While I was outside this evening, I found Junk Pile and all three of her kittens, playing in front of the storage house.
When I had the chance, I tried to see if I could get one of them to come close.
It almost worked.
Almost, but not quite! This was as close as little Braveheart would get!
It’s hard to see, but there’s a kitten behind the grapevines in the background. :-)
They love playing on those stairs!
I’ve been keeping that insulator on the steps filled with water lately. Junk Pile and her kittens seem to prefer drinking out of that, over the wider, shallower container by the food dish.
I would love to have stayed longer to try and play with them, but I was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes!
Meanwhile, I had this on my bed…
At first, it was David, Cheddar and Big Rig, but then Keith pushed his way in between and settled in, too!
We had a really hot day today, so when things cooled down enough, I went out to water the garden plots and sunflowers.
Which is when I found this.
All the leaves on one side of this one have been eaten!
This is the first of the large sunflowers that has had this kind of damage. :-( At least the top didn’t get chomped off.
One of the more recently chomped smaller ones is showing signs of recovery.
It also had a friend!
We’ve got a lot of grasshoppers and locusts this year, but this is the first green one like this that I’ve seen. :-)
When I was done and dragging the hose back to the house, I found Creamsicle napping on top of the straw bale. :-) My coming close for a picture woke him up…
I caught him mid stretch. :-D
Meanwhile…
Today, my husband and I had our doctor appointments that we should have had back in March. They were supposed to be physicals, but the doctor wasn’t expecting that. Which is when I found out he does physicals in the mornings, when, as he put it, his mind it still fresh. Which was not a problem, since we had lots to catch up on. He hasn’t seen my husband since December, and has seen me only while I was accompanying my mother.
Us all having the same doctor is coming in handy.
Before doing a full physical, he wanted us both to get fasting bloodwork done. For my husband’s part of the appointment, we updated the doctor on his upcoming visit with the pain clinic. Even though he hasn’t seen my husband in more than 6 months, he remembered that we’d already been waiting for almost 2 years, so he was a bit shocked that this was going to be a first visit. We also told him about the appointment at the cardiac clinic to discuss my husband getting a defibrillator implanted. He had questions about that. Mostly, why does my husband suddenly have such a low ejection fraction? It turns out that the cardiac clinic has not been sending any files to our doctor, so he had nothing. He still has nothing, really, because the cardiac clinic has not been able to find why my husband’s ejection fraction is so low, and are openly perplexed by him. The doctor has requested for us to remind the clinic to send the files to him, so he can see what’s going on. Same with the pain clinic, when the time comes.
In our previous province, all medical files were electronic, and could be accessed by any authorized doctor. So my husband could go from his GP to the specialists at the pain clinic (all 4 or 5 of them that were assigned to his case), to any other specialist, and they would all have access to the same information. Here, there is no connectivity. When our previous doctor suddenly moved out of province, we had to pay to have our files sent to the new clinic. A GP can access the electronic files at their own clinic, but not the files at the heart clinic or the pain clinic. They all have to send their files to each other, as needed. All of the specialty clinics should be sending everything back to the primary caregiver every time, so that at least that one person has all the information. Why that isn’t happening for my husband, we don’t know, but the doctor was not happy with having so much information missing.
We spent some time talking about my husband’s medications, and the problems he’s been having getting refills for the painkillers. So that’s been updated but, after we get the bloodwork done, he wants to look at switching my husband to morphine, and focus on pain management a lot more. There’s one medication in particular that he was wondering why my husband is on at all, and he just didn’t know anymore. I suspect the total number of prescriptions my husband is on will be reduced.
I’m happy to see him being pro-active about it. The previous doctor didn’t want to change anything until after my husband was seen by the pain clinic, but that took so long, the doctor moved out of province before that could happen!
My own part of the appointment was short. I have only one prescription, and I’ll see him again after my bloodwork is done. We ended up chatting a bit about my mother, since I’ll be bringing her back to see him tomorrow.
As for our follow up appointments, he started to ask if we could book them in the mornings when I mentioned I’d asked for the afternoon, because of the drive. When he realized how far away we live, he completely back tracked and said to make the appointment for whenever works best for us, and to book another “joint” appointment, and he will accommodate us. Since our bloodwork requires fasting, we will book the appointment after we get it done, which likely won’t be until Monday.
