats without even knowing for sure what gender they were, and they were fine with it.

But that got worked out much later.

I was able to head out a bit early to my mother’s bringing along my stock pot and a good knife, along with the prepped vegetables and herds, for the chicken stock was would be making for her. When I got there, my mother was back in bed, after her morning med assist. I noticed she had a garbage bag ready for the bin by the door, so I quickly dropped the stuff off, grabbed the garbage and headed out. Which turned out to be excellent timing. I passed one of her neighbours in the hall; someone who’s window faces the street. We ended up chatting for a while, and he told me he seeds me out his window quite often. He was very sweet. He mentioned that my mother clearly needs more help, and that he’d told her, if she ever needs anything, to just knock on his door.

When I got back, I told my mother about this, but she had no memory of him saying this to her! When I told her which apartment he was in, she even struggled to remember who lived there. She would recognize him to see him, but not necessarily connect him to any particular apartment.

It’s good to know she has some good neighbours.

When I got back to my mother’s, she was up and at her table. She joked about her being wrapped in a robe and wearing a regular shirt, because it’s been so long since her laundry was done, she ran out of nightgowns!

She was rather amused when I started unpacking my supplies and pre-prepared ingredients to work on her chicken stock. I just had to prep the chicken legs and thighs. My mother insisted I wash the pieces really, really well, to wash off the “chemicals”, then started telling me how the stores all spray meat with chemicals to make meat last longer. I told her that’s not quite what they do, and she got instant angry with me – but I was still washing her chicken for her, so she turned off the angry. I’m not sure if she was thinking of the CO that’s used to keep beef red in packaging, or she she was thinking of the chlorine rinse they used to do, to kill off bacteria like salmonella, though that hasn’t been done in years. No doubt, it was something she saw on daytime TV or read in a paper, many, many years ago.

After the chicken was in the pot, I started adding the mirepoix ingredients, then showed her the rest. I don’t think she has ever used ginger before, except maybe in power form. I know she was aware of turmeric, as she had bought a whole bunch for herself because she’d read about how healthy it was, but didn’t know how to use it. She ended up giving it to us! Apple cider vinegar is something she was completely unaware of.

She was oddly surprised by how many garlic cloves I brought – an entire head, so about 6 or 7 cloves. That was probably the last thing I would have expected her to be surprised about. “Polish penicillin” was always a staple ingredient when I was growing up, and she often brings up about how we should plant lots and lots of garlic. I remember how my parents would sometimes eat it. They’d pour some salt onto the table, then dip their cloves of garlic into the salt as they ate it raw!

Once the chicken stock was at the point where I could turn it down to a simmer, I got the first two loads of my mother’s laundry going, then we went over her shopping list. She had added a few things to it since I started it for her a few couple of days ago – including wine! The pharmacy has a liquor section, but the wine she likes isn’t available anymore. In our province, the government controls liquor sales (which is one of the reasons our booze is so expensive; it’s mostly taxes). When Trump started talking tariffs, our premier ordered all US booze to be pulled from the shelves. This was already bought and paid for by the government, of course, and hardly anyone was demanding US booze get pulled. It was just an childish tantrum on the part of our premier. Canada has one Western province where alcohol sales are private. Some places did try to remove US booze from the shelves, but the customers complained so much, they put them back. People in our province have no such say in the matter. The irony of this childish display is that we’ve had tariffs on US products for decades.

Which means the wine my mother usually gets – a super sweet kosher wine my parents bought for as long as I can remember – is no longer available. She asked me to try and find something I thought would be close. 😄

The pharmacy was my first stop and I had to ask one of the staff for help. I don’t know wines. Nothing against them. There just aren’t a lot of alcoholic drinks that I enjoy. In the end, I had two staff members looking things up, trying to find something my mother might like to replace what she normally would have gotten. It came down to just one thing – without US products, their shelves were pretty empty – and there was only one bottle of it left. On sale, too, which was nice.

That done, I picked up a few other things on her list, then got her bubble packs. I got another nice surprise at the checkout. My mother has the loyalty card, which is on her file at the pharmacy. She had lost track of the card for a while, but because it’s on her file, any times she got her prescriptions, she was still collecting points. Only at the store counter does the card need to be shown to collect points.

My mother was able to get $40 off her stuff! Plus, she collected enough new points through her prescription refills that, next time, she’ll be able to get another $20 off. !!!

When I told her that later one, her response was, why didn’t they use that $20 right then?

*sigh*

That done, the next stop was the grocery store for a somewhat larger shop than usual for her. She even requested I picked up some of the deli chicken I would get for her for sandwiches. She didn’t want slices, though. She asked for a chunk about an inch thick. That certainly made it easier for the deli person!

By the time I was done the shopping and back at my mother’s, her Meals on Wheels had arrived and the empty tray was waiting on her walker, outside her door. Those get left in the common room for pick up, on the next delivery day. So I took care of that for her before heading in. I was quite surprised she was done so quickly, and commented on it. I did notice the container with vegetable soup was on the counter, though. Once a week, they do a “use whatcha got” soup using leftovers. My mother says it tastes like dishwater. !!! So that ended up getting tossed. Another moment where she suddenly got angry at me, this time because I couldn’t read her mind over just how she wanted it tossed. *sigh*

Once her things were put away, the rest of the time was spent tending the stock, her laundry and general clean up. I did stop for some tea and a bun as a lunch, before getting back at it. Once the stock was done, I took out the meat to set aside for a bit, then the large sticks of celery and carrots, because I knew my mother would want to include them in a soup or something. I found a little strainer that I used to get most of the big stuff out for the stock before salting it and letting it cook longer, while I deboned the chicken. That all fit into one of the freezer bags that I’d brought along with everything else. The vegetables went into a handy take out container my mother had.

The stock was a different issue. I should have brought jars! I could find only two suitable empty jars and started ladling the stock into them, through the strainer. My mother kept telling me to leave everything out to cool down, first. It took me a bit to understand that she didn’t like the containers being used, and especially when I put the lids loosely on the jars. She thought they would take longer to cool down than if they were just left out. The idea of covering them at least to keep dust out apparently never occurred to her!

I find myself wondering if she was expecting to leave my stock pot behind?

By this point, I was finishing off and starting to pack things up to leave, as soon as her last load of laundry was dry. I had mentioned to my mother earlier that I needed to swing by the garage before going home (she wouldn’t understand what getting a tire torqued means). When she started complaining that I was getting ready to leave, I told her, I still need to go to the garage on the way home.

Which is when she started getting mad at me again. Why was I leaving so soon? I told her, I’d been there for almost 5 hours. Didn’t she finish her Meals on Wheels first? Yes – before I came back with her groceries. She actually tried to claim I’d been there for barely 2 hours, instead of almost 5 hours!

One of the things she wanted me to do was cut her toenails, which I really didn’t want to do on top of everything else. It would have been good for her to soak her feet to soften them, first, too, which hadn’t happened. She basically started having a tantrum. It was as if I hadn’t done anything else for her at all, because her toenails hadn’t been done.

Then she started berating me, asking why I booked to go to the garage on a day I was going to be at her place. I told her, I didn’t; I brought the truck in yesterday. This is a safety thing to make sure my tire doesn’t go flying.

Some time ago, I’d brought over a good set of toenail clippers, because she only had fingernail clippers, and a micro-pedi grinder thing. She told me to take those home, and was angry about it for some reason. I told her, no. She has toenail fungus. If I take them home and use them, I would get her toenail fungus. Only she can use them, now. That made her mad, too.

In the end, I agreed to take a look at her feet. It turned out her nails were really broken up, and only a few had anything to be trimmed. I started using the clippers and she got angry again, demanding I use scissors, because the clippers didn’t work.

They worked find.

I think she may have tried to clip her own toenails and couldn’t manage it, because then she told me one toe had gotten so bad, she grabbed scissors and cut as much as she could, herself.

While I was doing her toes, I pointed out which one had the fungal infection. That lead her to complain about how she spent so much money on medication for it, yet never used it. So I asked her were it was and went looking. At first, the only box I found that was the size I remembered it came in turned out to be eye drops. My mother got angry again, saying she’s never bought eye drops before, so why was it there? She forgot that we did get eye drops for her, when she started getting treated for her macular degeneration.

I finally found the box, hidden way in the back of her cupboard, and applied the medication, but this is not something she can do herself, and it’s not on her care list with home care. I’m not sure if we can even add it to the list or not, partly because I don’t know that my mother would be willing to let them do it.

Ironically, for someone who complains about all the medications she’s taking, she once again brought up about how she thinks she should be using the inhaler – a prescription that was cancelled. I had to explain to her, getting this was a test to see if she had asthma. The alternative would have been to get on a waiting list to get tested, and it could take a year or more before she got to the top of the list. It was simply faster to have her try the prescription to see if it worked or not.

My mother doesn’t understand. She has trouble breathing at night, and she’s gone from complaining about “having” to take it, to now wanting to have it, even though it made no difference at all. Her mind has just latched onto it, now that the prescription has been cancelled. She’d been wanting to stop using it for a long time, too.

Anyhow.

I finally managed to head out, though my mother was still quite angry that I was leaving “so early”. I did manage to get to the garage in good time. I just had to wait until someone was available to do it. Then, since I was there, I popped into the grocery store across the street to pick up some bread, after my daughter told me she hadn’t had a chance to do any baking today.

