Once again, I found a top corner of the sliding window by the food bowl out of its track again. That corner can be reached if a cat is on the shelf above the food bowl. That Kohl fit through there too was a bit of a surprise, though!
I spotted her while I was feeding the cats and got her back into the isolation shelter, where she promptly discovered the wet cat food I’d put in for her and The Grink. That gave me time to grab some wood lathe and nails to reinforce that corner.
So this window now has a piece of wood lathe on both sides of the opening, to keep the window in its track. For now, I’ve added a strip of clear duct tape to one side of the panel for something to pull it with, since there is no longer an exposed edge to use to slide it.
Problem solved.
Almost.
Advance polls opened today and my younger daughter and I headed out to vote. On my way to the truck, I checked the isolation shelter and found The Grink, all alone again! Both sliding windows were still in place. That left only one way she could have gotten out.
Through the roof.
After we got back, I found Magda and put her back into the isolation shelter. I then took the bricks that the box we put over the entrance to shelter from the wind were sitting on top of, and put them on the roof to weight it down. You can see that in the next image in the above slide show. These bricks are salvaged from the chimney to the wood burning furnace that was removed when the new roof was installed.
Hopefully, that will keep Magda Houdini in the shelter! (You can just see her in the last picture; those windows need to be cleaned, inside and out!) It is not good for her at all to be squeezing through things and jumping down from such a height, when she is so fresh from surgery. Plus, we still need to dose her ears until we’re out of that medication.
Once we are able to move the shelter away from the house and give it a thorough cleaning, I hope to do a few minor modifications to it. One of them is to figure out a way to latch the roof so it can’t be pushed open from the inside. I also want to find some strong handles to attach to it – the ones I have on hand are not heavy duty enough for the job – to make is easier to maneuver. Eventually, I want to replace the wheels with larger ones, as well. We got the best that we could afford, and they’re good, but the shelter is heavy enough that the wheels want to sink into the ground when it’s being wheeled across the lawn. All in all, though, there is very little that needs to be modified. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.
Today has been a surprisingly cold day. When we were out and about earlier, it was around -2C/28F, but the wind chill put it at -9C/16F We’re supposed to reach a high of 2C/36F today, but it will still be very windy.
A good day to stay indoors and get ready for Easter.
We’ve got a turkey thawing out for Sunday, and the sourdough loaf for our basket is also thawing out. After a bit of organizing and cleaning up, we’re going to select a basket from our collection and start assembling it to be blessed tomorrow, and then we will enjoy the contents on Easter morning. Today being Good Friday, it is also a day of quiet and contemplation.
On that, note, my daughter has been working on things while I write this, and it’s time for me to go help her out!
I lost track of things and forgot that today was Valentine’s Day!
This morning, I had a 8am telephone appointment with my mother’s doctor. Normally, I would be outside, giving the cats their food and warm water. We were still under an ongoing extreme cold warning (which is now finally over), so I would have basically just taken care of the cats and skipped most of my morning rounds!
With the phone appointment, however, I messaged my daughters, asking if they could take care of the outside cats. I was pretty sure my older daughter had gone to bed after a night’s work, but I wasn’t sure if my younger daughter was available.
She was, and she took care of the outside cats for me, while I waited for the call.
Which was about half an hour late, of course. My daughter was back inside, updating me, when the phone rang. With the cats’ food trays and bowls so full of frozen kibble, we’re figuring out ways to make it so they can actually eat it. With the isolation shelter open again, I’m thinking of taking some of kibble from the kibble shelter and putting it in the isolation shelter. When there was just two cats, there was excess kibble, but once the other cats started going in there again, the bowl was empty, and even the kibble scattered about was eaten up!
As for the phone call, it wasn’t my mother’s doctor that called, but another doctor working with her. I explained about my mother having been in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and how we were told she needs to see a doctor every month to monitor her kidney function, now that she’s back on the water pills. They didn’t actually have everything in my mother’s file yet, and the doctor had to ask me when she had been discharged!
They did have the results of her last bloodwork done while she was in the hospital, though, and he could tell me her kidneys are doing just fine.
