kittens

Catching up

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Well, it took a while to make a dent in clearing storage space in my computer. It seems to have made a difference already. It looks like most of the volume wasn’t even photos or video I take casually. It’s all those trail cam files. I keep way more than I need to! At some point, I’ll have to go through a major delete session. Especially with the files going back a few years. I really just need to keep any files that have our vandal in them, but he has so many vehicles, I don’t recognize them all. Plus, I do like to keep the files that caught wild life, too!

I have some morning cuteness for you to start with, though!

When I first took the cat bed out of the cage and set it next to the one the cats were all crowding into, they ignored it for quite a while. Eventually, though, the cat puddle spilled over, and now they are using it. As I was coming in from my morning rounds, I spotted these two on it and had to take a picture! The black and white has now named Patience. The tortie still needs a name.

Anyhow. Time to catch up on yesterday!

I headed to my mother’s early (checked the truck’s tires first; they’re down a bit, but not enough to need topping up), stopped long enough to go over her shopping list, then did her shopping for her. 

I usually bring food for us to have for lunch, and my mother insists on paying me back, even though I tell her she doesn’t need to. She’s been increasingly fussy, though. The best fried chicken and wedges she loves so much, she’s decided are the cause of her “heart” problems (it’s not her heart, but she doesn’t understand anatomy and refuses to believe all those test results showing her heart is incredibly healthy and strong), so she now refuses to eat them. The Chinese food she loved, she now refuses to eat because she’s decided they serve cat meat, and the family that runs it is… well… Chinese. There’s a chicken restaurant that she used to go to regularly, but she said their food always gets to her cold (not an invalid complaint; at least for their chicken dinners). She did love their pizzas, but the last couple of times I brought pizza, she was aghast at the price. Which has gone up quite a bit, and she is convinced it’s because they’re cheating people and the government should make it so all pizzas cost the same. She also thinks restaurants all buy their pizzas frozen from the same place, apparently. Basically, all the options in her town have been slowly eliminated for one reason or another. The last time I was there, I brought a couple of croissant sandwiches and a Chef’s Salad from the grocery store for lunch. I asked if she wanted me to do that again, and she said no. It costs too much (it didn’t cost much at all), and she had food.

Well, I hadn’t had breakfast yet, and I don’t want to eat her groceries, so after I picked up what was on her list, I was going to pick up a submarine sandwich. It was big enough to share, if she changed her mind. Then I remembered the have a hot food display with whole rotisserie chickens, chicken pieces, nuggets and the like, so I decided to see what was in there, thinking maybe there was some hot food I could bring back.

I’ve never seen these in the display before, but they had complete meals available! A big piece of chicken and thigh, a generous quantity of mashed potatoes and a generous quantity of vegetables, for $6.99 !!! I put back the sub sandwich, then grabbed one meal with beans and carrots, and one with peas and corn.

When I got back to my mother’s, I found she had been busy heating up leftovers and putting together a lunch for us – breakfast, for her also! I’m glad I picked up the dinners. Her list was short, but as I put things away, I found her fridge pretty empty. It’s not that she can’t afford to buy groceries. I think it’s more because she keeps cutting more and more foods out of her diet, because she’s suddenly decided they are bad for her! At least she did have some hamburgers made with beef my sister gave her (beef is one of the foods she’s decided to stop buying, opting instead for more processed meats!), so I sure as heck didn’t want to be eating a protein she needs for herself! 

She actually did seem happy with the dinners, too – especially when she saw the price tags on the containers. So we had ourselves a good lunch, and she was all set for supper, too.

My sister had visited my mother yesterday, and changed her bedding for her. I got an email letting me know she found bed bugs. *sigh* My mother’s building is run by the province’s public housing department, which subsidizes rents, so there is one provincial number to call. They did have a separate maintenance number, which I made sure to add to my mother’s phone list, since calling the main office is an exercise in frustration. The automated system just punts you to voice mail, but the voice mail boxes are always full, so you can’t leave a message, anyhow. The maintenance number gets you to a real, live human being – eventually.

The head office for public housing is located in the smaller, closer city, rather than the big city, where the legislature and most government offices are. When I mentioned that this office is for the entire province, my mother refused to believe me, saying it had to be just for our region, because if it was for the entire province, it would be in the bigger city. She simply could not accept that a government department’s head office could exist outside the capital city of the province. I tried to explain, but she was getting herself worked up, so I dropped it. A very strange thing to get upset over!

It was shortly after noon when this was all done, which means we had a couple more hours before her phone appointment with the doctor. I knew where was a chance she’d call early, though, and sure enough, she did. In fact, from the time, I think she was making these calls on her lunch break!

I set us up on speaker phone, and the first thing the doctor asked was, why did we have this appointment? I told her about the tests results that were supposed to be sent to her, and she said she had nothing on file. The last tests results she had for my mother were from September. !!! Then she said she would check online. Our province’s patient medical records are all digital now, but they’re sort of all over the place. She had to log into a system outside the clinic to find the test results.

They came back normal.

All of her tests and scans, including the one the test that needed 5 days to complete, came back normal.

My mother is ridiculously healthy, as far as their tests go.

So we went over my mother’s symptoms again, and mentioned the prescription she gave my mother to test out made no difference. We talked options and possibilities. One of them is to have my mother referred to a specialist, which is my mother’s choice.

The doctor, however, would have to see my mother in person and do a physical exam before she can make a referral.

