The Beast looks so tiny at the top! Directly below is Pom Pom, and they are both on top of Clarence, who is getting HUGE. Then there’s Shadow at the bottom. Tin Whistle is snuggled into Clarence’s chest, and Ghosty is off by herself. Soot Sprite crawled into the pile after I took this photo, too!
All the cats are doing well. I have not been able to get a picture of Toni. She is such a worm! If you come close to pet her, she starts to squirm and roll and wriggle – then seems confused when the petting stops, because she’s no longer in reach.
Today is working out to be a fairly quiet day. We have reached 8C/46F! Warmer than forecast. I think I’ll take advantage of it and head into town to refill the water jugs after I finish writing this.
Speaking of taking advantage of the weather…
After talking with my brother (I don’t think he’s happy with me, but he did agree to the vehicle sales), I did some research on that old panel van, then contacted the guy today. The van is actually a 1950 Dodge panel truck, and it turns out to be a collector’s item. I found some similar ones, 1959 or so, in rough shape like this one, but they still had their engines and door handles, etc. selling for $2000 or more. That would be US dollars, too. Anyhow, some years ago, my brother said it was worth around $1000, and that does not seem to have changed.
When I first called the guy, I left a message and mentioned that. They decided not to buy the panel truck! 😄 The other vehicles will be used in restoration, but that one was an “extra”.
To take advantage of the mild weather we’re having, they’ll be coming out on Friday for a truck and two cars. The tractor his son wants to buy will likely have to wait until spring. The forecast does say we are supposed to get heavy snow on Thursday, but only briefly in the morning, then Friday warms up again, so it should be okay.
I missed getting a picture of Judgement curled up around the kitten. He moved when I stop to get a picture.
Every once in a while, that kitten lets me pet it, and even pick it up.
Today was not one of those times.
It’s been really nice outside today. According to the weather apps, we hit 6C/43F instead of the predicted high of 4C/39F. We hit 6C yesterday, too. The forecast is for 4C tomorrow, then 7C/45F! All the paths we shovelled are melted and green, and there is water pooling in parts of the driveway, visible in the tire tracks.
A perfect day to walk around!
The guy that was interested in the old vehicles has come and gone. He came with his wife, his son, and two of his son’s friends. Really nice people! We started off looking at vehicles in the old hay yard, then made our way to the car graveyard, then back into the outer yard to where there are some vehicles by the storage shed, and even the ones by the old threshing machine. The son and his friends were really excited when we went past the old Farmhand tractor. Turns out one of them has one, that runs. They were so thrilled to see that it still had the original hand crank! 😄 In fact, they were geeking out all over the place. The wife, meanwhile, was just following along with her coffee, slightly bemused. Cars are definitely not her thing. 😁
In the end, they identified three vehicles they want to make offers on, and the son and his friends asked to include the tractor, too. That actually made me happy. I’ve already talked to my brother about having someone take it. I was thinking one of my nephews, perhaps. This is something that has historical value, and can still be restored. The longer it sits out there, though, the worse its condition will become.
They will talk it over, then he’ll call me with an offer to pass on to my brother.
I know my brother asked me not to let them in, but I hope he can trust me enough to understand why I did, anyhow. We’re already talking about selling this stuff for scrap, and we won’t get much money for them. Not the cars, anyhow. The old farm equipment would get more, since they don’t have things like vinyl dashboards and padded seats that need to be removed. If there is someone willing to buy individual vehicles for parts and restoration, I see that as a better option. We’d get a better price per vehicle that way, too, even it’s not by much.
We shall see how it turns out! I was very happy to meet them all and we had a great time walking around and chatting. They were excited like kids in a candy store at times! There were even a couple of vehicles they’d never heard of before, and would be all giddy about things like window shapes on an Epic, and the fins on the back of one old car from the 50’s.
The only downside I can think of, is that I don’t think my brother knows just how bad a shape most of these vehicles are. He thinks anything can be fixed, which may well be true, but who is going to fix them? Not us, and he sure doesn’t have the time to do it. He’s already got way too much to deal with! I even feel bad that he took so much time to come out here to climb up on the roof, then into that tunnel, and finally to replace the light fixture. He was here for 4 hours, plus another 2-3 hours driving time, plus time at the hardware sore, plus the amount of money he spent on the supplies. He really went above and beyond! He always does.
He is protective of his baby sister, too. Perhaps a bit over protective! 🧡😁
I tried to do a head count this morning, while feeding the yard cats. I got either 34 or 35. Rolando Moon was not around, but Sad Face was there this time.
I still don’t know which ones are the new ones. All 15 cats in this photo are regulars, as far as I can tell. There’s that spotty grey tabby, on the water house roof, that I was talking about yesterday, that I hadn’t seen in a while.
I ended up spending most of the day in the van with a friend, two cats and our aquarium fish in a bucket, while my daughter took a walk around downtown until I messaged her to come back.
What a mess the whole thing turned out to be.
It gives me the willies, just thinking about it.
On a completely different note…
I’m going against my brother’s wishes today. Partly.
