gas prices

First city shop; the not-Costco trip: this is about $418, +

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

So yesterday was an interesting one… thankfully, not too interesting!

We hit 30C/86F and the rain that was forecast for our area was suddenly not being forecasted anymore. It was still insanely humid, though. The garden was wilting from the heat, so I set up the sprinklers to water the beds.

Which is when my phone started screaming at me.

Several times.

We were getting tornado warnings. However, the alerts were for the “mobile coverage area”. Which is pretty darn big. Looking at the weather radar after the first alert, the system was right on top of the smaller, nearer city we sometimes go to. My sister lives near there. The system continued to move northward, passing to the east of us.

As far as I know, there were no funnel clouds sighted, but some of the downs got walloped by massive rain, winds and, in some places, softball sized hail! I later saw photos people were posting on some local weather watching groups I’m on, and the damage in places from the wind and hail was pretty bad in places.

We had some pretty clouds blow over our area, and the odd gust of wind.

I’m okay with that.

There was no respite from the heat and humidity, though. My poor daughters, upstairs! My older daughter was working, but my younger daughter tried, and failed, to get any sleep.

I fared somewhat better, at least. Aside from being tackled by kittens, repeatedly, my room was much cooler, and I’ve started to partly sleep through the kitten attacks. I do have to be increasingly careful moving around, though. Question has decided I am her human, so I often have her climbing my leg while I’m on the computer and either sitting on my knee, or forcing her way up into my arms so she can sleep on my chest. During the night, at one point, I woke to find her snuggled over one of my arms.

She wasn’t alone.

One of the grey tabbies was also draped over my bicep.

Something still seemed odd, though. Thankfully, I could reach my phone and use the camera and flash to try and see. Which is how I found Ghosty stretched out in front of my leg and belly. Which is imressive, for such a tiny kitten!

When I had to roll over, I carefully scooped up Question and moved with her. The other kittens took off, but Question just settled in wherever I happened to stop moving, which means she spent most of the night sleeping in the palm of my hand! Another time, I woke to find her draped across my neck, and another kitten curled up around my head.

When my older daughter came in to help do Leyendecker’s meds (letting her sister, who usually does it, to finally get some sleep!), Question had moved to my pillow, curled up next to my face, and slowly slid down until she was on my shoulder, instead. I’m told it was an adorable sight!

After doing Leyendecker’s medications, I did my morning rounds (I’m pretty sure I’m seeing new kittens, but at this point, it’s getting hard to tell!), then grabbed an insulated bag with ice packs in it and headed to the city.

I ended up stopping at a gas station in the town my mother lives in, after discovering I was out of washer fluid. For some reason, the light that’s supposed to turn on and tell me it’s empty, doesn’t. I had some in the car, but after filling the reservoir, I went in to replace the jug. As I was leaving, a woman outside started chatting with me, asking if we’d gotten the storm. I told her it passed us by, but I’d heard about other places that got hit really hard.

She was in one of those places!

They were in a trailer, attending the Treaty Days events when the storm hit. Thankfully, they did not get any damage, though the ground was white with hail after it passed. A nearby town, closer to the lake, got the softball sized hail. She said some of the trucks she saw looked like someone had gone at them with a sledgehammer! Absolutely wild!

I’m really thankful it missed us. There are people in my local gardening groups that already had their gardens smashed to bits from hail in the last set of storms. I’ve since seen other photos posted online from the aftermath, and there were thing like large trucks blown over, pieces of sheds in the middle of fields, downed trees, pieces of roof torn off, and sheds blown apart.

I’ve not been home long, so I haven’t had a chance to see what sort of response there has been. So far, I have not heard of any people injured.

I’m glad I ran into the lady at the gas station. She was really nice.

Once in the city, my first stop was at a Walmart. This shop was mostly stuff we don’t normally buy.

This is what $203.24, after taxes, looks like.

The main thing I was looking for was puppy pads. There are a couple of places the kitten keep making messes in, once of which we will have to do some serious rearranging to access. The other is under my desk, where I was able to put some old disposable diapers we’d hung onto over the years. That, at least, will be easier to clean up this time, but I didn’t have anything to replace the diapers with. I was quite happy to see the Walmart was well stocked in the puppy pads!