The problem, of course, is making a 93 yr old who struggles to walk, climb into the truck and drive to the clinic, over and over, because there are no local doctors available.
The hospital in her town does have a lab, though.
My mother won’t need to physically go to the clinic every month.
They will mail bloodwork requisition forms to my mother every month. The local hospital will not accept these forms being faxed to them. It would have been better if I could physically pick it up, to eliminate any risk of the form being lost in the mail, but that’s just not an option.
I will, however, be in that town next week, and will be stopping at the clinic to get my own medical files to take to my new doctor, before my daughter and I have our appointments. So he got a form printed out and it will be waiting for me when I get there. As my mother had bloodwork done this month, already, she won’t need to get it done again until next month.
Aside from that, she can have telephone appointments to go over the results, though they do that only if there is a problem. She won’t need to physically come in for an appointment unless there is a need. We will have to continue to monitor her for swelling and breathing issues, which the doctor at the hospital already explained to us, and my mother is to go to the ER right away, if problems start up again.
That done, I updated my siblings in our group chat, as much to make sure I wrote down the details while it was still fresh in my mind as to share it with family. Then I phoned my mother to update her.
As I started talking to her about the monthly appointments the hospital doctor said she needed, and that I called the clinic about them, my mother got somewhat agitated. It took a bit to figure it out, but she was under the impression she had a physical appointment with her doctor. I had told her I had made a phone appointment to talk about her case, but since then, she got it in her mind that this was an appointment with her, not about her. I clarified and told her, I’d made a phone appointment with me, that I had just gotten off the phone, and I was calling to let her know how it went.
She stayed very quiet as I went through the call which, in itself, is unusual. Normally, she interrupts and starts taking the conversation in other directions. I’m not completely sure how much she understood, but when I got to the part about going to the local hospital for monthly blood work, she said that we would have to keep track of that for her.
Which, of course, was already the plan!
She then started talking about her medications and the lock box. To make is short, my mother was very angry about having the lock box, the home care aids cant get into it, she doesn’t need this big box and can manage her own medications.
I was alarmed when she said the home care aids can’t get into it. She said she didn’t get her medications this morning. At first, she made it sound like it was because the aide couldn’t open it, but if that were true, I would have gotten a phone call. Or my brother would have. This happened only once, with one person, though. My mother had 2 other visits the day before, after the new lock box was brought over, and got her medications. Now she was saying the aids can’t get into the box at all?
I asked if she got her morning medications, and she said no.
No one showed up.
????
Again, if they were short staffed, I would have got a phone call, because I would have had to drive to my mother’s to give her her medications.
Then I noticed the time.
It wasn’t even 9am yet.
They are supposed to give her her medications before 7 an 9am.
I mentioned the time and said, they probably just haven’t made it yet.
Well, my mother was still quite angry. She can manage her own medications. They don’t always come at the same time. She doesn’t need this big box.
We talked for awhile and I reminded her, this was doctor’s orders. It was for her own safety.
Oh, so my children don’t trust me?
I brought up that she herself has noticed she is not remembering things. Then I brought up the pill boxes full of loose pills I’d found when I got her old bubble packs to take the the pharmacy, and that the pharmacist had to dispose of them. She has a history of messing with her medications, and things like that were why she needed a lock box and med assist from home care. This is for her safety.
I didn’t bring it up with my mother, but in the group chat with my siblings later, I mentioned that all these pills she had in there were pills she did not take when she should have. Plus, she ignored the days and times on the bubble packs, just staring from the top, and taking them whenever she had her breakfast, because she is supposed to take them with food (except I don’t think any of them actually specify to take with food). And by “with food”, she means with a couple of crackers or cookies or a piece of toast and, before we got the home care med assist, she would take them at 5am and 5pm and before bed, instead of the times on the bubble pack. As a result, she often had a couple of active bubble packs going at once, and really made things harder for the home care aids.
But all of that would have been too much to talk to her about. We basically just have to bring it down to “doctor’s orders” and “it’s for your safety.”
Our call got interrupted, though, by a knock at the door.
The home care aid had arrived to give her her morning medications.
