It’s not even 8:30am as I start this, and I’ve already spent a couple of hours outside. It was already 19C/66F, and I don’t think we got any cooler than that overnight. Right now, we’re at 23C/73F, but at least the wind is making it feel a bit cooler.
We’re still expected to reach 29C/84F as a high today, so I wanted to make sure the garden got a watering before the heat hit. Most of what we’re growing this year is stuff that needs a lot of water to begin with, but they also like heat, so this should work out, I think.
After I was doing the last beds in the south yard and dragging the hose back to the house, I spotted something dark in the grass.
It was stillborn kitten, completely encased in its amniotic sac. I was surprised to find it, since I’d gone past there with the hose earlier. It wasn’t until I collected it to bury it that I realized how wet it still was. This happened while I was out watering!
After I buried it, I started looking around in case there were anymore. I found one just around the corner of the house.
This one was not in its amniotic sac.
Then it moved.
There was no mother in sight, and it had clearly been left there, likely before the first one I found was stillborn.
Sadly, I had to dispatch it, because there was no way it was going to survive.
I’d messaged a daughter about it and she came out to join me. We walked around the house looking, in case there were more, but we found none.
This is one of the more feral cats from last year’s late litter of eight kittens. That would make her just over a year old. While I’ve been able to sneak pets now and then, as soon as she realizes I’m touching her, she runs off in a panic. Otherwise, she does stay close to the house in general.
I tried to see and she did look a bit damp under her tail, but not enough that I could be sure – she could just as easily have gotten wet sitting in the damp grass. And she still looks rather round. Which means either it wasn’t her, or it was and… there’s more in there? Good Lord, I hope not.
While my daughter and I were walking around, she updated me with her own situation. She is absolutely stressed out and exhausted. Her computer has been dying for a while, and she’s picked out a replacement system at Memory Express that meets her needs. Unfortunately, that’s when she discovered her credit card expired last year – and they never sent her a replacement. She used it to buy her current computer, at least 10 years ago. The card was paid off and she wasn’t using it, and never noticed that it was expired until now. So that was going to delay her purchase.
The problem is, in this heat, her computer is not wanting to boot up anymore. She had a couple of completed commissions that need to be sent out, plus she needed to buy more online storage to use as a backup. She has the free storage available, but it’s not enough. She managed to get the computer working long enough to send out the completed commissions, but her computer crashed again while she was in the process of paying for the online storage.
So she’s been spending most of the night with her computer covered in ice packs wrapped in towels, fighting with it. She got the commissions sent out and finally got to the point where she is backing up the one essential folder she needs to protect, to start with. Once that started uploading, she couldn’t use her computer anymore. It’s still backing up as I write this. She has tried going to bed earlier, so as not to be hovering over it, but she keeps getting up to check it. With good reason, considering how often her computer has been crashing lately.
We talked about finding a way to set her up in the living room, where the air conditioner is, but she doesn’t think she needs to. Part of the problem with her computer (besides its age) is the physical case. It just can’t cool itself down enough. Newer desktops, like the one I had to get, have much better cooling systems, and the boxes allow for more air circulation.
She noticed a selling feature on the desktops she’s been looking at often includes their improved cooling systems!
Meanwhile, she’s been transferring funds from her PayPal, which can take several business days to process. If worse comes to worse, she’ll pay us to get it for her. Chances are she won’t be able to purchase her replacement computer until the middle of next week. Worst case scenario, it will have to wait until next month. Most of her clients are repeat customers, so it’s unlikely she will lose any commissions in progress, but it will certainly delay things.
Meanwhile, she’s stressed to the max.
It’ll work out. It’s just that in between stage that is making things difficult!
This will make the third desktop in our household that’s being replaced, and we’re still paying off my husband’s.
Ouch.
At least she can claim hers as a business expense!
So that was what I got updated on while we were walking around the house. Thankfully, we did not find more remains. When I head out later in the day, I’ll have to look again, just in case.
What a year this has been.
And it’s not even the end of July, yet!
The Re-Farmer
[Update: *sigh* we just found 2 more, scattered about. Confirmed the mom. She completely ignored her kittens.
This picture of domestic bliss was interrupted when suddenly she, and two other mamas, drove off Rolando Moon! Rolando doesn’t like the babies, nor any of the other cats, really, and I guess they see her as a threat.
Just a little bit longer, and Button will be off to his forever home!
I have to admit, going outside in the mornings has gotten a bit nerve racking. My daughters fed the outside cats early this morning, and it’s much the same for them, now, too. We keep looking around, wondering what we fill find.
Happily, this morning, all we found were active, playful – or napping! – kitties.
Finding Rolando Moon chilling in the wheelbarrow was quite funny!
While I was watering the garden this morning, ahead of the upcoming heat, I was watching the cats and noticed that only one kitten was with Brussel. Which sort of confirms to me that three of the recent losses were from her litter. The one remaining kitten, at least, looked very strong and healthy.
As for the new litter that was brought to the junk pile, I am thinking there is two kittens in the litter, but that I’m sometimes seeing other white and greys playing with them. I saw the two of them lying in the open together, with Mama nearby, and they seem a bit older than I originally thought, too. I was entertaining the possibility that Button was part of this litter and had been brought over ahead of the others or something, but I still think that’s unlikely. Possible, but unlikely.
