There is most definitely a plus to not closing our gate anymore, to avoid having it freeze shut again.
Our angel with a front end loader showed up yesterday! What a beautiful sight!
With the temperatures, no one went out while he was still here, but I did make sure to send a note to the renter to pass on our thanks. Like many others, they were pretty snowed in, too. Having that front end loader sure makes a difference, though! Their kids were home; school was cancelled, and the buses haven’t been running for days anyhow, due to icy road conditions. Plus a shortage of drivers. I don’t know if that’s because the drivers are snowed in at their homes, too, or if they just don’t have as many employed right now. Could well be both!
The driver even made the area in front of our person gate wider. I think he could see, by the tracks in the snow from the tow truck, that the area in front is used, and where space is needed for turning around.
The cats are loving it! After the front end loader was done, I could see on the security camera, cats running around and playing all over the plowed areas! They were having a blast!
This morning, after feeding the critters, I started a bit of shoveling, including clearing part of the snow ridge in front of the people gate, where we unload the van. I couldn’t stay out for too long. I hadn’t put toe warmers on this morning, and my boots that are supposed to be rated to -40C/-40F… aren’t. :-D The girls and I will head out later in the day to clear the paths. I’m just so grateful that the big job is done. Yes, we couldn’t have gotten out with my mother’s car, but this makes life so much easier!
The kitties were looking pretty miserable when they came out for kibble! As you can see by the nose in the window, they were eager to get back into shelter, once they had their fill of kibble and warm water! I do wish I’d been able to catch the death glare I was getting from Caramel, who is drinking water in the above photo. I think she is going to be a very happy camper, once we manage to catch her and she gets placed into a forever home – indoors!
This is what the temperature was like shortly after I got back inside – and still is now, as I am writing this! The -28C/-18F is bang on, but I’m happy to say we weren’t getting that -36C/-33F wind chill. The wind may be coming from the south, which we normally have issues with, it’s only 9 kmh/5 1/2 mph, and what trees and outbuildings we have on the south side are enough to reduce that. Still, it wasn’t a good morning to be out there for very long, that’s for sure!
The 14 day forecast is looking pretty good, though more snow is on the way. On Sunday – tomorrow – we’re expecting less than 5cm/2in, but on Tuesday, they’re predicting another 5-10cm/2-4in, then another 2-4cm/1-2in starting late Thursday and into Friday. I know so many people who are even more snowed in than we have been. Many have the equipment to dig their way out, but they’re running out of room for all the piled up snow! It takes my old brother, who lives closer to the city, 4 hours to clear his driveway with his snow blower. My sister’s husband uses their tractor and it takes him 2 hours, though for where they are, it’s generally a longer wait for their roads to be plowed, so it only gets them so far.
I’m liking the sight of warmer temperatures in the forecast, but the warmer weather also tends to bring more moisture – and more snow!
As much as we needed that precipitation, we have enough, now. :-D
Since I posted a screencap of our weather earlier, it has actually gotten a bit colder, instead of warmer, though the wind chill has been reduced.
While heating up water for the outside cats, I spotted this, outside our dining room window.
They were staring very intently at something past the south yard, but I couldn’t see what it was.
Butterscotch and Nosencrantz are still nice and cozy in the sun room. They are getting more active and wanting more attention, too. When the time comes, we’ll see if Butterscotch will let us bring her indoors with Nosencrantz this time, and see if she’s willing to become an indoor cat. If she does, that leaves only Rolando Moon as one of the originals that my late father used to care for, and there’s no way she’ll ever come indoors. My younger brother took her and had her spayed after my husband and younger daughter came out here ahead of the move, but by the time my older daughter and I came out, she had managed to escape the garage they were keeping her in and came back here. She is not a cat suited for indoors, at all! But as snarly, growly, bitey and mean she is – in between demanding pets and skritches! – we love her anyways!
Once outside, I did the minimum amount of cleared needed. We could open the door, but not all the way, so that got cleared. The cat’s non-heated water bowls had to be dug out of the snow. My daughters had already shoveled snow off the low-angle roof last night.
Things like the path to the compost pile, however, will wait a day or two.
You can see in the foreground, where the deer made their way through the snow into the south yard! They’re not quite comfortable enough to go around the front of the house, to the sidewalk path. :-D
We are fortunate where we are. We got snow, but were not snowed in. I would rather not, but if we absolute had to, we’d be able to use my mother’s car to get out, even if the roads are not yet plowed. I know others have had a lot more snow, and are going to need a while to dig their way out.