My mother was starting to lose it at this point. With so many holidays over the next while, it was either making an appointment very soon, or in January.

Given the test results, this is not an urgent situation, so we’re going with January. I will call to make an appointment, later.

The whole call took less than 10 minutes.

As soon as it was done, my mother was all “I don’t want to see this doctor! I’m not going back there!” This time, however, her reasoning was legitimate, and not just her racism emerging again. She even said, she’d apologize to the doctor, but between her own English and the doctor’s strong accent (plus, she talks fast), my mother simply can’t understand what she’s saying. As it was, I was struggling to understand her at times, too, and kept having to ask her to repeat herself, and I can’t even blame my auditory processing issues for it, this time. I had the same problem when we were talking to her in person.

I still need to find myself a new doctor, too, so I’ll have to make some phone calls to various clinics and see if any of them have doctors open to new patients that would be willing to take both me and my mother.

My mother was also frustrated that we had two days with this waiting, for just a few minutes call! 

As we were talking after the call, I got a 1 hour reminder from my phone, for the appointment.

I’m glad we set the new appointment for the afternoon instead of the morning, so that this time I was actually there when she called early!! My mother could not have handled this call at all, on her own.

But it was done, and we have some next steps to take. 

I spent some time looking things up related to some of the other options the doctor mentioned that she can do herself at home. Some of what I found, she physically cannot do, but there is enough that she can do, that it’s not much of a concern. Then she started to talk about what other foods she should stop eating, and I had to play interference on that one. For starters, there is nothing diet related when it comes to her symptoms, but in her mind, everything comes back to whatever food issue she’s developed, based on something she saw on TV, read in a “women’s” magazine, or hear from her neighbours. It’s all pretty messed up. Even now, she will sometimes randomly tell me, I need to eat more soup (she has no idea how much soup I do or don’t eat). Why? So I will lose weight. She saw some guy on a daytime talk show, decades ago, saying something about eating soup to lose weight. I recall that particular fad, and this was a very long time ago! But it’s in her mind and, because some self proclaimed expert said it on TV, that magically makes it true, and she believes that if I just ate soup, I would lose weight.

Funny. She complains about her own weight, but doesn’t apply this magical advice to herself!

The thing is, she hears and reads all this stuff and latches onto it, and has decided that any ache or pain or whatever she’s dealing with, is directly related to a food of some kind, therefore she must cut it out. She could break her leg, and think that means she ate the “wrong” thing for breakfast. Very frustrating! Especially since she should know better. A lot of stuff she now believes is “bad” is stuff she helped grow, raise and process for almost her entire life. We butchered our own cows and ate lots of beef when I was growing up, but now beef is bad? 

Anyhow. I’m getting distracted.

Once we were done talking about the call and next steps, I was more than happy to head home, and my mother was more than happy to send me on my way, so she could go for a nap!! She did give me some Christmas cards to mail for her at our post office, because she no longer trusts the staff at the post office in her town. I was okay with that, as I turned out to have a parcel in the mail, anyhow. I’m glad I looked at her cards, though, because she had a wrong address for my nephew. I’ve since confirmed the correct address, fixed the envelop, and need to go back to the post office after I’m done this.

As for my parcel in the mail, it was a different brand of lysine for the cats. The previous brand we tried was more granular, instead of the fine powder we were getting before, from a supplier that seems to no longer supply lysine at all anymore. The granular is fine if it’s being mixed into wet cat food or dissolved into water, but it doesn’t stick as well when tossed in dry kibble.

This new brand is a fine powder, and I’m quite happy with it. It dissolves very quickly in their water, and when tossed with the dry kibble, sticks to it much better. Hopefully, this means the outside cats will actually eat more of it, instead of it falling off the kibble when I set it out! It’s working out so nicely, I think we’ll be putting this brand on a subscription. It came in a 500g bag, which is bigger than what we had found previously. We’ll see how long a bag lasts, first.

Now it’s time to grab a food of some kind, and see what other maintenance I can do on my computer! 

The Re-Farmer

A day of progress – finally!

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First, the cuteness!

I counted 35 this morning.

Of these ones, the two tuxedos on the left will watch as I pause a few feet away to take a picture, but as soon as I move closer, the start moving away.

Syndol, posing pretty in the middle, and the white and grey in front, LOVE attention. I can pick those two up and cuddle them, and they can’t get enough of it.

Hypotenose and the two orange cats are “touch and go”. I can touch them, but then they go! I am sometimes able to pick up the almost all orange cat and hold him for a bit, but he doesn’t like it and wants down quickly.

In other things…

I didn’t have anywhere to go today, which means I finally got some progress in the living room. Since it has been turned into a cat free zone, we’ve developed the terrible habit of shoving things in there, just to protect them from the cats. The girls even keep their laundry baskets in there, because when they have the baskets upstairs, cats will pee in them! 

The girls and I have been taking turns doing a little bit and a little bit there, but we’ve not had a day when we can just focus on it. The problem is, we don’t know where else to put a lot of things. There’s a reason they’re in the cat free zone! However, we’ve decided we’ll be doing our Christmas celebrating in the living room this year, and that includes any decorating.

We’ve done no decorating at all. Normally, we’d have the tree up on the door in the dining room by the Feast of St Catherine’s (Nov. 27) and decorations around the dining room by now, but with the kittens we have now, even having the tree hanging against the door (which we don’t use), several feet off the ground, it not going to be enough. 