One of the things we are talking about doing is building a larger, outdoor cat cage. Something like a catio, but self contained and moveable. When we get to the point of trapping females to get them spayed, we will need somewhere to isolate them for 2 weeks. We can’t use the sun room for that anymore; I don’t think we can fully close the doors, due to shifting. Mostly the outer door. I think the inside door can still close.
I was talking to the Cat Lady about it and asking if her husband had any construction sites in the area, and the possibility of scavenging building materials that would otherwise be doing to the landfill. He’s an engineer and doesn’t typically deal with that side of his contracts, but there aren’t any builds in our area, anyhow right now. She promised to bring it up with him, and maybe he can throw some castoffs into his truck when visiting a work site. Most of the building projects we have in mind are pretty small, so we could manage with castoffs. It would be a win-win, since it would mean at least a little bit less going to the dump.
They are in the process of having a catio being custom built at their new house – something to make it easier to keep the cats up for adoption separate from their house cats. They have a catio from their previous house that doesn’t work where they are now. They will try to get it to us. That would make things a lot easier, I think. Depending on what it’s like, we might just need to do some modifications. If that doesn’t work out, we can use the parts and pieces for something that suits our space.
We are such sucks for the cats.
Anything we can do to make it easier to catch and fix the outside cats will be a huge help, too.
Yesterday, as I was heading back inside through the sun room, I spotted Button and his blue, blue eyes. I’ve been trying to capture just how blue they are and, this time, the light was hitting them just right. The camera was even able to capture the colour very well, too!
I was able to get a few pictures and even a short video. When I had the chance, I shared them with the Cat Lady (and others! 😁), just so she could see the colour.
Soon after, she was asking me questions about Button, and telling me she was going to share the photos around. She knew some people that had lost their elderly cats and was hoping they’d be willing to adopt a kitten.
Well, I don’t know about the ones that lost elderly cats, but she did find someone that was very interested!
Best of all, this person is a vet!
For all his tiny size and blue eyes, we know Button is likely at least five weeks old, based on things like how much he’s eating solid food, compared to how often he nurses on the creche mothers. The vet knows that he is a foundling, and that we know little else about him. We also just assume he has ear mites.
The Cat Lady will pick him up, most likely on the weekend when they are in the area again. He’ll be with her for about a week before going to the vet. The vet is even taking on the expenses that the rescue would normally take on before a cat is adopted out.
Now, we’ve had way too many of these things fall through in the past couple of years, so I’m not holding my breath on this, but as it stands now, Button’s gorgeous blue eyes seems to have found him a forever home!
Now for the sad news.
The girls had fed the cats outside quite early in the morning, so when I went out to do my rounds, I topped up the kibble a bit, then did my usual routine.
There is one black and white kitten – one of the Squashes (kittens that like to sit in the pots with my summer squash) – that we’ve been keeping our eye on. He (she?) did not seem overtly sick, but was definitely not thriving. Yesterday, I honestly thought he was dying, like the other black and white Squash kitten I’d found a few days ago. However, when I picked him up, he perked up, got active, wanted down, and started behaving normally.
I was keeping an eye out for him while I was outside and, by the time I was ready to head in, I had not seen him anywhere. This kitten was one that always stayed close to the house, with several favourite places to hang out, and he was in none of them.
*sigh*
So I started looking for him, knowing I was likely looking for a body. But where could he be? If anything, this is one kitten I would have expected to find out in the open, like some of the other kittens we’d found passed on.
Once all the obvious places where checked, I started looking for the less obvious places he might have gone into.
Which is when I saw the tail, peaking out from under the back of the kibble house.
An orange tail.
This year, we’ve had one orange fluffy kitten, and one orange and white kitten. The orange and white kitten was in the sun room, enjoying himself in the cat cage.
Which is when I realized, I hadn’t seen the orange fluffy one in a while.
I will not go into detail but, let’s just say, the orange kitten had been under there for quite some time. It took some creative effort to get him out and bury the remains under a rose bush.
I made sure to hose down under the kibble house after. There is a sheet of rigid insulation on the ground that fits perfectly under the floor of the kibble house, and a lot of the cats and kittens will hang out under there, or hide under there if they feel threatened. The back wall of the kibble house is just a few inches above ground; too low for an adult cat to squeeze under. The front is more open, with just the 2×4 supporting the floor of the kibble house for them to squeeze under. It’s hard to see anything under the kibble house without basically getting down on the ground. When I retrieved the remains of the orange kitten, I did make sure there were no other remains.
Which means I still had the black and white kitten to find.
With the condition of the one kitten, I really wanted to make sure the black and white wasn’t in the sun room for us to find by the smell or something. After looking all over, I found myself eyeballing the counter shelf. The kittens like to hide under it, and go between it and the window.
Then one of the other cats moved out from under the table saw, and I could see a little black.. something.
It turned out to be a barely visible tail tip.
*sigh*
This one got buried under the honeysuckle.
So that’s two more gone, and we don’t know why. The Cat Lady says it’s most likely lung issues. I suspect she’s seen a lot more of this than we have!
But still, this is 5 kittens I’ve buried in less than a week, and only one of them looked like it was having issues. I can’t say for sure about the orange one, since it ran from us all the time, but the other two had seemed hale and hardy, until they weren’t.
It just occurred to me; this black and white and the orange kitten were both Brussel’s babies. That’s at least two out of her litter of four she has lost. Possibly three, as the other black and white might have been hers, too.