So we’ll have at least one more medical appointment this month, on top of the others.
With this doctor wanting to work proactively on managing my husband’s pain, I suspect we’ll be back fairly regularly.
By the time we were done, my husband was at his limit – and we still had the drive home to do. He was worried about his appointment at the cardiac clinic next week. The letter said that there have been a lot of delays, and to expect to be there for as long as 2 hours. That’s after a 1 1/2 hour drive. We’ll have to make sure to call in advance so they can have a stretcher available for him to lie down on; something they were able to arrange to do for him before, after a previous appointment was so late, he ended up walking out because he was in just too much pain. They’re a cardiac clinic. They don’t take into account any other issues a person might have, unrelated to the heart, unless it’s brought up directly.
Another reason why not having central files is a problem. When he goes to any specialist, he has to explain everything else to them. At the cardiac clinic, he could see any one of a team of 5 that works together, so he has to explain his disability, and why he uses a walker, all over again with each one. Otherwise, they assume that his use of a walker is related to his heart condition.
It’s frustrating, to say the least.
At least now we’re able to actually get appointments and treatment. The months of delays because of the pandemic shut downs have really messed things up for him. Our province has once again had more people testing positive for the Wuhan strain of coronavirus, and people are freaking out and demanding things shut down again. What the media isn’t including in their reports (though it’s on the provincial government website, for all to see), those new cases are from 5 days of testing, and represent only .9% testing positive. The total number of positive and presumptive positive cases for the province since March is .03% of the entire population. A person is more likely to get hit by a car than test positive for the Wuhan strain of coronavirus. People don’t seem to understand risk factors at all anymore, and the panic means people like my husband are having a hard time getting medical care. During our appointment, the only time it came up at all was when I mentioned we were supposed to have today’s appointments back in March, when everything got shut down. My husband’s appointment at the cardiac clinic got cancelled. While my husband did get one appointment rescheduled at the cardiac clinic, for a test in nuclear medicine, next week will be the first time the cardiac team will be seeing him. He’s had a couple of telephone appointments, but that’s it. He had also finally gotten contacted by the pain clinic just before the shut down, which that added a few more months to his wait.
If things shut down again, lack of treatment would certainly mean his condition degenerating further. Lack of treatment is more likely to kill him, than any of us coming in contact with the Wuhan strain of coronavirus.
He is certainly not the only person in this position.
It had been a while since I’d seen the outside kittens, so I was happy when they showed up this evening. Little Braveheart had follow Junk Pile to the food bowls by the house, but ran off when I came out. They hung out by the steps into the storage house, before hiding in the grape vines, so I decided to sit on the steps and see if I could tempt them to play.
Braveheart was immediately curious!
Just look at that intense gaze! :-)
And who’s that back there?
Another baby, chewing on a grape vine! :-D
Junk Pile, meanwhile, came over and lay on the mulch, growling at me the whole time! That seems to be her default attitude these days. :-D
I broke off the spent flowers of a spirea growing under the stairs to wiggle around on the step. It worked a bit!
Braveheart pounced at it! :-)
Her sibling even came a bit closer.
I saw no sign of the third kitten, though. I hope it’s all right.
After this, they ran off with Junk Pile into the spirea, so I let them be.
Once indoors, I got entertained by more kittens.
The cats love the base of the washing machine packaging so much, we don’t have the heart to get rid of it, yet! :-D
Layendecker had been napping on it when Turmeric crawled on and woke him up. :-D
While doing my evening rounds, I decided to check the pump shack to see if Rosencrantz’ kittens were still there. I have not seen them since that first time.
I didn’t see them, but Junk Pile was following me around – growling the whole time.
Then, as I passed the junk pile, I saw Junk Pile – and her three kittens!
Two went and hid among the pallets before I could take a picture.
Junk Pile was growling at me while staring me down! :-D
This was also the closest I’ve had Junk Pile come near me since she was a kitten herself!
Eventually, little Braveheart went down and out of sight. I ended up going around the back of the rotten pallets and could see two kittens – including the bravest one – looking up at me.
I started playing the finger wiggle game, and Braveheart was more than willing to stalk and tackle them!
You can see the second kitten as a blur, slinking away below.
While playing with little Braveheart, I noticed a face staring at me from inside a pallet.
I saw the second one and tried to get a photo, which didn’t work, but when I uploaded this photo, I was thrilled to see I got them both!