Last week, I got a call from someone interested in some of the old vehicles we’ve got lying around. He’s interested in restoring vehicles which, to me, is a lot better than just selling them for scrap! I did tell him it was my brother that owned the place, and we were going to wait until the weather was better for him to come out. He called last night, and talked about his son and a friend coming over, late this morning. I did tell him, he wasn’t going to be able to get anything out right away. He’d have to see, to understand.
Then, of course, I told my brother. I would never sell anything without talking to him, first, since this is all his stuff.
My brother said, don’t let them in.
???
We were messaging, so he called and we talked about it.
There were a few concerns he had. The first was that this was someone trying to take advantage of me and offer less than the vehicles are worth – and I sure as heck wouldn’t know what they’re really worth. Still, I think my brother doesn’t realize just how far gone some of those vehicles are. I didn’t even know which one the guy was interested in; he’d said a Ford truck, but there are several of those!
Another concern my brother had is that these vehicles have basically been used as storage. They have all sorts of things in them he might want to keep. He’d have to go looking through them all, even if we were just going to call a scrap dealer, to make sure nothing was hauled away that shouldn’t be. That won’t happen until spring, at the earliest.
And finally, there’s the question of how to transfer ownership. As far as we know, none of these vehicles have any sort of ownership papers left. It wouldn’t matter for something going for scrap, but if a vehicle is going to be restored, registered and insured, there needs to be some sort of paper trail. It’s something he and my parents had to deal with, years ago, and it was a major pain to find a workaround.
So when the guy called this morning, as I asked him to, so I could open the gate, I told him I had bad news and explained the situation.
In the end, though, I decided to let them come and take a look. I honestly don’t think they’ll find anything worth buying, but looking wouldn’t hurt. It turns out he’s not only interested in looking at the ones in the old hay yard, but was wanting to see the vehicles way out in the car graveyard, too. He knows nothing will change hands, but he will bring along pen and paper and write out which (if any) he’s interested in, and an offer. I can then pass that on to my brother.
I hope my brother understands that I’m actually trying to help him out with this. Of course, if they don’t see anything they’re interested in, it won’t matter either way. In the end, we really need to get those old vehicles out. If for no other reason than they are a hazard for the renter’s cows!
So I’ve got the gate open, and am keeping an eye on the security camera live feed for them, and we’ll go for a walk together. The guy is even bringing his wife along. 😊
Here we were, happy to have one last “warm” day to do the winter mulching, because it was likely to be the last day above freezing this year.
The forecast has changed.
They’re now saying we’re supposed to hit 6C/43F … in the middle of November!
While I was out, helping my mother run errands, it was just below freezing, and that was enough to set things melting in some areas. Over the next few days, we’re supposed to get snow, or a mix of snow and rain, because we’re expected to go just above freezing again. To have basically a week of temperatures between 4-6C/39-43F, that is enough to melt away all the snow we currently have.
I’m not complaining.
The mulch we put on the garden works both ways; it’ll keep the ground from freezing too much, but will also keep it from warming up too much. Otherwise, the garlic might start sprouting, only to get killed off when the deep freeze hits.
Also, we’re supposed to hit 4C/39F on the day I’m taking 6 cats in to be spayed and neutered!
I was messaging with the Cat Lady about that. She’s really stressing that we need to make sure and use all those slots she’s booking, and stay on the good side of this vet. It seems the last time the vet had one of these steeply discounted spay days, half the people who booked never showed up. Which I find absolutely astonishing. After that happened, the vet basically banned the no-shows from rebooking. Understandable! As for the Cat Lady, she’s been trying to help someone else slightly north of us that has a yard cat colony even larger than ours. That person was one of the no shows. Apparently, the drop off time of 8am was too early for her. Which blows me away. Yeah, it’s early, when you have to drive quite a ways to get there, but the vet has even said that if someone is in that situation and has to stay in town until it’s time to pick up their cats, let them know and they’ll try to do those cats first. For me, I’ll leave earlier than necessary, just in case I get stuck behind slow traffic, or have a breakdown or… who knows. Things happen. I just can’t imagine giving up such a deal on getting spays and neuters, and I especially can’t imagine just not showing up after booking an appointment! It’s happened so often, however, that the Cat Lady says we’re basically the only ones she’s still willing to help out with spays and neuters through her rescue.
We actually show up.
The only stickler right now is, each cat has to be in its own carrier. We’ve got 4 carriers, and need to bring in 6 cats. She’s put the word out to people who have borrowed carriers from her to bring them back, trying to come up with two more we can use.
I got curious and went looking online. If we really need to, there are soft sided carriers available through our nearest Walmart that are on clearance – but only if we order online, it seems. But we’re talking about only $10 or so for a carrier. Heck, I might just order a couple for pick up, since I have to go there soon, anyhow. I’d rather have hard sided carriers, but any carrier is better than no carrier! We’d just have to be careful what cats go in them, because some would tear their way right out of a soft sided carrier!
Well, if I’m going to be doing some running around, at least I’ll have good weather for it!
Just not tomorrow, because that’s when we’re supposed to get both snow and rain.
Well, I won’t be going to help my mother today – we’ll be doing that tomorrow – which means I can get work done outside while it’s “warm” today. Yay!
But first, the adorable:
David is so good with the kittens! He’s also a great ball of fluff, and the kittens love to snuggle up to him. At one point, Shadow, here, was completely engulfed in David’s fur, but moved before I could get a picture.