The facial tissue was on my list; I didn’t want to get a Costco sized package of those, so I got them at Walmart. The tinned cat food was also on the list. I got a replacement package pectin, which was not officially on the list, but I do try to pick some up as I’m able. I would have also picked up replacement wide mouth canning lids, but they only had regular mouth size. There’s some toothpaste and deodorant, which are also things that I try to pick up extras of, when I can.

Not at all on the list was the broom. It’s just a cheap one, but it has stiffer bristles. The carpet in my room is a strange, felted-looking surface. It attracts cat hair, dust and everything else like nobody’s business! With the kittens, I’m not able to vacuum as often as I should, but I try to at least sweep it. All the brooms we have are soft bristled, so they don’t work very well. I’ve already tried this one out, and it’s exactly what I wanted. It pulls up so much cat hair! That’s make life easier for the vacuum cleaner!

I also got a cheap little toy for the kittens. It’s meant for dogs, but it’s a little fox that crinkles when squeezed, and the kittens will have a blast with it.

Also not on the list, but I did remember we needed, are a couple of pairs of kitchen sheers. They were both quite affordable, but one was less than $3. We’ll see how long they last, compared to the one that cost just over $10. I also grabbed a wooden spatula. We’ve got lots or plastic ones for the non-stick pans, and most have heat damage. The one that doesn’t has a crack in it. I’ve looked at wooden ones before, but they were all oddly thick. This one seemed properly thin enough to actually get under things, rather than just push them around the pan. 😄 It was less than $5, so that was nice, too.

The one big purchase this time, though, was a new pair of shoes! I finally remembered to look for some.

A nice pair of steel toes work shoes! I love the boots I have now, but I’ve been wearing them so much, one of the heels is giving out, and the zipper and Velcro closure are starting to wear out. All the work shoes had security cables on them, so I had to find an employee to unlock a couple of pairs to try on. It was funny when the first thing she did was point out that they were men’s shoes, not women’s. I told her I knew – I can’t fit women’s shoes! What made it funnier is that there was another lady looking at shoes to try on, and she was only looking at men’s shoes, too!

The ones I ended up getting were slightly more expensive, but at $69.97, that’s still a good price for steel toed shoes.

I put them on as soon as I finished loading everything else in the car!

The one last thing not on the list that I got was an actual food item. There was a really good sale on large package of blueberries, so I got two. They were only $3.84 each!

That put me at a before-tax total of $182.68.

My next stop was at the international grocery store, where I was also able to pick up some dim sum for lunch. That really hit the spot!

This is wat $215.21, after taxes, looks like.

This time, it was the strawberries that were at a great price! The bananas weren’t on sale, but still pretty cheap. The Coke Zero wasn’t on sale, but still cheaper than the local prices. The raspberry drink was a cold one for the ride home.

This store is one of the few places I can get the Beaver Buzz brand of energy drinks, so I try to pick up quite a few for my older daughter and I. It’s also where we can find the Philippine soy sauce my husband likes, and a 4L size of soy milk my lactose intolerant daughters drink. There is an uncut piece of locally produced Applewood smoked bacon in there; they didn’t have the big chunks, or I would have gotten a much larger one! There’s regular 3% cows milk in there, and I found the wide mouth canning lids I wanted. There’s some truffle infused olive oil; a real treat that is often not in stock. I picked up some sweet potatoes, because I’m getting a hankering for a sweet potato and peanut soup from a recipe my SIL gave us.

The girls and I had recently been talking about liverwurst. We used to get it all the time. When my oldest daughter was a baby, I’d picked one up and, while continuing to shop, gave it to her to hold and play with. She was very happy with it. It took a while to realize why she was so quiet and content. She had bitten a hole in the package and was happily sucking the liverwurst out! After that, for a long time, we would start our grocery shopping by buying a small tube of liverwurst for her to enjoy while we shopped, then did the same thing again with her sister. The girls were remembering that we used to get it all the time, but we just… stopped. So when I saw large tubes of it in the grocery store, I grabbed one. The thing cost over $11, though!