My mother has no understanding of how much she is messing herself up.
After I got off the phone with my mother, I updated my siblings again. My mother’s behavior is a strong demonstration of just why having that lock box, and home care visits for her med assist, is so important. We were able to chat for a bit, wondering about how my mother will handle having a Life Line, once that gets set up.
It can be really hard to help my mother when she keeps trying to sabotage our efforts. These group chats and updates are extra important, because my mother will say one thing to me, then something different to each of my siblings, then tries to play us against each other. This is something she has done for pretty much as long as I can remember though, of course, as a child, I had no understanding of what she was doing.
Aside from the group chat, I got a Valentine’s Day message from my SIL, which is when I was reminded that that’s what today it.
Which got me to thinking about the whole theme of Valentine’s Day being about love, and about what it means to love someone. Years ago, I read a point someone very wise said.
Love is a verb.
Most of us think of love as a feeling. Something you “fall into”. An emotion.
Which all can be part of love but, in the end, love is not how we feel, but what we do.
The English language rather fails when it comes to the word love. There are too many definitions for one word. The Ancient Greeks had different words for love that I think we could not go wrong, bringing back. They also viewed their words for love on a sort of scale. There are nine modern and ancient words for love. Here are four ancient ones.
The first type of love – the basest form – is eros. Eros is physical love, and the root of our word, erotica. Eros is about sex, really. In English, it would probably be better translated as “lust”. Eros was considered the lowest form of love.
The next type of love is philia. This is platonic love. Yes, there is a physical aspect to it – hugs and kisses between friends that have zero sexual connotations – but philia is brotherly love. The love of deep friendship. Philia is used in many ways in our language. Philadelphia is known as the “city of brotherly love” based on the Greek definition. It is also found in the suffix -phile. One example being bibliophile, a lover of books.
The next type of love, higher on the scale, is storgê. This is what might be called, family love. It is particularly used to described married couples raising their children together.
The highest form of love, however is ágape. This is unconditional love. Sacrificial love. Agape is independent of any external factors. It is given wholly, and expects nothing in return. Agape is the foundation of Christianity; that Jesus set aside His godhood to live fully human; a sinless life we could not hope to achieve, take on the punishment for our sins we all deserve – all of us, throughout humanity, throughout time. An execution so horrific, a new word was invented to describe the pain. Excruciating. Ex crucio. From the cross. To die in our place, so that He could conquer death, that we may live. All we have to do is fully accept this gift of His, yet we have no obligation to do so. That is the height of agape love.
So what is love, in our daily lives?
Love is what we do.
Love is to be friends with someone, be apart for years, yet when reunited, it’s as if those years apart never happened.
Love is seeing each other at our best and at our worst, and still being there for each other.
Love is a couple growing old together, facing the world together, long after the tingles have faded.
Love is a parent denying a child something they want, in favour of something they need, even when the child has a blowout and says they hate us for it.
In one of my recent devotions, these verses from Luke 11 were included.
5Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ 7And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity e he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
While the devotion was about persistence in prayer, as both a parent and someone with a lifelong interest in how people lived in the past, this line stands out to me.
‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’
In context for the time period, most likely the family was sleeping together on a mat woven of reeds or grasses. Even overnight visitors would join the pile. Can you just picture it? Husband and wife, lying on the floor, their kids snuggled up around or even on them. Dad there with a toddler on his chest and another child on each side, while Mom lies next to them with a babe at her breast… and then there’s a knock at the door! No wonder the response is “don’t bother me… I can’t get up…” !!
For most of human history, that’s how we slept. That’s how we lived. We had almost constant physical contact with each other. It wasn’t until the Victorian era that houses started to have rooms set aside just for sleeping, and that children got separate rooms to sleep in. Even now, in many places around the world, separate bedrooms (and sometimes just having beds) are a luxury, and the idea of children sleeping apart from their parents would be unheard of.
Sadly, we live in a world hungry for love. Real love.