For our non-traditional Wigilia feast on Christmas Eve, we’re planning to have all finger foods and do a Columbo marathon. For New Years, we’re planning on doing a fondue. It’s been ages since we’ve done fondue, and we have two pots. One is suitable for lower temperature fondue over a candle, like a cheese or chocolate fondue. The other has a gel fuel burner and a stainless steel pot for high temperature oil fondue, so we can cook meats or do tempura vegetables.

So however we arrange things in the living room, we need to make it so there is room for the food and fondue pots, all four of us can reach the food, and all of us can see the TV. We almost never use the TV – we’ve got an antenna and can pick up a few channels, or we can use the Roku, but we usually end up watching things on our computers, instead.

As I write this, my daughter has taken over and is now vacuuming, but I interrupted her. I checked out the bathroom window and saw a great pile of cats trying to squeeze into the cat bed under the platform. The thermometer in there is at 0C/32F, so it’s warmer that outside, but they’re enjoying the body heat. There is another cat bed inside the cage, but they aren’t using it, so I popped into the sun room to move it next to the bed they’re trying to all fit into. Most of the cats ran off while I was doing that, but not the one fluffy black kitten with the white blaze on his face. This one is more socialized, and learning to enjoy cuddles, so as I backed out from under the platform, I picked it up to hold.

And promptly got a wet hand.

He back end was wet and looking wrong, so I brought him inside. I held him while my daughter gloved up and did a thorough washing of his nether regions. As near as she can tell, he got a matt in his fur over his urethra that has fallen off, leaving a bald spot. She was able to clean other matted fur and found a small wound in the process. We put some antibiotic cream on it and put him back in the sun room, after drying him off as best we could.

If we didn’t already have so many cats in the house, we could have kept him inside to keep an eye on him, and called the rescue. The Cat Lady and her family, however, are in the middle of moving. Their house finally sold! I don’t expect to have any rescue related activity until next month, and certainly don’t want to send another sick cat their way! The vets keep finding all sorts of other problems when they get checked over.

Oh! I just got a message and some photos from the Cat Lady! One of her daughters has the flu, and she’s being cuddled by Muffin (who now has a new name) as she’s laying on the couch! So adorable!

She still won’t let the Cat Lady touch her, and will hiss and bite her, instead! She’s bonded with the Cat Lady’s husband, goes out to job sites, has strangers coming up to her in her fancy truck seat all the time with no issues, cuddles with the kids, but will NOT accept the Cat Lady, even after all these months!

Anyhow… I’ve been distracted!

Time for me to get back to work and help my daughter in the living room, and figure out what to do with the space!

Oh, that reminds me…

I finished setting up the “plug” for the air conditioning vent. My brother had cut a piece of 4″ Styrofoam for it, but it still needed to be trimmed. The vent pipe itself worked rather well to “cut” the edges as I pushed it in, then cleaned it up more.

Since my brother used a hole drill attachment to install the pipe, I had the round pieces from the wall, each with a pair of drill holes in them from when my brother first marked out where to make the opening. One of the holes is right in the centre. The circles fit perfectly inside the vent pipe. One of them is a piece of panelling from the inside. So once the foam was trimmed to fit in the vent, I used a small, round curtain rod that happened to be in the living room, to make a matching hole in the middle of the foam. I took a piece of doweling left over from when I made the outdoor kitchen model and flattened one side, then carved a recess in the middle. I looped some paracord around that, then strung the ends through the centre hole of the “ugly” disc, then threaded that through the foam. I used some double sided foam mounting tape to secure the disc of panelling onto the inside end of the foam, with the paracord threaded through the middle hole. The cord got knotted against the piece of panelling to hold both discs tight against the foam, then I made handle out of paracord ends. The whole thing fits perfectly into the vent pipe, and I can line the disc of panelling up with the wall behind it. I’m rather pleased with how it turned out!

When that was done, I checked on the luffa that was drying over the heat vent. It had started to get mold on the outside, before it got too dry for mold, but when I broke the outer skin off, I found the mold went straight through. No sponge, and no viable seeds. 

Darn.

It just didn’t have a long enough time to grow!

Ah, well. We’ll be trying again in the future, after I get fresh seeds!

Now… time to go help my daughter!

The Re-Farmer

Not who I thought it was!

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While feeding the outside cats this morning, I spotted the kitten with the cloudy eye.

At least, I thought I did.

It ended up under the kibble house, but I managed to get a picture.

Which is when I discovered there was another cat already under there! The kitten had been right at the edge and backed up as I tried to take the photo, which is the only reason I saw the other one, hidden under there!

You can see the cloudiness in the kitten’s left eye in this photo.

However…

This is a photo I posted recently.

I thought we had two almost identical kittens from this litter – yet now that I can compare photos, I can see they are the same kitten.

There is no cloudy eye in this photo from a few days ago!

There is another tabby from that litter that’s seen even less frequently than I thought, now that I know I’ve been mistaking this one for it!

Yes, that left eye looks a bit darker in the photo, but that’s because of how the daylight is hitting it.

Very strange! I’ve never heard of cloudiness in the eyes coming and going like that!

What I’m finding amusing is that angry looking face. More so because, these are its siblings.

They all have matching angry faces!

While the black and white kitten is getting quite used to pets, and the tortie is… more tolerant, shall we say, of being pet and picked up, that little tabby just won’t allow it, even though I’ve managed to sneak a touch now and then, while it’s eating.

Which suggests to me that the tabby is female, given how the socialization of yard cats has been for us over the years! 😄😄

The Re-Farmer

Gorgeous day!