Now, the funny:
As the day warmed up yesterday, the snow on the metal roof of the water bowl house started to slight off – until an icicle stopped it! Yes, that overhanging piece of snow is being held in place by the tiny tip of the shorter icicle.
And now the ugly.
Tumblr.
Fair warning, I guess, that some people might have issues with what I’m about to say next. That’s okay. I’m not offended by people disagreeing with me. Also, a warning for later on, for those who don’t want to hear about war crimes.
I got a Tumblr account, quite a few years ago. Mostly because my daughters got accounts, and it was a way of sharing things and so on. Just another social media account. I’ve got quite a few of them, most of which I rarely go to. My older daughter uses it for her online business, and it’s the source of many of her commissions. Frankly, with her skill and talent, I think she could do much better if she marketed herself elsewhere, but it’s her business – literally – not mine. When I started this blog, I set it so that my posts will automatically share to a Facebook account I created for it, and to the Tumblr account I created under the same name.
At the time we started our account, Tumblr was still a pretty sane. It was a lot of younger people, who wanted something other than Facebook. The joke was that Facebook was all about middle ages wine drinking women. It isn’t, but I know enough of them that I found the joke funny.
In its early years. Tumblr went through the same struggles FB did, with the usual p0rn bots and explicit material inundating people’s feeds. They did eventually solve that one, and things settled for a while.
Social media, in general, is a cesspool. The anonymity of the internet tends to bring out the worst in people. People throw out threats of death, rape and violence at the drop of a hat, as well as vile insults, instead of having actual… you know… discussions about things we disagree with. Limitations on how long comments can be make it harder to hold those discussions, but people don’t even try. Instead of “I disagree with you, here’s why”, it’s “You are a terrible, evil person and deserve to die” or whatever. Twitter in particular used to be really bad for that. It’s why I never started a Twitter account. I probably still won’t, now that it’s X, but since Musk took over, he’s actually done a pretty good job of cleaning it up.
Which brings me back to Tumblr.
Over the past few years, the content on Tumblr has gotten increasingly worse. We’ve got an entire generation of people who have been indoctrinated into far left extremism from kindergarten through university. They can barely read, can’t spell, can barely formulate a coherent sentence, know nothing of history except for revisionist history, can barely do simple arithmetic, and couldn’t logic their way out of a paper bag (there are exceptions, of course, but they are the minority), but my goodness, they sure do think Capitalism is Eeeevil, all white people are racists, and of course, riddled with gender ideology.
Then Musk started cleaning up Twitter, and all the p0rn bots, child s3x traffickers and g00mers moved to Tumblr and TikTok. They were already there, of course. There was just suddenly more of them. Right after the takeover, a lot of leftwing extremists, who think “freedom of speech” is a bad thing, left the platform for Tumblr and TikTok (the garbage took itself out!). For a while there, my Tumblr account was being inundated with new “followers” that were bots and/or p0rn, which I would block and report – hopefully before I saw some animated gif … activity, shall we say.. Eventually, Tumblr seems to have gotten control of that, but not quite. They have this think in the dashboard with recommended Tumblrs to visit, including “live” streams. From the thumbnails, every single one of them I see looks like it’s p0rn. I could report them, as p0rn and sexually explicit material is not allowed, but in order to do that, I have to click on them, first, and I’m not about to do that.
Things have really exploded since Oct. 7. No, not because a terrorist group with the explicitly stated, charter written goal of genocide against Jews attacked Israeli civilians – a war crime in itself. Not because these creatures (I wouldn’t even call them “animals”, because animals would never stoop to this level of degeneracy) murdered, tortured, raped and abducted civilians, degrading women in public and desecrating bodies. Not because they murdered entire families, from infants in their cradles to the elderly. No.
They support the bad guys.
As with so many other things, they’ve redefined things. Evil becomes good. Lies become truth. Wrong becomes right. Even words are redefined. For a group that hates “capitalism”, they don’t even know what it is. Likewise, words like “colonizer”. They only know the meanings they’ve been indoctrinated into. Then, because they live in a very loud bubble, they have come to believe they are the majority, and that anyone who disagrees with them is evil. Not just wrong.
A kicker was when I saw some “art” being shared, purportedly done by an artist in Gaza that was killed by an Israeli air strike. If this were true (and there was no reason to believe it is), this would have been suicide by Israel, and I said as much. There was plenty of warning. Civilians could have left. Or at least, they could have, if Hamas hadn’t blocked their routes out of Gaza, but that’s another issue. Anyhow, I was accused of having “no empathy”.
So now we have Tumblr awash with Palestinian propaganda, with absolutely nothing about what was done to Israel. As far as these people know, Israel just up and decided to commit genocide against Palestinians for no reason. They either have no clue, or justify, the fact that Palestinians supported with Hamas did, and were celebrating and dancing in the streets, not just in Gaza, but around the world.