By the time I left, it was starting to rain! We had reached our high of 10C/50F, too. Happily, I managed to get home before it was getting too dark. That half-light at the end of the day makes it so hard to spot deer getting ready to run across the road.

While things ended on a fairly negative note, I got a lot done at my mother’s. Her fridge is stocked up again, she has her meds, I got her chicken stock made and she has cooked chicken to last her a while.

It just took a really long time, and unfortunately, spending that much time with my mother, even on a good day, is pretty draining.

I am so very tired now.

The Re-Farmer

How things went and, a new addition?

November 8, 2025 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Good grief, I can’t wait until the days start getting longer again. I keep thinking it’s closer to midnight, but it’s barely past 5:30 as I start this!

This morning was the first morning where I could actually say it was cold. We even had some snow on the ground, though not enough to cover much. For the past while, I’ve been giving the yard cats their morning feeding after softening it with some really thin, warm “cat soup”, but it’s been freezing faster than they can eat it, so I did just dry kibble this morning. They very clearly were expecting different and weren’t too happy not to get it!

I was heading out soon after to do my mother’s morning med assist, after being called yesterday about a cancellation. She now has 20 minutes scheduled, so they have time to do a meal assist and, if she’s willing, to help her get washed up or dressed on top of her regular assist.

When I got there, she was still in bed and really struggled to get up. I encouraged her to stay in bed while I made her breakfast, but she made her way out and did her morning washing up routine. Once she was settled with her meds and food, I took care of her commode, etc.

Since she has a lunch assist now, I asked her what she wanted, in case there was something I could leave out or set up for the worker that came for her lunch assist. In the end, I just brought out a can of chicken noodle soup, because the rest of what she wanted had to stay in the fridge.

Overall, things went well, though my mother seemed quite down and a bit depressed about how she was feeling. She said she thought she was going to the hospital today, but did acknowledge that she tends to feel better after getting up and moving about, and is usually feeling pretty good by the end of the day. What did catch my attention and showed me how much worse she was feeling than usual is that she did NOT do her usual complaining, with the whole “I’m dying!” thing, then launching into what she wants us to do for her before she dies. She was quiet about it, and that’s way more of a red flag.

Yes, I did send an email to the home care office when I got home, as this is something they need to know. The care aides also pass on things like that, as they observe them.

The only time things started to go south was near time for me to leave. She remembered something she wanted to tell me, then started going on about how she didn’t want us using her pension to pay for things here at the farm.

…

Yes, she paid for the door, and I told her again (when I had the chance) that I appreciated it, but I had never asked her to. It was my brother that talked to her about it because, for the past while, she’s been talking about how she wants to help me and my family out more. She’s also been hinting about helping with the door before, too. So something has changed.

Before I could figure out, she started talking about how, she doesn’t live here any more, it’s not her responsibility, then started complaining about how much doing the roof cost. She is convinced we were cheated, because it shouldn’t have cost $14,000. I told her, that was just how much things cost at the time. If it had been done three years earlier, it would have cost $9000. I didn’t get a chance to remind her that I’d gotten estimates from three different companies then, and they were all pretty much the same cost. She had said no.

She started telling me, I should have gone to other companies to find a better price, and I told her, I went to 5 different companies (3 responded, but I didn’t even try to bring that up). Then she started complaining that they charged for clean up. We shouldn’t have paid for that. We should have done it ourselves. I said to her, do you know just how much there is to clean up from a roof?

She was talking about the door.

It seems that when my brother talked to her about it, he’d brought printouts, including the original estimate with details on what was included in the cost. Clean up was part of it. My mother said that we could have “saved some pennies” by doing it ourselves.

*facepalm*

I just did not want to go there. Instead, I started getting ready to leave, because I still had to go to our own pharmacy to pick up some refills. I double checked his message about how they’d be ready for pick up today, to see if there was a time I had to wait for, as it was still early in the day for that sort of thing. As we were talking, I read out “pick up injections”, and my mom was all “injections!” then going on about my poooor husband that he has to take injections, and oh, we have it so hard, we suffer so much…

…

I told her, he’s been on two injections for years. (She knows that; she reacts the same way, every time) Doing injections is not a big deal these days. She still tried to play the pity game, and how she feels so sorry for us. I told her, yeah, we have problems, but so does everyone, and a lot of people have things a lot worse than we do. We have a lot to be thankful for.

Even with this stuff, I’d say it was a good visit when it comes to my mother.

From there, it was off to our pharmacy, where I was also able to get my vitamins that I didn’t get at Costco. Different budget. Then it was just getting some gas and going home. I wrote off my planned trip to the dump today. I want to avoid extra driving as much as possible until we can get that leaking seal fixed, next week, and we’ve got a trip for a doctor’s appointment in between.

By the time I got home, it wasn’t too much longer before I was heading outside to take care of the outside cats and switch out the trail cam cards, before it got dark.

The cats were very happy to have the softened kibble again!

After I put the food out, I was topping up water bowls with warm water when I spotted one of the older grey tabbies eating at the feeding station under the shrine.

Then I realized that cat I thought it was, was by the house – and this one was much bigger!

Also, shier. I didn’t try to get any closer, as he was clearly ready to take off if I did, but he also watched me from behind the shrine’s pedestal base, rather than running away.

Just in case, I did a head count and got 35. Which means we have several more than my last highest count.

So it looks like we have a newcomer. This was the only one that seemed a stranger. I think the other “extras” were cats that didn’t usually show up at the same time as others at feeding time. With the colder temperatures, more are coming closer to the house instead of waiting until later.

Later on, I headed outside to check on some noises the girls were hearing through their windows (they can hear a lot more than I can!). I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but I did spot this crowd.

There are four cats in that cat bed! You can barely see the little tabby.

Frank is the one looking right at me, and the little white and grey draped over her back end is the one that has been sick for the last while. It has discovered the heat lamp and spends most of its time in the isolation shelter lately, and it looking much stronger.

They’re going to have to get used to it being closed up, soon.

Thanks to a generous donation, the rescue we’re now connected to is going to book us for for spays and/or neuters. The goal is for four cats, two at a time. With keeping the isolation closed up while females recover from surgery for two weeks, two adult cats is the limit. Though if we are able to get Frank and Pinky in there, I’d probably keep that little white and grey in with them, too.

I’ll have the dates sent to me later, but they will be booked some time after the 16th. I would hope we can get other females after that, but they’ll do neuters are well, if that’s what we can catch. I would love to get Adam, Slick, Sprout, Sprig or that white one with the grey tabby patches, but that would involve trapping.

I should maybe talk to them about the possibility of taking the friendliest outside cats for adoption, some of whom are already fixed. More than a few times, I’ve almost been able to touch one of the more feral cats, only to have a super socialized cat or three, push their way in, demanding attention and scaring off the more feral ones.

We’ll work it out.

So, that’s how things have been today. Tomorrow is Sunday, and it looks like it will actually be a day of rest for a change. We’re expected to have some snow in the wee hours of the night, but tomorrow’s high is supposed to be just below freezing. After that, we’re supposed to warm up again, with highs above freezing for almost two weeks. More time to get as much done outside as I can, while the weather is good.

But not tomorrow.

The Re-Farmer

Recovery mode, and unexpected help

November 1, 2025 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today was a day when I could appreciate that the high winds and colder temperatures meant I couldn’t work outside. I certainly wasn’t up to it.

It’s strange how a day basically spent waiting for the truck to be worked on could wipe me out like it did. I think part of it had to do with all the walking I did being on concrete or tile floors, instead of grass and gravel. It really did my left hip in, that’s for sure. Plus, I grabbed the wrong cane from the truck. I should have gone around and got one of the adjustable sized ones. Instead, I grabbed a wooden one that was a bit too tall for me. Which didn’t seem to be an issue while I was walking around, but once I was in bed, my left shoulder started feeling like my hip – ready to pop out of a socket!

The girls took care of the morning routine for me. I had a rough night, but did try getting up a bit later than usual. My younger daughter basically banished me back to bed. I can’t say it actually helped any and I finally gave up. It was hours before I started feeling human again. A day of recovery was certainly needed.

Oh, to have the life of our cats.

Needless to say, I was extra appreciative that my brother volunteered to do my mother’s grocery shopping today. He also brought her the new pillows my SIL found for her. One of the things that came up while I was talking to my siblings is that my mother is using an old, home made feather pillow that used to belong to her aunt, that actually looks in better shape than the store bought ones. My mother is always complaining that her breathing is worse at night. Is it possible she is reacting to the feather pillow?

She did end up giving my brother a hard time about the pillows, because he couldn’t find fresh pillow cases, and he refused to reuse the ones on her bed, just in case she really was reacting to something in her pillows. He never found any. I know the ones I changed out for her were still in her laundry, so it may be that I had used up her last pillow cases when I changed her bedding. My mother uses four pillows, with two for under her legs, so she may simply not have more than 8 pillow cases.

After my brother stopped at her place, long enough to make a lunch to share with her, he came here to the farm. He had a number of things planned, so I quickly went over to say hello before he got busy. He already had an envelope in his hand as he was getting out of his vehicle, and quickly got something out for me when I got there.

It was a check from my mother.