I just went looking through my photos. There is one of her kittens that has a distinctive black splotch over its nose, and I’ve been seeing that one around the house. Looking at the others in the photo, I am now more convinced that the other three from her litter are now gone.
Wow.
So…
What a start to the day.
At least we have the good news of Button soon to be going to his forever home with a vet!
I ended up going into town this morning. One of my stops was not far from the marina.
I forgot it’s fish fly season right now.
Buildings and sidewalks are covered with them. Piles of them were under street lights. I walked past a poor guy using a leaf blower, trying to clear the sidewalk in front of retail outlets. Before going inside, I had to shake my shirt to knock the still living ones off of me. Ew.
While in line at one of my stops I – with permission, of course – removed a number of them from the back of the woman in front of me, and she was kind enough to check if I had any on my back, too! 😄
The good thing is, they emerge, mate, hatch their eggs and die, all within 24 hours, so this won’t last long!
After I got home, I was able to make the medical appointment for my mother to go over her prescription changes. They were actually able to fit her in this coming Friday, which is nice and fast.
Then, with the temperatures a much more bearable 20-22C/68-72F outside, and no rain expected, I finally got outside and got some progress in the garden. That will be for another post. For now, I share the cuteness!
Two of Brussel’s kittens are now regularly at the sun room. If the other two are around, I’m not seeing them.
Broccoli’s calico looks like a grizzles old man!
Then I found one of Brussel’s kittens in one of my summer squash pots! Thankfully, not on the one seedling that has managed to germinate. I was able to harvest the fuzzy little squashling and move it to the sun room.
It did not appreciate this.
This is a kitten that hunches down rather than runs away, and it did hiss at me. I think it did clue in that I mean it no harm, because I was able to handle it later, without getting hissed at. I just got a death glare, instead!
Button’s habit of sleeping right in the doorway is a bit of a pain, but with all our losses this year so far, every time I see him sleeping like that, I find myself checking to see if he’s still breathing!
Yes, he was fine. 😁
Seeing Brussel with only two of her kittens does make me wonder about the other two.
Then there is a pair of white and grey/black kittens that have decided the hand rail is the place to hang out.
They are not socialized, but I was able to pet them. Once actually stopped and let me, but the other disappeared under the branches of the rose bush that covered half the hand rail. I did manage to pet its back as it duck into the foliage, though.
Gotta keep working on the socialization thing, if we’re going to be able to get them adopted out! The Cat Lady even contacted me today, as she has someone looking for a kitten, and we do have some that we can handle regularly now, that are also old enough to be weaned.
Getting any adoptions done at all right now would be amazing!
Today, being Sunday, is my day of rest, and I’m going to take full advantage of it!
Not that it means I don’t do my usual rounds and checks, of course. My daughters, however, were sweethearts and took care of feeding the outside cats before going to bed for the day, so I could sleep in.
That was quite early in the morning, so when I did head out, I topped up their kibble. As I was doing it, I heard a bit of a cat fight in the space between the cat shelters.
I saw a cat get run off by Adam, who then settled in among a few kittens. I do believe she was protecting them!
I have no idea which of the kittens in the photo are hers anymore! There are just a few that I know for sure are not.
She is such a good mama!
While checking the garden beds, I’m now always on the lookout for developing female flowers and squash. There is one pumpkin vine that has a couple of baby pumpkins that are pretty darn big, for the stage they are at!
I’m hoping they got pollinated and will keep growing, but it’ll be a while before we know for sure. The pumpkin flowers, both male and female, are larger than most of the winter squash that are blooming. There are a few winter squash, though, that have had some equally large male flowers blooming. It should be interesting to see what kind of squash they turn out to be!
After I was done outside, I grabbed our empty water jugs and headed to town. I had considered taking them with me to the city yesterday for refills, but I’m glad I didn’t. We don’t usually allow our drinking water get down to just one jug, though, and the last one was set up last night, so I wanted to make sure to get the empties refilled right away.
I was rather surprised by how busy things were in town, though. Even for a summer Sunday in a tourist town. My first hint at what was going on was as I left the grocery store and had to wait for an absolutely gorgeous old low rider, painted black with red and yellow flams all over, drive by. Then, as I was leaving the parking lot, I could see the street ahead was closed and filled with people.
There was a classic car event going on.
No wonder it was so busy! For the population of the area, it’s amazing just how many classic cars there are! The show is very popular and with good reason.
Still, I was glad to leave the crowd behind. It’s been more than 6 years since we moved out of the city, and I’m still peopled out. 😄
In other things, we are supposed to get more rain, off and on, late this afternoon and evening. We still have a lot of standing water all over, and I wasn’t able to pull into the yard to unload the truck. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get more rain from 4am – 6am and then continue to be cooler and drier for the next few days. Hopefully, that means I’ll finally be able to get out with the electric weed trimmer and clear the spaces around the garden beds I need to work on. I really don’t want to be dragging an extension cord through wet grass!
Last night, it actually got cool enough that I had to turn off my fan! Last year, I had a box fan set up in the window, but I hadn’t done that yet, this summer. Part of the problem is the power bars (we have surge protection power bars at almost every outlet – and this house does not have enough outlets!). I’ve got different things plugged into the one I needed this year, and some of them are the larger plugs that take up two spaces. I was able to move things around between power bars and free up a plug in the power bar that can be reached from the window, and I could finally set the box fan back up. What a difference that made!