We even hunger for the platonic physical aspects of love that used to be just part of our everything living, before cradles and cribs and separate beds and bedrooms became the norm, among other changes. Our culture has become so hungry for philia and storge, many turn to eros to fill the emptiness. We have reached a point when many cannot view any sort of physical affection as being anything but eros. A parent can’t even kiss their own child on the lips, or a mother breastfeed her baby, without people viewing it as something sexual in nature.
Our current culture, at least in our Western nations, has redefined love in other ways. To far too many, love means to always go along with what a person wants. To validate and enable anything they do, even if they are self harming in the process. It means to agree with anything they say, no matter how wrong they are. If you do not do this, you get accused of hate – another word that has been redefined dramatically!
Which brings me back to today.
Today, my mother was very angry about her medications being in a lock box. When told the reason why, she tried to turn it around and accuse us of not trusting her.
For some people, the “loving” thing would be to do what she wants. To make her “happy” by giving in. Take away the lock box, and let her take her meds whenever she thinks she should, or only the ones she thinks she should, even though she can’t remember what all of them are anymore, and certainly doesn’t know what the new ones are.
That would, of course, be wrong and even harmful. So the loving thing to do is NOT what she wants, but what is good for her, even if she can’t understand it and has hairy fits about it.
When it comes to my mother, I don’t “feel” love for her. I don’t know if I ever have. Years of confusing and abusive behaviour made that impossible. But she is my mother, and I still “do” love for her. She can get mad at me and yell at me and say cruel things to me, but I will still “do” love. Or she can flip like a switch and suddenly become oddly generous or kind, and I don’t know if it’s real, or if she’s trying to mess with me. It doesn’t matter. I will still “do” love. That doesn’t mean I’ll put up with the behavior, and I will call her out on it – which is also a way to “do” love.
I can make similar parallels to our home life, where my husband has to sleep in a hospital bed in another room. We may not be able to share a bed, but we can still “do” love.
Or where our daughters gave up so much to move out with us, turned the poorly insulated upstairs into their own apartment, and put up with freezing winters and boiling summers up there.
Or my younger daughter crawling out of a warm bed this morning, to go outside in freezing temperatures, to feed and water the cats while I wait for a phone call.
There are so many ways to “do” love.
This Valentine’s Day, I wish you much philia. I wish you storge and agape and even, if appropriate, a little bit of eros!
Today is January 6 which, in our family, is our official last day of Christmas.
Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, also known as Three Kings Day. When the girls were little, they would have put their shoes out last night, filled with “hay” for the three kings’ camels, which would be replaced with a few treats and small toys for them to find in the morning.
The Bible doesn’t actually say there were three kings. Rather, it speaks of the Magi – wise men – from the East, who came bearing gifts for the newborn king of the Jews, and doesn’t say how many there were. It mentions three gifts – gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Matthew 2:9-11
And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them,
until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.
They were overjoyed at seeing the star,
and on entering the house
they saw the child with Mary his mother.
They prostrated themselves and did him homage.
Then they opened their treasures
and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
While nativity scenes often have the wise men at the stable with a newborn Jesus in the manger (the “inn” referred to in English translations would more accurately have been translated as “upper room”, and the stable would have been in the lower room of an extended family household, overcrowded by other family members come to Bethlehem for the census). By the time the magi arrived, Joseph and Mary would have been properly married and, as described in the verses above, living in their own house. By the time Herod realized the magi were not returning, enough time had passed that he ordered all males under 2 yrs old in Bethlehem slaughtered. I’ve read estimates, based on what is know of the region and likely population of Bethlehem at the time, that the number of children killed might have been about 17, though of course, no one really knows.
Joseph, Mary and Jesus were safely in Egypt by then. Egypt was also under Roman rule, so this was akin to moving to another province or state.
At this, we have a close to our Christmas season. I hope you and yours have had a blessed time, and that the new year will be one of peace and good health, and may all your needs be met.
January 4, the eleventh day of Christmas, is the memorial day Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton – a considerably more modern saint, and the first US citizen to be canonized as a saint.
Today, January 3, is the tenth day of Christmas. Rather than honoring a saint, today honours a name. The Most Holy Name of Jesus.
Jesus, of course, is the name we know in the English language. I grew up in a Polish household and, while spelled the same, we pronounced is YEH-sus (the J in Polish has the same sound as the English Y).
