I’ve definitely been running around too much, over the past while.
With the trips to the city, I haven’t been doing as much physical labour, but I’m still in a lot of pain. Mostly the OA joint pain, but it’s definitely more of a mental fatigue than a physical one.
I headed out early today to do the morning watering. I didn’t need my older daughter to help out this time, nor was my younger daughter heading out with me, so they got to do some catching up on stuff in the house, instead.
My younger daughter was going to get the lawn mowing done as much as she could, in the heat. So, just riding mower stuff! We will just need to do the areas that can only be reached with either the push mower or the weed trimmer, later on.
I picked up some of my mother’s favourite fried chicken and potato wedges for our lunch today, so we had a relaxed visit over food, first. She was having one of her better days, behaviour wise, which made it much more pleasant! After that, we went over her shopping list. I spotted some gaps and asked a few questions, and did end up adding a couple of things to her list, too.
Before I headed out, I changed her bedding for her, so she could lie down while I was gone. She is really having a much harder time moving around her apartment of late. For all the heat, she’s also been finding herself getting cold!
I hit a couple of stores to get her shopping list done. It wasn’t a large list, but still came out to over $90. That’s just for one person for a week, and she has Meals on Wheels three times a week!
After her groceries were put away, I did some light housekeeping for her, then headed out. I made a brief stop at the hardware store, hoping to find some buckets in smaller sizes than 5 gallons, or watering cans. There weren’t any in the store, but I did remember to get handles to attach to the isolation shelter, to make it easier to move around, and caps for the end of the emergency septic pump bypass, so we can close that off and finally set aside the last of the outside parts of the emergency bypass.
The hardware store did have their garden centre section open, so I checked it out. I did find watering cans there, but only got one, as the price was pretty steep. I also spotted some lovely looking sage transplants and picked up two. There’s just enough room in the tiny raised bed, with the other herbs, for them.
All of this took long enough that, when I got home, it was already time to do the outside cat feeding, so I took care of that right away. A couple of kittens needed eye washing, and I changed out the ice packs in the sun room cat cage, for Poirot and her babies.
It’s barely past 5pm as I write this, and I am so drained, I’ll be heading to bed pretty much as soon as I’m done supper. Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, and then we’re going to cool down a touch for the next while. I’m hoping to get the rest of the transplants in, and maybe even get the direct sowing done. I noticed this morning that some of the Spoon tomatoes have started to show flower buds!
This is what WP’s AI image generator thinks I look like. 😄
At some point, I need to edit my May garden tour video, too. I decided to keep the video files I took, back on the 21st, and here we are, last day of May, and it still hasn’t been put together!
Little by little, it’ll get done.
I just wish there weren’t so many distractions pulling me away, at times!
We’re expected to reach around 30C/86F today, with the next couple of days potentially getting even hotter. So I’ve been heading out early in the mornings to water the garden and the saplings. This morning, I snagged my older daughter to give me a hand, since it was already 16C/61F by 6am.
While I went to the old kitchen to start getting food ready for the outside cats, my daughter shoed up and went out through the main door. It makes things easier to pass things from the old kitchen to someone in the sun room through the old kitchen door with the missing screen.
I had quite a surprise when I opened the inner door, though!
Miss Lemon, Hastings and Japp were tucked in, between the doors again!
The old kitchen is quite a bit cooler, so I’m guessing Poirot moved her babies to get them out of the heat again.
With that in mind, we left them there for a while, and worked on the cat cage. My daughter set one of the larger ice packs right under their cat bed. As thick as the cat bed it, it should still feel cooler, and it won’t melt as quickly. We set a couple of frozen water bottles around, too, before I started passing the kittens over for my daughter to tuck them back into the cat cage. By then, Poirot had come in and was very interesting in what we were doing to her babies!
After that, I headed out with the kibble and some leftover cat soup to distract the adult cats, while my daughter started preparing the wet cat food for the bigger kittens, mixing in some lysine/pumpkin seed powder and splitting it up between all the little bowls we have for them. We switched out a frozen water bottle in one of the cat beds in the water bowl shelter, too.
My daughter then grabbed the wagon, which already had containers of water waiting, to the outer yard and watered the walnut and Korean pine trees while I did the rest of my rounds. By the time I was switching out the memory card at the sign cam, my daughter was done refilling containers to finish watering the trees in the outer yard, while I got the hose going into the leaky rain barrel, and used a bucket to water the trees out there.
The very first leaf bud on the Opal plum has emerged! It was rather strange to water a stick in the ground, not knowing if it survived its time in the mail, and being transplanted. Today, we have proof of life!
Once the food forest saplings were watered, I worked on the main garden area. There are quite a few potato leaves pushing their way through the mulch!
I think I’ll grab a small bucket of stove pellets, though, and head back to the garden before my younger daughter and I head back to the city today. The bed the flowers were replanted has no mulch at all, and it’s just baking in the sun. The high raised bed, and the newly planted strawberries, also need protection. On being watered, the pellets will break up into sawdust, so they won’t disturb the more delicate seedlings, will hold water longer, and should help keep the soil at least a bit cooler.