We’re supposed to warm up a bit tomorrow, so that might be a good day to start clearing out the paths. It’ll warm up even more, the day after, and generally stay mild for the rest of the month. We’re supposed to get a bit more snow here and there, but as far as temperature goes, we should be good.
Just think; the first day of spring is March 20 this year – not very long! Granted, where we are, we can reasonably expect a blizzard in April, but still… things should be slowly warming up now! If all goes well, we will have a slow melt of all this snow. It’d be nice for it all to be absorbed right were it is, and not drain away into the lake.
The snow started falling last night, and it hasn’t stopped yet!
We are at a relatively balmy -7C/19F. According to my app, the wind chill is -13C/9F.
I’d say our wind chill is colder than that!
It’s warm enough for the kitties to come out for breakfast, though Caramel’s expression looks like one of supreme displeasure! :-D
I am so glad we built the kibble house. It’s made things much nicer for the babies!
Butterscotch and Nosencrantz are still doing well in the sun room, though Nosencrantz did seem almost interested in going outside with me.
Almost.
I had deer hanging around the north yard and waiting for me to be done. It was the usual pair, at first. Then this one showed up.
The piebald deer has returned!
This is at least the 3rd winter she has been visiting us. I can’t remember if she started coming during our first winter here, so it might actually be her 4th winter visiting.
She also chased off the other two! :-D
I checked on the van this morning. The charger read full, so I unhooked it, then tested the van.
It started fine, but then I watched the display screen, as the battery charge dropped before my eyes, then the “charging system failure” warning came on again.
So I hooked the charger back on again.
After making sure our mechanic was good with it, I called CAA to tow it over. As you can imagine, they’re pretty busy right now, so I made sure to let them know, there was no emergency or urgency. They couldn’t even give me an estimated time. Logging on later, they have an ETS past 5:30 this evening, but I don’t expect them that “early”. The driver will have to call me for more detailed directions, anyhow, because they just have the map pinned at the highway junction nearest us. Honestly, if they couldn’t make it out today at all, I’d be okay with that.
When it gets here, we should have enough power to start the van and back it out of the garage, but I’d the battery would be dead before they could finish loading it up, based on how fast I saw it loosing charge in the display. Chances are, they won’t be dropping off the van until after the garage is closed, so they’ll probably have to use their own charger, just to be able to park the van after unloading it.
The snow has pretty much stopped falling while I was writing this. A quick look at the weather radar, and it shows the system is just passing us now. It looks like rain is also on the radar, but it is going to miss us entirely. Previous forecast of reaching as high as 3C/37F this afternoon are now saying a high of -3C/27F. I don’t know how much snow we actually got, but the paths didn’t need to be shoveled when I was out this morning, and the driveway looks driveable. Which is good, because we can’t get the little electric snow blower out of the garage. I was able to shovel out one of the swinging doors on that side, but it still won’t open far enough to take anything out, and we’d have to take the wood chipper out before we could take out the little snow blower. At least we can get inside that part of the garage now, though.
Areas to the south of us would have gotten more snow than we did. My sister wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it in to work. Their farm is one of those “turn on the gravel road and drive until it ends” sort of locations, and their driveway drifts over quickly. I haven’t heard from my brother, yet; he’s even further south, and would be in the thick of system right now, judging by the weather radar. He should be able to work from home, though.
Things went south before I even woke up this morning. Or, should I say, things going south was what woke me up!
I still had a litter box in my office/bedroom, so our post surgical kitties wouldn’t have far to go, if they needed to.
I was awakened by the sound of Beep Beep vigorously trying to spread the litter all over my carpet.
And we still don’t have the replacement belts for our new vacuum, yet.
*sigh*
Then I went into the sun room to start my morning rounds, and found water on the floor.
Under the spare cat food bag.
Despite things cooling down, yesterday’s warmth has lead to water leaking in the sun room again, and it’s making its way through now.
And we still don’t know where the water is getting in, so we couldn’t patch it.
So I had to spend some time taking care of the bag of cat food which, thankfully, has an inner lining that kept the kibble from getting wet, and setting out a bucket to catch the drips.
Butterscotch and Nosencrantz were doing very well, and enjoyed their wet cat food treat. They are getting so spoiled these days! :-D
The kibble bowls outside had been picked clean of even the kibble from the brands they don’t like. I am pretty sure I know who ate it. Last night, on the security camera live feed, I saw a very large skunk, running back and forth on the driveway, and too and from one of the sheds. Skunks don’t fully hibernate in winter, and it can be pretty safe to assume a very hungry skunk visited the kibble house last night.