I also picked up some cheeses from the “fancy cheese” counter. I got an Alexis de Portneuf and a Ceddar with Caramelized onion. I was also looking for some parmesan that was not grated, because I would really like to make …

… the original Fettuccine Alfredo.

The price of parmesan is insane! In the end, I only got a little chunk, and it still cost almost $8 – on sale! Hopefully it will be enough for one recipe of Fettuccine Alfredo.

Other things were better priced. I picked up a 2 pack of whole chicken that was only $13.35 These days, I’d be hard pressed to find a single whole chicken for that price.

The big indulgence, however, was a beef brisket. I’ve never bought a brisket before. I’m going to have to look up how to cook it properly. It cost $55.40, and I normally would never buy a single piece of meat at that price, but it was really a good deal. It was on sale for about $9.90/kg ($4.49/lb was on the signs, if I remember correctly). Looking at the other cuts of beef, they were generally $20+/kg. Even the ground beef wasn’t much cheaper! So that was my major splurge.

What I did not get today was any dry cat food. Normally, I would have picked some up at Walmart., but they didn’t have the large sized bags, and the smaller sized bags were more expensive than what I find at Costco for bigger bags. Plus, I no longer had room in my mother’s car.

I so look forward to getting a replacement van!!!

So after this, I headed towards home. My husband’s bubble packs were in and I was supposed to pick them up tomorrow, but I decided to take a different route and get those, too.

Since I remembered to bring the ice packs, I could do that! 😁

His bubble packs, plus a container of diabetic candies (the last one!!) and a gallon of distilled water for his CPAP, because I forgot to get it at Walmart, came out to $89 and change.

Ouch.

Thank God for his private insurance prescription coverage!

My last stop was to fill the gas tank. The last time I filled it, the prices were still at 149.9 ¢/L, but the next day, the prices went up. Now it’s the same price as in the city; 157.9/L

I did, however, make one more unexpected purchase.

This gas station was newly renovated. It closed down as a Husky and reopened as a Shell. Aside from the fancy new pumps and new signs, not a lot has changed, but there was a new display of books that caught my eye. I was torn between several that would be very useful but, in the end, decided that this one would be the most immediately useful. For all that I grew up in the prairies, I don’t actually know a lot about what native species we have that are edible.

Or maybe I know more than I think. Flipping through it in the store, I did recognise a lot of the photos. I think mostly it’s that there are some that I don’t know if they are safe to eat or not.

I’m going to enjoy going through it more thoroughly!

Filling the tank cost $32.26, and the book was another $24.95, though I did get a slight discount for using my CAA card. According to my receipt, I was also discounted 0.03/L on my fuel. I’ll take what I can get!

So that is our first city shopping trip for the month. There will at least be one Costco trip – maybe two, if the price of cat food is crazy enough to warrant a second trip.

I really miss having a van. I don’t like making so many trips to the city like this!

The Re-Farmer

It’s crazy windy out there!

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

After my successful outing yesterday, now that the main road has been repaired, my younger daughter and I headed out today, to do an early birthday shopping trip. Her birthday is actually next month, but we don’t pay too much attention to exact days. ;-)

It rained most of last night, though the water levels around our yard did not increase too much. There were plenty of fallen branches already. Once again, feeling so thankful we were able to get those trees cut away from the house a few years back. We do still have dead trees we’ll hire someone to take down, as they could potentially fall onto the house, but they are far less of a risk than the ones that were right over the roof and into the power lines!

Our birthday gift to my younger daughter was going to be a clothes shopping trip at a particular local Thai clothing store. My daughter mentioned she really needed some jeans, so we decided to hit a Walmart, first.

The first surprise of the day was the first mile of gravel road. When I drove it yesterday, there was one really bad patch at the intersection nearest us, where the gravel trucks sunk keep into the saturated road. Even with the grader going by, it was still pretty bad.

After a night of rain, that entire first mile of road was filled with saturated patches; none as bad as the one nearest us, but still enough that we had to carefully skirt around the worst parts – and I could still feel the van trying to sink into the road as we did! In fact, right now, the best part of the entire stretch to the highway is the spot that had been washed out and repaired!