The cats are not happy. 😄 They like to sit on the wide ledge to look outside, or use it to get to the top of the shelf, where there are beds set up for them.
During the day, I have the fan facing the screen and blowing hot air out. At night, I flip it around to blow cool air in. We dropped to 13C/55F last night! It was glorious!
As for right now, even though it’s 23C/73F, with the humidex at 28C/83F right now, I’m having a hard time not going back outside to try and get some things done before it rains again. Even if I weren’t taking a day of rest, things are still just too wet for the work I want to do! None of it is urgent anymore, like it was to get those beds shifted so we could finish getting the transplants in. It can wait. It would be nice to get some more progress done before I do my next garden tour video, though.
We shall see. It all pretty much comes down to what the weather allows!
Today, things are a supposed to be a bit cooler than the past couple of days, but it sure didn’t feel that way while doing my rounds this morning! I’m writing this at a little before 7:30pm, and we’re still at 25C/77F. We were expected to hit 27C/81F this afternoon, but I’m pretty sure we beat that.
We did have rain overnight. Enough to refill the rain barrel, so I made sure to put the diverter back on. I’m glad I did!
Though several hours had past, and it was quite hot out already, it was so humid that nothing was drying. The grass and plants, I would expect, but even the sidewalk and patio blocks, and the front steps, were all still damp. By the time I was done and got back to the house, my feet were soaked!
After finishing my morning rounds, I was planning to go to the city, but made sure to call my mother and check on how she was doing. She sounded really good. We talked a bit about her prescription change, and that I would be calling the clinic on Monday to get her an appointment with the doctor to talk about them and get her prescriptions updated for the pharmacy. Of course, now that she’s back on one pill she was told to stop for a short while, then get the blood tests she had done at the beginning of the week, plus another pill is now morning and evening, instead of just evening, she has immediately begun to associate starting the medications again with whatever she happens to be noticing at the time. Lately, it’s been “dry mouth”. Not anything close to the medical dry mouth that can be a symptom of various things, but she doesn’t understand just how extreme the medical condition can be. From what she describes, it makes me think she is either dehydrated (for all our encouragement, she is just not drinking anywhere near enough water) or sleeping with her mouth open at times – or both! Well, she woke up with a dry mouth this morning, so it must be because she restarted taking that one pill, yesterday. More alarming, she started saying that maybe she should stop taking it again, and…
I stepped in at that point and reminded her to not start messing with her medications. Again!
*sigh*
We talked about it for a bit, and I reminded her that she’s been complaining about that for quite a while now, both with and without that one pill. She did admit that this was true.
As we were talking and I mentioned I was planning to go to the city, as my own little “day off”. This is my birth month and, when I was asked if I wanted to do the usual take out again, I said no. I wanted a grocery shopping trip! Not just any grocery shopping trip, though, but a more luxurious one. 😄 So I got a rather generous budget, instead!
I mentioned my birthday was coming up, too, and my mother had forgotten about it completely. Which doesn’t bother me at all. If it weren’t for my family and Facebook, I’d forget my own birthday. I even forget my age, most of the time. 😄
Anyhow.
When she found out I was going to the city, my mother wondered if I could pick up some milk for her along the way. 😄 I had intended to take a different route, but that was fine. I told her I’d do it on the way out, not on the way back, since I would have things in the truck that needed to stay cold.
So that was worked out. Before heading out, I remembered to return our reusable bags – most of them insulated – to the truck, including one filled with ice packs.
Then it was off to my mother’s town, a quick stop to pick up her milk, and a brief visit.
She was sweet enough to have an envelop with a monetary gift for me. Which I made sure to say, she did not need to do. I appreciate the gift (gas money!), of course, but I don’t want her to think she’s in any way obligated to gave me anything.
I did have to chuckle when I transferred the cash to my wallet, though. It was $50, which was very kind of her. What is funny is, with my brother as PoA keeping track of her finances, I know that she sent our vandal a check for $1000 for his birthday, a few months ago.
*shakeshead*
She has such a terrible habit of making things worse for herself and is completely oblivious as to how what she does can be such a problem. I mean, it’s her money, she can do what she wants with it, but to even keep having contact with our vandal, after his years of verbal abuse and trying to get her to change her will to leave this farm to him instead of my brother… what was she thinking???
Ah, well.
Once done at her place, I made a stop at the gas station. This time, I just preset the pump to $30, then went inside when it was done to get some food and a drink for the road as well, since I forgot to have breakfast. After I paid for everything, making sure to say which pump I’d used, I drove away from the pump and off to the side and parked. After opening my drink and setting up my food (I even keep a plastic plate in the truck, to protect the seat, for times like this), I checked my phone for messages before leaving.
There was a purchase notification from my bank that I started to clear, when I noticed something strange about the number.
I hadn’t paid too much attention inside the gas station as I was paying, and I don’t normally keep the receipt. I thought I’d heard the woman on cash give me the total, but clearly I’d heard wrong. This number was way too low!
She forgot to charge me for the gas!
So I went back inside.
I explained that I hadn’t got my receipt, but I saw my bank notification, and I didn’t think they charged me for the gas. At this point, I was talking to two women behind the counter, including one I see almost all the time. As soon as I mentioned the gas not being included, they both looked at each other and said “The $30!” After I’d left, they’d noticed the indicator on the machine inside, but I guess neither had seen who had gotten gas there!