Which makes being accused of having “no empathy” truly ironic, since these people clearly have no empathy for things like a baby being put in an oven and roasted alive, while the mother was repeatedly raped, and after the father was murdered. Or about how families in their safe rooms (imagine living in a place where you need to have a safe room in your home!) had their houses burned around them. Some survived. Some roasted to death in their safe rooms. Those that tried to escape their burning homes ran out, only to be shot to death by the waiting Hamas. Or the people who got tortured or raped in front of their loved ones, before being executed. There was even a Hamas terrorist that phoned his mother from the home of one of his victims, bragged about the atrocities he had just committed, and was praised by his family for it.
But nooo…. these are not the bad guys. The “zionists” are the bad guys, and the Palestinians that were so happy about what was done to Israeli civilians are the victims.
Tumblr is just oozing with anti-Jew hatred right now – and the people engaging in it actually try to say that “the Jews” agree with them.
Yeah. Logic is not their strong point.
Anyhow.
So I started going something I haven’t been doing for years.
I’m starting to use my Tumblr account.
More specifically, I’m sharing accurate information to Tumblr. Historically accurate, evidentially accurate and truthful information. Yes, I vetted this stuff first, and if something is a mix of both (the best lies have at least some truth in them), I won’t share it.
One of my sources is someone who grew up with the ideology of the region. He knows it because he lived it and believed it. Today, he made a video about a statement made today by the Palestinian Authority – not Hamas – that explicitly stated their intention of exterminating the Jews, complete with koranic verses about it, that was being preached in mosques in sermons. It even showed how these “leaders” are lying to their own people. I shared it, and lo and behold, I actually got a comment (“notes”) on it (I don’t promote my Tumblr account, so I don’t typically get any reactions from there).
I also shared an unrelated video talking about Canada’s insane and bizarre gun “buy back” scheme that got delayed. This is what I got under the gun control video.
As you can see, I don’t have any patience with idiocy.
Note that the person did not say anything to counter the actual claims in the post. They just went straight into an attack on me – and my crops. I doubt they even watched the video to see what it was about. Also “say it to my face” is hilarious, considering they’re the ones that started off attacking me.
As for the video about the PA declaring their intend to commit genocide on Jews?
That’s right. Under a video about how the PA – not Hamas – has made a statement explicitly saying they intend to wipe out all Jews in all the world, I was attacked for not having “real empathy” for people.
Again, I doubt this person even bothered to watch the video. Especially considering how quickly after I shared it, that they commented. Also, for this person to then claim to speak for “Jewish people” would be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that Jewish people were so horrifically slaughtered.
This is pretty typical. They don’t even try to argue their position. They just go straight into the personal attacks. What you WON’T see is any sort of proper argumentation or rational debate. It’s all pure emotionalism and pure, unadulterated hate. These comments are pretty mild. I’ve seen much worse, elsewhere.
I didn’t bother screen capping the rest of my response, which was a bit of a history lesson. Which is probably talking to a wall, but I don’t expect people like this to have the cognitive ability to process the information. Someone reading it might, though.
So Tumblr is a cesspool, and it’s gotten much, much worse of late. The things my daughters are being exposed to is bad enough that it’s affecting our relationship. I’ve even seen one daughter sharing “art” that was essentially p0rn featuring surgically mutilated bodies, under the guise of a particular s3xual identity. Recently, I was telling a daughter about a Mary Pickford movie I’d just watched, that had a particularly well done and moving scene involving the death of a child. I mentioned the name “Jesus” and my daughter had a visceral reaction of disgust. Keep in mind, that my daughters were strong Christians, based on research, evidence and logic. But reason, evidence and logic holds little sway against emotionalism. One of the first things the “gr00mers” and indoctrinators do is divide their targets away from their loved ones, and that means viewing them as the “enemy” and shunning them. We used to be able to talk about anything, even when we disagreed. Now, they just walk away or make snarky, gaslighting comments. I’ve considered deleting my Tumblr account, but that wouldn’t actually solve anything. It’s gotten to a point where my husband and I are seriously considering blocking certain sites, using parental controls (ironic that we never needed to consider this when our daughters were younger!), but that won’t solve the problem. Just cause new ones. We’d have to cut of the internet completely, and that would end my daughter’s online business, end this blog, and end a primary means of communication (we’d have to cut off the data plan on our cell phones, too. Though we do live in a cell phone dead zone, some signal does still occasionally make it through and, of course, would be an issue anywhere we go).
So what, realistically, can we do about it? Not a whole heck of a lot that will actually be useful.
Well, hopefully, things will improve. Right now, am about to go outside with my daughters to get some physical labour done. We all need to spend more time outside, and less time on our computers.
It’s a bit of a habit of mine to look through the bathroom into the sun room, checking on the cats, during the night. Usually, as things have been getting chillier, there’s a huge pile of kittens in the big cat bed in front of the cat cage. Yesterday, I’d put some scrap pieces of rigid insulation on top of the cage – they had been over the smaller window last winter, but are too scratched up to use again this year, so I just set them aside. The cats love that insulation (and not just to scratch at!), and I was soon seeing several at a time, sitting in the sun spot on top of the cage. I’ll also see cats in the window, or at the food and water bowls, etc.
Last night, however, I wasn’t seeing any cats. Even this morning, as I was about to go out to feed them, the sun room was empty. They didn’t start coming in until they heard the old kitchen door, and the sound of kibble being pored into the little bin.
