In the second picture, you can see him enjoying pets.
Midnight still has a mark on his nose. For most of the summer, he had an odd wound there that would get bigger, burst, start going away, then get bigger again. Which was rather gross because he kept trying to rub his nose, wound and all, against us while demanding attention! At some point, it simply started to heal and now there’s just a bit of bald skin where it used to be.
Fluffy lets us pet her regularly now, and is often found lounging on various beds and blankets.
Today, I finally got progress done in the sun room, which meant taking all the beds scattered on the floor out, as well as the food trays and water bowl, so clear the half of the room so the floor could be scrubbed. I put all the beds and blankets into the wagon and set it outside. It was always either Fluffy or Midnight in the wagon, enjoying a nap in the sun.
Once the floor was clear, I unhooked the shop lights from one end, then cleaned all the windows on the inside.
Then I did the outsides.
Then, since I had the bucket with glass cleaner and long pole window washing tool out anyways, I did the outsides of all the first floor windows.
Then I did the windows in the isolation shelter.
Plus the roof.
That done, I got the bucket refilled with all purpose cleaner to start on the floor in the sun room. I’ve got a broom with super stiff bristles on it and I used that to scrub the floor, because there’s no way a regular mop can do the job. It was a very dirty job, but I got a little more than half the floor in the room done. Then my daughter brought me a mop bucket and I used a mop to rinse the floor – which required several changes of water.
It’s going to take quite a while for the floor to dry. Once it’s dry, we can clear the other half. Most things will go outside, but the counter shelf will be moved to the cleaned half, since it’s easier than trying to fight it through the door.
I did get the lights set up again before doing in, and the wagon with the beds was tucked into the other half for the night, in case it rains. The cats are going to have to find other places to sleep tonight!
They have lots of places to choose from.
Through the window of the above photo, you can see the beds with the self seeded tomatoes. That got covered for the night. The other beds in the main garden area did not get covered again. Instead, I harvested.
There are a few California Wonder bell peppers and the Chocolate Stripe tomatoes that will be left to ripen indoors. The single Caspar eggplant is about as ripe as its going to get, so we can try that out at any time. It’s unfortunate that we got only one one successful eggplant, and even that is smaller than it should be.
This morning, my younger daughter and I made a dump run. When we got back, she went straight to the food forest to keep working on the transplants. Her sister took a break from working on commissions to come out and help. Even I was able to help out. With the 18 holes my daughter got done last night, I started by watering each of them – something that would have been good to do with all of the transplants, but there wasn’t the opportunity. Then we worked assembly line style, getting plants out of their big pots, then my younger daughter brought them to the pre-dug holes while her sister went along and put soil back around them.
I found more pots with self seeded willow in them.
Some, like in the photo above, showed signs that someone had already cut away willow earlier, and new ones had started to grow from the same stems. We tried to cut away as much as possible, but there’s just no way to separate their roots out. In the second image, you can see the pile of most of the willows I’d cut away, including from haskaps that had already been transplanted! The leaves are quite similar, but the stems are very different, which helped in finding where to cut them away.
Then my alarm went off for my afternoon painkillers (just T3s now), so I left the girls to it and worked on other things. One of those was doing a scan of the truck. The check engine light had turned itself off a couple of days ago, but turned on again while we were driving to the dump. It was the same code as before, that our mechanic says is likely the gas cap. The other possibilities are all things we’ve taken care of already. I cleared the code, then sent our mechanic screen caps of the scan results, asking for suggestions. We’ll be doing our Costco run tomorrow, so it should be interesting to see if the light is still there.
By the end of the afternoon, this is how far the girls got.
They got 18 haskap into the pre-dug holes, then dug and planted another 7, making for 25 transplants done today. There are still another 10 large pots waiting to go into the ground that will need larger holes dug, before we can switch to the ones in the trays that don’t need such deep holes. In the third photo of the slideshow above, you can see what’s left.
It’s unlikely we’ll have a chance to work on them tomorrow, but we might be able to finish getting things in the ground on Monday. At least for the pre-measured area. Once that’s filled, we can start sticking more of them wherever we can find space.
After that, we go back to clear out the rocks that got dug up. Then the soil around each one will get raked smooth, and finally a water trench will be made around each one.
Then we can start hauling over wood chips and start mulching.
Meanwhile, we have various garden beds that need to be cleared out. The carrots need to be harvested, but those can wait, since they handle frost just fine. At the very least, a bed needs to be prepared for the garlic, which needs to be planted this month.
On the plus side, we should have a couple more weeks of relatively mild weather before overnight temperatures start consistently going below freezing. Which I am grateful for. Today I saw one of those Facebook “X years ago today” photos come up. It was a photo taken out of the living room window, 8 years ago, and there was snow on the ground. I think we even had a blizzard on Thanksgiving weekend, that year. So I am quite happy with the weather we’ve got happening right now! In fact, it was a perfect day to be working outside today, and not get too hot while doing it!
I’m also happy that I was feeling well enough to be outside most of the day, and finally work on the sun room, too. We’ll see how things are with our Costco trip tomorrow. I’ll definitely bring the walker along and have my daughter push the cart, instead of using the cart as a walker, just to be on the safe side.
Well, we most definitely dropped to freezing last night, so I was expecting to see much of the garden finally killed off for the season.
I didn’t make it outside for quite some time, though.
I was doing great in the wee hours when my alarm went off – so much so, I skipped the painkillers and fell back asleep. I was still feeling good when the morning alarm went off and I took my meds and supplements as usual, then promptly fell back asleep again.
Then the phone rang. I was expecting a call back from what I missed yesterday, at 10am. The call came at about 9am, and I was still hard asleep.
It did turn out to be the cancer clinic calling. Finally! I have a date to come in on Tuesday next week. I had thought I’d be getting a procedure done – another biopsy and testing of my lymph nods – but she said the appointment should be only half an hour. So it sounds like I’m just talking to a doctor? I will find out when I get there.
The clinic is in the same hospital the cardiac clinic is in. The cardiac clinic that would not accommodate my husband’s disability while always being very late calling him in and making him wait in painful waiting room chairs, then ghosted him when he refused to put up with it anymore.