Once on the highway, all was good, though. Since we were heading to a Walmart first, we make our usual stop at the town my mother lives in, to fill the tank and pick up some fried chicken for “breakfast”.

That was my other surprise of the day.

Gas prices went up 8 cents a litre, overnight.

My fuel gauge was just above 3/4 of a tank.

Apparently, my gas gauge isn’t accurate. The tank on our van hold 95L (25 US gallons, 20.8 Imperial gallons). That makes a quarter tank 23.75L According to my gas gauge, I needed less than a quarter tank. I have noticed, however, that the gauge stays at the full line for quite a long time, and that the needle seems to drop faster, the lower it goes. Especially if it dips below half a tank. I remember commenting about it with a mechanic at some point, because I was never quite sure how much fuel was actually in the tank. His answer? Just keep the tank full! :-D Good thing that’s what we normally try to do.

While I was paying at the gas station, I remember to ask about the road we needed to cross to get to the next highway. The cashiers weren’t sure but, thankfully, the next customer in line was able to tell me that all was well. I’d heard the road had washed out at a new bridge, but all was fine, though plenty of fields were still full of water.

Once at the Walmart, I left my daughter to hunt down the clothes she needed, while I picked up a few things. More cat kibble, of course; that’s one thing we have the hardest time stocking up on. I also made sure to check out the garden centre, and made an unplanned purchase.

I picked up some strawberry plants. It’s something we were intending to do, eventually. These will be planted in the asparagus bed. I only got 4 plants, but strawberries are easy to propagate. At this size, they cost just under $4 each, though there were much larger plants in hanging baskets, with strawberries already ripening! Those were completely out of my budget, and we have nowhere to hang baskets, anyhow.

One thing I looked for but couldn’t find was lamp oil. The closest I found was citronella oil for those outdoor torches. I’m wanting oil for glass lamps we have; there are two we brought with us when we moved, and two others we found here at the farm while cleaning out my parents’ stuff. One of those actually looks like it had kerosene in it, though. It appears to have dried out, but the glass is stained dark. I haven’t tried to take the lamp down from the top of the shelf it’s on to find out; it’s safe from the cats up there! :-D

Anyhow, I used to be able to buy lamp oil at Walmart, but now I can’t find any. We considered trying Canadian Tire, but decided not to go there today. I’ve just looked online, and apparently they do carry scented lamp oil that can be used in indoor lamps. I had to read comments and reviews to find that out, since it wasn’t information included in the product description. Something to remember, the next time I’m there. It’s something to include in our stash.

My daughter was able to find a couple of pairs of pants that she needed, suitable for working outdoors, and was very happy. Once we were done there, we headed to the Thai place I originally wanted to take her to. She ended up getting two more pairs of pants that will be perfect for summer weather. While there, I found something for myself, too. I spotted what looked like swoopy folding bamboo and cloth fans. They turned out to be hats! Then, of all the things to find in a clothing store, I was very excited to find steak spice. This place has both a storefront and a restaurant. The building used to be a grocery store and butcher shop. The owner was a good friend of my in-laws. He had his own recipe for steak spice that is the best we’ve ever had. My FIL would mail us about 10 bags of it, once a year, so we could have fresh to use in our tourtierre filling. When the owner retired, I’d seen signs that the spice mix was still available, but I’d never actually seen it on the shelf before. As I was paying for my stuff, I commented on it and found out that when the Thai family bought the building, they also bought the spice mix recipe!

My husband was so thrilled when he saw the bag of spice mix. When we get a chance, we should pick some up for my FIL. He’ll love it!

That done, we headed home. During this entire trip, we were fighting the winds the entire way. We certainly weren’t going to be putting the transplants out for hardening off today, that’s for sure.

Then we got home and saw it wasn’t an option at all.

Pegging it down wasn’t enough for these winds!

Once everything was inside the sun room, my daughter and I straightened the platform out a bit, but didn’t try to put it back up. While my daughters finished taking things inside and putting them away, while I put the strawberry pots into a small bin to join the other plants in the sun room, I headed back outside and fussed with the tarp, pegging some corners down again to keep it from blowing away.