I’m so glad I checked my phone before I left! If I hadn’t, I would not have seen the notification until I’d parked at my first stop in the city! I’m also glad I have my bank app set up to send me those notifications, too, I might not have noticed at all, even when checking my accounts, later!
Once that was cleared up, it was off to the city. I had a regular shopping list as well as personal shopping, and my first stop was at a large Walmart. I ended up getting most of what was on my list there, including more kibble. For myself, I picked up a couple of t-shirts, since I’m managed to stain pretty all of mine, including my new ones. I tried looking at shoes, too. I need to replace my indoor shoes, which I’d found at a Walmart, but I just can’t find another pair like them. The ones that are similar don’t fit my feet right. I ended up having to skip the shoes again. I did amuse myself by first looking at women’s shoes, including some “wide” pairs. Ha! Wide compared to what? I was looking at several sizes larger than my feet, and they were all so narrow, I didn’t even bother trying any on.
It’s not just a problem with shoes. Most of my clothes these days come from the men’s section. Even the Plus Size women’s clothes are just wrong for my body type. The fabrics and overall quality tend to suck, too, and even plain shirts tend to be more expensive.
So I’m happy with my very plain, very generic, men’s t-shirts!
That done, I packed everything into the truck, but was left with a bit of a conundrum. One of the things on my list that I picked up was a couple of packs of ice. They went into an insulated bag along with some other things that needed to be kept cold, plus ice packs I’d brought from home. I made sure to keep those bags in the cab, with air conditioning, but once the truck is parked, it gets so hot, the insulated bags can only do so much!
It just meant I needed to do the rest of my planned shopping a bit faster.
The next stop was at the international grocery store, which I haven’t been to in ages. It shares a parking lot with a Dollarama, so I dashed in there, first. They had the taller, plastic coated metal support stakes in stock, so I bought 8 of them. These ones each some with an adjustable plant tie, and cost $3. The same size support stakes, without the ties, cost more than twice as much at Canadian Tire, and Walmart doesn’t even have them.
That was my mother’s birthday gift to me. 😄
Part of why I wanted to go to the international grocery store was to go to their eatery section and treat myself to dim sum for lunch. Oh, how I love their dim sum!
It was also the place to pick up a nice selection of cheeses and charcuterie meats. I even found truffle enhanced gouda this time!
The fungus, not the chocolate.
I’m thinking, a Columbo marathon and some charcuterie with the girls. My husband wouldn’t be joining us, though. He likes Columbo. He doesn’t like charcuterie. 😄
While I was in the city, I got a message from my husband. He told me they’d just been hit with a wicked thunderstorm! They didn’t lose power or anything, but there was definitely a nearby lightning strike!
There was also a deluge.
Did I mention I was glad I put that rain diverter over the full barrel?
It was probably another hour and half after the storm ended, that I got home. Before leaving the city, I’d sent a message about driving into the yard to unload. My daughter went out to check the status of things, and suggested that was not going to be an option.
When I got to the gate, the driveway was still full of water. So was the entry through the vehicle gate into the yard. The ground there is already really soft, but with open water all around behind the garage again, the truck would have torn up the grass, or even gotten stuck, if I’d driven in!
My daughter helped me carry everything in. We didn’t even try to use use the wagon. Once loaded with things like 9kg bags of kibble, it would have sunk into the mud, too!
Once everything was unloaded, I gave the cats their evening feeding, then checked around the yard. It was the wheelbarrow that really showed me just how much of a deluge we got. This morning, the wheelbarrow had just a couple of inches of water in one corner. That corner now had about 8 or 9 inches in it! All the low spots around the garden were full of water.
Everything in the raised beds, though, is very happy! They got their fertilizer just a little while ago, and now they got a deep watering. Nothing seemed to be damaged by the rain itself. The winter squash is getting really big, and even the much smaller melon vines are seeing a growth spurt!
I’m happy to see that Brussel’s babies are hanging out around the house now! Well. At least the orange one. The other two are black and white and, while one has a distinctive patters on its nose, there are so many black and whites or grey and whites, and they run around so much, it’s hard to identify them at times.
Thanks to a donation of kitten kibble, I’ve been making a point of mixing a bit of it in with the adult kibble, then putting the food around outside the sun room, first. Once the adults are distracted by eating, I put kitten kibble in the bowls inside the sun room, where the kittens prefer to hang out. Not all of them, though. Quite a few are coming to the house to eat, but they haven’t discovered the sun room, yet. By including some kitten kibble with the adult kibble that gets spread in some of the areas they are willing to go to, they will at least get some of it before the adults eat it all!
When I was done with the feeding and checking of the yard, though, I wasn’t able to go back in through the sun room, as Adam was busy nursing some babies in front of it. So I went in through the main doors, then went into the old kitchen to finish putting things away. From there, I spotted Adam through the window. She had moved outside, and was nursing a whole bunch of kittens – including Brussel’s orange baby! She had kittens climbing all over each other, trying to reach the nip, and she was just laying there, putting up with it all!
What a good creche mother she is!
I do sometimes see two other mamas nursing babies besides their own, in or near the sun room, but none on the scale that Adam does!
So, that has been my day today. All in all, I’m pretty happy with a more relaxed trip to the city, and am looking forward to treating myself to some really awesome cheeses!
I wonder if the girls are up to a Columbo marathon tonight?
