Today was that day of the month that always reminds me how much I dislike shopping! :-D
Actually, it went very well, all things considered. So I’m happy about that.
I got an early start to doing my rounds, which meant it was still very dark as I switched out the memory card on the trail cam.
I also paused to take this photo of our lights.
Continue readingToday the girls and I headed into the city for our monthly shop.
I know that there are people out there who actually enjoy shopping. I don’t get it. I really don’t!
Okay, so today turned out to be a more complex shop than usual, but still… Ugh. It’s just so draining!
So here is a picture of a fungus. Because it cheers me up!
Yesterday, when it looked like the predicted thunderstorms were actually going to pass over us, we shut down our computers and enjoyed the show.
We didn’t get anything too severe, so it turned out to be unnecessary, but why take chances? :-D
We did get some wonderful, much needed rain, though!
First up, here is a kitten fix for you to enjoy. :-)
Continue readingToday, we finally got our monthly shop in the city done. We got the main shopping done at Costco, and still had energy enough to take in a couple more stores. It made for a long, achy day. I forgot to take pain killers before we left. Ah, well.
We encountered a couple of strange things in the process. The first was at Costco, when we stopped to look at a food dehydrator. I had one but passed it on before the move, and will be wanting to replace it by the time we start gardening. The one on display was tipped over on its side, so while we were maneuvering it around so we could see it properly, we got a good look at the settings.
We both did double takes.
Living food? What on earth is “living food” supposed to be? It’s already got settings for yogurt, so not bacteria, and bread, so not yeast. I’m familiar with the raw food diets and the claims about enzymes, but there’s fruit and vegetable settings there, too. I’ve even been doing searches, and I’ve found a Living Food Institute, living food as a brand name for, among other things, dehydrators, and raw food diets that define living foods as “all natural and uncooked.” Which doesn’t explain having its own setting.
Very strange! :-D
Then as we were heading into another grocery store for things we don’t want to buy in bulk, we walked past a cart corral and spotted this…
Someone left their liverwurst behind, and there it sits, all sad and lonely. Strange, indeed! :-D
It was a productive shop, though the Costco was very busy for a Tuesday morning! My daughter and I were both pretty sore and tired by the time we got home. My younger daughter had a shift today; we dropped her off, then headed straight to the city. One of the things we got were cat treats for the mamas in the sun room, so before I headed out again to pick her up, I took some time to sit in the sun room with them.
Beep Beep could not get enough cuddles!
I spread cat treats in different areas, including the box nest I hope Beep Beep will use when she has her babies, as well as tucking some under the blanket for Butterscotch. She would be in this picture, too, if the blanket were lifted up. :-D Beep Beep was a real greedy guts and ate up all the other treats, then came over to me and demanded all of my attention!
Having a heavily pregnant cat try and roll around on your stomach and chest is truly amusing.
And painful. She kept slipping, and she has very sharp claws!
I’m happy to say that, by the end of the day, I could see that both cats had used the litter box. I was really hoping they wouldn’t find the litter too odd and just used the floor or something. I’m also happy to say that Butterscotch seems quite okay with me being around her and the kittens, and purrs up a storm when I reach under the blanket to pet her, and even touch her babies. They are so adorable!!!
There is one thing about having them in the sun room that makes things less convenient; we can’t go outside through it right now. I don’t want to take a chance of either of the mamas getting out. The bags of outside cat food are kept in the old kitchen, but the deer/bird feed is in a bin in the sun room. That means getting the cat food from the old kitchen, then walking through the house to the main doorway, then back to the sun room, from the outside, to the cat’s food and water bowls. Then going back through the house, the old kitchen and into the sun room, to get a bucket of feed for the birds and deer. I don’t mind, but it is kinda funny.
I was almost finished the last bag of deer feed, so on the way to getting my daughter I stopped to pick up more feed. I am now switching away from the deer feed (which is a mix of mostly oats and sunflower seeds) to straight black oil seed. I don’t expect the deer to be coming by as often, now that things are greening up and food is more available in the bush, and the birds prefer the black oil seeds. The deer are more than happy to eat it, too, so it’s win-win. :-)
The Re-Farmer
Today was our Costco shopping day. This was my splurge for the month. :-)
Continue readingOne of the nice things about February being such a short month is, pay comes in a bit early. Which meant we got to do our monthly shop before we started running out of too many things!
The trip to the city wasn’t quite uneventful. Not far from our driveway, there are open fields on both sides of the road. We’ve had some very high winds for the past couple of days, but not a lot of snow, so I wasn’t expecting to hit several small drifts across the road in a row.
Then we reached the big drifts.
Continue readingYes! We actually made it into the city for our big, monthly shop!
Oh, it is SO good to be stocked up again! :-D
It almost didn’t happen, though. The noises the van was making was still a concern.
Continue readingThe temperature outside is not the only thing was was warming up today. This is what I saw when I looked out our bathroom window this morning.
Pretty sure that’s Big Jim in the empty water bowl. :-D
Also, they are absolutely shredding the piece of Styrofoam I’ve got partially holding up their cat cave roof! :-D
We’ve taken advantage of the warming temperatures with a quick trip into the city last night, and a trip to finally do our bigger shopping today. We’re skipping our usual monthly Costco shop this month, because of how things worked out for the holidays, but it was still worth driving into the city to get at least a modestly large shopping trip in.
Among the things we picked up today was 5 large bags of kibble for the outside cats. Going to the city to buy those alone saved us about $50-$75, if we’d bought it locally. The price range is because the stores are often out of stock of the lower priced varieties. The savings in cat food alone more than makes up for the cost of gas to drive to the city.
I had to buy a memory card. A 16 Gig card in the city cost me just under $16. A comparable card locally? Almost $25.