Hopefully, the cancer clinic is better.
What isn’t better is the length of the drive, downtown driving to cross the river to a sort of second “downtown” of the French part of the city, and endless parking issues around the hospital. The woman that called me even brought up the parking as a potential issue, and I told her about taking my husband in and having to park several blocks away. She completely understood. I appreciate that she brought it up. It is clearly a major problem.
Oh, and the appointment is for 9:15am. The drive, with heavy downtown traffic, is about an hour and a half. More, with construction issues. Then we’d need the time to find parking, then walking however many blocks it’ll take to get to the hospital. We’d have to leave at around 6:45am to be sure to get there in time.
I passed on to my brother and SIL about the appointment. While chatting with me SIL, I mentioned that the parking issues was brought up.
She had a suggestion. We could drive to their place, just outside the city, and leave the truck in their driveway. She would drive us to the hospital, drop us off, then come back for us later.
!!!!!
My SIL is such an awesome person. I very gratefully accepted the offer.
By the time that was all worked out, I’d had breakfast and was getting ready to head outside. Unfortunately, pretty much right from when I lurched out of bed to get the phone, the pain started kicking in. It kept slowly getting worse so I held out until my afternoon meds, using the topical painkiller lotion in between, hoping that with the two of them, things would improve.
It never really did. I’ve just taken my evening painkillers and it’s only now starting to get better.
My younger daughter, meanwhile, had gone out to start working on the transplants. She had come in briefly in the mid afternoon when I remembered that I wanted to go to the post office. I had a thumb drive to drop off for someone, care of the store’s owner, as well as getting the mail, in case there were more medical letters in.
My daughter came with me. I drove but stayed in the truck while she did the running around. By the time I was driving home, I had to hunch over the steering wheel, as the angle helped ease the pain a bit.
Once home, I decided to stay outside and finally look at the garden as I’d planned to do earlier. My daughter offered to bring my walker over – she had set it up under the crab apple trees as somewhere she could sit to rest and hydrate every now and then. I said no and just took my time over things.
Of course, I couldn’t NOT do stuff while out there.
The winter squash vines all seemed to be frost killed, even with the frost cloth I had over it. Which I’d left, because it’s white and still lets light in. Plus, I wasn’t up to moving it. The vines looked damaged, but the developing squash did not seem to have damage to them. So I left them.
The bush beans, in the first photo above, are all killed off. The Cosmos and Crackerjack marigolds in the second photo seem to be killed off, too. Looking through the plastic over the melons, they look dead, as well. I did not try to uncover the peppers, Chocolate Stripe tomatoes and eggplant. The celery, which I have not been able to harvest to dehydrate as planned, looks just fine!
The summer squash, in the third picture, were completely frost killed – revealing a few squash that looked big enough to harvest and not very damaged by frost!
So, I harvested them. Two Lemon squash, some Prolific Longneck, and some yellow zucchini.
In the other images, you can see that some zucchini flowers look surprisingly strong and like they might still bloom!
After that, I checked on the tomato and bean beds by the compost ring. The self seeding tomato plants in the old kitchen garden, which is still covered, seem to have survived, but the ones in the tomato bed did not. After checking on the state of the tomatoes still hanging on the vines, I decided they were worth picking, with the split ones going into the compost ring. Only the larger tomatoes. The Orange Currant tomatoes are so small, there was nothing salvageable there.
I was being haunted by cats while doing this, so I did the evening cat feeding. Which is when I got to love on this beauty.
Colby SO loves attention now! He’s such a gorgeous kitty!
That done, I finished picking tomatoes and set them in the cat free zone, aka: the living room, to see if they will ripen, then decided I was up to doing at least some clean up work on the tomato bed.
I basically just took off all the plant ties and clips, then pulled the stakes out. With the green stakes, I was able to make a bundle of 10 but, since we stole some to use for the haskaps, I didn’t have enough to make a second bundle of 10, so those will just wait there for now. The bed is at the stage where the protective collars can be removed, but that was more than I was able to do today.
The deer ate the entire row of Swiss Chard, but it’s trying to grow back! Chard can handle frost quite well, and the little leaves have no frost damage at all.
After that, I felt I had enough energy for one more thing. I measured inside the water bowl shelter, then cut a narrow piece of plywood to length.
The first image shows the new board, which is in the middle, plus I added back one of the other narrower boards I’d tried adding to make it wider, previously. Originally, it was just that white board in the back (there’s a spare piece of wood I’m just storing there for now). I set the self-warming shelter back, and it now has enough space to be set sideways, with the peak matching the angle of the roof. Hopefully, nothing will try climbing on top of it and crushing it again!
Under the shelf, you can see the last beds and blankets that need to be cleaned for the winter, but in the second photo, you can see I’ve added another bed, already cleaned, to the second floor. As the season progresses and we plug in the cat house, there will be power to the heated water bowl for the winter. We still need to pop the roof on the cat house to clean it for the winter, and check the heat bulb and smoke detector.
That was about it for me, by then. I did go over to see how my daughter was doing. She’d been at it almost all day. She had planted 6 more haskap, but then switched to just digging holes. While she was doing that, I gave all the pots and trays a watering. I hadn’t realized until then that my SIL wasn’t able to take all the spruce trees! There are still about 5 trays and a few loose pots of them!
My daughter dug another 18 holes before calling it a day. Digging the holes is actually the “easy” part of the job – getting the root bound haskap out of their pots is far more difficult.
Unfortunately, as she moved her way down the tilled rows, the top soil was getting shallower in places, and she was digging up a lot more gravel and rocks. Including hitting some rocks too big to dig out!
You can see the edge of one in the first photo above. The second photo shows some of the “smaller” rocks she’d gotten out of another hole. As for the third picture…
Yeah… that’s a crack in the spade’s wooden shaft. It finally broke while she was digging around that rock in the first photo.
Thankfully, my brother had brought a couple of his spades out and left them for us to use, too. We have another one that has a metal shaft that my daughter doesn’t like to use. She’d started using one of my brother’s that had a wooden shaft, but the top was some sort of ergonomic handle that she found actually caused her more pain. Which left only one last shovel available that she could use! Another wooden shaft, which she prefers. Hopefully, no more big rocks will become an issue.