Drier Sheet is back today, and still just a bundle of nerves. I was, however, able to get a look at the stitches on his leg. We were not able to dose him with the remaining painkillers the vet sent home with him because he simply disappeared for several days. The wound seems to be healing nicely, though, and the dissolving stitches are still holding.
Button has been an easy one to catch and hold. In fact, we have to be really careful walking around the sun room, and just outside, because he has this terrible habit of going under our feet.
This kitten has the absolute bluest eyes, and I think that may be his permanent colour! I tried to get a picture to capture the colour, but did not succeed. Still cute as a Button, though!
One of the things in the packages I picked up today was a donation of kitten food and some cat treats. When I did the evening feeding, I used the regular kibble outside to lure the adults away, then put kitten food in the sun room and other places the kittens tend to congregate in, in hopes the adult cats wouldn’t eat the kitten food before the littles got some.
It was somewhat successful. There are several male cats that prefer to eat inside the sun room, though. We have several bowls, spread apart, and sometimes I’ll find a kitten eating with an adult cat. Mostly, though, the adults just push their way over the bowls and scarf down the food. With the kitten food, I actually had to chase some of the adult cats out so they wouldn’t eat all the kittens’ food!
All the while I was out there, I was hearing thunder in the near distance. I decided to take advantage of possible rain and quickly weeded and loosened some soil in the potato bed at the chain link fence, where the potatoes didn’t come up, and direct seeded some White Vienne kohlrabi. I’ve seen several resources saying that they can be planted now as a fall crop in our area. In the past, I’d always planted them in the early spring, but if they ever germinated, something ate them right away. Perhaps if I try them now, it’s past the season of whatever ate them. That and they are in a completely different location, which might also help. We shall see!
Meanwhile, as I worked, it was so hot and humid, I had sweat just pouring off my face!
I used to dream of some day living in, or at least visiting, a tropical paradise. I could have handled it in my younger days, but as I’ve gotten older, I just can’t seem to tolerate the heat anymore!
As for the thunder I was hearing, I just checked the weather radar, and it passed us by completely. It’s almost 10pm as I write this, and we’re still at 25C/77F with a matching humidex. The predicted rain that was supposed to start around 11pm and last until about 2am, is now expected to to be light showers, starting at 2am, lasting about an hour, then starting again at about 5am and lasting another hour.
It’s a good thing I gave the freshly sown kohlrabi a through watering. Later, I’ll cover it with some mesh or something, to keep the cats off.
Aside from planting the kohlrabi, about the only other thing I got done in the garden was to harvest the last of the garden scapes. We have been hanging on to most of the previous harvests, so we can make a big batch or two of… something. We haven’t decided it. Tonight, though, the girls are planning to use some to make a pasta sauce. Sounds wonderful!
As for me, given that I got pretty much no sleep last night, I should probably got to bed but…
Yup. You guessed it.
The later it gets, the more awake I am!
That and it’s so hot and humid in my room, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to sleep anyhow. Especially when Butterscotch, Cheddar, Clarence, Peanut Butter Cup, Ghosty, Fenrir and Freya, all decide they need to snuggle right up against me as they sleep! Not necessarily all at once, but usually at least 4 of them at a time. You’d think they’d try and avoid more heat, but nope…
We have the old basement door open, hardware cloth barrier in place to keep the cats out of the basement, and a blower fan at the bottom of the stairs, blowing cooler air up. It helps quite a bit, but the basement door has to be fully open.
When the basement door is fully open, it covered the doorway into my room. Which means all that cool air doesn’t go into my bedroom at all. I do have a box fan in my room, but it mostly just blows around warm air.
Ah, well. Better the heat than the cold. If we lose power or something major breaks down now, it’s not that big of a deal. If the same thing happens at in the winter, it can be life threatening.
Adam was blocking my way into the house again, nursing the bebbies – including Button! I’m so happy to see he’s been absorbed into the creche.
Now for the more serious stuff.
Last night, I got a call from my mother. She had called for an ambulance and, as we had discussed before, she was letting me know so that I could update the rest of the family and check on her place, etc.
That was at about… 4:30pm – ish.
After several hours with no word, I tried calling the closer hospital ER I thought they would take her to.
She wasn’t there.
So I tried the next hospital, and there she was.
She was stable and doing fine, but a doctor had not seen her yet.
After confirming phone numbers for myself and my brother, who has PoA, that was about it.
My plan was to head over to check on her place in the morning. I wasn’t decided on whether I should call the hospital before I left, or from my mother’s town.
I ended up not being able to sleep at all until past 5am. Since I was intending to do some driving, when I woke up less than 2 hours later, I asked my daughters to take care of the morning outside stuff and tried to get more sleep.
It didn’t work.
About an hour later, I found a direct message from my brother, asking if I’d heard anything. No one had called him. I had not heard anything, either.
I was tying my shoes, getting ready to head out, when the phone rang. It was the hospital, letting me know my mother was discharged and ready to go home with a prescription. After confirming which entrance I’d be picking her up at, I was on my way.
It turns out she’d spent the entire night basically in the waiting room, in between getting tests and Xrays done. There were no beds available. When I got there, she was talking to another older woman who had been there just as long as my mother, and still hadn’t been seen by a doctor! It was 15 hours in the ER by then!
I got my mother into the truck, and she was so tired, she wanted to go straight home. She was, at least, given a meal while she was there!