So it was worth the drive in, even as messy as it was out there. We were above freezing today, and everything was melting like crazy on the roads. It’s going to cool down again, starting tomorrow, so I’m glad to get the hours of driving out of the way, before everything freezes up again. Temperatures are expected to drop again, starting tomorrow, though not the deep freeze we recently had.
It should be interesting to see how the deep freeze will affect our electricity bill. Our billing cycle is mid-month, so there is a calendar overlap. Our first bill, just over a year ago, was over $300, going up almost $100 each cycle over the next few months, topping out at just under $600. During this time, the hot water tank had finally died and we were heating water every day for washing. Comparing the costs of our energy usage a year later, the bill only went up about $25 in the same time period. It should be interesting to compare the time period after we got the new hot water tank, and were no longer boiling water for hours, every day!
The Re-Farmer
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
Just a bit of catch up from yesterday, since I shut down the computer when we heard a thunderstorm coming in. It ended up passing us by, but even so, it got pretty loud out there!
When doing my evening walk around the yard, I decided to head around the main garden area to check out the choke cherries.
There is one chokecherry tree on the south side of the garden, that my mother planted among the raspberries. It has very few berries on it; I don’t think it’s getting anywhere near enough sun in that location. The few it has are starting to turn a darker red.
This first photo is from one of the trees hidden among the lilacs along the north fence line.
This next photo is from a tree about 50 feet away.
These black ones are basically ripe.
Quite the difference between the two trees!
I’m not sure if we will be doing anything with them. My mom was suggesting making jam, but I am really not up to that. Especially for such a small amount of berries. I wouldn’t mind trying to make wine with them, but we don’t have the set up for that right now. They’re not the sort of thing you eat straight, though you certainly can. They’re more pit than berry. :-D
Anyhow.
Yesterday was our day to go into the city for the Costco shopping. It was a relatively small shop, though. My husband gets his disability payments at the end of the month, and gets both CPP Disability (from the government), which is a fairly small payment that comes in a few business days before the end of the month, and then his private insurance payment, which comes in on the last business day of the month. So we’ve been doing our monthly shop with the first one comes in, the paying the bills with the second one.
Not this month.
Because his CPAP died, we made sure to order that as soon as the money came in. It ended up costing about CDN$650, which is an incredibly good price. His insurance will reimburse a portion of that, but that won’t happen until next week, at the earliest.
Hopefully, the CPAP will come in quickly. Although the sleep apnea does not seem as severe as it was years ago, the affects are being felt. It’s not even the lack of oxygen, but the lack of REM sleep that can really cause problems. When he was first diagnosed, the specialist estimated my husband hadn’t had any REM sleep for at least a year. It almost killed him. So we don’t want to take any chances!
The CPAP was ordered on Friday and my husband got a shipping notice before the end of the day. However, the company can only guarantee shipping up until it gets to Canada. After that, it’s up to Canada Post. So the shipping estimate is 2-3 business weeks. !!!
I don’t expect it to take that long. Packages tend to get shipped faster than envelopes.
With that done, we basically did a half month shop, rather than a full month shop.
Now, I want to make one thing very clear.
I hate shopping.
Okay. Maybe “hate” is too strong of a word. Still, I really, really, really dislike shopping. I don’t like being around so many people, in crowded aisles, etc. Basically, everything about shopping, I dislike.
Which means a trip to Costco uses up all sort of spoons, until I’ve got nothing left but knives!
Which is why I like to have at least one of the girls with me. They make sure I don’t just turn around and leave half way through shopping. It’s much more pleasant with their company!
So we (both girls came along this time) did the Costco shopping, gassed up the van, and I even remembered to bring the jerry can to get premium gas for the riding mower (regular gas at Costco was $1.169, compared to $1.239 elsewhere, and premium was $1.269, so it was worth doing it there!).
Before the move, our usual routine was to do the Costco shopping for the big stuff, then go to a local grocery franchise for the non-bulk stuff. In the years we were away, that franchise expanded into the city here, but there are very few of them. The girls wanted to pick up something we knew was carried by this company. We did consider checking out a couple of the other grocery chains, but really don’t like them, so I looked up the nearest store of the one we do like. It turned out there was a location a convenient drive from the area we were in, so we decided to check it out.
Well now.
Did I mention I hate shopping?
When we got to the place, the first thing we saw were the extra signs. It was an “international” store, with online shopping. Of course, that had us joking about whether they delivered to where we live, out in the sticks. It also had a “kitchen” area.
Hmm.
Then we walked in.
Wow.
I must have looked like a country yokel that had come into the big city for the first time!
We couldn’t believe this place!
It was huge and open. The aisles were wide, and accessible (knowing so many wheelchair and walker users, it’s now automatic for me to assess aisle space and judge how well someone in a wheelchair would be able to navigate). The “kitchen” area had a wide variety of local and international foods, hot and fresh, with a lovely, well lit and welcoming seating area. They had several food “bars”, with the usual things like chicken wings, olives and Chinese food – and a perogie bar! There was a cheese island. Half the store was dedicated to international foods – three aisles were of just Filipino food.
Before the move, there were a couple of local grocery stores that had stuff we couldn’t find anywhere else. One was an Italian store that specialized in European imports. The other was a Chinese grocery store that included hot food take out/dine in areas (with some of the best bao I’ve ever tasted).
This store was like those two, plus the regular grocery store, merged into one.
It was heaven. A total joy to shop there!
We had to deliberately stop ourselves from going through all the international aisles, so we wouldn’t completely blow our budget!
We need to come back. With money. All three of us agreed that this store alone was worth the drive to the city to shop in.
Did I mention I hate shopping?
Not here!
I can’t wait to go back. And this time, we’ll plan on having lunch there, too!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 