Here, you can see the day’s work. Six more haskaps transplanted, on the left of the photo, and 18 holes dug. That leaves another 30 holes to dig, but the last ones won’t need to accommodate the big pots. The last ones could be done with a hand trowel, for the haskap in the trays.
You can see the piles of soil that have more gravel in them, too.
By the time she was done, my daughter fully needed to use my walker to go back to the house! The poor thing could barely walk by then.
While all this was happening, I got a message from my sister saying they might be swinging buy to drop off some tires, then head back out again. We’d been inside for a while when I checked the cameras and saw they were here! So I went out to talk to them.
Oh! I completely forgot to mention last night!
A few years ago, someone had come out here to buy several old vehicles out of the car graveyard. Two years ago, he came back wanting to buy a couple of little cars parked by the old threshing machine. They’ve been there so long, they sunk into the soil right to the undercarriage, and there were caragana and red osier dogwood growing around them.
We made arrangements and he just needed to figure out how to get them out and take them home.
I never heard back from him. I thought he might have changed his mind but, last night, I got a call. He was at the gate!
It turns out he had started a new business this spring, and now has a crane truck. He was able to use it to lift the cars out and tow them to an open area closer to the gate, where they can be easily accessed to load onto a trailer, which will happen another day.
Of course, I let my brother know and kept him up to date, then sent him video I took of the crane work. My brother, however, was visiting my mother at the time and didn’t see all of it; all he saw was that someone had come for the cars – and he completely forgot about the arrangement made, two years ago. Not a surprise. At the time, they were frantically trying to get their own stuff off their property they’d sold to bring here, before the possession date. He ended up phoning me after visiting my mother and had seemed very confused and anxious about it.
By the time they got here tonight, though, he had had a chance to see everything I’d sent them. When I realized they were here and I came out to see them, my brother was just coming back from the main garden area, where they’d checked out the progress. Then I saw my SIL come around the trees on her phone, look up and laugh, because she had just messaged to tell me what a great job was done with the digging! I told them, it was all my younger daughter! They were very impressed.
Then we had a chance to talk about the vehicles, and about the lack of paperwork for them. Even scrap yards need proof of ownership when it comes to old vehicles. That’s all gone, and the people who would have had them have passed on. Most of them have been there for so long, they would be considered abandoned, anyhow. We’ll need to figure it out.
I mentioned the guy is still interested in some of the other old vehicles, and my brother wants to talk to him about that. They’ve taken two trailer loads of stuff from here to the scrap yard and for the last one, they barely got enough back to cover the cost of gas to take them there. Selling the individual vehicles to someone who wants to rebuild them, and can pick them up himself, would have a much better rate of return. Plus, my brother is also now looking to sell more of their farm equipment, because he’s not going to be farming with them after he retires in a couple of years.
They weren’t able to stay long, though, but thanks to her generous offer, I’ll be seeing my SIL next week, when she drives me and my daughter to the cancer clinic.
Which means we will need to do our Costco trip on Sunday. Tomorrow, the dump is open so we’ll be doing that, then planting trees before more holes are dug. I know myself well enough to admit that I wouldn’t be able to do a Costco trip on Monday, without putting myself in a physically bad situation for the cancer clinic appointment on Tuesday, which leaves us only Sunday to do the Costco stock up trip, leaving Monday to do any recovering I might need. Particularly since I am now out of the Tramacet and am back to using only T3s for pain.
So, that’s where we are at now. Thanks to my daughter, much progress was made on the digging, and I was even able to do some stuff in the garden to prepare it for winter. I continue to pray for a mild fall, because I will need the time. I’m going to be severely limited in what I can do to prepare the beds for winter, and the girls aren’t that much better than I am, until they get their surgeries. Which won’t be for months, while I should get mine within October.
Meanwhile, with the weather changes, my husband is getting hit with a lot of pain, too.
What a broken and battered household we are right now!! 😄
Ah, well. It is what is it, and we do what we can. What else is there to do?
Today came in densely foggy. Enough that we were getting fog advisories from the weather department. While the girls were out doing the morning cat feeding, they heard was sounded like rain, but it turned out the fog had condensed on tree leaves so much that it started to “rain”, but only directly under trees!
I was feeling good today, and my plan had been to get some more progress on the sun room. It was too damp out for the things that needed to go outside. Instead, I decided to focus on jerry rigging a tool to finally work on the eavestroughs. We have three areas where it is too dangerous to get up to the eaves without proper safety equipment, which we don’t have. I’d bought a bristle brush tool to clean them from the ground, but both heads that came with the kit broke off. I also got a hose attachment. We can’t see it, but there was obviously too much debris for the hose attachment to accomplish much, plus the elbows on the downspouts kept clogging.
The brush tool’s head might be broken, but I was left with a useable handle. I repurposed some heavy gauge wire from the mesh garden bed row cover hoops that the cats bent up by jumping on it. A hoop got folded in half with the ends secured to end piece the bristle brush had been attached to, with the loop formed by the fold bent to make a hook. It’s only held with tape, but it’s the heavy duty repair tape I picked up. I figured if it worked, I could find something more permanent to use another time. Until then, this stuff is strong enough to hold it.
It worked surprisingly well. Two of the eavestroughs were particularly bad, as it’s been quite a long time since anyone has tried to clean them. There was basically compost at the bottoms of them. As well as the modified tool worked, there was only so much I could flick out with the wire hook, but I was at least able to loosen things a bit, too. Hopefully enough that the hose attachment could finally wash it away.
It was a very messy job.
I started working with the hose attachment on at the eavestrough that runs along one side of the old kitchen, then over my bedroom window, with a right angle turn where the two roof sections meet. The roof sections form a sort of channel where everything drains or falls into that corner, so it was seriously built up with debris. Being a corner, it was also very difficult to use the hook tool in the space, but I got a fair bit out.