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With gorgeous babies!

I so want to pet this baby! I can’t get near it, though. Which makes me think it’s a female, since it’s almost always the females that have been making strange!

This kitten looks so much like the one with the cloudy eye. I can’t tell if I’ve seen that one recently. I counted “only” 34 this cats this morning.

Including this one.

I’ve been feeding the outside cats earlier in the afternoons, rather than the evenings, because sunset is now earlier than 4:30pm, and I want them to have a chance to eat before the racoons come after dark and eat all the kibble that’s left. As I was finishing up, this little fur ball was eating in the sun room. I stopped to pet some of the friendlier cats, and not only did he let me pet him, but he actually stopped eating and came over for me to pick him up and cuddle him!!!!

These two, plus the fuzzy tortie and the tabby with the cloudy eye, are all part of the same late litter of 8 as Pom Pom, The Beast (aka: Tiny), Soot Sprite, and the sadly missed Snorri. They’re among the few we can still remember are siblings, because they’re all so much smaller!

Weather wise, today has been gorgeous. We hit 7C/45F today! The original forecast was for 3C/37F. Even our overnight low is supposed to drop to only -1C/30F.

Unfortunately, I’ve basically wasted the day. Oh, I was productive this morning, but ended up having to lie down because my back was giving out and fell asleep.

Surrounded by cats.

Now that I keep my door open all the time again, my bed is consistently covered with a dozen cats.

We need to take more “glamour shots” of the kittens and send them to the Cat Lady for posting among her contacts. She and her family are still dealing with house sale issues. They haven’t been able to sell their current home, and were just resigning themselves to giving up the one they wanted to buy. They even brought the 25 cats that were being boarded back home. Then a last minute dream offer came in, pending a house inspection. Which should have happened a couple of days ago. If that goes through, they are going to be insanely busy over the next month, so I’m not expecting her to be able to get back to working the rescue until that’s done. I don’t want to be bugging her about it when she’s got all this to deal with – on top of her own health issues! She’s a dynamo! I don’t know how she does it, at times!

Anyhow.

I don’t know how much I’ll be able to get done on the next garden analysis post tonight, so I might not have one ready to be posted tomorrow. It’s just been one of those days, and my head space it not where I need it to be for that type of writing.

I did, however, try something this morning that I’ll cover in my next post. I just wish it wasn’t what caused issues with my back!

More on that next…

The Re-Farmer

Full little bellies

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Ah, it feels so good to be using a keyboard again! I really don’t like using my phone to tap out blog posts. 😄

Would you look at this bunch?

There’s always quite the rush of cats in the sun room when I first come out with my little bin and scoop to feed them. They’ve usually tossed things about over night (or the racoons have!), so I now put the bin down in the ground and let them have at it, while I pick things up and put them back where they belong. Then take scoops of kibble from around usually 3 or 4 cats eating out of the bin to fill the feeding areas in the sun room. Even after that’s done, I usually still have one or two I need to bodily remove from the bin so I can take it outside. There is a black cat that now lets me pet it and even move it around while it’s eating. I think it’s the one I posted a picture of recently. I’m not 100% sure, though.

This morning, every time I tried to do a head count, I got a different number. However, my first head count, done while they were all still voraciously eating, rather than running around all over the place, I got 38, and I’m almost positive I did not double count any of them. Once they’ve had at least some food, though, they start running around and then some start disappearing.

Then there are the ones that don’t disappear. They instead settle down in the sun room, with full little bellies, and settle in for a nap!

I’ve managed to touch the back of that fluffy grey tabby in the top right a few times while eating. He (she?) would run off, but not as quickly as usual. When not eating, I can’t get close enough to touch.

I think my daughter and I will need to head out earlier for my eye appointment today. I can see on the security camera live feed that the fog is getting thicker. We had fog alerts starting last night. After my mother was done at the hospital, we were hitting fog on the drive to her place. In one stretch, I turned off the main highway to cross over to her town and immediately drove into a wall of fog. We kept driving in and out of fog banks the whole way, but it did seem to clear up as we reached her town.

When I was driving home, I started driving through fog banks again. In some places, the ground was clear, but the fog hung like a ceiling, above.

When I came out to do my rounds this morning, there was a light fog. The trees are covered in light hoarfrost. I expected it to get lighter as the day went on, but nope. It’s getting denser!

So glad we’ll be taking the truck, and not my mother’s car!

The Re-Farmer

Glad to be home

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First, the cuteness!

The cats are quite enjoying the box I found to better stabilize the platform I rigged up for them as a way to store the wire mesh door we made to keep cats out of the old basement in the summer. The one that reminds me of Nosencrantz so much especially likes to just be a loaf in it! I’m constantly seeing cats milling around under there, though, and they do like that rigid insulation!

Also… I’m not 100% sure I recognize the cat on the left. It’s getting so hard to tell some of them apart!

I counted “only” 34 outside cats this morning.

As for the inside cats, Tiny, aka: The Beast, is now big enough that it’s safe to let her out of isolation. With the loss of Snorri, we no longer have to keep the door to my bedroom/office closed, even overnight. Tiny has been thrilled with her new freedom to explore the rest of the house.

The rest of the cats are thrilled to be able to go into my room again. As I write this, there are currently 8 of them asleep on my bed, with all but one of them in a single, huge pile of fur!

Gotta get more adoptions done!!!