I tried to ask lots of questions about how things went, and she was already starting to forget details. I got information in dribs and drabs over the next while. When we were at her place, she showed me the hand written prescription she was given. I didn’t think she had one, since she also told me the doctor assured her copies of everything would go to both her doctor and the pharmacy.
The good news is, the issue found the last time she saw the doctor has improved. The bad news it, it had nothing to do with why she called the ambulance. She did get one of her prescription doses increased, though, and – little by little – she told me things the doctor suggested that we’ve already been trying to get her to do for … oh… several years now? She still flat out refuses to get a hospital bed.
Then she showed me the physical prescription. I couldn’t read some of it, but it looked like one medication’s dose was increase, so I said I would take it to the pharmacy and talk to them about it.
I’m glad I did. They needed that physical copy.
It turned out one medication was back to normal; the pharmacy didn’t even know there was a chance, since it was a temporary experiment. Another did have an increased dose. After some discussion, I went back to my mother’s to get her bubble packs, so they could add the change to them. It was going to take long enough that I had time to have breakfast while I waited!
By the time I got the updated bubble packs and brought them to my mother. She was sleeping soundly, so I just left them on her table with a note.
I think hung around town just long enough that the post office would be open when I got to our little hamlet. M, I got your surprise parcels, but have not looking them them yet. Thank you so much! I ended up having 4 packages, including a large but light one, so I messaged my daughters to have one of them meet me at the garage, to bring them in.
Once we got everything inside, it was late enough that I decided to top up the kibble for the outside cats.
That’s when I found a less pleasant surprise, on the ground under the water bowl shelter.
A stillborn kitten, still fully encased in its amniotic sac and attached to its placenta.
I went around to put kibble in the bowls under the shrine, and found a second one!
After that, I decided to do some walking around to see if there were any others.
There was not, so I buried the two that I found.
I don’t even know what cat was pregnant. There is one – I believe a sibling to Peanut Butter cup – that we’ve not been able to get close to, but I’ve been able to confirm as female. I think she might be pregnant. She’s so fluffy, it’s hard to tell, but if she is, she still is, and the stillborns were not hers. No other cat that I know is female looked even remotely pregnant.
After the sad job of burying the babies, I made a point of checking things I normally would have in my morning rounds. I find my morning rounds to be very meditative and enjoyable.
It was, however, hot and muggy. As I write this, just past 4pm, we’re at 29C/84F with the humidex at 32C/90F, and we haven’t even reached our high of the day, yet.
Yesterday, when I saw no rain in the forecast, I wrote that I would have expected thunderstorms. Well, last night, I did hear thunder in the distance as storms passed us by. While I was driving to get my mother, there were storm warnings on the radio, including the possibility of golf ball sized hail! Our local forecast now says rain should be starting around 11 or 12 this evening, and continuing until about 2am. We are now also expected to have rain all day Monday. We’re supposed to cool down slightly over the next few days, then get hot again. For us, that means close to, or hotter than, 30C/86F.
The conditions are frustrating. The coolest part of the day is in the morning, but the humidity is so high, it’s too damp to do anything like mowing or weed trimming. I need to get the weed trimmer out to work on the log frame of the low raised bed, but the winter squash plants are getting so big and long, it’s going to be a challenge to do the work without damaging them. I should be able to temporarily fix them to the trellis netting for the peas and beans, though.
So the grass cutting and weed trimming needs to wait until things are no longer too wet – but by then, it’s too hot. The temperatures don’t start coming down until about 7pm – and if the heat doesn’t get us, the mosquitoes and horseflies will! Bug spray or not bug spray!
Bah. At least the garden is planted. If we’re expecting rain tonight, I might take a chance and plant some kohlrabi in the empty space where the Purple Caribe potatoes didn’t come up.
But not until things start to cool down.
Until then, I’ve got a couple of boxes to open up and see what’s inside!
We’ve got a hot day coming, so I wanted to give the garden beds a solid watering, to help them cope with the coming heat. It was already 22C/72F at the time. I can’t remember what the humidex was.
While doing my morning rounds, though, I got a bit of a harvest.
There were quite a lot of scapes to harvest! There’s a few left to harvest over the next few days, but at this point, the bulk of them are harvested. We just need to figure out what we want to do with them all!
There were a few sugar snap peas large enough to pick. The little strawberries are the ones grown from seed last year, and the larger ones from the bare root plants we planted this spring. There is one plant among the asparagus that has berries, but the other three have been eaten, in spite of the barriers I put up to discourage the deer. *sigh*
I have spotted our first female pumpkin flower. The camera on my phone just did NOT want to focus on it, though. After I got the picture, I found a male flower and hand pollinated it. I later found a new female flower among the winter squash and was able to hand pollinate that one, too.
After a quick breakfast, my older daughter and I headed outside – my younger daughter is out of commission and walking with a cane again. 😢 We finally got around to removing the insulation around the base of the newer part of the house. This uncovered two windows – a third was already uncovered. These two windows don’t have screens on them, so I’m hoping to build some new screens for them. This way, we can have the windows open and allow more air circulation in the basement and hopefully help it dry out.
The insulation was taken to the barn for storage. My daughter took the smaller pieces in the wagon, fighting her way through the tall grass. With both of us, though, it took only two trips to get it all stored away.