Once I switched to the hose attachment, the first thing I focused on was the opening to the downspout to try and clear the elbows. Thankfully, I was able to get it fairly clear. The next while was spent trying to drive debris towards the opening, then forcing it through the elbows when it started jamming up again. Every now and then, I would hear a thunk as the debris would finally come free and drop down to the elbow at the bottom before finally getting washed away. I had to stop regularly to clear debris away from the opening at the bottom.
It was slow going.
I could only work small sections at a time, and had to stop to scrape with the hook tool again, several times. After about an hour of that, I got the old kitchen section – roughly 10 feet – mostly done, and had started around the corner. That corner is going to be particularly difficult to clear!
Then my alarm went off for my scheduled painkiller time. By then, I was actually start to feel it, so I knew I would have to call it a day and come back to it later. Still, I’m pleased with how much I was able to clear.
Meanwhile, I started getting messages from my SIL. They were on their way over to take the trailer of hot water tanks to the scrap yard, then use the trailer to get and bring back a water tank for their caravan. Water suitable to use for showering as well as the toilet and sinks. They’ve been using an outhouse all this time! There was already one against the storage building that they had cleaned up and put a new door on, as well as using the one in the inner yard that we’d made all pretty inside, several years ago. Definitely not something they’ll be wanting to do if they come out in the winter!
Once inside, cleaned up and medicated, I ended up helping my daughter in the kitchen.
She was trying to butcher the Arikara squash. It was fighting back.
The outer skin on that thing was definitely well cured. 😄
She managed to get it cut in half crosswise, with me helping keep it steady on the cutting board. It took a lot of strategic stabbing, then it took both of us to break it open. We made sure to collect the innards in a bowl, and I started collecting seeds while she tried to split the halves lengthwise. The knife would only go so far, and then it took the two of us pulling to break them apart.
The second image in the slide show above is the collected seeds, rinsed and set out to dry on parchment paper.
We are wanting to get a taste of this to know if we even like it, so the pieces are being roasted plain. My daughter will be using half of it for a soup that I will not be able to eat, as it will be spicy and full of fish. I prefer to eat winter squash on its own, seasoned with butter and brown sugar. My husband doesn’t like winter squash, so I’ve basically got an entire half of the squash to myself!
While my daughter was getting things into the oven, I headed out to the compost pile and found a surprise at the door. My SIL had left a bag with some items she had brought for us! I called back to my daughter to tell her that my SIL had already come to the door, then went to the compost ring. She was still close enough to hear me and came back. It turned out she had knocked on the door, but we were so buy wrestling with the squash, we never heard it. She thought I might have been resting and didn’t want to disturb us, and just left the bag.
So we had a chance to talk, and walked over to where my brother was struggling to hook the trailer up to their truck. It was not cooperating! Since I wasn’t going back in right away, I messaged my daughters about the bag by the door, so they took it in and my older daughter came out to return the bag. We talked for a while longer and got caught up on things. They won’t be staying overnight, and likely not come back during the weekend. They’ll just be coming back tonight with the water tank, dropping it off and leaving, and it might be full dark by the time they get here.
After that, it was late enough to do the evening cat feeding, so I headed in through the sun room, where I spotted this guy, tucked away in the shelf shelter.
This is Bobert. He is not very friendly, but not feral, either. He and Larence, another grey tabby, with no white on the nose, used to both hang around together a lot, but Larence seems to be among those that have disappeared. I saw very few cats around when I did the evening feeding. More show up during the morning feeding. I think I’ll try to join my daughter tomorrow morning and do a head count while she’s setting out the cat soup.
My older daughter just came by to let me know that the squash is done roasting.
Time to go and find out how it tastes!
The Re-Farmer
addendum: I almost made it – then got a message. They got to the scrap yard and almost got turned away, because they’re on strike!!! My brother explained they drove 80 miles to get there, and how where they do know about the strike? They were eventually allowed in, but only if he unloaded the trailer himself. For the amount they got back, with him having to do the work himself, it’s no wonder most people just send this stuff to the landfill. It’ll barely cover the cost of gas for the trip in that truck! That’s why I’ve been just collecting aluminum. Ferrous iron just isn’t worth much.
My daughter and I headed into town this morning, hoping to get the truck worked on, even though I hadn’t received a message back from the garage with a time. I had my suspicions, but my daughter had something to do in town after, so I knew it wouldn’t be a wasted trip.
Oh, my. I really feel for the owner of the garage.
When we got there, he was outside, on the phone. My daughter stayed outside by the truck while I went into the office and waiting for him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying on the phone, but I could hear his tone, and it was a lot tenser than his usual laid back manner.
When he came to the office door, he was furiously texting while also apologizing. He had meant to text me back with a time, but had never had a chance to look at his schedule to tell me when. He was finally able to set his phone down on a shelf just outside the door, telling me how, after he’d had to go home yesterday, unable to work on our truck, things ended up taking hours longer than it should have. Of course, that absolutely screwed up his schedule completely.
He had just sat down at his desk and started getting his schedule out when his phone started ringing again. From where he’d left it just outside the door! He had to answer it and went outside again to talk. When he came back, he looked absolutely frazzled.
He was, of course, needing to catch up on things, and I could already see his bays were full, so there was no way we’d be getting in anytime soon. He had no openings today and, at best, could squeeze me in between other scheduled jobs. Of course, that would me us waiting in his office, since there’s nowhere else to go in the industrial park his shop is now located in. Alternatively, he had openings tomorrow.
We’ll be back tomorrow morning.
Poor guy. Yes, there was another mechanic, but there are things only the owner can take care of and, when it comes to our truck and needing to figure things out, he had taken that on himself rather than delegating.
That arranged, my daughter and I headed into town. I had forgotten our water bottles to refill, but we’ll be back to do that tomorrow. My daughter ran her errand and we were soon home.
I was feeling really good today – left the walker in the truck and didn’t even need a cane. After we had lunch at home, I headed outside to see what I could get done, as we are expecting rain.
I got the cat beds soaking in the tub finished and set out to drain and, if it doesn’t rain, dry. Floor mats got hosed down, which will need to be done again another time or two. I got the cat cage dismantled and the interlocking mat under it set out for soaking, then hosing down.