They were intensely curious, but not quite willing to tackle the wiggling fingers.
I’d have stayed out longer, if I weren’t being eaten alive by mosquitoes!
I am so thrilled. We were never able to socialize Junk Pile, but maybe we’ll be able to socialize her babies!
The area we have the picnic table set up for painting is near where the cucamelons are planted. After painting last night, the girls checked them out and spotted baby cucamelons! When I’d checked them earlier, they weren’t even blooming.
Of course, I had to check them out, this morning.
The tiniest cucamelons on the tiniest of flowers! There are lots of them, and they are all barely visible. :-D
I had another smile waiting for me when I got back in the house. Our feline matriarch has laid claim to the base from under the washing machine; she likes the Styrofoam. Before heading outside, I took the piece that was inside the drum of the washer and set it on the floor.
She took the bait.
She’s been in it pretty much all day – and if she hasn’t, one of the other cats was in it! :-D
I think we’ll keep it, just for her. :-)
The girls and I planned a cookout today. Usually, we do these later in the day, when it’s cooler and the fire looks great as it gets dark. The girls have plans for the evening, so we did it earlier than usual.
Though we bought a big bag of potatoes while stocking up for the month, I ended up getting some from the store that were already wrapped and ready for grilling or baking. What can I say. The price was really good, and I didn’t feel like fussing with foil.
Along with the potatoes, I put together something we’ve never gone before, based on a recipe I’d found online. Ground beef meatballs, stuffed with cheese, encased in onion rings, then wrapped in bacon. I have a cooking sheet that’s designed to do things like vegetables on a BBQ, and I used that as my base. I lined it with heavy duty aluminum foil and made “sides” around the edges after the meatballs were set up, then covered with another sheet of foil. I also prepped corn on the cob by peeling off only a couple of the other husks, pulling back the rest so I could remove the silk, covered the cobs with the husks again, then let them soak in a giant bowl of water.
Once everything we ready, I got a fire going and built it up until I got a good, solid base of coals. While I was doing that, the girls painted one last coat on the picnic table.
Since the picnic table wasn’t ready to use, and we needed a table of some kind, we ended up bringing a pair of saw horses and a couple of 3×4’s that we’d been using to hold things near the picnic table. The sheet of high density plastic that I’ve been hanging on to (I think it was used to cover the basement window for the winter at some point) was brought over as a table top.
Once I had a decent amount of coals, pushed them to the back, then set up one of the oven racks from the broken stove over them. Sitting on the concrete blocks, the rack is still pretty high above the coals, so I used an old roaster lid to cover them and keep the heat from above, like a sort of oven.
After about 20 minutes, I set up the other rack and put on the meatballs. My daughter had added a baking sheet over it, just in case the cats decided to go for them, and I ended up leaving it on to serve a similar purpose as the roaster lid.
I’m not used to cooking thick hamburger like this over fire, and we had some concerns about getting them cooked all the way through (the cheese in the middle would help with that, at least), but within moments of putting the pan over the fire, I could hear it sizzling!
After about 10 minutes, we checked how they were doing.
Wow! The cheese just exploded out of them! :-D There was quite a bit of liquid, so I left the baking sheet off and just loosely covered it with foil again.
The potatoes were ready by then, so I moved them to a corner away from the coals, and covered them again to stay warm.
We kept a close eye on them and, after a while, flipped them.
Sort of.
They kept wanting to fall apart, and the bacon was sticking to the foil!! My daughter managed to get it done, though. :-D
Once they were done, the pan was moved to the other corner, and the corn was put on.
The corn cooks very quickly, compared to most things. Still, after flipping them, I ended up using the roaster lid to cover them.
My husband wasn’t able to join us, so when the food was ready, I prepped a plate for him.
The plate was too small for both of his cobs of corn. :-D
The husks make a great handle to use while eating the corn. :-)
It all turned out absolutely delicious! I don’t know that I would do the meatballs again – at least not over a fire. They were quite difficult to get off the foil. Still, they were so tasty, they’re worth the fuss.
It was so nice, sitting outside then enjoying a delicious meal. We were serenaded by cicadas. Two of them. LOL (Cicadas are not really a thing in our area.) There was a constant snapping and crackling as caragana seed pods exploded in the sunlight, while we played “chase the shade” with our chairs. LOL We had feline company too, of course. Potato Beetle demanded attention, and kept steeling our chairs for naps!