Somehow, he convinced her to cover the cost of replacing the door. She had been teasing that she would “help” with the door. I didn’t rise to the bait and figured she would soon forget about it. At best, I expected she might pass on a bit of cash, or cover what she thought it should have cost, rather than what it really was. Nope. She actually paid for the entire amount!

I am extremely grateful, but also extremely suspicious. Either way, it’s going to pay down some of the credit we had to use to pay for the door. It also means we’ll have the cash needed to get the septic tank emptied for the winter.

I made sure to phone her to say thank you. I got her answering machine twice and, when I finally got through to her, she was more interested in getting off the phone and back to her supper…after complaining that my brother, who used her debit card (something she can’t use herself; it’s beyond her) to buy her own groceries, rather than have her pay him back in cash afterwards. She thinks he’ll steal from her if he uses her card.

I suspect this is confession through projection. Back in the day, she used to do stuff like that to my dad.

My brother, as always, went above and beyond while here. He replaced the motion sensor light over our door. The old one was still working since he fiddled with it last time, but he said it wouldn’t have lasted much longer. He was actually surprised it was still working at all.

Then he got busy with the other stuff he needed to do, among their belongings stored here now, for a while longer. I made a point to message him after he left to say thank you for replacing the light, taking care of my mother for the shopping, and somehow convincing her to write that check.

On his way home, he gave me a call (hand free, of course) to let me know that apparently, my mother wants to buy us a car, because we are having so much trouble with the truck. She asked him advice on what kind of car he would recommend. What we think she wants is for him to actually find a car, and then she would pay for it.

While I would be quite grateful for such a generous gift, we are both suspicious. Her generosity, when it happens, often comes with a price. In this case, it may simply be that she recognizes she can’t get into our truck anymore, so if I need to drive her for a doctor’s appointment or something, we would need a small car she can get into. Her car is still here. My brother checked it out and it’s running. The flat tire is still holding air. It did start showing a check engine light, the last time he got it going, so there’s something else going on . My mother has long had troubles with it – my brother had been the one to get it fixed until we moved out here, then we were the ones getting it done – and we know that it would be needing continuous repairs. It’s older than our truck with about as much mileage, so that’s to be expected. I brought up the possibility of using it as a down payment, but he doesn’t think we’d get much of anything for it.

Well, we shall see.

As for me, I am feeling very thankful for the unexpected help, even though I’m sure my mother will try and use it to control me somehow.

I wasn’t planning to use the truck until my appointment next week, but without the Costco trip, we’ll have to make a small trip to town tomorrow for a few groceries we’re running out of. After our mechanic gives the truck the all clear, I’ll do the Costco shopping and get us stocked up.

I’m certainly glad I got as much as I did for our first stock up trip! Especially getting those 40 pound bags of kibble at the feed store.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even more windy than today – we’re expecting gusts of up to 67km/h (42mph) – so I will likely not be getting anything done outside, anyhow. At this point, it looks like the weather will allow for some progress outside on Monday. By the end of next week, our expected highs will all be below freezing for a while. The long range forecast, though, says to expect some warmer days in the middle of November, with daytime highs above freezing for the rest of the month.

At least I was able to get the winter sowing done before it got too cold. That was the main thing. Anything else that gets done out there will be gravy!

The Re-Farmer

Gee, thanks, Mom

October 31, 2025 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Well, I’m home and settled in, now.

I got the spark plugs in the truck replaced, but not the recommended wire replacement. I’ll get my own mechanic to check those out when I go in for the oil change I already scheduled for next week. For now, I want to avoid driving the truck, if at all possible. There probably isn’t any issue right now, and Canadian Tire is notorious for adding unnecessary work to their recommendations. We’ve been burned by them, badly, in the past, and in more than one province. This particular store has been okay for us but, the last time I was there, my brother was able to join me and basically diagnosed in advance that the problem was likely the wheel bearing, since he’s checked everything else that he could, and it was fine. Still. Better save than sorry.

After the bill was paid – I even used the last of my Canadian Tire dollars to bring the price down a bit – I still had a gas budget, so I popped across to Costco to fill the tank. There was a huge line up at every set of pumps. Their price for regular was $1.179/L while everywhere else was at $1.299/L.

Then I headed straight home.

I’m happy to say the truck did seem to be running well. The misfiring was not happening anymore! I am, however, already paranoid about any vehicle we have. Especially with how the tires feel while driving, and I did feel like I was all over the road somewhat. I had noticed they topped up the tires during the ONE HOUR diagnostic. I could see the vehicle from the waiting room and, for most of that hour, there was no one around it that I could see.

Our local garage doesn’t charge for diagnostics, and they usually take just a few minutes. Even when they’ve had to put the vehicle on a lift and physically check things, they haven’t charged me. When I was trying to figure out why I was losing air on new tires, shortly after I got it, they took the tires right off to spray them and try and find a leak, never found any, and never charged me a cent. The problem turned out to be the valves, not the tires.

Anyhow.

Once I was home (to a supper waiting for me!), I found a text message from my sister. My mother had called her. She said my mother had tried to call me, but there was no answer, so she called my sister to see if she knew why I wasn’t answering.

…

So, before I even started my supper, I listened to the messages from my mother. Well. One message. The other was just her, breathing into the phone. Then I gave her a call. She told me she left a message and when I mentioned the second message, she told me that was because she was waiting for me to answer. She assumed I was next to the phone and just not picking up.

The first message was her usual, “where are you? My fridge is empty!” spiel. When I told her I had just gotten home, she was all “where were you?”, like how dare I not be around when she calls. Then she started going on about how I haven’t called her since Sunday… or when I was last at her place (she could no longer remember the exact day, and yes, it was Sunday). I told her, I’ve been busy trying to get things done, while the weather allows.

I told her I’d gone to the city to do the Costco shop, but the truck started giving me warning lights, so I ended up at a garage all day and never got my shopping done. Without going into detail (because she wouldn’t understand it), I said that I got enough done that I could get home, but would be getting things checked out when I go to our regular mechanic next week.

Long story short:

It’s all my fault I was not available to do her grocery shopping because I’m a woman and too stupid to buy a good vehicle.

When I mentioned I was already planning to talk to our mechanic, who is the owner and sold us this truck, she started “advising” me to tell him to be “kind” to me, because I, a mere woman, know nothing about vehicles.

*sigh*

She wasn’t even being “mean” about it. That was just the gist of it by the end of that part of the conversation, and she says the same thing every time the topic of a woman buying a vehicle comes up. I told her; it’s an older vehicle with a lot of miles on it. It’s going to need work. All vehicles do. She’s had vehicle problems of her own, of course, but she always had other people to take care of them for her, so she had no idea just how often they needed work.

She also didn’t notice or care that I didn’t get my own shopping done. She just went into how she needed groceries.

I told her, I could come in tomorrow.

She hemmed and hawed. Probably because it was “too soon” (she does that, every time I try to nail down a day with her) before asking if I was good with that… maybe she’s bothering me too much… (a common guilt trip she tries). I told her, I’d rather not drive until I get the truck checked by my own mechanic that I know and trust. Then I suggested she could call the grocery store and get them to do her shopping and deliver it. She has had them deliver her groceries before, but she’s never had them do her shopping before. She hemmed and hawed again; she wants me to do it, because I know what she wants and likes. Not even my brother and sister shopping for her get it “right”. Fair enough, but I was just too tired and too hungry to play her games this time.

In the end, she did say she would try calling the grocery store and see if they could take care of it for her. At this point, she probably doesn’t even have a list. I’ve been helping her make her lists, the last few times. I hope she does try it. I know she still has food in the freezer and would still have canned meals and so on, so she might decide to just… not.

She kept wanting to talk, even after I told her I had supper waiting for me, that I was hungry and needed to eat. It took several times, saying it several different ways, before she graciously allowed me to get off the phone and have my supper.

I am just too tired for her games today.

I’ll call her again tomorrow to find out how things went.

For now, I think I’m going to go to bed. It’s barely past 8pm, and I’m ready to pass out. It doesn’t help that my left hip keeps threatening to dislocate. No pain. Just instability.

Yeah. Bed sounds like a great idea.

The Re-Farmer

Covering for home care, and cozy from the wind

October 26, 2025 / Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

This morning, I was to cover for home care for my mother’s med assist, so I was up and about feeding the outside cats before it was light out.

They seem torn between famished for breakfast, and wanting to still be in their cozy spots!

Thankfully, it was light out by the time I started heading for my mother’s, as the first thing I saw when I got on the main road was a pair of deer on the road! The highway condition group I’m on has been reporting a lot of deer activity this year, with certain areas being particularly dangerous right now.

I got to my mother’s a bit early. She was still in bed, and I would have brought things to her, but she came out to join me. I made her a breakfast that she could have with her meds. I suspect it was a fuller breakfast, small as it was, than she would have been up to doing on her own. Hopefully, she will be willing to have the home care workers help her with that. The new assists aren’t part of her current schedule, but they would be informed by now, and her morning assist is 10 minutes to allow for extra help, even if it’s just to get the kettle going and doing some instant oatmeal.

When getting some milk out for her, I discovered she had issues with the carton. She had tried, and failed to open it from both sides and ended up making a hole with a knife! I was able to get the spout side open for her but, with the hole she made, had to be very careful pouring it into her cup. Last time, I’d got her a plastic jug of milk from another town. She had cleaned it out to use it as one of her water jugs for drinking and cooking, so I gave it an extra rinse and transferred her milk from the carton to the jug.