With the cat half of the sun room finally empty, I swept as best I could, but the floor washing and window washing will have to wait. Instead, I brought out all the cleaned cat beds and blankets and set them on one side, then brought all the food trays that had been removed and laid them out on the other, along with a water bowl. This way, the cats will at least have someplace warm and dry to hang out in, should the weather get wet. The wind, at least, seems to be dying down.
By the time all that was done, it was time to do the outside cat feeding. The singleton kitten would not let me touch her today, but she kept calling at me. She looks so sad without the little kittens to play with! I’m glad she’s staying close to the house now, though. Hopefully, with all the trays returned to the sun room, she will start hanging out in there more often, and the other cats won’t chase her out.
Before heading in, I did my evening rounds and checked on the garden. I watered the muskmelon, since they are under their own mini greenhouse set up. Then I noticed a strange bit of colour among the yellow leaves of the red noodle beans in the other bed.
There it is. Our single, sad, floppy little red noodle bean! I couldn’t see any others. Which I found funny because the same thing happened the first time we tried growing this variety during what turned out to be a drought year. We got just one sad little bean that year, too.
I would really like to successfully grow this variety, but I think I’ll wait a year or two before I try again.
I was still able to get a little harvest for today, though.
I got a handful of beans from the ones planted later in the season, with the Arikara squash. My pain levels started to kick in, so I asked a daughter to make supper, and I now have those beans on my cooling plate as I write this. I also grabbed a few of the Blueberry Tomatoes for the girls.
Sept. 23, and we still have a few things we’ll be able to harvest. If the long range forecast is at all accurate, we will have no danger of frost at all for at least the next 10 days.
I’m appreciating every frost free day we’re getting as a gift right now!
Okay, main goal of the day: getting the truck to the garage for our afternoon appointment.
As usual, we planned on leaving early. My daughter was really struggling this morning, unfortunately. She’d had a bad night. We’ve had more outings than usual that she came along with to help me out, and it’s starting to wear on her.
This time, it was Gouda, parked on one of the inside out cat beds under the canopy tent. So adorable!
I was having a good day, when it comes to pain levels, and started off driving but right away realized I was feeling unusually sleeping. A down side of having to take painkillers every 6 hours. I never get more than a few hours of sleep at a time, if I manage to fall sleep at all.
We got to the garage about half an hour early and settled in the waiting room chairs. We could hear the owner working on something in the back and he didn’t see us, which was fine. We were in no hurry. I actually started to fall asleep in the chair.
Then he walked by the door to the office, focused on his phone, stopped and did a double take when he realized we were already there and waiting. He greeted us then continued outside, going back to his phone.
Shortly after, he came back and apologetically asked us if we wanted to go into town for lunch or something; he needed to go home to take care of something. We were okay with that and he said he would text me when he was back.
I got my daughter to drive and we ended up going to the Dairy Queen, because I had some coupons. My daughter was a sweetheart and insisted on paying for it, too.
We took our time about it, though I wasn’t that hungry and ended up saving my burger for home. I just snacked on some fries. I don’t really like fries all that much, and gave the last of them to my daughter, since she hadn’t eaten before we left. After a while, we decided that we could just as easily go back to the garage and stay in the truck, where I’m sure I would have fallen asleep. We were getting ready to head out when I got a text.
The thing he had to take care of at home was taking longer than it should have, and he had no idea how long it would be. Rather than have us wait, he asked if we were willing to come back tomorrow.
I answered yes, then asked if he wanted us back for the same time. By that point, I don’t think he was able to keep checking his work phone. I’ll just assume the same time if he doesn’t respond.
So we headed home, instead, stopping only to pick up some gas.
$1.899/L
Ouch.
At least I got my 3¢/L CAA discount, so we paid $1.869/L instead. Every little bit helps.
Once at home, I sat at my computer for a while, but was still so sleepy, I couldn’t actually accomplish anything useful. My husband came over to talk and the first thing he said was that I looked really horrible! 😄😂 I did consider just going to bed but, by this time, it was past 3 and I knew that would screw up my night.
After a while, though, I started feeling better. Well enough to go outside to do the evening cat feeding. The singleton kitten, I noticed, is no longer a junk pile cat. She is now and under the cat house cat! The sun room trays are all outside right now, as we’ve made very little progress on clearing and cleaning the sun room, and spread out on the ground near the cat shelters. As I was topping them up, the little one was peeking out from under the cat house, meowing at me. I could see she wanted to come out so badly, but was also too scared to actually do it!
She did come out eventually, though. Especially after I started to add cat milk to some of the trays, too.
I was still feeling good, so I decided to do some yard stuff and garden watering in between topping up the cats’ water bowls a bit at a time, so as not to scare them away from the food. I checked the drying cat beds and stuff, and they were finally all dry, so I tucked those into the wagon and under the screen for now. I’ve got other pieces soaking with detergent in the tub, so I agitated them for awhile. That water got quite brown in the process! They are still soaking, as I wasn’t up to scrubbing them today. Then I started watering the garden.
Yes, the garden is still worth watering! Not all of the beds, but some of them. The strawberries, squash and sunflowers at the chain link fence all got a watering. I’m really impressed that the squash – winter and summer – is still surviving and blooming.
The old kitchen garden got watered and I found a surprise. In the beets and parsnip bed, the parsnip greens have gotten so tall, their leaves were sticking through the wire of the cover. Some of the beets are also quite tall and the only reason they aren’t going through the wire is because they’re in the middle of the bed, under the highest part of the curve.
About a third of them were gone.
Not completely, but at one end, there was a substantial empty spot that had been full of leaves.
My first thought was deer, but that seems so unlikely. The deer don’t typically go through that garden; too many paths and obstacles. Plus, my daughter added more wood chips to the paths yesterday, and that’s not a surface a deer would want to walk on. The alternative is skunks or racoons, and they would have cause more damage than just a bunch of leaves eaten. So it must be from a deer.
The wire cover did protect the plants at least somewhat, as they were not completely eaten down to the ground, like the Swiss Chard all was. So frustrating!