While waiting for the fire to burn down, the girls (who had missed breakfast) had brought out hot dog fixings and toasted a couple of dogs early on. They left the supplies behind (in an insulated back with ice packs, of course) when they had to leave. Once the cooking was done, I started to build up the fire again and began working on the pile of branches against the old log cabin. I was out there so long, I ended up having hot dogs for supper, too! :-D
I found another smile waiting for me on our makeshift table.
Of all the places he could lay down for a nap, he chose the picnic backpack, and used the cutlery as a pillow. What a silly boy!
I’m not sure when this happened, but I noticed it after I had started to rebuild the fire again.
The half-block cracked in the heat! I pushed it back into position after the photo was taken and I moved the piece of wood off of it.
I check the other blocks, when the fire died down a bit, and can see that one of them has cracks, too. Only on the top of the brick, though.
Eventually, the piece on the half block fell right off. As I moved it to one side, I noticed this.
One of the bricks under it has not only cracked, but when I tapped it while moving the ashes around, chunks broke off.
Well, they still do the job, so I don’t mind!
Meanwhile, I’m already thinking ahead to what I want to try cooking on the fire pit next!
If all goes to plan, by the time this post is published, I should be in the city with one of my daughters, doing half of our monthly shop. While going over our list, we realized we will have to split it into two trips.
Of the various outdoor projects we need to work on, I decided to start on the picnic table. It meant working in the shade, and with water, so being out shortly after the hottest part of the day would be less of an issue.
I had company.
Creamsicle tired himself out, rolling in the dirt where the picnic table has been for the past couple of summers. :-)
We will be painting the picnic table a ridiculously bright blue that I found, but first, it needed to be scrubbed.
I started with the underside, since that required the most time. Here is how it looked before I started.
I had kinda hoped those white patches were old paint but, alas, they were not.
They were old, dry mold.
I spent the next while methodically scrubbing away everything but the underside of the table top.
Which revealed a fair bit, such as the state of these two legs.
There were rotten pieces that just sloughed off as I scrubbed.
I intend to paint the underside of the table, and especially the bottoms of the legs.
This old picnic table has a lot of rot on it, but it is still strong enough to sit at. The goal is to make it more pleasant to sit at, until such time as we can replace it. The paint may even add some years to it, but I don’t expect it to.
You can actually see the colour of the wood, now! :-D
At this point, I’ve scrubbed everything except the underside of the tabletop and only managed a cursory scrub of the few inches above it. Here, it became an issue of mobility. I don’t bend and reach very well anymore, which meant I needed to find a way to raise the whole thing higher.
The area I was working in is near the old garden shed, which is an area I was able to clean up of a lot of stuff, our first summer here. Among those things was a stack of what I eventually learned are chimney liners. They and the chimney blocks we are now using as a retaining wall/planters (with more in the basement) were intended to replace the crumbling chimney for the wood burning furnace.
They were acquired shortly after my parents bought the property. The chimney had needed replacing even then (about 50 years or so ago), but it just never happened!
So now I have the inserts stacked by the back of the house, waiting until I can figure out what to do with them.
So I grabbed three of them and set them up.
… after hosing off all the spiderwebs, first…
They were perfect. I wish I’d thought of using them earlier. It made things SO much easier on my back!
Here is the underside of the table top, with years of dirt and mold scrubbed away.
I can also see where some attempts had been made to strengthen and stabilize it. We had lived in a building my parents bought as an investment property in the “downtown” of our little hamlet, years ago. After many years of problem tenants costing them thousands in damages, they didn’t want to rent the house out anymore, so we lived there for a couple of years before moving out of province. While there, we got this picnic table for a whole $5. The municipality was replacing the picnic tables in public parks and selling off the old ones for next to nothing. So it was already old when we got it, but still in great shape. It just needed a paint job. Which we never got to do, before we left the province. So my late brother brought it to the farm. He is likely the one to add the angled braces supporting the middle board. That bar across the middle was an addition, too. It looks like a hole had been drilled though to support a shade umbrella, which is probably why the braces and support bar were added. Then there’s the other piece, with a lager hole drilled through it, to support an umbrella with a larger post. I’m pretty sure we have the umbrella that was used in there, stored in the sun room now. When we’re done painting, I plan to see if it fits.