I wish her local grocery store still carried the smaller plastic jugs. They only have 4L in plastic, and my mom can’t handle jugs that size. My siblings and I will have to make a point of getting 2L milk in plastic jugs for her, when we know we can swing by to drop it off.

After that, I spent the next hour or so doing some of the things home care can do for her, like emptying her commode and rubbing the Voltaren on her back, and stuff they can’t, like changing her bedding and sweeping her entire apartment.

She told me that she’s been asking the ladies to do the Voltaren in the morning and before bed, and they have been quite willing to do it, but there’s one home care worker she has issues with. This is the same one that will come in, get her pills out, then leave without making sure my mother takes them. Last night, my mother has asked if she could rub the Voltaren on her back. Her response was to look at the sheet and say, that’s one listed on there. Which… of course it isn’t. This stuff doesn’t require a prescription. But they are supposed to be able to help with a number of things – her bed time visit has 15 minutes schedules for that. I don’t know if this worker refused to do it or not.

As we were chatting, my mother asked me if living here at the farm has been helpful for us, financially. I told her that yes, it was at first, but things are getting really expensive now. Especially when we have things like the door to replace. This is the first time I told her that we had to put it on credit. That’s when she started saying that my brother should be taking care of this stuff for me. I just laughed at that, because I know when she says that, she’s saying it’s because he’s male, and I shouldn’t be doing “man” stuff. However, she had also been teasing about helping pay for the door, so that would also have been her way to say he should have paid for it. Meanwhile, our deal is that we live here “rent free”, in exchange for maintaining the place and keeping it up as much as we can. I wasn’t going to go there, though.

Then she started saying that we should be communicating more. That confused me because she knows I’ve been talking to my brother about this (it’s his house, after all), and her. So I asked her, what did she mean? Oh, I should be talking to my brother about it and… don’t forget! He has access to her money.

…

???

Yeah, he has Power of Attorney, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to use her life’s savings!

I told her, she needs to talk to my brother about her money, not me. Then I added, I won’t ask her, like our vandal did. He was forever going to her for money. He even expected her to pay for a large building he wanted to build and was furious when she refused, and blamed her for having to take out a loan. She said, oh, that was a long time ago. He doesn’t ask for money. Not any more, I pointed out. I reminded him of how she’s given him a check for a substantial amount, only for him to come back asking for another one, saying his wife had accidentally burned the check with their garbage in the burn barrel. She gave him another, much smaller, amount (still a lot, though). When my brother found out, he checked her account and discovered the first check had already been cashed!

She remembered that. That was money she gave him to go towards the building he wanted to build.

*sigh*

That did give me a chance to tell her about our incident from a couple of days ago. When I told her how he’d opened up his shirt, took off the support strap and started waving his colostomy bag at me, she told me, he’s been showing that thing to everyone.

*shudder*

All in all, things went really well this visit. I was able to get quite a bit done for her, which was nice. I even remembered to ask her if she wanted me to make lunch for her before I left – and from her reaction, I could tell she had meant to ask me to do just that, but had forgotten! She told me what she wanted put together on a plate for her, then to set it in the microwave, so that all she needed to do was turn it on when she was ready to eat, after someone from church came over to give her communion.

After I was done there, I was going to swing by the grocery store to pick up a couple of things for home, but they were closed. So I made a side trip to the town closer to us and got a few things there before heading home.

By then, the winds had gotten even worse, so there was no way I was going to get anything done outside today. A forced day of rest!

The forecast now says we will be getting rain all day tomorrow (Monday), continuing on through half the next day. So that’s two more days of outside work lost. After that, it’ll be cooler, but at least the winds will have died down and the weather clear. The problem is, Wednesday is my first city stock up shopping trip. I’ll shoot to head out as early as I can and hopefully get back with enough daylight hours to get at least some work done outside. At this point, I think I’m going to start winter sowing, just to get things into the prepared beds while I still can! On the plus side, the long range forecast now suggests the first couple of weeks of November might still be warm enough to get more done out there.

When it was time to head out and feed the outside cats, I ended up spending quite a long time doing my evening rounds, checking for wind damage, picking up fallen branches, etc. I was finishing up when I spotted this cozy scene.

In the first picture, you can see Pinky in the cat bed on the bottom. That is the cat bed that had been in the catio, where she and her little would cuddle together and sleep.

In the upper level Midnight is in the cat bed there, and in the second picture, you can see he is cuddling with a little grey tabby kitten! Which is amazing, because he usually growls and swipes at the kittens!

I’m glad to see kittens in there. Most hang out together in the sun room, but some just won’t stay there other than to grab some food. The winterized catio is being well used, too. So far, it’s been holding up to the wind all right. I did put the red bench I made against one side wall, to reduce how much it was fluttering in the wind, so that helps, too.

Technically, it’s warm today, but with that wind, it’s very unpleasant out there, so I’m very happy to see the cats using the shelters. Some, like Adam, Sprout and Sprout’s calico seem to have secret spots out in the outer yard somewhere that they hang out in. Sprout’s fluffy orange and white seems to have moved into the portable greenhouse!

Oh, I have news about the ones that have gone to the foster. The adult and Pinky’s two have been spayed and neutered. The adult is completely deaf and has a really bad ear infection, but there were no ear mites in any of them! The vet thinks the adult may have been born deaf. I fully expected to learn the infection was from a really bad ear mite infestation, and that that is what caused the deafness.

So the adult is going to be rehabilitated and socialized, so she can be adopted out rather than coming back to us, since she won’t survive long as an outside cat. If she really were dumped, as we suspect, I’m amazed she survived long enough to find our place at all!

We do the best we can for the outside cats, so they can be cozy, safe, well fed and warm, but nothing beats getting adopted and living the good life indoors!

Gotta work on socializing more kittens, and getting those ladies fixed!

The Re-Farmer

Finally! Several times over!

October 22, 2025 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Thankfully, there was no rain today. The installers were able to get our new door in!

I headed out quite early to feed the outside cats, then make sure the gate was open for the installers. We have had the folding table I made out of folding legs and a piece of plywood I found in the basement set up under the kitchen window for some time. The hand rail to the door runs past it, and the isolation shelter needs to be set up there for the winter, so I moved the table out and cleared the patio space under it. Then, since it was clear anyhow, I set up the pieces of insulation that go against the basement wall for the winter. The table itself, I set up next to the elm tree outside the kitchen window, keeping it handy for the installers, if they needed an extra surface. It will be folded up and put away for the winter, later.

They did end up using it, along with one they’d brough themselves that was almost identical in dimensions!

Once inside, the makeshift barricade to keep the cats out of the entry while they worked was set up. Then I made myself some breakfast.

I was settling down to eat when I heard their truck and trailer backing up to the house. I headed out to greet them and touch base, then went back in. After I finished eating, I found I had a decent amount of time before I needed to go to my mother’s, since we worked out that I would do her grocery shopping after the meeting with the home care coordinator in the afternoon.

I took advantage of it and started working on what was originally supposed to be a wattle weave wall in the old kitchen garden.

The first photo was before I started working on the bed and had brought the stakes over.

Hard to believe that those black looking stakes are also maple, and were as bright as the new stakes, originally! They turned black after the first major rainfall.

You can see my initial attempt at wattle weaving in that first picture, too. Removing those was my first order of business. Once they were clear, I raked away any leaf litter that had blown into the area I would be working on, and clear out a few weeds.

Once that was cleared, you can see in the second picture that I wrapped twine along all the uprights. In the third picture, I’d laid out the first stakes that would be pounded in. These would be placed in the middle of each of the ones already in place, using the twine to keep them in line with the other stakes.

In the first photo above, the next set of stakes were laid out, with my spare on the side. These would go between each of the stakes already pounded in, in a slightly offset row, which you can see in the next two photos.

You can also see the hammer and board I used to pound them into the soil. The board was set at the top of each stake, and I used the flat side of the hammer on the board to pound them in. That pretty much assured I’d never miss, and wouldn’t be damaging the tops if I did.

With all the stakes in place, I started putting the pieces I’d tried to wattle weave, back, running them in between the offset rows. Some of them were rather bent from being woven around the stakes for so long but, for the most part, they went in fairly well. Some pieces were pretty wonky, though, leaving gaps. Once they were all in place, I went to my pile of smaller willow switches and use them to fill in gabs, making for a thicker and more solid wall. You can see how that looked in the first two photos.

Then I grabbed the loppers and headed into the spruce grove. In our first years here, I’d cleared up and cleared out the poplar growing in a few spaces along the edge of the grove. Poplar being poplar, they’ve been growing back. I found the straightest ones in the size range I needed, cut them down and trimmed away their branches. I also gathered some much smaller, narrower pieces to weave into the ends of the garden bed.

In the last picture of the slide show above, you can see the wall with the new lengths added. The pieces woven into the sides helped lock in the larger pieces in the deadwood fence at the ends.

Then, I forgot to take pictures of the rest. I’ll do that in daylight, tomorrow!

As the deadwood was laid between the rows and pushed down to the bottom, the stakes started to get pushed outwards slightly. I decided to secure them with twine, basically joining the stakes together in a zig zag pattern, making sure they were snug against the tops of the deadwood as I packed them down as much as I could.