Anyhow…

The plan for today was to help my mother with errands so, while doing my rounds, I took the time to open the doors to where her car is parked and give it a quick check.

I almost immediately noticed the back tire on the driver’s side looked awfully low. The tire that had gone flat before was the front driver’s side tire, so this was not expected at all.

The car barely fits in this addition to the garage, so I backed it out, then checked the tire pressure.

It was only 10psi!!

So I pumped it up, but saw no sign of a leak anywhere. I checked the front driver’s side tire, and it was really low, too, though not enough to be noticeably flat.

Of course, I checked the other two, and they were slightly on the slow side, too.

The bizarre thing is, when I took the car in to get that tire checked, the employee that worked on it thought it was the passenger side tire that was leaking and was done checking it when I returned to the garage. I told him it was the driver’s side tire, so he took that one off. He could not find a leak in either of them. All the tires, however, were topped up with air, just in case. I was there to see it done.

So why would all four tires be low, with one practically flat? We even used the car a few days ago, when we had to pick the truck up from getting its new battery.

I’m so glad I took the time to check on her car, so far in advance of needing it! With all the driving around I did with my mother, the tires have held their psi. No evidence of leaks, anywhere.

Very strange.

If it weren’t for the fact that we have snow on the ground that would have given evidence, I would be concerned that a certain “someone” made their way into the garage and let the air out. As it is, the only foot prints in the snow have been our own.

Another reason I am glad I checked the tires.

Road conditions sucked.

But only the gravel roads, and only those sections shaded by trees. They were sheer ice! Even though I was driving slowly and cautiously, ever now and then, the car would suddenly start fishtailing. Not much, thankfully, and not for long, but enough to be a concern. The last thing I’d want is to hit either ditch on the sides of these roads. They are very deep and very steep! The chances of being able to drive out, even with 4 wheel drive, are very low.

We got a light and fluffy snowfall overnight, which didn’t help matters.

Even on the highway, for the first while, I was not confident driving at the speed limit for quite some time.

Oh, how I wished to be driving the truck, instead!!!

Thankfully, today turned out to be warmer than forecast – again – and the paved roads melted clear by the time I was heading home.

Except the gravel roads, where were even slipperier!

As I was reaching the intersection by our place, though, I saw the grader coming through. Our section of the road had just been done. He had to move aside for me to be able to turn in, so at least the last 200 ft or so was good!

This should have been done long ago. People are really upset with our current municipal counsel. For some reason, they didn’t go with the usual company for road maintenance – a local company that has all the equipment and storage facilities on hand, and had done an excellent job of keeping our roads cleared and safe as quickly as possible, every year we’ve been here. Instead, they’ve decided to lease a grader, rent someone’s space to store it, for a ludicrous monthly fee – and a 125 hour limit. Oh, and they’d have to hire a driver each time, too. They only got the grader today, which means for the past while, roads like ours have been just left as they were. It got so bad in areas that the school division would not allow buses to drive on them, for safety reasons.

Which means parents on these dangerous roads had to drive their kids, however many miles, to meet the bus at the highway, instead.

Hopefully, it will no longer be an issue for the rest of the winter.

Anyhow.

Since I was there with the car, my mother wanted to do as many errands as she could, so we stopped at quite a few places. For all that my mother is 92, uses a walker, frequently complains about how bad her knees are (but won’t wear her brace), and is clearly struggling at times, once she gets going, she is really hard to keep up with! At the grocery store, we’ve switched from her using the shopping cart as a walker, to her using her walker and me pushing the cart, so that she has the option of sitting down if she needs to. Once she gets going, though, she just races off! Unfortunately, she’s one of those people who doesn’t really watch out for others or, if she does see them, all but barrels right through them. Yikes!!

We got it all done, though, and she was quite glad to get home and finally rest!

For me, it was just a stop at the gas station, then home, and I was sure glad to be home, too!

I thought I could look forward to taking it easy for the next while, but…

There was an answering machine message when I got home. A reminded for my eye appointment on Monday. I was very glad to get it! I have my phone set to send me a reminder 1 day in advance, so I wouldn’t have forgotten or missed the appointment. However, my eyes will be dilated for a field of vision test, which means I have to get my daughter to drive me home.

Other than parking in the garage, she has yet to drive the truck.

So tomorrow, we’ll be heading out for her to do some practise driving. Pretty much everything is in different places from any other vehicle we’ve driven. It’s also just a few inches wider and longer than the van – just enough to really affect getting in and out of parking spaces, or taking turns. It won’t take long for her to get used to it, but better to do that in advance, then when I need her to drive me home because I’ll essentially be blinded.

I just checked my calendar and see I have a reminder to get my bloodwork done on the same day my husband’s CPP Disability comes in, before Christmas instead of after. That, at least, is not an appointment. I just need to show up at the clinic and ask for the requisition for that should be on file, then step across the hall to the lab to do the tests. Since I will likely be doing our first January stock up shopping that day, and don’t usually have breakfast until I’ve reached the city, I can swing by on the way and get the bloodwork done while still technically fasting.

Then there’s the extra city trip that my daughters will need next week.

Good grief. I try to keep the winter months as close to home as possible, but this year it looks like our December is going to be filled with outings!

I just want to stay home and hybernate!

The Re-Farmer

The breakfast crowd, and technology frustrations

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Today is supposed to be a chillier day. We’ve already reached our expected high of -9C/16F Which wouldn’t be too bad – especially with how bright and sunny it is – but the wind chill brings it down to -19C/-2F The wind is just whipping around the house, too, so areas that would typically be more sheltered, aren’t.