These lilacs are at almost full bloom in most places! The double lilacs in the old kitchen garden are also opening up. I’m not seeing white lilacs yet. The dwarf Korean lilacs by the house will bloom later on, and the variety I can’t remember the name of right now, closer to the chain link fence, will bloom last of all.
I like having such an extended lilac season.
We’re already creeping up to 20C/68F, just in the time it took me to write this. I’d better get out there with those pellets before things get to hot!
With an even hotter day expected for today, I was outside early to take care if things while it was still relatively cool.
If 20C/68F at 6am could be considered cool.
After the cats were tended to – and they were a lot happier and more active in the relative cool, that’s for sure! – I started preparing things for the upcoming heat.
The transplants were moved outside so they wouldn’t cook in the portable greenhouse later on. If you click through the above slideshow, you’ll see we have tulips blooming, and the wild plums are in full bloom.
I watered some of the winter sown garden beds, lifted plastic covers up for air flow, and was watering some of the food trees when I got a message from my daughter.
My mother had phoned. My daughter didn’t get to the phone in time, but her my mother leaving a message about not feeling well and going to the doctor.
???
So I shut off the hose, headed inside and listened to the message. Which wasn’t particularly clear in what exactly she was having trouble with, or what she was intending to do, but it was because she’s not getting her medications on time.
I called her back.
She started talking about how she was poorly she was feeling and she has to go to a doctor (she sounded good; voice strong, few issues with finding her works, no breathing issues…), and it was because she wasn’t getting her medications regularly.
Her morning med assist wasn’t expected to arrive for another hour.
After asking a number of questions, and basically, she thinks that the home care workers should arrive at her place at exactly the same time, ever day, no matter what. And there should only be two people visiting, not so many people, and that’s why she’s not getting her medications “properly”.
She’s getting her medications. They have a 2 hour window when she’s supposed to get them.
Then she started going on about the no-show on Saturday. She had asked someone about that and apparently this person had made arrangements with a friend to take over for her (which can’t be accurate; she would have arranged with another home care worker, but that’s not how my mother understood it) because – insert extremely mocking and condescending tone – it was Mother’s Day and she has a little daughter she wanted to spend time with.
Now, I have no idea what was actually said, since this was on Saturday, not Mother’s Day, but she was made at this woman for arranging to spend time with her daughter, rather than the woman who didn’t show up.
Which reminds me of another home care worker she complained about. While my mother was taking her pills the worker was texting her own mother on her phone. My mother was extremely mocking in describing this. While that does seem unprofessional, I suspected there was something else going on. After several different days of my mother complaining about the woman texting her mother while at my mom’s place, she finally mentioned…
Her mother had just had to put her dog down, and was having a hard time about it.
My mother was using her mocking tone again as she told me this, too.
I tried to explain to her that they need to have a lot of people, not just two, because they have a lot of people besides her that they have to visit, and they need to have enough people to cover for each other is someone gets sick or whatever. My mother began to complain about how they only cared about themselves, only themselves, not about her… They should only care about her.
Meanwhile, it’s my own mother who doesn’t care about anyone else, only herself. The home care workers should all not care about their own families. Just her.
The hypocrisy was completely lost on her.
Then she started talking about needing to talk to the doctor and to make an appointment.
One of the things on my to-do list was to call to arrange a phone appointment, because my mother’s doctor had left a message with her to do that. The clinic wasn’t going to open for another hour, though, and I told my mother that.
I kept asking questions, trying to understand what was going on, and telling her that if she really felt she needed help (she mentioned waiting up in so much pain, she can’t move and can only scream, but she doesn’t want to disturb her neighbours…), she had a life line. Push the button. That’s what it’s for.
She didn’t really respond openly, but clearly wasn’t interested in that. She wanted me or my siblings to drop everything and do it for her. Instead, she started talking about how, because she’s not taking her pills regularly (I think we might be having an issue of her rewriting her own memory again), that’s why she’s feeling so poorly. Her pain is getting worse, her vision…
Her vision?
She’s mentioned her vision before, but hadn’t said it was getting worse. That fact that it was NOT getting worse is why we got away with cancelling her last appointment.
I told her, she hasn’t said it was getting worse. None of her pills will help with that. This is where she would need to go to the eye clinic in the city. (The treatment is injections into her eyeball. Which she handled we better than I ever would have!!!) Did she want me to make an appointment at the clinic for her?