The tomato bed in the east yard got watered, but I didn’t bother with the other two beds. Since our single Arikara squash has been harvested, I cut away the vine, so that bed is now just bush beans. The leaves do have some minor frost damage, but I could see there are still beans developing. I probably could have harvested some, but didn’t have a container for them and didn’t want to push my limits.
In the main garden area, I did some more selective watering. I was doing the very last bed when my older daughter came out. I asked how her sister was doing, and she said not very good. She’s dealing with with increased pain levels now, so she’s settled down in the cat free zone to have some movies playing while she continues knitting my ankle socks for me.
While I finished watering the last bed, my daughter told me her plans for roasting the Arikara squash and to use half of it to make a squash soup. Personally, I look forward to having straight up roasted squash. I want to get a good taste of it to see if this is something we want to keep growing in the future, other than to keep collecting seeds for a rare squash variety.
I started telling my daughter how surprised I was with how little frost damage there was, and that I could probably harvest some things – then asked if she wanted some peppers. We had two California Bell peppers that are fully red now, plus a couple of Sweet Chocolate peppers that were ripe. She happily took them and will be using them in her soup. There are still some green peppers on the plants that will hopefully do all right. With peppers, though, we can also harvest them early and let them ripen in the house.
I did remember to look up what colour the California Bell peppers get, since they are bright red and, for some reason, I thought they would be yellow. I found images of both red and yellow peppers. 😕 I got them from MI Gardener and looked at their page, and their image is of green peppers!
So… red it is.
I headed inside soon after, as I didn’t want to push myself. At this point, I might head into town tomorrow on my own, rather than dragging my daughter out with me again. This time, I want to remember to grab a couple of 5 gallon water jugs to refill in town, after the oil change and whatever else needs to be done.
For now, I’m coming up on my schedule evening painkillers time, and I think I’ll try to go to bed after that and get a few hours of sleep before the next set. I tried that last night and it didn’t work. I ended up awake until somewhere past 4am. That might actually help me finally get some sleep tonight, though!
An odd thing about taking the painkillers every 6 hours. I’m not entirely sure how much it’s making a difference. I still get hit with the lower abdominal pain, enough that I’ve used the topical painkiller to help with that. Yet even when I’m not feeling the abdominal pain, I’m still feeling other pain. Particularly that left shoulder’s rotator cuff. The painkillers don’t seem to be touching that at all. Which makes me wonder; if they’re not helping with something as relatively minor as the shoulder pain, how much can it be helping with the abdominal pain? Granted, my shoulder has never hurt badly enough to warrant a trip to the ER, but you’d think a dose as strong as what I’m taking now, 6 times a day, would reduce the shoulder pain too, wouldn’t you??
Ah, well. It is what it is. At least I’m not getting side effects like that violent dizziness I was getting with the Percocet.
So… that’s how the day went today. We almost got the truck done! Our mechanic had told us what he’d needed to go home for, and I really hope it all worked out for him and his family.
If all goes well, the truck will finally be done tomorrow, and it’ll be ready for the winter, as well as all the trips to the city we’ll be needing to do over the next couple of months!
Okay, we are back from town, and were done with the truck way earlier than expected.
As we pulled into the parking lot at the garage, we saw a truck pulling out and leaving. Then we found the doors locked! It turned out we had just watched the owner leaving to drop someone off. Which was fine. We were about 40 minutes early for the appointment.
I messaged our contact with the rescue to let her know we had arrived and were waiting for the owner of the garage to come back. She messaged back right away, suggesting she come over right then. She had just arrived at work and was only 2 minutes away.
Of course, I said yes!
Then the owner returned. I went in to talk to him while my daughter waited outside, then helped the woman from the rescue load donated cat food into the truck box. None of which I could see from where I was standing inside.
I described to the owner what I was seeing on the gauge, even as we drove to the garage, compared to what we were seeing for weeks after our last oil change, which included an engine flush and the third oil sensor replacement. It had been working just fine after that. I explained how the readings started changing after a while, first only when we made a trip to the city, little by little. There was the direct correlation with engine temperature, which I monitored during the drive in.
After they were done loading the truck, he drove it into the shop and started testing it – well before our actual appointment time.
While he was getting ready to hook up his physical mechanical oil pressure gauge to test it, my daughter told me about the ear mite medications and where she tucked them away, and that she’d made sure to set the biggest cat food bags centered over the axle to distribute the weight. I quickly popped open the tail gate to take a look and was totally amazed!!!
Of course, I messaged the women from the rescue to thank her again.
It wasn’t until later that I realized the larger bags my daughter was talking about were not the 9kg size we typically see, but two 40 pound bags of a brand we buy from the feed store in the town north of us. !!!!! You can just barely see one of them in the shadows in the first photo above.
We had expected that the garage would hang on to the truck for a while, and we’d get a ride into town, but that didn’t happen. We sat outside in the sun for a while, then popped into the waiting room when it started getting too hot. My daughter had brought her knitting bag and worked on one of the ankle socks she’s making for me while we waited.
They worked on the truck, revving the engine at times, testing it out. After a while, the owner came back and got on his computer for a bit, then got a printout to show us, which I got to keep.
What it came down to is that yes, our oil pressure is slightly lower than “normal”, however, it is within range. I told him flat out that, after all the problems we’ve had, I don’t know what “normal” is anymore, so he told me where, on the gauge itself, I should expect to see it. Then we talked about how that can change based on things like temperature (winter is going to show higher than summer), and even just age and wear and tear on the engine.
There is nothing else to show why that pressure would be that small amount lower, so he wants to change our oil to something thicker. He asked if I could come back tomorrow, and we can, so that’s now booked for tomorrow afternoon. As he was starting to remove his pressure tester, I remembered to ask him to change out our burnt headlight bulb – I’d bought a new bulb weeks ago, but we were never able to get it done ourselves, for various reasons. So he quickly did that for us.
The whole thing was done, and it wasn’t even noon, yet.
When I asked about paying, he told me he’ll give me a total after I come back tomorrow and he does the oil change. We both forgot about the check engine light, but the oil change with a new filter might actually fix that. I did remember to text him about it shortly after we left.