Then it was time to flip it over.
I know my mother did make efforts to protect this from the elements. She’s the last person so have painted it, and she told me how she would cover it with a plastic table cloth over the winter, to protect the wood (she used thumbtacks to secure it, and some of them are still stuck in the wood!).
It has been a long time since anyone has done anything to protect it, since. She has been living where she is now for about six years, so it’s definitely been longer than that.
Long enough for lichen to start growing on it!
The top was a lot easier to scrub. :-)
There was red paint at one corner of the table top, as well as the seat below. I suspect someone used the table to do something else, and made a mess on the table. Whatever kind of paint it was, parts of it actually dissolved and washed away with the water!
I had to use the hose almost constantly as I scrubbed. Otherwise, it all just sort of smeared. !! There was also debris packed into the spaces between some of the boards that not even the jet on the hose nozzle could blast out. Among the nearby junk around the old garden shed, I found some wire sturdy enough that I was able to get the debris loose and clear.
When we first got this table, it was a sort of reddish brown colour. I think the provincial parks department got some sort of deal on the paint because, for a while, all park benches and picnic tables were painted that same colour! There’s no sign of it now, though I can see that someone did paint it a different grey some time before my mother’s final coat of blue-grey.
So the table is now prepped for painting!
When they had a chance, the girls came out to see how it looked, then we flipped it upside down over the chimney inserts again. Since we’ve got at least 1 city shopping day to do first, it won’t be right away but, hopefully, it can be done before we go back to get the rest of what we need for the month.
Hhmm. I should probably pick up another paint brush or two. You never know. We might have more than one person available to work on it at the same time! :-D
Once it’s painted and ready, we’re thinking of setting it up near the fire pit. We will be making sure to pick up things we can cook over the fire, and I’m hoping we’ll be able to use the fire pit quite a few times this year. The picnic table will get some good use, once it’s no longer nasty to sit at! :-D
After putting kibble out for the outside cats, I was about to leave the sun room with bird seed, when I startled something small and white.
I stayed in the sun room long enough for the brave baby to return!
I could see no sign of the other two of Junk Pile’s babies. They hang out in the spirea by the storage house, where we now have bowls of food and water set up for them, but this little one decided to check out where all the other cats are going!
Rosencrantz has been coming over for food in the mornings pretty regularly, but I don’t think her kittens are in the pump shack anymore.
So there are at least 6 kittens from 2 litters, about the size of this little cutie, plus however many Butterscotch ended up having. If any survived. I haven’t been able to see if she’s still nursing, as she has become somewhat unfriendly. I think she really didn’t like being indoors and doesn’t want to take the chance of us doing that again.
Over the nest few weeks/months, I expect to see more yard kitties showing up by the house!
With Junk Pile’s babies starting to use the spirea to hide in, I moved a food dish near the area. This morning, while Junk Pile was by the house, waiting for me to refill the kibble, I saw her mostly white kitten, sitting on the mulch by the grapes.
It’s not the white kitten in the photo above!
Can you see the little white nose peaking out from under the grapes?
The grey baby eventually came out to eat with mom, but I didn’t see the white one again.
While checking on the garden beds and doing a bit of weeding, I pulled a few baby carrots.
Breakfast of champions! :-D
I’ve got the three varieties in here; purple, white and rainbow mix.
They were very tasty! :-D
Today, we’re going to have to really push to finish the old kitchen and sun room. The weather forecast has changed.
The heat warnings are back, with a predicted high of 30C/86F, and the humidex making it feel like 36C/96F. The thunderstorms that had been predicted for tomorrow are now expected this afternoon. Even if the storms miss us again, we’ll likely catch some rain, and among the stuff we have sitting outside are power tools.
Yesterday, things were a bit cooler and finally nice enough to start a fire in the fire pit!
I’ve been putting small branches and the invasive vines I’ve pulled up into there since last summer, so it felt good to finally burn that stuff away!
While I was at it, I decided to clean up the bricks around the fire pit that the skunks revealed while digging for grubs.
Knowing that these were the glazed bricks we’ve got all over the place under there, I decided to use the sidewalk ice scraping tool. Just a flat blade that would slide across the surface, and cut away the root mats at the same time.
It worked remarkably well!
In the above photo, I’d finished uncovering the bricks all the way around.