…
We’ll talk about that later, she says…
Then she started saying how she needs to be “around people” (meaning, have someone available to help, 24/7, as in assisted living/supportive living/long term care). Which I totally agree on. She asked and I told her again that I’d gone through her entire panel with the home care coordinator again, making changes where things have gotten worse for her, and basically taking her worst days and writing that down, to try and get her in somewhere; preferably long term care. I reminded her that most people go to long term care from the hospital; they fall and break a hip or something, and never go home. Just straight to long term care. Most people don’t actually want to go into long term care, like she does, so hers is a different situation. But we would still have to wait for a bed to come available, and for that, we’re basically waiting for someone to die, because that’s pretty much the only way space becomes available in long term care.
(I didn’t mention it this time, but I had told her about one of her neighbours that I’d run into, while my mother was in the hospital. She told me it had taken 8 months and two hospital transfers for her late father to get into long term care. He wasn’t well enough to go home, but there were no open beds in long term care, so he had to stay in the hospital.)
I remined her that I was already supposed to call the clinic to make a phone appointment for her this morning, but the clinic wasn’t open yet, so I’d have to call her back.
Which meant I lost about the cooler weather to get stuff done outside.
I had time for breakfast before calling the clinic. I made an appointment for tomorrow morning, which means I’ll have to be at my mother’s before 8am. I called my mother to let her know, but it went to her answering machine, so I left a message. Then I headed outside to at least finish what I was half way through before I headed inside.
Once I was back inside, I spent more time on the phone. One was to return a call from the small engine shop I’d left our push mower at, for servicing.
There are a couple of parts I can’t remember the names of, one connected to the choke, that were done. That’s why I couldn’t start it anymore. They simply were no longer there. My guess is, they broke and fell off. Our lawn is very rough on lawnmowers!
The problem is, this is a Canadian Tire, Certified brand. The parts are hard to get at the best of times. With these parts, there aren’t any parts numbers. Which means, they don’t service them. “Fixing” it would mean replacing the entire engine and, at that point, may as well just buy a new mower!
He’s going to try and find the parts for me but I told him, if you can’t, you can’t. Just let me know and I’ll pick it up.
I then told him that I do have another push mower. The prime pump needs replacing, and it’s jerry rigged for starting and stopping. It’s about 20+ years old. He told me that it would probably be easier to find parts for that, and those older machines last a lot longer!
So what I might end up doing is bringing the newer push mower home as basically trash, and bringing my mother’s old push mower in for servicing and repair instead. We shall see.
I also made a number of calls about the truck, trying to find out if the insurance will cover the lost box cover, and it it would be worth making a claim.
Long story short, I would start an insurance claim. They would make an appointment for me to bring it in for inspection. Someone from the insurance company comes to town every other week to do these inspections. If it’s determined that the damage isn’t because of some fault (rust, previous damage, etc), and that they will cover it, it would be worth paying the $500 deductible. A new cover ranges from $1200 to $2800. !!!! The tail light would also be replaced. They don’t just replace the cover, but the whole unit, and that costs about $250-$300. Not worth making a claim for just that, if the inspector decides they won’t cover the loss of the cover, at which point I could cancel the claim entirely.
Eventually, I made my way back outside.
This was the temperature before I headed out, then when I got back in.
Much of what I did was things like watering down the hot concrete, misting the transplants and garden beds, and wetting down the mats in the sun room to help cool through evaporation.
The first picture above was taken when I started my rounds at about 5:30-6am. Poirot stayed with her kittens for quite a long time. The wall thermometer was already reading about 20C/68F, while outside was still around 13C/55F. The frozen water bottles would be thawed by then, but must still have been helping keep things cool. Little by little, as I could reach, I replaced the water bottle in front with a new frozen one, and replaced the ice pack on top of the carrier with another ice pack. Eventually, I was even able to add a small ice pack along the side of the carrier.
Poirot let me do this.
She did growl at me as I did things around her, but I was able to give her a squeeze treat and she was quite happy with that, and with licking the last of it off my fingers, too. When I added the ice pack on the side, she shifted, but let me. Later, I put my hand in to pet one of her kittens and…
… she licked my fingers!!!!
When I later saw that she was gone, I switched out the water bottle in the back of the carrier for a frozen one. The second picture with the babies is after I’d done that.
So while it was still pretty hot in the sun room, things were much better in their nest, with the help of the car windshield heat screen blocking the sun from the windows and judiciously placed ice packs!
The bigger kittens had their own ways to keep cool.
Little Kale, in the first photo, was on the very bottom of a shelf, where temperatures would be cooler. The next photo shows some of the other kittens, chilling with the moms – one ran off before I could take the picture. Last image is of Sir Robin the Brave. When we pick him up, he almost immediately flips over onto his back, so we can pet his neck and chest! This kitten is so socialized, it’s amazing!
Meanwhile, every time I had the chance, I would try and call my mom to confirm about tomorrow.
No answer. Every time.
Then my older daughter offer to buy supper, so we wouldn’t have to heat the house with cooking (the upstairs is insanely hot!), so my younger daughter and I headed out, but not before I tried calling my mother again. Still no answer, so I ended up calling the home care coordinator, because that’s the only home care number I have. I explained that I talked to my mother this morning, but had been trying to get back to her for hours, and there was no answer. She was quite surprised to here this. My mother’s supper med assist was going to be happening soon. She told me she would let the home care worker know and that they’d get back to me.