When I came outside, I “caught” a deer in the path to the compost pile, half way between the pile and the house. It froze and stared at me for a while, before walking away, then into the spruces. Even as I brought out the seeds to the feeding station, it stayed and watched me until I was almost clear of the lilac bushes. By the time I was heading to the garage, to take the van to the mechanic, two deer were at the feeding station. They watched me, but didn’t run away.
The van started well enough, and no warning light or message from the onboard computer about the brakes. I left it running to warm up while I went to unlock the gate.
The lock was frozen.
We don’t have lock de-icer.
It took me about 10 minutes to finally be able to get the key in and open the lock.
Which is when I discovered the slide bar that holds the two sides of the gate together, was also frozen.
This thing is about 2 feet long, and the ice had formed between the metal of the bar, and the metal of the gate it slides on.
After fighting with it for a while, I went to the garage, shut off the van, and grabbed a tool kit. I ended up having to remove one of the bolts that holds it in place, but also stops it from sliding too far over the other half of the gate. It allowed me to pull the slider upwards, pivoting on the opposite bolt, enough to break free of the ice. Much sliding back and forth was required to scrape the ice off. The ice had filled almost the entire length where the two pieces of metal where in contact.
That took another 20 minutes or so.
The gate is being left open, now.
Then it was back to the van and off to town, with a brief stop at the post office, along the way.
We’ve got high winds from the north right now, blowing across the road the entire trip. It wasn’t too bad at first, but the closer I drove towards the lake, the more snow there was, the more drifting, and worse visibility. When I reached the stop sign to cross the next highway, it was sheer ice and hadn’t been sanded!
Which is when a new warning light came on. The battery light, while my onboard computer flashed with “charging system failure.”
Seriously???
Thankfully, I was less than 5 minutes from the garage.
When I got there, his parking lot was full, so I pulled in behind his own vehicle and went in.
But not until after I shut off the van, then restarted it. The warning light did not come back on.
Once inside, I saw that not only did he have all three lifts full, but he managed to squeeze in another car in the middle, and a utility vehicle between a vehicle on a lift, and the bay door behind it.
At least he had another mechanic with him this time!
Clearly, he wasn’t going to be able to check the van, anytime soon. I did bring in the printout to show him and we talked about what was going on, as well as the road conditions. He thought I was going to be dropping the van off and coming back later, but that wasn’t an option. My daughter still has a limited license, so someone with a full license has to be with her, and my husband no longer has a valid licence, since they wanted him to do a legal name change when he tried to switch to this province’s license. And she can’t take the road test to get her full license, because of all the restrictions and mandates against organic humans.
I would have been willing to wait, or he could have called me later in the afternoon, when he could fit the van in, but with the road conditions, I didn’t want to chance it.
I’m now booked to come back at 10am on Friday.
It’s a good thing we did that, as conditions had worsened even in the short time I was in with him. It was slow going in places, and more than a few spots were down to almost zero visibility.
About half way home, that “charging system failure” warning came back on.
I was just coming up on the turn towards our driveway when the van kicked into battery saving mode and shutting things off.
After pulling into the garage, I checked, and the battery was down to 8.4 volts. It is normally at 14 volts.
Thankfully, we have a good charger.
Unfortunately, the battery is really hard to get at. The fuse box and a piece of frame support is basically on top of it.
But, it is charging, and I should at least be able to get it to the mechanic in a couple of days.
One of the things on the list of stuff to check that I got after changing the oil, was corrosion on the battery connectors. It was something I’d noticed myself. But would that be enough to prevent the batter from charging? The mechanic suggested it might be the alternator, but until he actually gets under the hood to check, it’s just guesswork.
So, there’s something wonky with the brakes. The battery is losing its charge. We have a loose wire in our manual headlights knob, so that if I want to turn them on manually (auto still works fine), I sometimes have to wiggle it just right for it to work. The ABS needs to be fixed, and on and on.
This van has done well by us, considering the problems we had when we first bought it, but it’s mileage is right up there; I’m actually hoping to catch the odometer at 456,789.0 km, but I might have missed it on the way home. It’s old and little things are giving out, all over. We’re keeping up on them as much as we can, but the budget is just not there to get it all done.
Meanwhile, there is basic maintenance needed on my mother’s car, we have other equipment that needs to be fixed, the roof is leaking, we’re on borrowed time for our well, and the whole house needs a top to bottom renovation.
A lottery win would really come in handy right now. Not even a particularly big win. Just enough to replace and fix the things that need to be done!
This morning, a daughter and I took Beep Beep and Fenrir to the vet, which meant doing the morning rounds a bit earlier.