There was some seriously thick root mats covering some of them!
The next step was to hose them down with water, including using the jet to pressure wash some of the dirt out from between the bricks, and between the bricks and the fire pit ring.
Where the water pooled showed me the most uneven areas of the brick ring.
What I will eventually be doing is taking them out completely, leveling the base off as best I can, then putting them back.
Ideally, I’d be adding a layer of gravel under there, first.
I am seriously considering taking the wagon and a shovel out to the old gravel pit to see what I can salvage out of there!
Until then, we make do.
My next step was to use break up the ridge of soil and root mats around the ring some more.
Every now and then, I’d find a small rock, but then I hit was seemed to be a much larger rock.
A strangely flat and smooth rock.
I found another brick!
For a moment, I thought maybe there was a second ring of bricks, but the angle of it was too random for that.
Somehow, a single brick got left to one side, and got buried with the others.
The ones around the fire pit getting buried makes sense, but how does a lone brick on the side get left there long enough to be buried, too? Did no one try to mow there, before it got covered? Did people using the fire pit (and I know it did get used) simply walk around it until it disappeared, along with the other bricks?
So very strange!
I set it aside with another brick like it, that I’d found under some nearby maple trees. :-D
(These glazed bricks have been around for as long as I can remember. I have no idea where they came from, but they would be at least 50 years old, and probably quite a few years older. While I intend to take them out of the various areas they are in now, to replace them with what should be there instead (like infill around the house!), these are going to be kept and repurposed. They’re too slippery to use as a “floor” for anything (which is probably what they were salvaged from originally), but I think they would be great on walls or something, at some point.)
Once I broke up the ridge, I used the metal blade on the scraper to push the soil away, to try and level things a bit more.
The grills in the fire pit, btw, are the racks from our old oven. After burning away what was already in the pit, I started working on the pile of branches by the collapsing log cabin. When a solid bed of coals was formed, I put the oven racks in it, then built the fire up again on top, to burn away any grease or whatever that got on them while being used. We basically didn’t bother to clean the oven when we knew we needed to replace it fairly soon. It did have a self-cleaning function, but we didn’t feel it was safe to use. With elements on the stove sparking, we didn’t want to find out if anything electrical would give out in the oven, too!
So I used the fire pit to get the cruddy bits off.
Shortly after this, my daughter joined me, and we built the fire up once again, to get rid of more of the branch pile.
I also used a metal rake to spread the soil out more, then took the hose to it, to break up the clumps. The water no longer pools at the bricks. :-)
After a while, my daughter took out the oven racks and set them aside to be hosed off, later.
The next thing I want to do is empty the fire pit of ashes, which will be spread over a garden area or two.
Once it is cleaned out, I want to add some cinder blocks or bricks into the pit. They will be there to hold one or both oven racks. This way, if we wanted to, we could use pots and pans for cooking over the coals. I do have a campfire rack, but it’s meant to put food on directly to cook, not hold the weight of cooking utensils. The oven racks and bricks will open up more possibilities for what we can do on our fire pit. :-)
While I was working on uncovering the fire pit ring, I had help.
Not the most useful kind of help!
More like the “pay attention to me or I’ll trip you” kind of help! :-D
Eventually, he got tired of trying to make me pick him up and went for a nap. :-)
Such a cutie!
He would make such a loving indoor cat, but we’ve had no luck in adopting him or Creamsicle out. :-(
Lately, Potato Beetle and Creamsicle have perfected the art of rubbing against our legs WHILE we are walking, somehow managing to maintain contact and pressure even as we pull our legs away.
Such determined creatures!
Also, Potato seems to like my new shoes. Maybe that’s it. He’s happy I no longer have these.
My left shoe had actually blown out like the one on the right, but I’d used Gorilla Super Glue on it. Amazingly, it is still holding! The other shoe was only coming loose at the toe tip, so I glued that – only to have the sides blow out, soon after! The tip managed to hold on for days longer.
I’m not a shoe person. It’s so hard for me to find shoes that accommodate my feet, I don’t bother. I have one pair of regular shoes. Maybe a pair of sandals, too, if I can find them. Not this time of year, apparently. :-/
Women’s shoes don’t fit me, at all. I can wear extra wide men’s shoes, but to get the right width, I go with a size that’s a fair bit longer than my feet. Which is why I keep catching the toes of my shoes on things. :-D It means my shoes wear out on the sides faster, as my feet bend in a different area than the shoes are designed for. It doesn’t matter if they are cheapies, or if I spring for a higher end shoe. By the end of a year, all my shoes end up looking like this!