We were on our way to town when my cell phone rang. It was the home care worker, calling to let me know she’d just left my mother. She had been asleep this whole time!
She was also very groggy.
Otherwise, she seemed all right.
I was very, very thankful for the news.
Our trip to town did not take long. After we got back home, I called my mother, and she answered the phone. She told me she had been sleeping and had a hot water bottle for her back (I can’t even imagine using a hot water bottle in this heat!), and her pain was why she was in bed. She never heard the phone ring.
I confirmed she got my message about tomorrow, so we’re on for that.
As we were talking, there was a knock at the door.
It was her suppertime med assist.
???
Which means the person that called me before had swung by my mother’s place, just to do a wellness check! She was not the evening med assist person!
That was so awesome of them!!!
So that’s all done for today.
For now, I just need to do my evening rounds and do the evening cat feeding. Normally, I would have done it earlier, but it was so hot, the cats don’t have much appetite!
*sigh*
The temperature had dropped to 27C/81F, but has just jumped back up to 31C/88F.
Well, things need to be put away for the night. The low is supposed to be 9C/48F, though not until about 6am. We’re supposed to have some rain for a couple of hours in the morning, and the high is supposed to be “only” 20C/68F Then things drop right down for the next few days!
That’s some wild weather whiplash we’ll be getting!
Anyhow.
Time to get out there, then try and get to bed at a decent hour. I had intended to do a few hours work outside really early, then nap for a couple of hours, but… well… that just didn’t happen!
I went to see if I could find where Poirot moved her kittens. I opened the inner door of the old kitchen – and Poirot jumped up and out the window of the outer door.
She have moved all three of them in between the doors!
Well, it certainly would have been cooler there, but obviously, that wasn’t going to work!
I put them back into the carrier, the put the cover over it, without fastening it, hoping she would be okay with the “cave” being back.
Then my daughter and I watched her on the critter cam, grabbing a baby and disappearing out of frame. By the time I moved the camera, I could no longer see her.
She had moved one of her babies in between the doors again.
In the end, I went digging in a closet for one of those sun shields for inside car windshields, designed to keep the interior from getting too hot. It used to be in my mother’s car, but we never used it. I took it and set it around the back of the shelf the carrier had been in, to block the sunlight. Then I moved the carrier with the babies back to the shelf. Hopefully, between the frozen water bottles, the sun shield, wetting down the floor, thing will be cooler for her and the babies. Once we have more frozen ice packs, I have some I can put on top of the carrier, too.
I’m watching the critter cam now, but Poirot has left the sun room and hasn’t gone back up to the carrier to try and move them again.
This is not a problem I ever expected to have with a feral cat!
It’s a running joke about how cold it gets in Canada. The thing is, in much of the country, we get as hot in the spring/summer as we do cold in the fall/winter.
Today being a prime example. In the winter, we hit temperatures colder than -30C/-22F/ Now, we’re hitting temperatures above 30C/86F. The forecast was for a high of 31C/88F, but we easily hit 33C/92F.
I did the evening cat feeding and round not too long ago.
The temperature in the portable greenhouse was off the scale – and then some!
I did not know the needle could keep going like that. This would be what? 70C/158F? 80C/176?
I started off misting to cool things down, but that wasn’t going to be enough. All the bins and trays of seedlings got taken out and set in the shade next to the portable greenhouse. The new bags of seed potatoes were at the bottom, where it would have been cooler, but I moved them out and into the shade, too.
Cats were splayed all over the place. Inside the cat house would have been very hot, but those kittens are big enough to leave on their own and move to cooler places with the creche mamas.
There’s some video if you scroll through to the next file above.
It was the littles that were the problem. In fact, it was downright scary!
Poirot put her babies into a cat carrier in a shelf that’s supporting the platform that runs across that side of the sun room. For that time, it was a nice, cozy and protected spot with a soft blanket on the bottom.
Not good at all for today.
When I first stepped into the sun room to start gathering the bowls we use for wet cat food for the kittens, I saw that Poirot was not with the kittens. Nothing unusual there.
What was unusual was that all three kittens were panting.
Cats do not pant unless something is very wrong.
After moving things around for access, I took the carrier off the shelf and into the old kitchen. There, my daughter and I took the top of the carrier off completely. She had already brought out a frozen water bottle from the freezer, but we needed to cover it with something, and the knit blanket in the carrier had to go. I got a puppy pad and laid it on the bottom of the carrier, and the frozen water bottle was tucked under it at one end. While I held the carrier, with the distressed kittens inside, my daughter dug around in the freezer and found another frozen water bottle. That got tucked under the other end of the puppy pad.