I should have waited on the twine.

My original thought was to cut the stakes to just above the height of the deadwood, so they weren’t sticking up too high above it. I decided to see if I could get them pounded deeper into the soil, and more secure. For that, I headed to the garage for a sledge hammer.

Which did a mighty fine job of getting the stakes deep enough that I didn’t have to trim any of them! I was even able to pound in some of the original stakes a bit, too. Those ones I am keeping taller, though. They have matching height stakes on the opposite side of the bed, and will be used to hold hoops or whatever gets used to add protective covering to things growing in it, if needed.

Unfortunately, in the process of using the sledge hammer to drive the stakes deeper, I ended up snapping the twine in two places, and I had to take care of that before I could call it done.

Building the walls on this bed is now FINALLY finished! Now all it needs is another weeding, and it’s ready for next year’s garden.

By the time I was done and putting things away, I had time to change and get ready to head to my mother’s.

The installers were also finishing up! By then, they were putting the hand rail against the wall back. I couldn’t believe how well it worked out (there was minimal water staining visible when they took the old frame out, and everything else was still sound), and how quickly they got it done.

We finally have a proper front door again!

What they were NOT able to do was put the storm door back. It’s too tall for the new frame. It was handy for when we run the drainage hose from the washing machine out the window, but is no longer actually needed. The new steel door itself is built for Canadian winters. We won’t be getting any more frost at the bottom, or at the hinges!

The door now swings from the opposite side of the original door, by my request. That meant the arm bar had to be moved to the other side, too, since it needs to be opposite the hinges. It had to be mounted slightly higher because of where the handle and deadbolt are located, compared to the original door. The screen on the door can be removed, so we can still run the hose out the window when we do laundry, and the cats can’t get at the opening anymore.

I am very happy.

Then, it was off to my mother’s.

*sigh*

Short form. Honest.

I showed her a picture of the new door, thinking she would be happy. Instead, she was at first confused about which door it was (even though we’ve talked about it several times), then she didn’t seem to like the look of it (??), then she got really angry when I told her they couldn’t put the storm door back on because it wouldn’t fit. I got a lecture about how, if they’re not willing to do it, I should go find real professionals who would do it for me.

My mother makes a big deal about planting garlic, so I tried showing her pictures of the finished garlic bed with planting of spinach and Swiss Chard between the rows of garlic before covering the bed for the winter.

She became thoroughly disgusted when I mentioned buying seeds. I should be saving seeds (and planting spaghetti squash; that’s essential, suddenly). Which I have been, but apparently, seeds for things I’ve never grown before should magically appear or something, and spending money on seeds is stupid. Also, I need to plant spaghetti squash. Basically, she was really happy about insulting me for not gardening like she would. Practically chortling with glee in the process.

I tried showing her other pictures of the garden beds I’ve been preparing for winter, but gave up. She started ragging on me about how I keep talking about all the work I do in the garden, but never the benefits. I told her, the work is the benefit! I enjoy the work.

Turns out, that wasn’t what she meant.

Apparently, I get nothing from the garden. Ever. Not any of the stuff I’ve brought for her, even though we had so little produce this year. Things like drought and heat waves and a summer of endless smoke from wildfires means nothing. I should magically have a successful garden, every year, and it should be just like she used to have (or, at least, how she now imagines she used to have).

…

We tried talking about the upcoming meeting about her home care need and, in the process, I found out our vandal had visited again. He had shown up at the same time as her supper med assist, so he went into the common room. Even from her apartment down the hall, with the door closed, she could hear him loudly talking to people there, though not what he was saying. Knowing him, he was slandering me and my mother about this property. After the home care worker left, he came to her apartment and started ranting at her about the usual; that she “gave” the property to me (which she hasn’t), and so on. He wouldn’t let her respond to anything, of course, and didn’t leave until she started crossing herself repeatedly.

I asked when this happened, and she really struggled to remember. She did remember that it was after their exercises (which is why there were people in the common room), which meant Tuesday. Which was yesterday. But she couldn’t remember that it was yesterday.

We talked more about my mother accepting more med assists, like meal preparation, dress assists, bathing assists – basically, all that they’re allowed to do for her. She really does need the help, but her refusal to accept it is part of what’s keeping her from being approved for a nursing home, like she wants. She started getting angry at me, saying “I’m not used to having servants”. I told her, they’re not servants. They are helpers. Let them help!

That sent her off on a racist rant about the male home care workers, all of whom are apparently from India. I cut that off and told her, she can’t be saying stuff like that to the workers.

We also got her shopping list worked out in between all that.

Then the home care coordinator arrived, right on time.

The poor woman. She’s trying so hard to help my mother.

In the end, we were able to get her to accept allowing them to do meal assists on those days when she’s not feeling well, and we talked about the sorts of things they can do – quick cooking, reheats, etc. She said she would accept a shower assist once a week (she sponge bathes only), and she actually requested help with getting things set up so she can soak her feet once a week. She would accept dress assists, if needed, too. She might not need all of this every day, but we stressed, the more help she accepts, the better. We don’t want her to fall and hurt herself.

The coordinator also had to explain to her that she can say things like “I don’t want a man touching me”, in refusing their assistance with certain types of care, but she should NOT be going on about their race or country of origin. My mother tried to say, “I’m not going to lie.” I told her, you don’t have to lie. Just don’t say anything! The coordinator concurred.

It was a long and difficult meeting, but we did get progress.

There were a couple of forms that need to be signed every year, so when the coordinator was done, I followed her to the home care office, where I signed on my mother’s behalf. One of the forms was a list of what the clients needed to do for the home care workers, ranging from making sure driveways and sidewalks were clear, to ensuring the clients had no access to guns or knives. No using illicit drugs, no smoking within an hour before they are scheduled to arrive, no verbal or physical abuse…

Much of it didn’t apply to my mother, but a few lines where highlighted in regards to how the workers are to be treated!

She also gave me an emergency responders kit to replace the one on my mother’s fridge. My mother’s was incomplete for some reason. So when I got back to my mother’s, I went through her copy of one form, then filled in the information for the first responders sit. If she needed to be taken to the hospital by ambulance, they would grab this package and have all the info they need, from her meds list to my contact information, and signed permission for me to be her advocate, doing all the things I’m already doing on her behalf now.

That took quite a while to finish off! But it’s done. Finally!

Hopefully, my mother will behave.

I’m not holding my breath.

The paperwork done, I went to do her shopping. After I got back and put everything away, I had the idea of making a list of what she typically eats for her meals. This way, if she asks them to make her toast, they will know if she wants butter or jam or whatever on it.

Unfortunately, my mother just started to get angrier and angrier. She doesn’t trust people to make her food. She can do it herself. She doesn’t want to be a bother (ha!). Etc. I don’t know what she thinks they’d do to her food, but she even started saying that if this is what she has to do to get into a nursing home, maybe we can set aside getting her into a nursing home for now.

I was not impressed.

She is determined to sabotage herself. It’s so hard to help her, when she does this. Then, of course, she blames everyone else and has no understanding that her own actions are the problem. She simply can’t grasp it, and it’s getting worse as she gets older.

She and our vandal are very much alike is many things.

I finally set the list aside for later. By then, I’d been there for over 4 1/2 hours. The meeting was finally done, and I could finally go home!

Well… after a stop at the grocery store for a few fresh items we were out of.

At least coming home to our nice new door cheered me up a bit! I am so happy with it!

We need to find someplace to store the storm door, though. It’s still leaning against the house.

Things are supposed to warm up over the next few days; especially on the weekend. We are no longer getting rain in the forecast. Which means I’ll have almost a week of good weather to get more garden beds ready and do more winter sowing. We also need to winterize the bottom of the cat isolation shelter before moving it by the house, where we can plug in the heat lamp and heated water bowl. The catio needs to be moved, too. Pinky no longer uses it. I think she’s returned to the rafters in the garage, where she used to hang out last winter.

I plan to take advantage of every pleasant day we’ve got, before the end of the month stock up trips need to be done!

For now, however, I am mentally and psychologically exhausted. It doesn’t help that my eyes are still achy from the dilation drops and vision tests I had done, yesterday.

I think today is a good day to get to bed early!

The Re-Farmer

One more down, and a weird home care situation

October 16, 2025 / Re-Farmer / 10 Comments

Well, no surprise that the forecast changed overnight. Instead of rain all day on Friday, the rain started here last night, and continued off and on throughout the day.

Thankfully, it was a light rain.

As usual, I started out the day with feeding the outside cats. Before starting on softening the bowl of kibble, I quickly tossed a scoop full through the screenless storm door window to tide them over and distract them, first. I still have gelled turkey stock and meaty bits to mix into to their morning kibble with hot water and some canned cat food, too. Once I got it all mixed up, I left it to soak for a few minutes.

I’d seen on the critter cam that they’d somehow knocked the big cat carrier off its shelf, and it was in the middle of the floor, so I knew it would be in the way as I stepped out of the old kitchen. I snagged a daughter for cat herding duty, then tried to get through the doors as quickly as possible.

There were cats and kittens trying to get in, while others were milling around and eating the kibble I’d tossed in earlier.

Including a strange new ca….

Not a cat.

