Visiting kits and cats

While getting photos of the birds, I saw Jim at the base of the planter and started taking pictures of him, as well.

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Then The Outsider came through from the other side and posed!

It looks like The Outsider has moved right in with our cats.  It seems a bit odd that a lone kitten would show up like this.  It may be from a neighboring farm, but in that case, I would expect it to go home and only show up once in a while.  Alternatively, he may have been abandoned; something that still happens, unfortunately.

Whatever the reason, we are happy to have him, and so are the other kittens!

Then we have our other visitors.  Like this guy.

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It seems to now be a pretty sure thing that this is “dad cat”, that the girls would sometimes see while raking the yard.  We’d never really seen his face before, so no one recognized him when he showed up in the sun room a while back.  He’s coming closer to the house more often, and not just to quickly grab some food, and we’ve been able to get a better look at him and his rather distinctive face markings!

There is a grey cat that also comes around.  The grey and Dad Cat got into a big and nasty fight under our living room window a few days back.

I would not be surprised if we find ourselves with more kittens in the not too distant future. :-/

The Re-Farmer

Winter Prep, and future plans

Well, I’m certainly glad that yesterday was a good day, weather wise, because today certainly wasn’t!

Yesterday had warmed up quite a bit, which meant the ice and snow was melting and coming off the trees with a constant rattle of ice pellets hitting the ground.  When I had the chance, I checked around the yard to see if we had lost any other trees or large branches, and am happy to say that we did not.  Just a few little branches.

Heading over towards the apples, I could see that, while we only saw one deer over by the bird feeder, there were certainly others we didn’t see! Continue reading

A Deer Returns!

Note: I’m trying something different with my photos this time.  We’re close to our storage limit on our free WordPress account. I don’t want to reduce the number of photos we post, and we’re not in a position to upgrade yet, so we now have a Flickr account and I am going to try embedding the images.  Please let us know in the comments, if you are having any problems with the images loading, etc.  Thanks!

My darling husband has taken on the morning feeding of the critters.  With the bird feeder, this includes scattering seed on the ground for those birds that prefer feeding that way, and for any deer that happen by.  We’ve seen the odd deer, but they haven’t really hung around.

Well, this morning, one did!!!

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He’s a young one, and I’m sure he is one of the little ones that visited us in the winter.  There’s something about that swoopy snout that I recognize.

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Just look at those little antlers! :-D

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Getting the photos was a bit of a challenge for two reasons.  One, we keep the telephoto lens on the camera (for those new to this blog, we keep a Nikon D80 on a tripod in our living room window permanently, to photograph the wildlife out our living room window).  The deer was almost too close to the house for the lens!

He looks like he’s laughing at us, in this next one!

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The other challenge is reflections on the window from inside.  At the time I was taking these photos, I had to contend with reflections of my avocado on the glass.  :-D

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If it seems like he’s looking at something specific in some of these photos, that’s because he is …

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Sometimes, it was us in the window.

Most of the time, it was…

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… Doom Guy!

I wasn’t able to get a photo of it, but at one point, they were nose to nose!  So adorable!!

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He was quite attentive to all the noises around him, but not at all skittish.  Which is good, because it’s warming up today, and after all the snow yesterday, it’s falling off the trees with clumps.  We are hearing “phwomph” noises all over.

Also; avocado tree reflections. :-D

Then we got another curious kitten!

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In this photo, the deer had moved to the far side of the bird feeder, and The Outsider was on this side, watching him, while Doom Guy was on the other side of the feeder base, though he had left by the time this photo was taken.

I’m so happy to see deer back again!

I also managed to get some really fantastic pictures of The Outsider after the deer left.  Those will get their own post, next. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Crazy kits and cat strangers

Just before I headed out to my mother’s to help her with some cooking, my husband starts laughing out loud in the living room, calling us over.

If you’ve seen his previous post, you know why!

I managed to get some photos on the DSLR, too.

Too funny!

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What a handsome boy he is!

While he was going around the platform feeder, birds would start flying over, see him and abruptly change directions.  It looked like they were dive bombing him!

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He so wanted to get onto the hanging feeder, but it kept moving! :-D

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I don’t know what he found to nibble on up there.  We saw him chewing on things a few times.

I probably don’t want to know what he was eating.

He also was standing on his back legs, trying to climb even higher, but I wasn’t able to get photos.