I had moved out the plant stands the cats used to jump up the shelves, and I tried putting the carrier on the concrete floor there. When Poirot came in for her babies, though, she went right past them and up to the now empty shelf where she was looking for her babies. She ran off when I came close. I ended up putting the carrier back there, and she went right in to her babies.
Unfortunately, not only was it still hot there (the wall thermometer was reading almost 40C/104F, but the sun was hitting that spot, too. In the second file is some video I took. Poirot was trying to nurse her babies and just panting from the heat! I ended up getting a small plastic bowl with some water with ice cubes in it for her, but she wouldn’t let me get close. I didn’t want to chase her away from her babies, so I put it beside her food bowl.
She didn’t stay long. Not only was she too hot being there, but her own body heat would have made it worse for her babies.
While giving her time to be with her babies and figuring things out, I got the hose going, letting it run for quite a while to get rid of the scalding hot water from the hose sitting in the sun. I refreshed water bowls with cold water (our well water gets very cold, even in summer), misted plants, watered garden beds, and hosed down sidewalk blocks and concrete steps to cool them down. Which gave me the idea to wet the floor in the sun room. There are indoor/outdoor mats on the concrete floor and I went those down, so that the evaporation would help cool the room.
With Poirot away from her babies again, I moved the carrier to the floor, then set her special food and water bowls beside it. At first, the kittens were splayed out on the bottom of the carrier. When I came back later, they were as you can see them in the last image in the slideshow above. All together, with their heads against where the frozen water bottle is on one side of the carrier.
Looking at my desktop’s weather app, apparently we hit 35C/95F at about 4pm today. We are slowly starting to drop, but our overnight high is still expected to be around 19C/66F. Tomorrow – Tuesday – we’re still supposed to get even hotter then today, yet by Friday, we’re still expecting a high of only 4C/39F, with an overnight low of -1C/30F or -2C/28F, and a mix of rain and snow. After that is supposed to be another week of highs barely above 10C/50F, and overnight lows above freezing, but not by much.
On the plus side, there are now more days were we can expect rain (or snow), which will be helpful with all the wildfires going on right now. Most of them are now listed as under control.
Oh, dear.
I just checked the critter cam in the sun room.
Poirot’s babies are no longer in the carrier.
I hope she at least put them into the cat cage or something!
We got a nice little down pour in the wee hours of the morning. Not enough to refill the rain barrel, but enough to water things nicely.
Knowing it was going to get hot today, I made a point of having breakfast before I did my morning rounds, as I planned to stay out longer to do some planting, before it got too hot.
While checking on the covered garden beds, I tried to open them up a bit so they wouldn’t get too hot inside during the heat wave (we haven’t reached the hottest part of the day yet, and we’re already at 31C/88F) today and tomorrow, while still giving them protection.
I was hearing thunder the whole time I was outside. As I was gathering my supplies together into the wheelbarrow, the rain started coming down again. It didn’t take long for me to get quite wet before I could dash inside! I ended up waiting until about 8:30 before heading out again, though I’d really hoped to have been done by then.
I went through the bag of walnut seeds and found three that were showing roots and needed to get into the ground right away. That worked out perfectly, as there were three spots marked out along the wet side of the lane I want to keep clear to the second gate. It the second picture of the slideshow above, you can just barely see a dot of orange in the distance, marking the northernmost spot.
The first thing to do was rake around the markers, clearing them of dead grass and debris – and any little poplars coming up that I’d missed, before!
Next, at each marker, I removed a circle of sod, which I quartered and set aside to put back, later. Once the sod was removed, I dug around a bit more to loosen the soil and remove any rocks I found in the process.
Once the holes were dug, I added some of the indoor-outdoor potting soil my brother gave me, mostly filling the holes. Then a plastic collar was set into the soil. The loose soil and and sod (placed upside down), along with any rocks I’d dug up, was set around the collar and the hole in such a way as to create a sort of moat, so wany water would drain towards the middle. Then, all of them got a thorough watering. I actually have a couple of photos reversed. The one with the arrow shows where a walnut seed is. Each got pushed into the moist soil, root side down, and the marker was inserted into the soil near it. Each collar got topped up with more of the bagged soil and pressed down gently, before getting a final, thorough watering.
Once the seeds were planted and watered, I raked up more dried grass to set around as mulch.
Here was have the three planted areas, with the grass mulch set around the collars for mulch. The very last photo shows the “combed” area I’d raked the dead grass out of. I just thought it looked rather funny. 😁
Three seeds planted; five more to go! All of those will be planted on the east side of the lane, and closer to the inner yard fence.
While it hadn’t gotten really hot yet, things were pretty muggy, so I was more than happy to get inside!
I had some plans to head into town today, which turned out to work out for everyone. Because of her work schedule, my older daughter basically didn’t see me on Mother’s day until some time past midnight. She wanted to treat me with a Mother’s day dinner today. After the four of us discussed options and ideas, my younger daughter and I left for town in the late morning.