My daughter hadn’t had breakfast before we left, planning to take me out for breakfast after being dropped off in town. So the first thing we did was go for lunch. After that, we walked over to the dollar store, as I was looking for some specific things for the Christmas ornaments I wanted to work on. I ended up not finding anything, but my daughter found several small things she picked up.
From there, it was a stop at the pharmacy, where my daughter was a sweetheart and quickly ran in with the signed consent form they needed for my new pain meds. My husband had asked me to pick up a couple of things at the grocery store, and my daughters had their own shopping list, so that was our next stop.
Normally, I would have put some gas in the tank at that point, but I didn’t want to do that until after the truck was done and paid for. So that will wait until tomorrow.
By the time we were heading home, I remembered that we needed to stop at the post office, too. We are expecting several important letters, and one of them was there today. My older daughter now has a time for her appointment that was rescheduled to early November, along with the date they were able to give her right away.
I still haven’t received a call about my own biopsy I was supposed to get at the end of the month. The one I was supposed to receive before the weekend. If I don’t get a call by tomorrow, I’ll call the clinic that referred me and let them know.
That done, we got home and unloaded at the house. After bringing in the groceries, assembly line style, we started bringing in the donated cat stuff.
Then I got some pictures of what we got, which are the rest of the images in the slide show above, though I had already emptied two small bags that were torn, into the kibble bin for the inside cats. The 40 pound bags and two boxes of cat milk went straight to the old kitchen, so they were not included in the photos.
One bag had nothing but cat treat. So many cat treats!!! Another had more cat treats, plus three small bags of freeze dried chicken catfood, plus several loose little cartons of cat milk. There was a freezer bag of loose kibble, plus a slightly bigger bag of kibble that were on the side.
The last bag I went through had a couple of larger bags of kibble, a smaller one that was partially used and taped shut, and some canned cat food – and even more bags of cat treats!! I also started finding some strange little individual packets that were loose among the treat bags. I found the package they’d fallen out of and found out they are pill pockets.
With so many bags of dry treats like that, we should start mixing some in with their kibble feedings.
Which is what I can do next, as it’s getting time to feed the outside cats.
We did come home to a problem, though. Something is wrong with our toilet. It had gotten clogged, which seemed to be cleared, but now it’s slow flushing. We’ve checked the basement and there’s no sign of problems at the drains to the septic tank, though we’re due to run the hose through and flush it, anyhow.
My daughter came in from doing the morning feeding of the outside cats, so very excited!
She was able to pet the shrine baby. The single older kitten – who has started to come to the house, not just eating at the shrine feeding station!
What my daughter noted was that if she made eye contact with the kitten, it ran away – but if she faced another direction, it came back to the food bowl. Then she came back with the cat soup. It moved away, so she just crouched down near the bowl, looking in another direction.
While the kitten was eating, my daughter was able to reach out and pet it – and she let her! She even got an elevator butt response, while the kitten kept eating soup.
The kitten’s fur, my daughter told me, was astonishingly soft.
I was not doing very well today and ended up going back to bed. While I was down, my younger daughter headed out to start clearing and cleaning the sun room. This is something that needs to be done in stages, and it a huge and filthy job, since we were never able to get a spring cleaning done. She got some cat shelves out and cleared about a quarter of the room to bare floor, before she stopped for the day.
Unfortunately, I never got to see my brother and SIL before they had to leave. It turned out to be a good day for repairs. When he went to move his old pick up truck to move it and the trailer still attached, it wouldn’t start. After checking it over, he thought it might be the starter and was prepared to have it towed to our usual garage. Today, however, he thought of something else to try and it worked. He was able to do some other repairs, move the antique dump truck back onto the concrete blocks it had rolled off of, and even was able to check on the riding mower and get it working. It turned out that something was stuck, and nothing had actually broken. phew!
This evening, I decided I was well enough to do the outside cat feeding. Mostly because I needed to get outside and get some fresh air. Today is the 20th, so I was also hoping I’d be up to doing garden tour videos.
All the food trays that had been in the sun room are currently spread out on the grass near the cat shelters, since the sun room is being cleaned out. While setting the kibble out, I spotted the lone kitten.
So I tried what my daughter tried. I can’t crouch, but I could stand nearby and look the other way, until the kitten came back to the tray to eat. Without looking directly at her, I was able to slowly bend down and touch her.
She let me!
I didn’t stay for long, though. We don’t do cat soup for the evening feeding, but I do add a couple of little cartons of the donated cat milk (we’re on the last case that was given to us) spread out among various trays. I did only trays near the house, since we want to encourage the little one to stay close by.
She came back to the tray with Fancy Pants, whom she seems to get along with, and started eating again.
After a while I went to put things away when I heard a noise. A little skunk had come running and pushed itself onto the tray, shoving the kitten aside, startling Fancy Pants away, and started eating greedily. I scooted it away a couple of times before it left. I don’t mind them finishing off the kibble, but I want the cats to have a chance to eat, first!
After the cat feeding, I walked around a bit before going back inside and weighed in on how I felt. I decided to go ahead and do the garden tour videos. I haven’t gone over them yet, so I’ll see if I end up making new ones tomorrow or not.
Tomorrow, we take the truck in and I will be away until it’s ready to take home again. That’s partly way I made sure to get as much bed rest as possible today. My husband will make sure to keep the phone handy, as I never got the call from the cancer clinic in the city on Thursday or Friday, as we were told to expect. It means not much will get accomplished. My daughter will be coming with me, just in case I need help or need her to drive home when we get the truck back.
For now, I’m just happy we finally got to pet the lonely baby!
The only way we could do it was to have my daughter stand on the digital scale to get her weight, then weigh her while holding a cat and doing the math.
The problem with that is, the digital scales reading changes based on how the feet are positioned, how you might be leaning while standing, or even what part of the floor it’s on. When my husband came over and I mentioned this, he tried getting on the scale.
My husband has no balance.
He wobbled so much, the numbers never settled, and the scale turned itself off to no display at all, like it does after you step off the scale. !!!