Even after they were fed and watered, they were staying out of the sun room! I saw most of them running around the yard, but I also saw this…
There are five of the older kittens in the window! The fifth one is a black cat in the bottom left corner of the window. As I was taking the photo, I could see yellow eyes watching me, but it moved as I took the picture, so it’s basically just disappeared in the photo.
Nice to see them using the cat house so much more, as the temperatures drop.
As I was finishing up and heading in, I went into the sun room and looked around for cats. I saw none, but just as I reached the old kitchen door, I started to hear purring! There turned out to be one of the adult males tucked into the cat cage. I took a donated cat bed the inside cats don’t like for some reason, and tucked it into one of the bottom “rooms” of the cage. The cats won’t lie on most of it – the filling somehow bunched up in the middle, and I have not been able to get it spread out. Instead, they lie on one of the edges, right up against the back wall. That’s where he was, barely visible. When we tried to keep Toni in there after her leg was amputated and discovered she could squeeze through the 2″ square openings, we lined most of the outer walls with cardboard. We’ve left the cardboard there, since it helps keep things cozier, and the cats seem to like it. It does make it harder to see who’s inside, though! 😄
We’re supposed to have a mild day today. It’s been lightly snowing, and our high is supposed to be 0C/32F or so, depending on which app I check. We don’t need to go anywhere today, unless it’s to the garage. I’ll be phoning our mechanic in a bit to talk to him about the codes coming up on the truck. Tomorrow, I’ve decided to go to the big city rather than the small one. We don’t need to go to the international grocery store this month, so I was considering going to the smaller city, but for the stores I do need to go to, the big city locations are better. I’ll take advantage of it and check out a Fresh Co. I keep hearing their prices are really excellent, but we usually don’t have time to check out new places during our city trips.
We’ve got a gorgeous day out, today! Cold, of course. The weather apps told me it was -6C/21F out there, with a “real feel” of -12C/10F, but we’re sheltered enough that I’m still not breaking out the parka. My only concession to the cold was to wear one of my ball cap ear warmers that I made recently.
The kittens – even the smaller ones – seem to be handling the snow rather well, though this one looks quite affronted by it! 😄
In the slide show above; the fluffy tortie is making use of the self-warming pad set up in their favourite shelf to sit in and watch what’s going on outside. I got that shot yesterday. The other two, I took this afternoon. We have several very handsome black cats with little white bibs this year. The one sitting on the shelf shelter looks downright angry that the snow is on their favourite corner! 😄 In the last picture, you can see that the cats are making full use of the cleaned out and heated cat house.
While doing my morning rounds, I finally got around to a few things that either got missed while we had to do other things, or that kept getting forgotten about. One of those was to empty and move the rain barrel by the sun room. It was full, and had the diverter over it, so that got removed first. Then I had to break up the ice on top until I could remove the hardware cloth cover. We keep a rock and a brick on it to weigh it down, as the cats sometimes jump up on it. They also serve to hold the diverter (which is just a scrap piece of eavestrough) in place. I got the brick off easily enough, but I ended up removing the cover with the rock still stuck to the wire by ice! After emptying about half of the barrel into the old kitchen garden with a bucket, I was able to tip it over and empty it down one of the paths, then set it aside by one end of the wattle weave bed for the winter. After that, I had to use a hammer to break the rock loose from the cover. 😄 The cover is now stored away, but I ended up having to use the diverter and its supports later on!
I waited until this afternoon, when it was warmer, to deal with the old rain barrel way out in the garden. It didn’t have a lot of water in it, but it would have been somewhat frozen to the ground. I didn’t want to risk breaking the cold, brittle plastic any more than it already is. So that got taken care of this afternoon. I had a pile of branches we’d used as trellis supports on it to keep the critters out, since the cover for that barrel didn’t survive the winter, even though it was in the garden shed. Just in case, I also had a couple of branches in the water, so if a critter did fall in, it could climb out. Those all got set aside, then the emptied barrel set on its side next to the pile of branches. The watering can that’s kept beside the barrel and filled with water to keep it from blowing away, got emptied and stored inside the barrel itself. Leaving the barrel out like this also provides another shelter from the weather for small critters that won’t come closer to the house.
(As I write this, we’ve warmed up to our expected high -2C/28F, but the “feels like” is apparently -13C/9F. Not where we are!)
One the way back to the house, I remembered to grab the folding saw horse that was set up by the new trellis bed construction area. We’re not going to get more progress on that until spring. When I got back to the house, I realized that it had warmed up enough that all the snow was melting off the roof – and there was no longer a rain barrel or diverter to keep the water away from the base of the sunroom wall! That corner has already been undermined by water, and the last thing I want is for a freeze/thaw cycle happening under there. So I set up the diverter again, using the saw horse to support it, and the weights from the barrel cover to keep the diverter from sliding off the saw horse. I’ll probably have to come up with something else, though. The cats could very easily knock it all down. I might end up tying a rope loop the the nearby hand rail to hold the diverter, instead. For now, however, it’s doing the job.
We’re supposed to have highs above freezing in the middle of the week. Just for a couple of days. I don’t expect it to be enough to melt all the snow, but it will definitely get rid of most of it, I think. That will be when we cover the garlic and carrot beds with a deep mulch for the winter.