My first stop was at the place our truck is insured at. I talked to someone about the wind damage to the truck, asking if it was something the insurance covered. She didn’t know for sure, but gave me the number I needed to call and find out. Since the cover isn’t actually part of the truck, she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be covered, but it’s worth asking.
The next stop was at our usual Chinese food place to place an order, only to discover they were closed. We keep forgetting. They are always closed on Mondays. After talking about it with my daughter, we decided to try the other Chinese restaurant. We keep forgetting about that one, but I’ve been there for sit down meals a few times while waiting for my truck to be worked on, since it’s in a hotel right next to our garage. This restaurant, it turned out, closes on Tuesdays, so we were good! 😄
After going over the menu and deciding on things for my husband and myself, I left my daughter to take care of the rest while I went to the pharmacy. My husband had ordered refills of his injections for delivery, but getting them faster was preferrable. While there, I also picked up some liquid, spray on bandage. The little calico kitten has a strange wound on her back leg, and lost some skin. We can’t bandage it and, while we’ve been applying antibiotic ointment, it really needs more protection.
That done, I got back to the restaurant early enough that my daughter and I popped across the street to the grocery store, where she picked up drinks to go with our Chinese food. We got back just in time for the food to be ready.
That was a very nice treat from my daughter – and no need to heat up the house more with cooking, today! The air conditioner in the living room has been turned on. We need to start bringing the fans up out of storage in the basement.
In the end, it has turned out to be a more productive day than I expected it to be, with this heat.
One more hot day, and then it’s going to get downright cold again! I’m certainly happy to have gotten those walnuts in!
Well, we reached our predicted high of 31C/88F, with the humidex putting us at 33C/91F, and we’re not expected to start cooking down until well into the evening.
I had a much interrupted night, so the girls took care of the outside stuff for me, including watering the garden, so I could try and get some more sleep. Which is rather difficult when, every now and then, a cat will suddenly get the zoomies and parkour off my body while careening across my room. What a way to be awakened!
I did make my trip into town, late this morning. It was slightly delayed when I stopped at the post office to pick up a package, and found my daughter’s computer was in a day early! I’d even checked the tracking this morning, and it was still saying tomorrow, by the end of day. Once I had that, I went back home to drop it off, then headed into town. My daughter hasn’t tried to take it upstairs yet. Her old computer is still chugging away, backing things up onto online storage – a very sloooooow process. She’ll start getting the new machine set up during the night.
I had intended to see what errands I could do while I was in town after sanitizing and filling our water jugs (it’s a different grocery store than where I usually go to, that has a sanitation station with their refill fountains), I got a message from my husband asking if I could swing by the Greek restaurant and pick up a couple of gyros for him. I found out this morning that my husband had eaten almost nothing all day yesterday – he just didn’t have any appetite – and his blood sugars dropped dangerously low. He had to pop glucose tablets to get himself back up again. The water refill station at the grocery store happened to be next to their pharmaceutical section, and they had some of the glucose tablets in stock, so I grabbed a bottle. With his Ozempic dose being doubled, the danger of his blood glucose levels dropping are much higher. Which ticks me off because I am 100% certain that is his chronic pain could be brought under control, he blood sugars would normalize. However, there’s no fix for his back, and so far, no pain killers tried have been able to get it under control. At best, it become more bearable. It’s like when he was diagnosed diabetic the first time. After that he was diagnosed with sleep apnea and started using a CPAP. Almost immediately, his blood sugars normalized and he lost about 100 pounds. I suspect the increase in dose for the Ozempic is more for the potential side effect of weight loss, but he’s been on this stuff for years now, and it has had zero effect on his weight. Plenty of other side effects, like losing much of his sense of taste, a loss of appetite, loss of muscle mass and intestinal distress, but his weight just won’t change.
Needless to say, when he asked for the gyros, my other plans went out the window, got his food and headed straight home with it, and skipped the other places I was going to check out.
I had been thinking of going to the dump later today, when it opens for the evening, but we really don’t have enough garbage and recycling to make it worth burning the gas in another trip.
My other plan had been to try and get some lawn mowed this morning, before it got hot, but that didn’t work out. Tomorrow is supposed to be a little bit cooler, so I will see if I can get it done then. In fact, our entire 10 day forecast has changed and, after tomorrow, we’re now supposed to be closer to 20C/68F instead of in the 30C/86F range.
I just got back from refreshing the cats’ water bowls outside, and adding frozen water bottles in a couple of them to help keep them cooler. The cats are just splattered all over, trying to keep cool
So happy to see Button in there, getting some nip!
I’m just looking back at some of my garden posts from a year ago. At this time, our garlic was all harvested and curing, and I tried planting beets, radishes and spinach in the empty bed (they did not do well at all). I was also harvesting bush beans, turnips and G-Star pattypan squash. Not a lot, but at least something! I was even getting some yellow zucchini and the odd green one from the plants that survived getting eaten by slugs. We had Black Beauty tomatoes getting so big and heavy, we had to add extra supports. Our Spoon tomatoes were turning red, and our Sweet Chocolate peppers were covered in developing fruit. We even started harvesting some Indigo Blue tomatoes, and our Pink Banana and Georgia Candy Roaster had so many huge squash developing!