I’m both surprised and not surprised that Leyendecker turned out to be the heaviest at 30 pounds.
He’s not just a fat cat. He’s a tank. He’s got a skull almost as big as a softball. Hard to believe he was the smallest of his litter!
The lightest cat was Susan, at only 7 pounds.
I passed the numbers on to someone at the rescue. We will be able to buy ear mite medication through them. The kind that’s applied to the skin between the shoulders, since treating the ear canals hasn’t been working well. When it doesn’t take for just one cat, they all end with getting the mites again. We will work out getting the medication after the truck is looked at, on Monday.
Later today, I was able to head outside with the girls. While one daughter did the evening cat feeding, the other helped me with the washed cat blankets and beds, before we got the rain expected tonight. Some were dry, but most were too thick to be fully dry yet. The damp ones all got laid out under the canopy tent, most on the wire mesh curing frame, to continue drying. Hopefully, we’ll get more sunny days to set them out in, to dry and bleach in the sun.
That done, I stayed out to check the garden beds. It’s surprising to see how much survived the one night that reached freezing temperatures!
I took a closer look at some of the sunflowers, brushing dried petals off so I could see the developing seeds. The seed heads are all very small for the varieties, but it does look like there may be viable seeds.
After checking on things, I grabbed the loppers to prune dead and dying branches from the pink rose bush in the old kitchen garden. They are insanely thorny, but I was able to use the loppers to move the pruned branches aside, for the girls to clear away tomorrow.
While I was working on that, my brother and SIL arrived for the weekend, and I got to talk to them for a bit before finishing the pruning. I really enjoy spending time with them.
Overall, today was a good day. I was even up to making a quick run to the post office by myself. I didn’t start having pain creeping up until shortly before my evening meds alarm went off. It’s been getting worse since then, and I’m currently writing this while in bed, rather twisted up to find the least painful position. It’s not too bad… yet? We shall see.
One thing about the new dose and variation of painkiller. It makes me sleepy. My sister happened to call only a minute past my meds alarm going off. I had meant to lie down right away, but we spoke for a while. I ended up having to say goodbye, before I dozed off and dropped the phone!
Of course, now that I’m finally lying down, the sleepiness has passed. 😒
Not that it’s anything to complain about. Just something to work around.
Anyhow. I’m mostly really happy that we got the cats weighed as best we could. It’s been delayed for too long!
I did the evening cat feeding today, before checking on the garden.
We’ve had so many cats disappearing, but sometimes coming back, I have been asking my daughter which ones she sees when she does the morning feeding. Sprout and her daughter Sprig, the two calicos, were ones I have not been seeing much at all, though Colby, Sprig’s brother, has become quite socialized and stays near the house.
Sprout and Sprig look very much alike; especially as Sprig got older, and can be hard to tell apart. I’m starting to think Sprout has disappeared completely, as we’re only seeing the one calico.
She is quite feral, unfortunately. Not quite as much as Sprout, in that she will sometimes come into the sun room looking for food.
*sigh*
I am not sure how to get her. We need to get that white and grey kitten that’s left, of course. That kitten is also Sprout’s, making her Colby and Sprig’s baby sister.
I’ve put the wire trap with a back door inside the catio as something to get used to, and the other one that’s the same size but doesn’t have a back door on the table under the canopy. They are just open, not set, so cats can go in and out freely. I’ve not put bait in them. I really don’t want to use those traps because we are far more likely to get a skunk or some other cat than Sprig. Sprig prefers to eat on the tray under the water bowl shelter, where there is no room for any sort of trap at all.
This is so frustrating. We were finally able to get the 6 kittens to the rescue today! Now we have another cat that’s pregnant, very late in the season. We need to get her. If she has those kittens, they will not survive the winter.
More specifically, my daughter got them. My job was to distract Sweetie as much as I could.
While doing the morning feeding, none of the shrine feeding station bowls were filled. Just a small two-part food bowl inside the big carrier. Once that had cat soup in it, it wasn’t long before the littles were in there – though for a while, not even the fishing lure cat toy could keep Sweetie from trying to push her way in.
Then all three kittens were in and my daughter simply closed the door. They didn’t even freak out. We got the carrier inside as I messaged the rescue and sent them this picture.
We were able to leave almost immediately. After getting the carrier into the truck, my daughter ran back to get her meds while I opened the gate. She didn’t even change out of her pajamas.
They were completely quiet for the entire ride. When we got there and my daughter took the carrier out, she found the three of them mashed onto the crochet mat, one asleep, one blearily looking up at her.
Transferring them over didn’t go as well. We forgot that the carrier opens from the top again, and the rescue worker tried reaching in through the door. One of the tabbies got out – the most skittish one we almost caught before but let go before she broke her teeth biting at the carrier door. She had three dewormer syringes ready. The escapee ended up under a dresser, so she went for the others. The first one, she got a good grip on (while wearing a scratch proof glove) and was able to administer the dewormer before putting it in the kennel cage with its siblings we brought on the weekend. The second was was harder to grab, but I was able to administer the dewormer while she held it, then got it in the cage.
She had to move the dresser to get at the escapee but, of course, it ran off and into a closet, climbing up another cage like Spiderman, terrifying a mostly feral cat that was lying on top, and eventually scooting down between the side and the closet wall. The rescue worker was able to get it with the gloved hand while my daughter helped by grabbing a blanket to hold the kitten. It was very loud and upset! The rescue worker finally got a good grip and I was able to quickly administer the dewormer, then into the cage it went.
The three we brought earlier were doing very well. She’s been able to pick them up and hold them, which is huge! They were confirmed male. Today they were ready to go to a foster and probably still will, though it’ll be harder for her to get them out of the cage and into a carrier with the other three in there. They did, at least, start calming down while we talked.
We are now down to one kitten. The older singleton (confirmed female). I suspect that one will be a spay and return, but we shall see.
The main thing is, the littles are all caught! They will stay with the rescue until they are old enough to get fixed, and will get all the usual vetting and tests, before going up for adoption. Being as young as they are, they are far more likely to be adopted. Few people are willing to adopt adult cats or older kittens, no matter how well socialized. 😢