While Corvo was busily entertaining us, Doom Guy and The Outsider also came over and hung out at the bottom of the planter.  We couldn’t get pictures at the time, but my older daughter caught this one.

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He’s here all the time, now, and seems to have made himself at home.

My daughter also got a photo, a few days ago, of one of the mystery cats that sometimes shows up.

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This is one of two strange adult cats that have been showing up now and then.

He seems pretty chill. :-D

Beyond getting entertained by cats at home, I spent some time with my mother, doing some cooking that will be used by home care when they come by for meal assist later on.  I noticed that another jar of the chili we made for her finally got used.  She told me I should take it home, because it wasn’t “fresh”, and she needs to only eat “fresh” food, for her health.

Well, she eats plenty of stuff that isn’t “fresh” all the time, so I know that’s just something she came up with to excuse not eating the chili.  I explained again to her that the reason I put them up in jars the way I did, was so that it last longer.  It didn’t matter.  Like the chicken my sister-in-law made for her, that ended up going to the cats, she’s simply decided it has gone bad, and that’s that.

So much of the fresh food that was prepared for her ended up being thrown out, because she wouldn’t eat it for some reason, and it actually did go bad.  Such a waste.

I had a chance to show my mother some photos of the clean up I did along the fence line up to the gate, because of a concern she brought up when she phoned to ask me to come over.  It seems “people” have been telling her that I was not just cutting down dead branches, but taking down living trees.  Now, I’ve been keeping my mother in the loop about what I’m doing, including clearing trees from the fence line, because we will need access to it to repair it.  Then she started talking about her lilacs.  She had planted special lilacs by the gate.  I told her on the phone that they’re still there, I just cleaned out the dead stuff and the poplars that were growing in the middle of them.  She seemed taken aback when I mentioned poplars, but she was really upset that I had apparently cut down her special lilacs.  I assured her I hadn’t, then asked who it was that was gossiping about us that she was listening to.  I found out, and was not at all surprised it was the person that is the reason we have to lock our gates.  *sigh*  Ah, well.

So I showed her a picture of the area by the gate I had cleaned up.  Including this one.

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I don’t know what kind of lilacs those are (I wasn’t sure they were even lilacs; she has the usual purple lilacs on the other side of the gate).

It turns out, this wasn’t the gate she was talking about.  She thought I had cut down her white lilacs.

These ones.

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We cleaned up this area, months ago.

She has seen this area since I’ve cleaned it up, so she knew what I had done with it.  But when she was told I was cutting by the “gate”, she thought of the gate into the yard, not the gate at the driveway.

I’ve made a point of keeping my mother in the loop of what we’ve been doing, showing her photos every chance I get, until she is strong enough to come and see for herself.  Yet, all it takes is one person, who has no clue what we’ve done or what we are doing, to start gossiping, and she starts to panic.

So disappointing.

She saw the pictures, however, and I talked about the repairs to the fences that are needed, and the section with posts that will need to be replaces, and so on.  She was happy with what she saw.  It worked out well in the end. :-)

The Re-Farmer

 

 

Oh, what a day! :-D

How the day was going to go was a bit up in the air, to be decided after we picked up our van.  It ended up being a much longer day, but we got the bulk of our monthly shop in, after all.

In order to get the van home, my younger daughter and husband had to come along.  Now, my mother’s car isn’t a compact car, by any means, but my husband tops 6 ft.  Even with the seat back as far as it could go, he had to fold himself in.  He was basically wearing the car!!  Continue reading

Ouch

Ah, what a day!

Before I get into it, however, I will share some adorableness! :-D

I was outside and decided to check the sun room, to see if it was safe to close up the doors for the night.

It wasn’t quite there yet…

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Continue reading

Kitties, kitties, pile o’ kitties!

This is what greeted me out the window, when I headed into the kitchen this morning.

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The girls and I headed into town today, and as we came out to go to the van, we found Jim up there, watching. :-D

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We had visitors this morning, too.  The girls saw Dad Cat, a grey and white, at the food bowls.  Out my office window, I spotted another, almost completely grey, adult cat running off.  As we were leaving, we startled The Outsider – which is what the girls call the all grey ball of fluff kitten that has been coming around – away from the food.

While we were out, my husband opened up the sun room for the cats and later found this.

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That’s just a whole pile o’ fluff!

We’re living in cat heaven. :-D

The Re-Farmer