There, in the crowd of cats and kittens munching away, was a skunk! It and the cats were completely indifferent to each other!

As I got through and added softened kibble to several trays, I paused to pick up the carrier while my daughter dealt with the cats that managed to get through the doors before she could close the storm door. The skunk did leave while I was doing that, as did some of the more feral cats. It seemed unbothered by me as well as the cats!

Not a good thing, but there isn’t much we can do about it.

Once the feeding and watering was done (I’m bringing warm water to top up their bowls now, instead of using the hose, which will soon be put away for the winter), I did my morning rounds. My weather app said it was raining, but it seems our climate bubble was doing its thing again.

While doing my rounds, I found this…

With the trellis netting and other stakes and supports done, the deer could access the sunflowers. I’d already grabbed the seed heads that looked like they might have viable seeds in them, so the remaining ones had immature seed heads on them. A couple of the tallest ones were untouched, but the shorter ones were either broken with the seed heads eaten, or the entire stalks were munched down to just a couple of feet in height.

Cheeky buggers!

After the morning rounds were done, I popped inside long enough to have breakfast, then headed out to work on the next garden bed.

I decided to work on the log framed low raised bed. I hoped it would not be as bad as the last two beds I worked on. This one had the failed melons, the successful, if stunted, Spoon tomatoes and the failed purple beans and Swiss chard.

Here is how the first half went.

The first picture is how it looked after the grass clipping mulch was removed. There were very few weeds and most of those were crab grass.

The question was, how bad were the tree roots?

Since I would be dealing with rhizomes, I started by loosening the soil of the entire bed before I started clean up at the south end of the bed. This is the end furthest from those trees we need to get rid of, being the source of so many of our problems.

I started finding roots right away. The bed is 18 feet long, plus it’s another dozen feet or so to the nearest trees on the north side.

This bed turned out to not only have fewer normal weeds than the other beds, but fewer rocks, too. As for the roots, the closer to the middle of the bed that I got, the harder it was to get the tree roots out. With some of them, it was because the roots were running under the log wall. I could also feel that there was a large root, somewhere deeper below the bed, because I was finding roots that were basically growing vertically from something deeper than I was going with my garden fork, not horizontal, as usual. By the time I got to the middle, though, even with the pre-loosened soil, there were too many roots I couldn’t pull out of the soil, so I went to the north end to work my way back to the middle.

I promptly hit a larger root.

After fighting around it with my garden fork, I went and got a spade to dig around it, plus the loppers. I was able to cut away one larger root that I found in the process, but it was not the one causing me the most problems.

That’s the one you can see in the second picture of the slide show above.

This was not the root that was causing an issue further down the bed, though. This one ran diagonally across the bed, so I was able to use the loppers to cut it close to where it went under the log frame.

In the next picture, you can see where I’d made my way closer to the middle, and some of the other roots I was having issues with. Some would have to be dealt with when working the other side of the bed.

In the last picture of the above slide show, I had finished clearing one side. At the middle, I’d pretty much dug a pit to try and get the roots out.

In the end, though, there weren’t as many roots to fight with as in previous beds. There wasn’t even as many rocks to remove. The amount I had in the bucket after getting the first half done was about what I’d picked from a third of one side on the other two beds I cleared!

It had started to rain while I was working on this. A light and gentle rain, so I kept working, but I was getting pretty damp by the time I finished the one side. It was well past noon by then, so I headed in for sustenance and hydration.

I took my time with my late lunch, which turned out to be a good thing.

I got a phone call from home care, just as I was wrapping up and getting ready to head out again.

They were unable to find someone to do my mother’s evening med assist for Friday evening. They were still working on finding someone, but it was possible I might have to cover for Saturday and Sunday evenings, too.

!!!

Then they told me, they did actually have someone available, but this home care worker was male, and my mother had said she didn’t want men doing her med assist, so they were stuck.

?????

I hadn’t heard about this at all. My mother hadn’t had anything negative to say about the male home care workers, either, other than to mention that they were “from other places” (meaning, recent immigrants that weren’t white). But for her to say no men at all?

We talked about it for a bit, and I told them I could call my mother to find out what was going on. They told me that, if anything changed, to call the number for the home care coordinator (it was the scheduler and a new trainee that had called me) to talk about it.

After the call, I quickly updated my family, as well as my siblings in our group chat, then called my mother. There was no answer so I left a message. I puttered around on my computer while waiting, staying close to the phone, but I didn’t have a lot of time before the home care office would close for the day, plus I was going to start losing daylight to work outside. After a few minutes, I tried again.

This time, my mom answered just as the answering machine picked up. She’d been in the common room and was just coming back when the phone started ringing, so she’d never heard my earlier message.

I told her about the call from home care, that they didn’t have anyone to cover for Friday night’s med assists, and possibly Saturday and Sunday, too. Before she could start going on about how terrible they were, I told her that they actually did have someone available, but it was a male, and they told me she’d said told them, no male.

My mother confirmed this. She had called the home care office and told the home care coordinator, she didn’t want any med doing her med assists.

I asked more questions, and she said she didn’t want a man rubbing the Voltaren onto her bad and seeing her partially naked body. Which, as far as I knew, was something only done in the mornings, as they have extra time booked for stuff like that. She admitted, she had never asked one of the guys (it turns out there are three different male home care workers that have been visiting her) to do it, but eventually said that, if they had been women, she would have asked them to. She also admitted that they have never been unkind to her, and had never caused problems – unlike for example, one of the female home care workers recently not bothering to count my mother’s meds from the bubble pack, and one was missing. It turned out to have fallen to the floor. Or another that always leaves without making sure my mother took her meds, first.

The conversation got very intense as she tried to blame home care for not having enough people, etc. She was all over the place with it, and I kept having to bring it back to it just being about her getting her med assists. Eventually, though, we got to the heart of the issue.

My mother didn’t want brown people doing her med assists.

I had no patience with this and pointed out that, because of her not liking brown people, I might have to do her evening med assists, three nights in a row. She tried to make it their fault, saying “they” (the home care office) did this to me but I told her, no SHE is doing this to me.

In the end, I got her to agree to have a male med assist only to do her meds. No rubbing the Voltaren onto her back. If they were doing a morning assist, they could still do her commode, but no back rubs. If she’s uncomfortable with being touched like that, fair enough, but at least they could do her pills.

Once we got that decided on, I told her I had to call the home care office back quickly, as the office wasn’t going to be open for very much longer. She kept going on and on, keeping me on the phone, even after I told her I had to get the call done as quickly as possible. She did, however, finally talk about getting extra home care services, though in a way that had me rather confused, but I didn’t care at that point. We’ve been trying to get her to accept more home care services for quite some time now, and she’s been refusing, even though she really needs more help. I told her I would bring it up with the coordinator when I called her, and they would probably need to make an appointment with her to discuss it, but I needed to get off the phone to call the office. She STILL tried to keep me on the phone and I finally had to cut her off so I could hang up and make the call.

Thankfully, the home care coordinator was in her office at the time, so I was able to talk to her and not just leave a message. I told her about the situation and that I’d talked to my mother about it. I said that my mother had agreed that, as long as it didn’t involve rubbing the medication onto her back, she was willing to accept male home care aids. The coordinator filled me in on the call from my mother and, apparently, one of the men did offer to rub the medication onto her back for her, and she’d said no. I told her that, if the workers visiting her were women, she would be asking them to do her back, but not the men. Which would have been an understandable restriction, but the home care coordinator knows my mother by now, and she already figured out it was really about race.

So that was taken care of. They would be able to schedule men for my mother’s med assists, with the one restriction regarding applying the medication onto my mother’s back.

I then brought up about my mother bringing up her need for more care, and the first question she asked was, is my mother willing to accept more care? Which has been the biggest problem. My mother simply refusing it. I told her that yes, she is willing to do it.

My mother was due for her annual re-assessment anyhow, so we quickly made an appointment for next weed. Along with the care assessment, the coordinator wanted to go over the panel for a nursing home again, as that needed to be updated, too. I told her about how my mother can barely get around her apartment of later, needing to hang on to furniture or the walls to move around, and how I’d actually heard her crying out in pain at times, when I was last at her place to help out with things.

That done, I called my mother back with the appointment time and updated my family.

I could then finally get back outside!

I had an assistant as I worked.

Grommet was very determined to “help”. Usually by being directly in front of me while I worked, trying to give my hands kisses, or even trying to climb up my legs for attention!

The second side was done a lot faster, thankfully. Here is the finished bed!

The bed actually seems fuller, now that the soil is all fluffy again, instead of compacted. I’m out of stuff to cover it to protect if from the cats, though. When it comes time to do winter sowing in there, I’ll have to watch out for “presents” from the cats!

While working on the bed, I did find three frogs! One had come out of the mulch on its own. I was able to catch it and release it in and area where it would be able to burrow down for the winter. While picking rocks and roots, I uncovered two more frogs! I’m so glad I didn’t accidentally stab them with the garden fork. I was able to catch and move them to a safe place, too.

It was still pretty light out when I was finished, but not for long enough to start another bed. Instead, I did my evening rounds. While I was at it, I cleared up the pile of regrown maples my brother had cut away from the back of the pump shack for me. I set aside the straightest pieces for use in the garden, and the rest went onto the burn pile. Later on, I’ll trim the trigs and side shoots off the straight pieces, then bring the useable pieces to the old kitchen garden. They will made good stakes for the bed that still needs the wall on the inside to be finished.