I’ll be doing another garden tour video in the middle of the month. Hopefully, things will have progressed between now and then! It should be interesting to compare the two.
For now, though, the main priority is to keep things protected from the heat.
Last night was one of those nights where, as soon as I went to bed, I just kept getting more and more awake! I finally got up and spent time with my younger daughter, who was busy making pies. Of course, being up at 2 or 3 in the morning, I was peckish, so I made a snack in between batches of pies, then she and I watched an episode of Columbo while they were baking.
We cheated on the pies. We had some canned pumpkin pie mix. Yesterday, I made a quick trip to the local grocery store and grabbed some frozen pie shells and other missing ingredient. There was no way we were going to be making pie dough in this heat and humidity!
By the time I got back to bed, it was 4am, and even then, I was still up at 4:30!
I did get a bit of sleep, though, but was just after a nap at that point. We were looking at reaching a high of 29C/84F today, but the coolest part of the day was going to be a brief period at about 5 or 6am. My goal was to water the garden while it was still cool.
So when I woke up at 6, I got up and headed out.
The first thing was, of course, to feed the outside cats. As I was going into the sun room with the kibble, I saw several kittens asleep together in a small cat bed on the floor. One got out, another start looking around, and the third…
*sigh*
One of the tabby kittens was lying stretched out, looking like it was asleep. With this heat, I see a lot of the cats sleeping all stretched out like that, but with all the commotion, this one wasn’t moving.
Yup. We lost another kitten.
That’s three kittens in four days.
After putting the food out, I quickly buried it near the unknown kitten I found yesterday morning.
I wonder if it’s the heat and humidity getting to them? There was no sign of anything obvious. It was about 17C/63F at the time. The sun room would not have been much warmer – these days, we leave the doors to outside wide open and the ceiling fan on all the time, for maximum air circulation. If anything, down at the concrete floor, it would have been a bit cooler.
I don’t know what to make of it. About the only solace I can take is, fewer cats in the colony.
Once the sad deed was done, I started my morning rounds. It was very foggy this morning!
It was so dense that I could see the fog covering the tops of the spruce trees in the inner yard. My phone’s camera automatically clears up the image, so in reality, it looked foggier than in the photo.
That sun is red because of smoke. Again, the camera doesn’t capture it well. It was much redder than it appears in the photo!
I just checked the live fire map. There are no fires near us; they are all quite a bit further up north. However, there are currently 6 fires listed as out of control, another 5 listed as being held, 29 (!!!) listed as being monitored and another 9 listed as under control. Some of these, however, are grouped closely on the map, almost on top of each other. All of them are listed as natural causes. None are near populated areas.
So this morning, it was both smoke and fog!
Checking the weather forecast last night, it was saying thunderstorms during by around midnight tonight, but when I checked again this morning, it was saying thunderstorms starting at about 3pm this afternoon.
I’m writing this at quarter to 3 right now, and on checking the weather radar, there are no storms on the horizon. My phone’s app is now saying to expect a thunderstorm around 8 or 9pm.
We shall see.
Either way, with the upcoming heat, once I did my rounds, I did a thorough watering of the garden beds. Which was rather torturous, because I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Not so bad that I was willing to go back to the house and get the bug spray, though. Having had only a little more than an hour of sleep, I was planning to go back to bed as soon as I got inside and didn’t want to have to wash all
As I write this, we are at 27C/81F, with the humidex at 32C/90F The expected high had changed to 28C/82F, and I’m not sure if we actually reached it.
Oh! I just got a message from the Cat Lady. She just dropped stuff off at the gate for us. She didn’t message ahead, or I’d have opened the gate. She had The Wolfman with her, and she says he started going nuts as soon as they got on the gravel road. When they opened the windows at the gate, he started clawing to get INTO his carrier. He didn’t calm down until they were back on the highway.
This cat has gotten completely attached to them! More than any of the others they ended up keeping permanently!
Excuse me while I head out and collect the donated kibble from the gate.
Wow! Four 9.1kg bags of kibble were waiting for me! I’m glad I dug the wagon out of the garage to bring them over. That will be such a huge help!
Also, I am absolutely dripping with sweat. I just checked and yes, we reached the predicted high of 28C/82F in the last twenty minutes. The humidex is at 33C/72F Apparently, our humidity levels are just 56%, but I question that. Stepping outside was like walking into a sauna!
I did top up the cat food outside with some of the new kibble, and they definitely prefer it over the feed store kibble I got. They’ll eat the feed store brand, but not as enthusiastically. Not that they are eating much in this heat, anyhow!