There’s just a few things left that absolutely need to be done before the ground freezes. The rest can wait until spring.
The Re-Farmer
Addendum: one of the yard kittens had gotten into the old kitchen earlier and wouldn’t come out, so after I hit publish on this post, I went back to check on him. This time, he was willing to come up to me and even let me pick him up and take him out. We’ve got bright sunshine, the yard cats are enjoying their sun spots, and things are melting all over. So I checked my weather apps on my phone. Of the two apps I have, one of them says we are at 1C/34F right now! The sun room thermometer reads even warmer, of course, and the thermometer outside my husband’s window is right in a very sheltered sun spot. I just checked. It’s reading 15C/59F!!!
My daughters pulled an all nighter last night. Aside from my older daughter working on her commissions, they did the usual cooking and cleaning, and my younger daughter baked an amazing zucchini cake with cream cheese icing. She’d baked one while house sitting, using zucchini from my brother’s garden, but we had to buy zucchini for this one, since our summer squash barely survived the slugs and didn’t produce much this year. Oh, she also did laundry and ended up spending two HOURS taking care if this…
This happened while I was clearing bush to access the tree I needed to debranch and cut to size. These are tiny burrs from a weed that has the prettiest, daintiest flowers that become these horrible things. I’ve been pulling them up every time I see them, but once the flowers are done blooming, they’re really hard to see.
Turns out I missed quite a lot of them.
I’d tried to rub out as many as I could before putting them through the wash. Once through the drier, the tiny burrs are a bit easier to rub out, but I ended up putting them back in the washing machine, to be included in the next load. Which turned out to be my daughter’s bedding. She didn’t realize what was on them until she moved things to the drier. Rather than risk burs ending up all over her bedding, she instead started picking them out, mostly one burr at a time!!
I would never have had that patience!
They’ll need to be washed again to hopefully remove the last little bits.
Then, since they were both up anyhow, they let me sleep in a bit and took care of feeding the outside cats for me, and I could do my rounds a bit later. I had to change the batteries on the trail cams today, including the solar powered one. I’ve had to change batteries on that one only once since we got it, and that was because I accidentally left it on “setting”, which meant it spent and entire day and night draining power while waiting for buttons to be pushed. The solar panel would have kept it going during the day, but once it was dark and the batteries were being used, they were completely drained.
As for me, I was glad to have that extra sleep and, to be honest, I’m fighting the urge to go back to bed. It’s gorgeous out there and there is lots of work to do, but I’m feeling quite drained.
With yesterday’s chill, I was planning on getting some crochet done after having a late lunch. I was just settling in to eat in the cat free zone (the living room) when the phone rang. Of course, the living room handset wasn’t in the living room at the time, and I didn’t get to it before it went to machine. It was my mother, and telling me to call her back, and she did not sound good at all.
So I called her back right away and found out why.
Our vandal had just showed up at her place, out of the blue, and he was in a full rage, apparently, He was yelling at her at her door, so the entire building could hear, going on about how she “gave” me the farm. Where he got that notion, I have no idea, because the property was signed over to my brother, not me. This was directly because of our vandal harassing her to change the will and give it to him. With the farm off the will entirely, he would not be able to contest it. In some messages he’d more recently left on her machine, he went on about “squatters rights” and how the property now belongs to me, but Canadian law no longer recognizes squatter’s rights, and hasn’t for a very long time. Not that we’re squatters in the first place. We have an informal arrangement, but an arrangement nonetheless. I don’t know who got it in his head that the property now belongs to me (and just me; apparently, the rest of my family doesn’t exist), but that’s his current thing.
To my mother’s credit, she told him outright, it’s none of his business. He already managed to get what would have been his inheritance more than 20 years ago, but he wants more. He started going on about how he worked on the farm, too (as if my siblings and I didn’t??). He is absolutely convinced he’s somehow entitled to the property, and seems to believe my mother can somehow still give it to him? It makes no sense, but we’re not dealing with a rational person, here.
Also to my mother’s credit, she finally told him to never come back. Previously, she’s sabotaged our efforts to protect her from him by actually phoning him and inviting him for tea or to go out for lunch or something. There seems to be a huge guilt factor motivating her efforts to make peace with someone who used to be so close, but has become completely irrational. I think feelings of guilt are behind his behaviour as well. My late brother’s death really destroyed him. I think a part of him recognises how much he’d taken advantage of my late brother, and that they weren’t anywhere near as close as he’s invented in his mind since the accident. He’s been taking it out on my mother, in particular, and since my father passed, has been using both of their deaths to cruelly abuse and manipulate my mother. That he has failed just seems to eat at him and is causing him to double down. A newer manipulation he’s using on her is that he’s apparently dying of cancer one day, or can’t walk anymore on another (as he stands at the door, having walked into her building…). He likely does need hip surgery again, but how is that my mother’s fault? Oh, right. He’s blaming his hip damage on all the work he supposedly did at the farm. Back when we were still close, I was the one that advised him to keep at the doctors about how much pain he was in, after working aircraft maintenance, on concrete floors and crawling around inside the craziest of places, looking for hairline cracks. The doctors didn’t want to do it because he was “too young” and it would need to be redone every 10 years. Well, it’s been a lot more than 10 years, so he’s likely in a lot of pain right now. And now he’s rewritten his own memory as to the cause and using it against my mother for… what? What does he expect her to do for him? Probably give him what’s left of her money, instead of the land. Though he has vowed to use every penny, even to the point of homelessness, to sue my brother and I. For what, I’m not entirely sure.