Now that I have written this, I realize I’ve not switched out the trial cam memory cards yet, and it’s full dark right now. That’s the down side of changing from switching them in the mornings! Ah, well. I’ll survive.

Time to shoe up, grab a flash light, and go take care of that!

One more bed is done. Three more in the main garden area to go!

The Re-Farmer

How things went today

October 4, 2025 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I’ll start with the more pleasant things!

First up, while doing my morning rounds, I spotted something very white in the wood chip pile, from quite a distance. Check these out!

The first picture was of a group of three very round mushrooms – I thought they were puffballs at first, until I saw the stems. The next three pictures are with my hand for perspective – then I found a fourth one, off to the side!

I have no idea if they are edible, and have no intention of finding out.

As I was heading inside, I found this adorable cuddle puddle.

Two of them! The smallest kittens really like to pile together.

Once the morning round were done, I was able to get a few things done before heading to my mother’s. My brother came out today, but he had to focus on replacing the radiator on one of his tractors that got damaged last fall, then try to get it going. Days are short, so I just popped over to say hello before I headed out.

When I got to my mother’s, she was all “prepared” for me. I barely got through the door! She had ice cream buckets of tomatoes she wanted me to take home. One of her neighbours in her building has had a great tomato year in their little garden plot and has been leaving boxes of them in the common room for people to help themselves. My mother keeps taking more than she needs for herself, because apparently no one else is taking any, and she doesn’t want them to go to waste.

So… she gives them to me.

While I was getting the two ice cream buckets of tomatoes out from under her table for her, I saw her collection of jugs for her drinking and cooking water, so I refilled those right away.

There were other errands she wanted me to do, but I told her I’d do them after I’ve put away her groceries.

She didn’t have a list, so I sat down to start that with her. It took a while, because she kept wanting to go on about other things. There’s one home care worker she has issues with in particular. For a basic med assist, they are supposed to be there for 5 minutes, making sure she takes her medication before they leave. The morning assist is for 10 minutes, as they are supposed to help with emptying the commode or helping apply her Voltaren to her back. This one rushes to put the meds in the little bowl she has for them, to make sure they’re all there (sometimes, they can get caught in the packaging), locked the box up and leaves without making sure my mother takes her meds. Apparently, she’s been so rough with the lock box, she ended up knocking my mom’s phone off its charger and just left it where it fell.

My mother was also angry about her new schedule. She has five evenings, which is two med assists done by the same person, plus four mornings, done by someone else (out of a 2 week schedule) listed as “unfilled”. I tried to explain to her that they have to have the schedules out by a certain time, so if they don’t have someone for a specific date or time, they have to list it as “unfilled”. That doesn’t mean they won’t find someone. Just that they hadn’t, before the deadline. My mother thinks it means people are going to show up because they’ve… called in sick, in advance? She doesn’t understand how scheduling works.

It did give me a chance to try and talk to my mother about things she can do to try and get herself into a nursing home faster. I tried to explain that, because she’s only getting med assists, they basically view her as being able to care for herself. But if she takes advantage of the other assists they have available – meal assists, bathing assists, dressing assisted, etc. – that would go a long way to helping her get in faster.

She just got angry at me. She doesn’t trust the home care workers (there’s one that she says is really good at her job, and that’s the one that helped care for my father, before he went into the nursing home) and doesn’t want them touching her or preparing her meals. I tried to explain why she needed to get it anyhow and, besides, if she were in a nursing home, she’d be having that all done for her, anyhow. To which she said, in a nursing home, she would have “professionals”. I told her, the home care workers are “professionals”. They may or may not be good at their jobs, but they get training, first.

At one point she told me she had been talking to a woman that used to live in our little hamlet, that I went to school with. Her mother lived in the same building as my mother, having moved in a few years ago. It turns out her mother is in a nursing home now! She was visiting a friend and stopped to chat with my mother. As my mother told her how much she wants to be in a nursing home, she was told to try falling down! Which is pretty much what I was thinking, but hadn’t mentioned. My mother is constantly afraid of falling down, so she is super careful not to. If, however, she did have a fall, she’d have to use her Lifeline to get help, because she certainly couldn’t get up again on her own. They could call her an ambulance (and would call me to inform me of any issues). Chances are if that happened, my mother would end up going straight to a nursing home or supportive living, somewhere.

She did mention about the last time she used her Lifeline to talk to someone about her she was feeling. At the end of it, she was asked if there was anything else they could do for her. She said, help me get into a nursing home! The person on the Lifeline said they would talk to someone higher up about it.

I don’t know what they can do, but if there’s something, it would help! Lord knows, my mother isn’t willing to do anything herself that would get her in faster. We keep telling her things that would help (like getting other home care assistance that they have available), but she just refuses. I can understand why, but she doesn’t understand that she is sabotaging herself. She much prefers to complain and expect other people to do things for her, not do them herself. This is not a new thing. She’s been like this for as long as I can remember.

After much circular conversation, I did manage to get a shopping list written down for her. Some of it was “see how it looks” or “depends on the price” type stuff. She needed more of her Voltaren, too, so a trip to the pharmacy was also in order.

I was able to find everything she wanted, and even got her a pumpkin pie as a treat I was pretty sure she would be happy with. Either she’d be happy, or she’d be angry. Thankfully, she was in a good mood, and was very happy to see the pie!

Once everything was put away, she insisted I sit with a cup of tea for a while before I finished doing things like sweeping her floor, taking care of her garbage, etc. Then she foisted a bag of aluminum foil she saved from her Meals on Wheels packaging onto me, together with the tomatoes! She’s been carefully washing and setting aside the foil each part of her meal is wrapped in. From the amount in the bag, it’s been probably a year’s worth of foil! She thought I might be able to use them in the garden (??) or something. I told her, I could add them to our aluminum recycling. We save up our aluminum until it’s worth the trip to the salvage yard. She was quite happy with that idea.

All in all, the visit with my mom was pretty good. Just one racist rant I had to distract away from, and during the times she did get angry because she didn’t like what she was being told, it wasn’t quite the personal attacks on me such things often become. It was actually a pretty good visit, as far as that goes with my mother!

That done, I had a request from my husband, so I went to the town we usually go to for our local shopping. The difference in prices between grocery stores was worth the extra driving.

Thankfully, fruit cake was not part of his shopping list.

I could not believe how expensive these fruitcakes have become! Not that long ago, seeing them at prices above $7 was considered expensive!

After I got the few things on my husband’s list and made a stop at the gas station, it was time for home.

My brother was still working on his tractor, so I headed over for a quick hello and to update him a bit about how it went with Mom. Then I went in to change into my grubbies to do some work in the garden, instead of in the sun room, while there was still light enough.

I made sure to water the winter squash and cover them for the night, first. We’re supposed to get rain, but it’s also supposed to get cold enough that I’m not sure the winter squash would survive it. They might be kept covered for several days, if the 7 day forecast is at all accurate. The next three nights in particular will probably put an end to the eggplant, peppers and summer squash, so if there’s anything to bring in an ripen indoors, tomorrow will be the day to do it.

I need to get more garden beds ready for winter sowing, though, and today I started working on the bed the carrots and peas were grown in.

*sigh*

I got a little more than a quarter of it done. As I was working my way down one side, I kept getting tangled up in tree roots. It was a while before I found root they were all coming from and got that pulled out. Then I found more from another root!

It was starting to get dark, so I didn’t want to start fighting with roots I couldn’t quite find yet, so I decided to call it a night. For all the work done in these beds, particularly when they got shifted to their permanent locations, getting them ready for the winter should be easy. All of these roots I’m hitting were not there in the spring. I’m blown away by how far they are extending from the trees, and how big they are.

According to the weather apps, we’re supposed to get rain all night and all through tomorrow, with heavy rain warning. So it might be a couple of days before I can continue. The overnight lows that had been forecast to drop below freezing have changed to just at freezing. Hopefully, the cover will be enough for the winter squash. After that one cold night, we’re actually supposed to get decent, if cool, weather again. That would be a good time to get the garlic in.

Well, we’ll see what actually happens! I’ll take the mild weather for as long as possible!

The Re-Farmer

Morning in the garden, the truck is back and… sigh

September 29, 2025 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Okay, let’s start with the good stuff!

I’ve been feeding the outside cats a bit later every day, simply because it’s dark for so much longer. Which means getting through the old kitchen door with hungry cats and kittens swirling under my feet can get pretty dangerous! My younger daughter was on cat herding duty this morning. I can get through the door with the kibble bowl and avoid stepping on cats (barely), but I can’t also stop them from running into the old kitchen or close the door behind me at the same time! So I just try to get through as quickly as possible and start dropping food into trays to get their attention, while a daughter herds kittens making a mad dash through the door back out again until she can close at least one of the doors.

Later on, after the cats were fed, I’d done my rounds and I popped into the sun room to get some pruning sheers, I found this.

A great big bowl of kitties! Sir Robin seems content to be snuggled up with seven littles!

After the chat I had with the rescue, where they were trying to get an idea of how many cats we have, I did a head count as best as I could, of all the cats and kittens I could see. Usually, I try to count just the adults, as it’s so hard to spot the running around kittens at times. I think I got a total of 35, but I’m not 100% sure. I am sure that there were some “missing”, but I may also have counted some of the kittens twice.