We got a light snowfall overnight. Just enough to cover the ground. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to have a high of -10C/14F, then reach 0C/32F and 1C/34F over the next two days! So much of it will probably be gone before we dip below freezing again.

No surprise, that the cats were preferring the sun room to have breakfast in, rather than the cat house roof, or the kibble house!

This is 10 cats eating out of 2 bowls! There was another 5 eating behind me as I took this photo. All total, I counted 33 or 35 cats this morning.

When I was about to head in after finishing my rounds, I spotted a whole crowd of heads in the cat bed, watching me. A couple ran out as I stopped to get a picture, but I did manage to catch the runners in the shot.

I cropped out the second one that ran off. I don’t think anyone really wants to see that particular side of his anatomy. 😂 That calico in the back won’t let us come near her, but my goodness, she is not at all shy about telling us it’s feeding time! She is an unusually talkative cat. Especially for a yard cat.

We can sometimes pet that orange and white cat. There was a second orange and white kitten, but it disappeared a couple of months ago. The fluffy black kitten with the white blaze on its face is also getting better at letting us pet him, and even pick him up.

Barely visible behind the orange and white’s head is the little tortie. She won’t let us just pet her, but if we manage to pick her up, she will allow us to cuddle her. Being one of the only females we can actually touch, we have plans to bring her indoors as soon as we can. The calico is a priority, though, as she’s old enough to go into heat. Something that might actually happen earlier in the season, with our milder temperatures. That one, we just can’t get close to at all. Not even while they are all eating. With some of the other stand offish cats, I’ve managed to pet a few backs while they are eating before they run off. All seem to be males, of course. It’s hard to tell at times, because they move around to fast, but the older ones are a bit easier to spot.

You can see the little one with the cloudy eye. The pupil seems to be dilating the same as the good eye. There’s just that cloudy patch across it.

With the racoons being such an issue, I asked my daughter to give the cats their evening feeding earlier in the day, after we loaded the truck so I could make a garbage run. Sunset these days is around 4:30, so this not only got the cats away from the truck so I could leave, it meant they could finish eating while it was still light out. At night, I “arm” the motion sensor recording on the critter cam. When I checked the files this morning, I did see a couple of racoons go in, but there was no food left, so they didn’t stay long.

Meanwhile…

Yes!! I finally made it to the dump! It was even still open. I got so busy working on something else, I lost track of time. Thankfully, on Saturdays, they are open for 8 hours instead of 4.

After I tossed all the household garbage into the pit (they have bins for recycling, and various sheds and storage areas for electronic waste, paint, batteries, oil, etc., as well as separate areas for tires, large appliances, construction waste and other large stuff like that) and was closing things up, the woods on the other side of the pit suddenly started screaming. There had to be at least a dozen, probably more, coyotes back there! Coyotes have such a piercing howl, and some of them really did sound like they were screaming. Then there’s that yipping noise they make. Yikes! I’d hate to have a farm with livestock in this area. We do have coyotes here, of course, but I’ve never heard that many, all at once!

On a completely different note, yesterday evening I got to get some more progress on my garden analysis series of posts. I’ve got them planned out and organized into drafts, but each posts takes a lot of time to work on, as I go over my old posts and photos in the process. This year, I also have a number of videos to go over, as well. With my WordPress storage so close to maxing out, some things only got covered in video, or images are on my Instagram page, instead.

I think WordPress was having issues last night, Thankfully, it seems to not be happening today, as it hasn’t happened while I’m working on this post. As I was writing in my drafts last night, every now and then, it would simply disappear. Everything in my browser window would suddenly go white. The rest of the browser was still visible and uneffected; my tool bar was still there, the URL was unchanged, my tabs were still up. Just the contents of my WordPress editor would disappear. I’d have to reload the page to get it back.

Thankfully, WP automatically saves draft quite frequently, so I didn’t lose more than a sentence, but when it started happening more and more often, I had to stop for the night. I’m hoping to get more progress done on the drafts tonight. I’ve got the first completely post scheduled to post on Tuesday, and if all goes well, there will be a new one posted every morning for 10 days, altogether.

Which means I need to get my butt in gear. These analysis posts can take hours to write!

It does, however, help me get my thoughts together and make plans for next year, so it’s worth it.

The Re-Farmer

A closer look, and my daughters are funny

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As I was finishing up my morning rounds today, I spotted that kitten with the strange looking eye. I still can’t get close to it, but it was at some food, so it didn’t run away when I stopped to take a picture. I still had to zoom in on my desktop to see. This cropped image is the best I was able to get.

It’s still hard to see, but it looks almost like it has a cataract. Most likely, this eye got infected with the unusually bad strain of herpes that hit so many cats in our province this year. Whatever the cause, it was over with by the time this litter started showing up at the house.

I counted 36 cats this morning.

That critter cam we have set up in the sun room kept me busy last night. Those racoons are very persistent! They no longer really pay attention to my using the microphone to shoo them away.

Racoons make the strangest, snarling, piggy noises.

One of the first times I went into the old kitchen, I was surprised to find several cats in it! The outside door to the old kitchen from the sun room has a screen window. It’s old and torn and needs to be replaced. There is a window that slides down over it, but the slide locks have broken off, so the only way to move the window is to jam something like a screwdriver or a knife into the space, slide the latch and try and hold it in place while adjusting the window, so we just keep it all the way open.