My mother is the weak link and the soft target. He hasn’t been going after me anymore. Our restraining order is expired, but he knows that I am willing to go to such efforts to stop him, which seems to be enough to keep him from going back to his past behaviour. Mind you, we did have a trail cam stolen, as well as the old sign with my father’s name on it, while the restraining order was in effect, but he technically did not have to go onto the property to do it, and we have no actual evidence that it was him. Still, when I mentioned it in court during mediation while trying to get the restraining order (he was not present for that), his lawyer and the judge were both nodding along going, “yeah, it would have been him.” There’s simply no one else that would have done it. So far, I’ve only seen him on the trail cams driving by. He no longer gives the finger to the cameras, nor comes up to the gate to shout down our driveway, while clearly drunk again.
Anyhow.
My mother hadn’t actually wanted to talk to me about it. She wanted to talk to my sister about it, as my sister still has some civil contact with our vandal. Well. Her husband does, anyhow. She couldn’t get through to my sister by phone, so I promised I’d send her an email, which I did immediately after getting off the phone.
Then I messaged my brother to update him, and we ended up chatting for quite some time. There isn’t a lot we can do about it, but we need to be aware, in case this is a sign that our vandal is losing it again and might decide to cause us problems here on the farm again. As for my sister, she did get through to my mother, then sent our vandal a message that probably didn’t do any good at all, but I guess it was worth a shot.
By the time all that was done, my food was cold and my tea was tepid. I also had to move on to other things and never got to my crochet at all.
I still feel completely drained and have no desire to go outside and get work done. The chances of him harassing me from the road are next to nil, so that’s not the issue. I’m just tired. Mentally and psychologically tired.
Of all the struggles we have found ourselves dealing with since the move, our vandal turning from friend to foe is the one that is the most unfortunate and difficult. That he goes after my mother like that… Ugh. My mother may be pretty abusive and cruel herself, but that doesn’t justify his abusive behaviour towards her. Especially over something that is none of his business. Blaming the actions from both of them on mental illness – as accurate as that may be – cannot be an excuse to accept the behaviour.
So… that’s where I’m at now. I really need to get outside and get some work done, while the weather is good, but I have zero motivation and zero energy. I’m simply out of spoons.
Nosencrantz has started to regularly show up when I do the morning feeding. We don’t see her in the evenings, though.
This morning, not only did she show up, but when I was putting food in the kibble bowl under the shrine, she started to go for it without waiting for me to leave.
When I reached out, she sniffed my finger – and then allowed me to pet her! Tentatively, at first, but then she actually came closer to enjoy more than my just barely touching her.
She was still nervous, though, and wanted to eat, so I let her be. When I was done my rounds and doing stuff around the house and south yards, she was nowhere to be seen.
At least she’s coming back regularly for food in the mornings.
Now, if only we start seeing Marlee and Butterscotch again!
Not only was I able to pet Nosencrantz today, I was able to catch one of the kittens from the litter of 8 that is still really small. The only reason I was able to catch it was because it was on the cat house roof and three of the bigger cats were milling around, vying for attention, preventing it from running off. It hissed a little when I picked it up, and made a half hearted attempt to bite me when my hand got close to it’s mouth, but then it settled down and stared at my face while I skritched its ears and pet it. This kitten is one of the black ones with a little white patch on its chest, but is really, really fluffy and dense. In fact, its fur feels like it’s all undercoat!
I also saw two of the “new” kittens – the ones that Broccoli brought over not long ago. There’s a black and white one that I saw, then a fluffy white and black one. There’s a tortie that I saw last night, going into the sun room, but I did not see it this morning.
Among the other kittens, some seem to have gone missing. I haven’t seen the one eyed tuxedo kitten in a long time. The other tuxedo that had a messed up eye does seem to be around; we’re only guessing, because one of the tuxedos has an eye that looks… wrong. It doesn’t let us get close enough to get a better look. I haven’t seen the smaller orange and white kitten in a long time, though one of my daughters says she has seen it. The bigger one, with grey mixed in with its orange fur, like Pinky, is not only still around, but I’ve been able to pet it a few times.
Pinky is among the adults we don’t see anymore. Likely moved on to find himself a harem somewhere. Rolando had been back for awhile, but is gone again. It’s really hard to know how many cats we actually have out there. Some mornings, I’ve counted over 30. Today, I counted 26… I think. I’m pretty sure I didn’t double count, but it’s always possible there are kittens hiding under the cat house that I just don’t see to count, too. I make sure to put a bit of kibble at the openings they use, so they can eat without having to be around so many other older, more active, sometimes aggressive, cats. There’s one mama, the white one with black spots, that tends to be aggressive. With the adults, she usually just growls at them, but with the kittens, she will actually attack them! I don’t know what’s going on with her.
Still, we are making progress with the socializing. I wasn’t able to check with the black fluffy one, but so far, all the ones that have accepted attention are… Yup. Male.