We should have a brief respite over the next few days – meaning will be in the mid 20’s rather than approaching 30C/86F – but then we’re supposed to get right back up there again.
This is the sort of weather that breed thunderstorms, but so far, those only seem to be forming up north. If only they would get just rain to help put out those fires, instead, that would be good!
Well, the tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, melons and squash will sure enjoy the heat! We just need to keep up on the watering.
I think I’ll go to the living room and stand in front of the air conditioner for a while!
Last night, before doing the evening watering, I did a couple of things to – hopefully! – distract the deer away.
One of them went around the Montana Morado corn.
The aluminum tins spin freely on the twine, so I hope they will do as distractions. We can add more distractions after a while, to change things up before they get used to them.
This next one is more of a diversion than a distraction. On a wildlife group I’m on, someone had posted a picture of a deer with her fawn, in their yard. With the heat and lack of rain we’ve been having, they had put out a bucket of water for the wildlife. The mama and her baby promptly showed up and started drinking, even as the guy who posted the picture was sitting on his deck with a coffee!
We have water bowls all over the place for the cats, plus we found a way to keep using the cracked bird bath. Which is great for the cats and birds (and skunks, and probably the woodchucks and racoon), but they’re rather small for deer. I imagine they might still be drinking from them, but for the amount of water in the shallow containers, it wouldn’t slack their thirst.
It occurred to me that if we could set up water for the deer in the right place, we might be able to divert them away from the garden. The deer damage we have been seeing has been comparatively small; they seem to be just nibbling a few things on the way by. My thought it, if they can get water somewhere away from the garden beds, they won’t have a reason to go by and nibble.
The deer go through the maple grove and jump the fence at the gates along West fence line. Our kiddie pool isn’t being used right now (who knew a kiddie pool could be so useful?), so I set it up near the old willow that overhangs the fence. The rocks and bricks are there to keep it from blowing away if it gets emptied, but for little critters, like frogs or kittens, to use to climb out if they fall into the pool.
I checked it this morning, but I honestly couldn’t tell if the water level had changed much.
We’ll see if it works!
Meanwhile, here are a couple of other distractions. Some pretty, developing tomatoes!
This is one of the Mosaic Medley plants. It’s such a dark green! There are others I couldn’t get good pictures of that are a much lighter green.
More like these.
These are the itty bitty Spoon tomatoes. They’re so adorable! :-D
Last night, after setting up the deer distractions, I stayed out to do a very thorough watering of the garden beds. Last night, I ended up awake and 4am and unable to get back to sleep, so I finally gave up and headed outside to do my morning rounds early. With the expected heat, I stayed out to give all the garden beds another thorough watering.
Then I napped. LOL
This afternoon, after coming back from a dump run, I stayed out to check the south garden beds and noticed that the gourds were actually drooping from the heat. When a hot weather crop like gourds are feeling the heat, I am glad I gave everything that extra watering!
Meanwhile, as I was writing this, my daughter went out to put frozen water bottles in all the cats’ water bowls.
Any little bit to help the furry critters deal with the heat!
This big cheesy creature! Cheddar has grown to be such a big, meaty, boy. ;-)
I usually have several cats splashed across my bed, right where the breeze from my fan in the window hits. :-D
We’re at 33C/91F right now, with a humidex of 35C/95F. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to reach a high of 34C/93F with a humidex of 37C/99F. After that, we’re supposed to drop a few degrees, but then head back up to just above 30C/86F again. Not as hot as the heat wave we left behind, but definitely higher than the long range forecasts had been predicting earlier.
Which means the cats have been spending their days in furry puddles around the house during the day…
And going nuts during the night.
Somehow, flying insects are getting into the house. In my office/bedroom, I have a shelf that has a space for them (the cats, not the insects), right up near the ceiling. Unfortunately, to get to it, they can only use the back of my office chair, since their alternative jump off point is now filled with a box fan. I have a wall shelf at the head of my bed, and I’ve set things up to prevent them from getting to the top, since that is where fragile items that don’t fit anywhere else are stored. Some of the smaller cats, however, can climb straight up on part of it. I’ve tried to block the top by storing a triangular support designed to go under the knees, or behind the back, depending on how it is oriented, where they climb. Every now and then, I’m awakened by it crashing down because a cat has decided to go for it. Last night was so bad, I had to kick them out and close the door. Unfortunately, that meant they tore around the upstairs, instead. There are no doors up there, so the girls can’t close them out.
At least the cats won’t be keeping them awake for the next while. With the increasing temperatures, even with the much improved conditions after adding a box fan to the south window, set up to blow the hot air out, it gets too hot for my daughter’s computer and drawing tablet. She’ll be working at night again, which means they won’t be going to bed until something like 5am; shortly before sunrise. So they’ll be able to deal with the cats tearing around after flying bugs during the night! :-D
Time to start leaving ice packs on the floor for the cats to cool down on again. :-)
The Re-Farmer 