In Hebrew, 2000 years ago, it was Yeshua (Joshua), which means Yahweh Saves. It was actually a common name in the period. The Greek translation is Iesous. He was also Emmanuel, which means “God with Us”. There were other names and titles attributed to Him as well, but the most important one is the one He used for himself, in John 8:58. I Am. That is the name of God himself, from Exodus, and is an example of when Jesus directly identified Himself as being God incarnate, which ultimately got Him executed.
Which didn’t quite go the way the Pharisees planned, now, did it? 😁
We’ve got a bit of a break in between things, so I thought I’d drop in and wish everyone a Happy New Year!
Image created by WP AI image generator
My daughter and I headed out this afternoon to go to the bank in my mother’s town, where she could get a replacement debit card, after discovering someone had stolen her number and tried to use it in the US somewhere. Since it was so close to the grocery store, I dropped her off and went in to pick up some drinks for tonight, and more sandwich meats – because I know, no one is going to want to cook for the next while!
Then I spotted some excellent sale prices and got a few more things. Of course. 😄
When my daughter joined me, she picked up a couple of things just to confirm her replacement debit card was properly activated.
Before heading out, we stopped to fill the gas tank. Our province’s gas tax break ends tonight, and the prices are expected to jump by about 12¢/L tomorrow. Unfortunately, the prices went up since yesterday. I’d put some gas in yesterday at $1.309 and today it was at $1.369 *sigh*
And we’ve got so much driving to do in the next couple of weeks!
From there, we made a quick stop at the post office to pick up a parcel for my husband that came in today. While I was there, I got a cheap (on sale) bottle of wine for tonight. Then I saw the most adorable display of tiny mason jars of “Moonshine” (that’s the brand name) in different flavours. I ended up getting one of each for us to taste test. For the price of those, I spent more on them than the bottle of wine, but I’ll never be buying them again, so I figured it was a nice treat. The full size jars – these drinks all come in mason jars – are a pretty standard inventory item, but I’ve never seen the minis before. Our tiny little general store’s booze corner doesn’t have a lot of space, and these are seasonal items, so I don’t expect to see them again. Mind you, for such a tiny space, they manage an amazing selection.
From there it was home. As my daughter and I were gathering stuff to take to the house, I noticed something strange on the shelf against the wall.
The garage door handle.
My daughter had gone ahead to start the truck as we were leaving and, when she opened the door, the handle hit the sagging door frame and broke loose. When she closed the door as we were leaving the garage, I could see the screws in the door, holding bits of the handle still!
I don’t see the point of replacing the handle until we can do something about that sagging frame.
While my daughter took care of putting things away, I made sure to give the outside cats their evening feeding.
He is a strange one when it comes to trying to pet him! He wants pets, but he also wants to bite my hand. Or lick it. Or attack it with his paws. Or push his head against it, asking for more pets, then biting at my hand again.
Silly boy!
For now, we have a bit of time on our hands before we need to start preparing things for tonight. There isn’t a lot that can be done in advance. We plan to have a whole bunch of different appetizers that need to go into the oven, a vegetable tray with dip, a charcuterie board and baked brie with a variety of crackers, mini Naan and cubed French bread.
Oh, I just remembered something that needs to be made ahead! Asparagus pinwheels. They’re a simple appetizer. Flour tortilla spread with cream cheese all over, then rolled with pickled asparagus spears in the middle. This time, we will be including prosciutto with the asparagus spears. After they are rolled up, they get sliced into rounds about half an inch thick. They’re awesome, but we only make them for days like today. We just don’t normally have pickled asparagus spears around.
As we enjoy our spread this evening, we plan to continue our Lord of the Rings marathon until midnight.
Since I have to go to my mother’s so early in the morning for her MRI, I might take a couple of hours nap (I made a point of napping earlier today), but may end up just staying up all night, then sleeping when I get home.
I get the feeling sleep is going to be in short supply for the next while. 😄
Meanwhile, I hope you all have a grand time celebrating this New Year’s Eve and welcoming in 2025!
The Re-Farmer 