Well, with the racoons making them rather nervous, the cats tore a hole in the corner of the screen in the door. The inner door was mostly closed, just to keep the cold out a bit, so they had no problem getting through.

Once the racoons were out, the cats left the old kitchen, but once they knew they could get through that screen, they kept at it! We tried closing the inner door completely, but that just meant cats got stuck between the doors. I opened it to chase racoons out again, and there were three cats between the doors! So we left the screen door open and closed the inner door. The last thing we needed was for the racoons to discover they could get through the screen and tear into the garbage bags stored in the old kitchen until we can finally get to the dump.

Which is open again today. With the battery replaced in the truck, we can finally get the garbage and recycling out!

We are going to have to do something about those racoons. Several times, it wasn’t enough to just chase them out of the sun room. I went outside and chased them out of the kibble house – then chased away the other three that were eating kibble under the shrine! From the noise, some were running under the storage house, so they weren’t going far. The time I chased away the ones by the shrine, I’d counted 8 of them altogether.

*sigh*

Ah, well.

One a completely different topic, my daughters are funny.

This is how they mark off the days on our calendar.

Every month, it’s something different. Sometimes, it’s geometric patterns. Sometimes, it will be a theme based on the month. Flowers in the spring, vegetables at the end of summer, that sort of thing. This was started off as marine life, then went with a food theme, and even some kelp!

I love the axolotl at the top. And the coelacanth! Two of my favourite sea creatures!

The Re-Farmer

Feeling better, and critter cam update

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First, the cuteness!

Three of the four siblings, cuddling (The Beast was napping somewhere else).

Pom Pom is getting so big!! You can really see the difference between him and little Snorri. Even Soot Sprite is getting pretty big, finally, but it’s sometimes hard to tell Pom Pom apart from the older tabbies, as they run around.

I’m happy to say I was feeling better by the end of yesterday, and back to my normal routine this morning. I counted “only” 33 cats outside this morning.

Having the critter cam in the sun room is… interesting! I turned the motion sensor on in the evening. I didn’t realize just how often those racoons have been going in there! Mind you, if I hadn’t been chasing them off, over and over, they probably would have just gone in once, eaten all the cat kibble, and gone.

Part of the problem is, I forgot to feed the outside cats while it was still light out. It gets dark so early right now! Racoons are diurnal, but they tend to be out more at night than during the day. I don’t know where they have a den, but it’s clearly within earshot of kibble hitting metal containers!

It was mostly one or two that kept coming in. At first, I could use the two way talk function to shoo them out but, after a while, they started to ignore that, so I had to get up and chase them out. Eventually, I need to move on to other tasks and couldn’t be watching the live feed constantly. By the time I could check again, there were a whole bunch of little videos showing three or four of the buggers, coming into the sun room and eating all the kibble.

At least they weren’t destructive about it. It was the cats that knocked over the garbage can, not the racoons!

With so many racoons, though, we will have to do something about them.

My husband is starting to talk about learning how to tan fur, and use his leatherworking supplies to make winter hats.

Not that we’re in a position to do anything that permanent. Too many cats in the way.

The sun room is really busy at night, that’s for sure. The cats are constantly going in and out. During the day, it seems to be almost always empty! That will change as the weather gets colder, I’m sure.

While we hit 8C/46F yesterday, today’s high is supposed to be only -1C/30F. Still very mild, and I’m quite appreciating it. Especially the bright sunshine. A good day to finally make a run to the dump, once it opens this afternoon!

The Re-Farmer

What a lovely day!

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It is just gorgeous out there!

We were supposed to reach a high of 4C/39F today. We’re at 7C/45F right now! It turns out we hit 7C/45F yesterday, too. The snow is melting away, and it feels like spring!

Before I go on, though, we must first have the cuteness.

Snorri is just enveloped by David! The Beast (aka: Tiny) is bigger than Snorri! He’s all fur, so he looks bigger than he really is. I have to be so careful at night. He has a thing for curling up behind my neck, or on my legs. He’s so light, sometimes I can’t feel him there at all, and I have to check if he’s on or behind me before I try to roll over.

He does have a thing for necks! If he can get at one, he’ll climb right up any convenient human and settle into a neck, purring.

Snorri’s eyes are still really leaky, but he’s most definitely getting better. I hope he’ll start getting some meat on those bones soon! He certainly has a good appetite.

When feeding the outside cats this morning, I did repeated head counts. I kept getting 37, though I did get 38 once. I think I double counted someone. All the usuals that sometimes show up later were there – Rolando Moon, Brussel and Sprout, Broccoli, the orange and white, both Adam and Driver, Judgement – plus the ones that are almost always here; the printer babies – all the white and greys – the orange tabby, Hypotenose, Syndod, this year’s lone calico and tortie kittens, etc. Then there are the black cats and the grey tabbies. We have so many gorgeous cats this year!

One of the places I put a bit of kibble is in the space the smaller cats use to get under the cat house. While trying to count, I spotted a little white face, eating at the opening. I could only see a bit more than the nose and mouth, so I couldn’t say for sure if it was one of our usuals. There is one white and grey among this year’s kittens that I thought it might have been, but when I went to count the cats in the sun room, he was there. I can’t think of any other small, white faced cat that it might have been. I also spotted a couple of tabbies that I wasn’t sure of. It’s entirely possible they’re from this year’s kittens that are just bigger, and we were bound to have kittens from litters the shier mamas kept further away, finally starting to show up on their own. These ones are adult sized cats, though.