We’re going to be warm for the next while, so this morning I uncovered the winter squash and watered the few things left to water, including the sunflowers, which are blooming more and more!

The sunflower in the first photo had been chomped by a dear. It sent up two new shoots, which then branched out more, so now it has four or five stems reaching upwards. All the flowers in the first photo are from that one plant.

The second photo is from the one that got flower buds developing at the base of almost all the leaves. I couldn’t fit them all in a photo what would fit on Instagram. “Only” eight blooming seed heads are visible in that photo!

The last photo is of the tallest sunflower. So pretty!

I still have no idea if we’ll get any viable seeds out of these. We have almost no pollinators around these days. At least not the flying types. This past smoky summer, with drought and heat waves, was brutal on everything. There are still other types of pollinators, but I don’t tend to see them on the sunflowers. We shall see how it works out.

I’m happy to finally see some colour on the Cosmos flower buds. There are so few buds at all! Most of the plants don’t seem to be developing any at all, even though they are quite tall and healthy looking, other than a bit of frost damage on a few.

I’m even happier to see so many of the memorial asters blooming. I’m pretty sure the plants are supposed to be much bigger (the nasturtiums were much smaller than normal, too), but they seem to be doing okay. If all goes well, I’ll be able to harvest seeds from them before the hard frosts hit.

Speaking of which, this is why I went back for the pruning shears.

Those are all the onion seed heads in the trellis bed. They were starting to open and I decided to bring them in to finish off indoors, so I don’t lose too many seeds into the bed itself. I found so many tiny onions while working on the bed in the spring, from seeds lost last year!

The other bowl is the driest of the carrot seed heads. There are still more on the plant that were quite green, so I’ve left them for now. We even still have some carrot flowers.

I’ve got quite a collection of seeds “curing” in the living room now. I need to settle in one of these evenings and package them up soon.

Once done outside, I came in for breakfast. I just sat down when I got a notification on my phone that there as a new voice mail. My phone never rang.

Yes, it was home care.

I’ll have to get back to that, though. I’m still shaking my head over the whole thing.

I was booked to drop off the courtesy van and pick up the truck for 1:30. I left early so I could fill the van’s gas tank (as required) and put it through a car wash (not required, but it was getting pretty covered in gravel dust already). I still got to the autobody shop quite early. As I was driving in, I could see a truck that looked like it might be ours, but I wasn’t 100% sure until I spotted my phone holder on the dash.

The truck was so clean, I barely recognized it!!!

I headed in to switch keys, sign what needed to be signed, and pay what needed to be paid. The final damage, including the “betterment” cost, insurance waiver for four days and the deductible, was $720 and change.

If this were not covered by insurance, it would have cost us almost $1500.

I am really happy with the work done!

I’m glad I went with the bed liner stuff instead of regular paint. It looks really good, and I like that it has a texture and won’t be as slippery anymore. The inside of the tail gate was already coated with that, so it even matched that.

Then I got into the truck. Wow!!! They actually cleaned out the whole thing! The truck hasn’t been this clean on the inside since we bought it!

Once I was parked at home, I opened up the tail gate to check out the new cover. The latch to free it is much easer to find than the old one’s was. It rolled up nice and easy, and at the cab end, there are loops. Under the cover are straps with hooks to go into the loops. Waaaaayyyy easier to fasten then the buckles the old cover had!

That was about it for differences between old and new that I could see.

The trip to get the truck was almost enough for me to reduce my blood pressure after this morning.

The voice mail from home care was to let me know that the person scheduled to do my mother’s 9:30am meds today had called in sick.

It was past 9:37 when I was listening to the message.

She scheduler told me that they did find someone to cover it, but he wouldn’t be able to get to my mother’s until 10:30. She was concerned it might be late and wanted to know if I preferred to cover it myself. She wanted me to call back, but said she would schedule the 10:30 visit, just in case.

She didn’t leave a number.

Since my phone never rang (which means my Wi-Fi calling needs to be reset again), there was no caller display number. I couldn’t call her back. It would have been to give the go ahead for the late visit, anyhow, so I wasn’t too worried about it.

Being past time for her med assist, I was more concerned about calling my mother to let her know they’d be late.

When she answered, she told me she had just finished her breakfast. I don’t think she’d noticed they were late, yet.

I told her what the situation was and that someone would be coming, just at 10:30, instead.

She started making disparaging comments about how they call in sick so often.

Then she started going on about how we need to stop leaving her to strangers to take care of her. We need to take care of her. All weekend, and no one even phoned her.

…

I told her, my brother and I were AT HER PLACE on Saturday. It’s like she completely forgot that I came in to do her meds, grocery shopping and some housekeeping, just the day before yesterday, plus the surprise visit from my brother, and our taking her angel statue when we left, at her request.

When I told her that, she paused a moment, but just kept on going.

She was feeling sick. She’s been feeling sick for days. I tried asking her, sick in what way? but she got mad and told me to let her speak.

It turns out she meant her breathing, which makes everything else worse. So she was feeling bad overall, but blaming her breathing.

Then she told me she used the inhaler that I’d left out of the lock box for her, and was feeling SOOO much better, so she’d decided she will keep using the “puffer”.

…

I told her, she could finish that one off, but she no longer has a prescription. Because she’s been using it for a long time (more than a year) and it wasn’t helping.

Oh, but this one’s from the hospital, not the other one, and the one from the hospital works so much better.

I told her, they are the same medicine. The only different is how it’s released. Inside, it’s the same medication.

Oh… she says. Well I’ll still take it.

I reminded her that when I got her refill last time, she freaked out at me over how much it cost. I can afford it, she says (she could afford it before, too, but that didn’t stop her from yelling at me because it wasn’t free).

This went on for a while and I was starting to lose my patience. We do all we can to help her, and she keeps sabotaging our efforts. I told her I’d done a lot to get things the way she wanted, talking to the doctor, etc., and now she’s messing with everything again.

Ah, but this is my mother, so she took that to mean that I was complaining about how doing all that I do to take care of her is just too much for me. It really should be my brother doing all this, because he’s got the “biggest piece of the pie” (meaning, he now owns the farm). She has zero understanding that the farm is a burden for him, not a benefit, even with us helping as much as we can by living here, plus she thinks that transferring the ownership to him basically means he should be her slave, at her beck and call at all times.

My brother is on a flight across the country for his work right now. He works in internet security, at an international level. She has no clue how stressful or important his work is. All she wants is for him to be available to her at all times, and obey her every command. She’s been pretty blunt about that expectation, too. All because she transferred ownership of the property so it wouldn’t be part of the will anymore, in hopes our vandal would stop harassing her. Which he hasn’t. He just thinks she gave the property to me, for some reason. At least he can’t contest ownership of the property in the will, because she no longer owns it. Instead, she now thinks she owns my brother.

*sigh*

Then she started begging, pleading, for us to get her into a nursing home. Which we’ve been trying to do for more than a year, now. As she started that, she suddenly started talking about how Canada is turning into an African country, and this is a bad thing. I kept asking her, what does this have to do with being in a nursing home? She just kept repeating about Canada turning into an African country, then shifted to, it’s about her health. She needs to have people around her. She could start screaming.

???

Eventually, she was able to tell me that if she were in a nursing home and having troubles at night, she could start screaming, and someone would come to help her. But where she is now, she could start screaming, and no one would come (which has actually happened). I told her, that’s why you have the Lifeline. If you need help, push the button.

The entire conversation was very confusing and all over the place, with a lot more than what I’m including here – and all I was wanting to do was let her know her morning med assist would be an hour late.

I finally told her, again, I was calling to let her know her morning med assist would be late, adding that my breakfast was getting cold (sometimes, that works), and cut the call off. I just couldn’t handle the call anymore. There was no reasoning with her in any way.

While I was working on this post, I called and left a message with the mental health assessor that had come out this past Tuesday, mentioned that I had just found out the appointment had been interrupted by our vandal. I mentioned I had a phone call of concern just this morning and wanted to talk to her about it.

I do have my medical appointment in the city tomorrow, though, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to connect with her. If she’s able to call before I had to leave, that would be great (I did get a time frame). Otherwise, it might be a few days.

We are very much at a loss with my mother. She really does need to be in a nursing home or supportive living, but we’ve done everything we can to get her in. Unfortunately, she’s sabotaging a lot of our efforts by refusing the home care help she should be getting, like meal assists, dress assists, bathing assists. Not that I blame her for not wanting it, but if she can’t handle home care doing this stuff for her, how is she going to handle nursing home staff doing this stuff for her? Meanwhile, because she is NOT getting all this extra care that she actually needs, she’s viewed by the system as being too able bodied and independent to qualify for a spot in home car.

*sigh*

My brain is tired.

The Re-Farmer

The Re-Farmer

Sometimes, you need to go back, to go forward.

dealing with elderly parents

A mostly quiet day, mother issues, plus, cats. 😄

I am so tired

How things went and, a new addition?

Recovery mode, and unexpected help

Gee, thanks, Mom

Covering for home care, and cozy from the wind

Finally! Several times over!

One more down, and a weird home care situation

How things went today

Morning in the garden, the truck is back and… sigh

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