While doing my rounds, before going to the city, I went to the usual spots to see if any more branches had come down during the night.
None had, but when I reached the fence near the pump shack, I heard something moving on the metal table beside it.
It took me a while, but I eventually saw a kitten slink under the table itself.
Was that Junk Pile cat’s white and grey baby?
Near where I was standing is a spot the cats use to go under the chain link fence. Rosencrantz, whom I’d seen earlier as I put kibble out for the yard cats, went through, stopping several times to look back at me and give me a death glare! :-D
Just look at that face!
So was that Rosencrantz’s baby I was seeing?
She made her way to the pump shack, then settled down in front of the door, keeping an eye on me. I could no longer see the kitten under the table, but then and orange head popped out of the hole at the bottom of the door!
I’d actually enlarged that hole last year, when Pump Shack kitten was living in there. (We haven’t seen Pump Shack cat, nor her mom, Guildenstern, in a very long time.)
It took a while, but the other kitten did eventually come around.
Of course, there’s that little sapling in the way! :-D
This is most definitely NOT the grey and white kitten I saw before. This one has more white, and also has patches of orange in it.
So this is a first time sighting of these babies!
These would be the younger siblings to Keith, David and Junk Pile cat.
Shortly after this, my older daughter and I headed for the city. Having gone looking around online last night, I had several possibilities for washing machines that I wanted to check out at Home Depot.
Once at the store, I went looking at the machines. I wasn’t too surprised that there were fewer than what I saw online. Aside from the prices, I had also looked at ratings. GE had some of the lowest ratings, while Whirlpool had the highest. Those were out of budget, though. Plus, I wasn’t seeing any on display.
I had an employee acknowledge me when I first got there, asking if I needed help right away. I didn’t, yet, which worked out for him, since he said he needed to go to the back for a while. This gave me lots of time to look at the machines before settling on this one.
It was a GE, but not the same model I was seeing on the website that had the lower ratings. In fact, I don’t recall seeing this model online at all. The price was also easier on the budget than others on display. There were several cheaper ones but… they were also TOO cheap! And I don’t mean just on price.
There was also the issue of size, which turned out to be more of a non-issue. Where we have the washer and dryer is already tight. My daughter at home measured the width and messaged me the info. Our machine at home was 26 7/8ths wide. We could go up to 27 inches, but that was it. The machines were all either 26 7/8ths inches wide, or 27 inches wide. This one was 27 inches wide.
I then waited for the guy to come back.
And waited.
After a while, I asked a nearby cashier if she could see if someone was available, on the possibility there was someone else in that section.
There wasn’t.
So I waited some more, wandering around a bit.
Which is when I discovered there was a whole other section of washers and dryers I’d somehow managed to not see.
Of course, that’s when the guy came back.
I told him I was looking for a washing machine, mentioned that I’d just noticed the other section. After a quick walk around, I showed him the one I said I’d decided on.
“No,” he said.
I could only laugh. He did explain, though.
Basically, the brand sucks. He’d never use one himself, and wouldn’t sell one, if he could avoid it. His recommendation was to go with either Whirlpool or LG. I’d seen both brands were highly rated, but I hadn’t looked at any LG models online.
The first one he took me over to was a Whirlpool. It was over budget but, more importantly, it was 27 1/2 inches wide. That half inch would make a difference.
He showed me a couple others he recommended, both LG, that were 27 inches. The closer one we came to, I told him straight up was out of budget, so he showed me another one.
After going back and forth, I went with the cheaper LG.
This is it.
It cost $100 more than the GE, but it was still within budget. Well. Almost. After taxes and whatever fees were added on, it ended up costing $835 and change. So $35 over budget. It is also a higher capacity machine, at 5.5 cubic feet instead of 4.9 cubit feet in the GE I was looking at.
Unfortunately, they do not keep an inventory of stuff like this. It has to be delivered from the national warehouse in Ontario.
Expected delivery to the store: Friday, the 24th.
That’s more than a week away.
Now, I could have decided not to buy it, then tried going elsewhere, but that would most likely have meant going to another city, at a competitor’s location where we got our replacement hot water tank. That store has higher prices for the same makes and models, though, so even if I were able to find an identical machine, I probably could not have bought it.