Since I was going to be watering the garden anyway, I had decided to use the hose attachment and water soluble fertilizer. We have the 30-10-10 Acidifying fertilizer we’d found when cleaning out the old kitchen. Everything in the box was well sealed in plastic bags, so even though the box got wet at some point, the fertilizer is fine. With our alkaline soil, I decided it was worth trying. The peas and beans, of course, won’t get any benefit from the high nitrogen content, but anything that makes our soil at least closer to neutral will be a help.
I had a bit of trouble getting back into the sun room to get what I needed, though.
I was NOT about to interrupt Button getting some nip. Especially when he wasn’t having to fight the bigger kittens for it.
So I took advantage of the time to clear things on the patio blocks in front of the south facing basement window. The swing bench is there. The seat cushions have needed replacing for years, but I keep forgetting to get the measurements for cushions. Being out in the elements, moisture and debris gets caught in the fold between the back and the seat portions, so I undid the Velcro holding them in place and flipped the folds backwards for them to dry.
We stuck an old wooden bench against the wall that my daughter helped me move away after the insulation pieces were taken out. I ended up taking it off the patio blocks completely. All sorts of buckets and other things were stored under the bench, some of which got garbaged, some hosed off and set to dry in the sun. After that, it was old leaves, twigs, and other nature debris that needed to be scraped off the patio blocks and swept away. The window and the basement wall, of course, had to be swept clear of debris that got between the wall and the insulation pieces.
By the time I finished clearing that, Adam and Button were done, and I could fill the hose attachment and get to watering. The box of fertilizer has one large bag in it, with four smaller bags. One had been opened, but hardly anything had been used. Each one of the smaller bags was premeasured to put into the hose attachment. Handy! Of course, I used the one that was open already, even though it was missing a small amount, and set it up on the hose at the main garden area.
All the beds got a watering then, after the first watering had time to be absorbed by the soil, a second watering. Hopefully, it will be sufficient to protect the plants from the heat, even though a lot of these are heat loving plants.
I don’t know if the last Zucca melon will survive. When I did my evening rounds and checked on it, it was just covered in slugs, eaten to the point the stem with the newest growth on it broke off while I was removing the slugs! It still got a fertilizer watering, though.
That done, I switched to the front yard hose and did the East yard garden beds, and the beds along the chain link fence. There’s a section where we planted the Purple Caribe potatoes that never came up. I’m thinking of direct sowing something for a fall crop. I’m told we can actually still plant kohlrabi now, so I might do that. There is a single self seeded Jebousek lettuce that showed up in the gap, and I’m leaving it to go to seed, as it would be acclimating to our local conditions quite nicely by now. That, and the seed it came from survived the entire bed being reworked!
By the time the south and east beds were watered, the water in the attachment was looking pretty clear, so for the old kitchen garden, I switched gears. I used watering cans and water from the rain barrel, opening another bag of fertilizer and adding measured amounts into the cans after filling them. As I was watering, I spotted some Forme de Couer tomatoes developing!
I just realized; I forgot to water the green zucchini in the pot. The Magda and White Scallop pots still have nothing in then, and I’ve figured out part of the problem. I’ve got stakes to keep the cats out, but the kittens still fit! I’ve been finding kittens curled up in between the stakes, right over where the seeds were planted.
*sigh*
Oh, that reminds me. We now have all four G-Star seeds I planted, in the bed with the onions and shallots, germinated and starting to show their true leaves. Still nothing with the Magda and White Scallop I planted at the same time. I was really hoping to get those. We quite enjoyed the few Madga squash we’ve been able to grow over the years, and the White Scallop patty pans are a new variety we were really looking forward to trying. The G-Star, however, seem to thrive here, so we should at least get some of those!
After everything was watered, I took the time to put away some plastic for the garden. I’d laid the pieces out on the grass, weighted down to keep them from blowing away, to dry. Instead, it rained, and ended up with puddled. After a while, they were starting to kill the grass, so I finally gave up on that idea. Yesterday evening, I hung them up on the clothes line, instead. They’re pretty long, even with the biggest piece folded in half, so there was a risk the cats would start playing with the ends and tearing them up.
The wind was starting to pick up, and the plastic was starting to get twisted on the line, so I took them down. The biggest piece got folded smaller, before being rolled up into a bundle. The other pieces were long and thin – mostly clear garbage bags with the sides cut, and used to solarize a garden bed. Those got rolled up around a stick.
By the time I got inside and checked the temperature, we were – and still are – at 28C/82F, with the humidex at 31C/88F. The high for today is expected to reach 30C/86F.
I can’t complain. In the city we lived in before moving here, they hit 36C/97F with the humidex at 40C/104F, yesterday. Mind you, we’re expected to reach a humidex of 40C/104F today ourselves, even with a lower expected high. Most of the prairies, now extending into southwestern Ontario, are under extreme heat warnings. Tomorrow is supposed to be much of the same.
Looking at the extended forecast, we’re not supposed to get any more rain until the beginning of August, and temperatures are expected to remain high. Given the heat and humidity levels, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get sudden thunderstorms in there.
Well, all those squash and melons, peppers and eggplants, are going to love the heat! They might get a chance to really get growing.
Hmm. This is interesting. I just checked a completely different weather app, and it says we have a 100% chance of rain on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Every app seems to have a different forecast!
We shall see.
Until then, we’re going to hunker down inside the house. It’s not supposed to cool off out there until 7pm, and even our overnight temperature is supposed to be a low of 21C/70F!
Gotta love the prairies. We get as hot in the summer as we do cold in the winter!
The Re-Farmer 