Then I switched to rubber boots and went to see what else needed to be dealt with.

The diverter on the rain barrel had been blown off. I tried to secure it, only to come back and find it blown off again; just not as far. Even the cover on the rain barrel, which is weighted down with the board and bricks that hold the diverter in place, was blowing off, and that thing is made of mesh! One of the containers with our winter sowing (which have not sprouted, yet) was blown right off the step it was on. Thankfully, the soil inside was undisturbed. I moved all 4 containers to a more sheltered (I hope!) spot.

The huge tarp covering my late father’s car gets blown around a lot, but it was really bad today, billowing like a parachute with a car inside. I ended up dragging out three old tires from behind the pump shack to weigh it down; one on the trunk, one on the hood and one on the roof.

While working on that, I noticed that the side door of the storage house was open! Thankfully, it’s quite high off the ground with no stairs, so no cats would be getting up into it. It made me think to check the back door of the barn. When the snow finally melted enough that I could get in there for the first time since fall, I found the top half of the split door in the back was open. I checked, and it had not been blown open again. So I went into the storage house – I don’t think we went into there even once, last year! – and got the door closed. The side door is next to the kitchen, which has exterior blinds in the windows. They tend to rattle in the wind a lot, so I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to reduce that. There wasn’t, but I found another surprise.

Among the things we found lots of while cleaning this place out, are old canning jars that use glass lids. We went through them, and I’ve got shelves full of them that have no nicks or chips in them at all. We also found lots of the glass lids. What we didn’t find were the metal rings. A couple of jars had them still on, and they are so corroded, they’re stuck to the glass. These rings are deeper, to accommodate the width of glass lids and rubber sealing rings. The rubber rings are still available, but no one makes these rings anymore. I wouldn’t want to use the jars for actual canning anymore, but they could still be used for dry storage – if I could find more of these rings. I’ve looked online and could find some on ebay and the like, but they were quite expensive, and looked to be in poor condition.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, there in the storage house was a bucket of canning rings, and was that a deeper ring that I was seeing? After rifling through the bucket, I found about 8 or 10 of these rings, mixed in with some more modern ones, and almost all of them looked nearly pristine! I made sure to take them all out and set them aside. Now that I know we have some, I’ll pick up some of the rubber rings, and we’ll match jars, rings and lids, clean them up and have them available for dry storage.

I was very happy to find these!

Once done in the storage house, I came out and found that the tarp on my late father’s car was billowing again.

The wind had actually blown a tire, right off the roof!

So I fought with that some more. The car happens to be next to a pile of rocks that were cleared up from around the yard. Most of the smaller ones were taken out and used for various thing, but there were some bigger ones that were not so big I couldn’t lift them. After wrestling the tire back onto the roof of the car, I used rocks to weight down the edges of the tarp on the sides. It still billows, but no longer turns into a parachute. Unfortunately, several years of winds has been tearing the tarp to shreds. We need to pick up an actual car cover one of these days. There are covers for the make and model of this car, but they are not something our budget has room for.

It’s been interesting watching out my window as I’ve been working on this post. At the moment, the winds have died down, and the branches on the maples are just wiggling a bit. Other times, the entire tree is swaying, including branches that are as thick as many tree trunks. This particular maple I see from my window needs to have some of those big branches removed, to take weight off the trunk, before they break off completely. With winds like today, I am often amazed that they haven’t broken already. Especially since there is ant damage visible in the trunk, where the biggest branches split off.

Once the winds die down – hopefully, tomorrow – we’re going to have to spend some time cleaning up. Aside from the broken branches, things have been blowing out of the junk pile, and even out by the barn, we’ve been hearing the sound of metal being blown around; there are leftover pieces of metal roofing material among a pile of stuff near the barn. They’re weighed down with things like car tires, cinder blocks and metal grates, but they’re still being lifted by these winds!

Hopefully, we’ll just lose branches, and not any more trees. Or pieces of trees. We still haven’t cut up the piece of tree that landed on the canopy tent. :-D

The Re-Farmer