So I bought the machine. If we really, really have to, we can go to town and use the laundromat.
As he did the computer stuff, and put me into their system, we had time to chat. I told him about our washer dying yesterday, and how we had to decide if it was worth fixing. I told him about finding the plastic part under it, and he cringed. I mentioned the screws, and he cringed a bit more. Then I mentioned the puddle of oil, and he did a whole body twitch while in the middle of typing. :-D
After the transaction was done, he made sure to let me know to expect a call on Thursday, the 23rd. If there was no call, he said to call him early on Friday (I made sure to take down his name). The delivery trucks stop running at 4:30. Once they stop, there would be no chance of it arriving until Monday, so it would have to be early enough for him to make some calls about it.
The new washer will be delivered to the store. We’re too far away to have it delivered to our place. Which actually helped a bit, since it kept the price down. There would have been a delivery fee on top of everything else, but he was able to waive that.
So we’ve got more than a week without a washing machine.
And I needed to do laundry, yesterday.
While we could make the trip into town to use the laundromat, we’re not going to bother. At least, not yet. My daughters have already done a load of their own laundry in the bath tub, and I’m about to do the same.
The one good thing about the new washing machine not coming in right away is, we have time to haul the old one out and clean up the mess of oil under it.
By the time we got home, I was surprised it wasn’t even 2pm yet. If felt like it should have been more like 4 or 5!
This has been a very expensive month. I had to buy the push mower. Then I had to buy the parts and pieces to fix the sink. My daughter bought the new stove, and now we’ve bought a new washing machine. Meanwhile, we’ve got the riding mower still in the shop (at this point, I’m hoping they’ll continue to take their time getting to it!), plus my mother’s car will be ready for the end of the month. That one, at least, I’ve got almost 2/3rds paid off. My older daughter is still getting regular commissions, but my younger daughter is not going to be able to find a job for some time, given the pandemic situation, and our Premiere extending our “emergency” status for a couple more months, in spite of the lack of cases in our province. So it’s not like there’s any way for the income to increase with the outgo!
Unfortunately, it means a lot of things we’d hoped to get done this summer, likely won’t happen. We need to buy plywood for a floor on the trailer, and more for other projects we had in mind. I was hoping to buy materials to create a base for the cordwood outhouse we were planning to build this summer. While there is a lot we can get started on to prepare that won’t cost money, we do still need to buy some things, like mortar ingredients, and I was hoping to have concrete paving stones as a “floor” to build on. That project will likely have to be pushed back to next year. Plus, if anything else breaks down, there’s very little left in reserve. I’m just thankful we had as much as we did, set aside, to cover these. I just can’t help but think, how on earth are we supposed to come up with $10,000 for a new roof, when stuff like this keeps happening?
But, thanks to my husband’s private insurance and disability income, the bills are being paid, there’s food on the table, and gas in the tank. Being hear at the farm, we’ve got a roof over our head (even if it needs replacing!) and are secure as “caretakers” of the property. We are much better off than so many others, and have much to be thankful for.
Well, there’s one thing that might help, on the financial side. Our internet provider has had a new tower built in the area.
When moving here, the only option we had was satellite and, because of plan limits at the time, we had to get two of them to provide enough data for our needs. (Getting internet is a necessity, since my daughter’s business is entirely online now.) Even then, we had issues. Eventually, we were able to double the data one of the plans. Meanwhile, we lose connectivity fairly easily. Particularly in summer, when the foliage is full. The primary account’s satellite is usually fine, but the secondary satellite is barely a couple of feet to the side, and the branches block the signal more frequently (I’ve lost internet several times, just writing this post!). As we reach the limit on the data plan for our primary account, we switch cables on our router to the secondary account – and we switched cables just this morning. We have been regularly going over our data plans, and while the company waived those costs for the past couple of months, due to the lock downs and more people being stuck at home, that ended this month.
My husband talked to the company and will arrange for someone to come by next month to do a site survey (when we’ll have money to pay for the survey). If they can get a signal to the new tower, we would be able to move away from satellite completely, have only one account, unlimited data, and save almost $200 a month.
Yeah. We spend over $300 a month, just to get internet out here, with limited data and frequent loss of connectivity.
The Re-Farmer 