It’s awfully hard to keep the population down, when we can’t get near the females to get them spayed! Yeah, we can do the males, but if we don’t do the females, it won’t make much difference.
Meanwhile…
This inside kittens are just loving the new bed! The fact that it’s so tiny seems to be a bonus for them at this stage. We have another larger cat bed that was donated to us, but none of the cats seem to like it. After washing, the stuffing got all lumpy and won’t go back, which is likely the reason. When the adult cats wouldn’t use it, I brought it into my room after washing it, and the kittens don’t use it, either. But, my goodness, do they like this one!
Today is working out to be a blustery day, and we’ve already reached our high of 18C/64F. We are supposed to get heavy rain soon, so that writes off working on the trellis bed or prepping logs, cutting them to side and bringing them over for the second bed. The down side of having only an electric chain saw! Tomorrow is supposed to be a better day, but I’ll be back in the city to do the first Costco shop.
Oh, to have a van again, and not have to make so many trips to the city!
The weekend also looks good, though, so we should be able to break out the extension cords and get cutting again.
Meanwhile, I’ll be making a trip into town soon. We have water jugs to refill, so I’ll take advantage of it to run a few errands at the same time. I’ll even time it so I can get to the post office when it reopens in the afternoon. I’m not expecting any packages but, if there are any, I don’t want to have to make a second trip.
Our province is having an election right now, and the advance polls are open. I should get that done, too! This year, I’m voting for a friend of mine that’s running in a new party. Our province has been lurching between the same two parties all my life, to the point that there’s really no difference between them anymore. Which is scary, considering one of them is trying to out communist the Communist Party (yes, we have an actual Communist Party on our ballots).
Ha! I paused while writing this to look up some stuff. The polling projections don’t even include all the parties running in them, so they’re useless. The CBC (our government owned propaganda media) has a “voting compass” survey that I just did. At the end of it, it actually did match me with the party I plan to vote for, but some of the questions – particularly the demographic questions – were definitely a problem. You could see how the intent was to frame a narrative of how “good guys” would be voting one way and “bad guys” would be voting anything else.
Well, hopefully, there will be a good turn out of legitimate votes – the level of fraud is much lower on the provincial level than at the federal level – and we’ll have a solid rejection of both of the parties that usually win.
We’re supposed to have a federal election coming up, too. I don’t see our Prime Dictator calling it anytime soon, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he found a way to prevent it from happening at all, over some new “emergency”. He certainly isn’t going to call it until he’s sure the results are going to be what he bought and paid for, and he’s so hated right now, that might be a while. He tried that in the middle of lockdowns, calling an early election in 2021 to get the majority he was shooting for. So the Libs formed a defacto coalition government with the NDP until 2025. Canada has fixed election dates. Federal elections are supposed to be on the third Monday of October, every 4 years after the previous election. Since T2 called an election in 2021, that makes the deadline for the next federal election 2025, instead of this year.
T2 should have resigned long ago, but the recent honouring of a guy that turned out to be actual Nazi in Parliament while the Ukrainian president was visiting should have been the final straw. Instead, the Speaker of the House was thrown under the bus and resigned, and the Liberals actually tried to have the incident removed from Hansard – the official record of all parliamentary proceedings – to make it like it never happened. The Liberals, who were so quick to call the Trucker Convoy and their supporters Nazis – our PM even calling a Jewish MP whose parents survived the holocaust a Nazi supporter – are now trying to make excuses for their own celebration of a Nazi from a division noted for the atrocities they committed. This was in the region my parents are from, that became part of the USSR after the war and is now part of the Ukraine. My parents saw and survived some of this stuff, so it hit close to home for me. Poland has started extradition proceedings now, too.
But I am getting distracted. Needless to say, though, I’m a lot more motivated to get out an vote. While we still can.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to curl up and sleep like kittens do?
I had another sleepless night last night. 😢 I don’t know why, but every time I lay down, I started to feel wicked heartburn. At least I think that’s what it was. I could even feel it moving up my esophagus, the longer I was prone. I finished off the last of our Pepto, but I’m not sure that it helped. If it did, it took a long time. I ended up having to set things up so I could be upright, but couldn’t sleep like that.
Of course, with me being upright, the kittens thought it was play time. They actually were an appreciated distraction, for the most part.
I feel better now, but totally wasted. Of course, the usual things still needed to get done, but I skipped my morning rounds and switching out the memory cards on the trail cams and went back to bed. It wasn’t until about 1 or 1:30 that I finally had breakfast. I did get some stuff done, but it mostly made me feel more frustrated about how much wasn’t being done. It’s not like the world will end if these jobs get delayed a bit, but I have that constant feeling of time running out, this time of year.
Well, I’d better be feeling better by tomorrow, because I’m heading into the city to do our first shop for October, whether I like it or not. I’ve decided to do the smaller shopping, rather than the bulk Costco shopping, hitting places like the international grocery store we never made it to last month, etc.
It would have been nice if we could be doing this shop in a new-to-us van, but we’ve had no word on anything there, which means our mechanic hasn’t found something that meets our needs and the financing limitations yet. I’ll be happy just to have it before winter. I really don’t to have to be driving my mother’s car in the winter!
The Re-Farmer 