Well, no matter. They are welcome to food, water and shelter! Even Sad Face has become a permanent fixture. The next time there’s a cheap spay and neuter day, I hope we can snag him!

How bizarre that the visiting tom we kept having to chase away because he was so aggressive to the other cats, is now more approachable than all the female yard cats. !!

With so many cats to feed, it’s no surprise that we were running low on kibble, so today I made a trip to Walmart. When I got there, I found that Black Friday sales have already started. Another bizarre notion. This is a US thing, since we have our Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October. Meanwhile, Black Friday doesn’t even happen in the US until the end of this week, but Canada has Black Friday, too, and the sales have started already.

I was able to juggle the budget a bit and take advantage of some of the sales. Along with the cat food I was there to get, I was able to get things like a case of 24 cans of tomato soup at 77¢ each – easily the best deal among the things I got, since those cans now cost closer to $2 each. One of the things on my list, however, was not on sale. Butter. Even their house brand butter is almost $7 a pound! It would be cheaper to buy whipping cream and make it.

I didn’t buy whipping cream, and got only 1 pound of butter. We’ll just have to use the ghee more often, until our next big city shopping trip. The next time we’re at Costco, I’ll have to stock up on more butter than usual. Another of their big buckets of ghee wouldn’t go amiss, either!

Once I got home and we unloaded the truck, I had to feed the outside cats early. I was just going back to park it in the garage when I saw a couple of cats under it; one jumping up into the undercarriage somewhere, and another jumping up onto a front tire!

Yes, I make it a practise to bang on the truck before starting it.

The sound of kibble was enough to get them away from the truck, though.

In other things…

I called my mother last night, and it was like talking to a completely different person. She went from yelling and raging at me the day before, to cheerful and pleasant. I asked how she was doing, and she went into her usual complaints about her breathing; this time, she tried to blame it on the macaroni she ate. *sigh* After she went on for a while, I more specifically asked about her mood. She was all ready to act like it never happened, and she was never angry or said all those horrible things to me. We talked about it for a bit, and I tried to stress with her that if our vandal starts calling her about me, it’s because he’s trying to cause problems between us. She did try to defend him again, saying he was just telling her what’s going on, and I had to tell her, he has NO idea what’s going on. She quickly changed the subject. She didn’t quite apologize, but she did seem to try and make amends, in her own way.

I told her about our plans to get the hand pump on the original well serviced, so that we can then change the well pump and have back up water if something goes wrong. It took some time to explain to her why the well pump in the house needed to be changed at all. It has been changed in the past, but that was more than 20 years ago. The foot valve in the well, however, is original and some 45 or so years old – I think it was dug in 1974, but it might have been the year before. She couldn’t remember the exact year.

So she’s happy with the plans. Her only thing was to tell me to talk to my brother about it first, and I told her, I talk to him about everything. No living person knows this place better than he does. He was old enough to actually do a lot of this stuff alongside my dad. My other brothers were still too young for much of it, and some of it was done before I was even born. My sister is older, but she wouldn’t have been allowed to be part of this stuff, even if she were interested, because she is female. My mother then started going on about how great my brother is, and what a good job he’s doing with the farm.

Just the day before, she’d yelled and hung up on him when he called her out for how she allowed our vandal to manipulate her and treat me like crap.

She was like a totally different person.

Meanwhile…

In checking the trail cam files, I could see our vandal trying to figure out what was going on. The day the guys where here to pick up the vehicles, I saw him pull into our driveway while the gate was open – but not far enough to be trespassing! – to turn around, then slowly back down the road, so he could better see through the trees to where we were. I even remember seeing a vehicle backing up on the road, while the guys were jacking the truck out of the dirt and putting tires on it. On the trail cam files, I saw our vandal go by again, later on. Then, after the guys were gone and the gate closed, I saw a different vehicle pull into our driveway and turn around. From another camera, I could see that the driver of this vehicle was a mutual friend he’d clearly gotten to check things out.

On today’s file check, I saw our vandal in the morning, slowly driving past our driveway, then slow down even more as he drove past the bushes, trying to see through them to the other scrap vehicles.

Needless to say, we are no longer fake locking the gate.

It amazes me how furious and possessive he is about the junk. Yeah, some of it was his, but he abandoned it years ago, and neither vehicle that was taken had ever been his to begin with. The ones he’d left are in such bad shape, they aren’t even good for parts. Just the scrap dealer. Which is why he dumped them here, instead of keeping them on his own property. He was using this place as a garbage dump.

So we’re going to have to keep an extra eye on things for the next while.

Something else we might be able to keep an extra eye on is the sun room critters. My SIL gave us a camera. It was a Superstore freebie for purchases over X amount of dollars, and they had no use for it. It’s one of those little security cameras you can link to your phone to keep an eye on things through a live feed. It is not an outdoor camera, but if we can set it up in the sun room, we should be able to confirm what critters (most likely racoons) are knocking things over in there during the night. If it could handle outdoor conditions, I’d want to set it up facing the cat, kibble and water shelters, so we can see what, besides cats, is eating all the kibble, and sometimes knocking the heated water bowl right out of the shelter! Having a critter cam in the sun room, however, would be a good thing! It mostly comes down to how the device is powered. If it’s USB, we’ve got nothing to plug it into in there. We just haven’t had a chance to even take it out of the box, yet!

Who knows. I might be posting critter cam pictures on here, soon!

The Re-Farmer