At least it’s light out, now.
The heated water bowl was empty again.
Because Beep Beep and Fenrir needed to fast, I had them closed up with me, overnight. Which meant I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I had cats trying to claw the door open from both sides! When I made the mistake of going to the bathroom before going to bed, I had Beep Beep escape, dashing down to the basement. I caught her before she ate anything, though. Then I tried to get her back into the bedroom, only to have Fenrir escape. I caught her, only to have Beep Beep escape again, and she was NOT going to let me catch her! I finally had to snag a daughter to catch her, then hang on to her while I dashed into the bedroom, grabbed Fenrir and held on while my daughter quickly tossed Beep Beep onto the bed before any other cats got in.
I had only one carrier in the room with me, but that was enough for me to be able to get out of the room long enough to grab the second one, this morning. I had both carriers on the bed, with Beep Beep in the hard sided one (where she was trying to claw her way out!) before doing the inside cat morning routine and warming water up for the outside cats. Before heading outside, I went to move the carriers closer to the old kitchen door for later.
When I walked into my room, I found Beep Beep and the carrier gone from the bed.
!!!
I found it on the side of the bed, sitting as if it had been placed there. :-D She had managed to roll the carrier completely off the bed, and it landed right side up!
The plan was to do the critter part of my morning rounds first, then get my mother’s car started and warming up, so I made sure to hang my purse inside the sun room, so I could just grab and go.
It’s a good thing I did.
The old kitchen door into the house hadn’t latched properly behind me. Looking in from the sun room, I found it crawling with exploring cats!
Thankfully, my daughter was able to take care of that, while I went to my mother’s car – after scraping away more ice and snow, just to be able to open one of the doors wide enough – and getting everything ready so we just needed to grab the cats and go.
The drop off went well, with my daughter taking the time to warn them about some of their quirks. We just happen to be bringing two of our “meanest” cats this time. :-D
I still haven’t been able to connect with our mechanic, so we swung by the garage to see if I could talk to him about our van. Unfortunately, though it was supposed to be open, he wasn’t there. He’s on his own, so if he has to get anything, there’s no one to do it for him and he has to lock up. :-/ Hopefully, we’ll get another chance, later.
Once we got home, I was able to spend more time with our recovering kitties.
Nosencrantz doesn’t like to leave her favourite spot under the light bulb. It burnt out last night, but I found one last full spectrum bulb in our stash of incandescent bulbs – this light is meant for seedlings, not cats! :-D – but it’s brighter than the old one, so I wasn’t sure if she’s still like it. She clearly has no issues!
Butterscotch, meanwhile, has switched favourite beds! Usually, we find her in an enclosed box bed on the bottom shelf, but now she’s gone up a left and has been hanging out in the open bed. We’ve also been finding her loafed under the ceramic heat bulb more often, too.
She accepted pets, but had no interest in leaving her bed! :-D
Meanwhile, we have already heard back from the vet. They were checking details about our arrangement with the organization that’s helping us with all this, in regards to the shots and deworming and the like, as was arranged when we brought in Butterscotch and Nosencrantz.
Beep Beep had already been done and they were about to start on Fenrir. Since I had her on the phone, I brought up what they had found with Butterscotch, and how far gone her uterus was, and if there was anything similar with Beep Beep. It was quite a bit larger, and looking a bit worn out, just from having to many litters, but it was not so badly damaged as Butterscotch’s was. We don’t know how old either of them are, but I think we can now safely assume that Beep Beep is the younger one. For all we know, Butterscotch is her mother.
So we will get a call back later, to let us know when they can be picked up.
Meanwhile, the cat lady messaged me last night, with a reminder to have Beep Beep and Fenrir start their fast. While I had her, I asked about Cabbages.
Yesterday was her last day on antibiotics. Yay!! She’s eating quite a lot now, and today, she be moved out of the cage, to their “cat room.” In a few days, she will have a buddy joining her. That would be the more recent frozen cat they picked up, that lost its ears.
I’m just amazed by how quickly she’s bouncing back from being at death’s door the way she was!
If you would like to contribute to our fundraiser to reimburse the cat lady for Cabbages’ vet bills, click on the button below, or click here. If you would like to read more about it, click here.
So now we are just waiting for the call from the vet, for when we can bring Beep Beep and Fenrir home. Since they are both inside cats, we won’t have to do any isolating, but we’ll be keeping a litter box, food and water in my office/bedroom for a while, so they don’t have to go far.
The next trip to the vet, in a couple of weeks, we’ll be taking cats in, and they won’t be coming back. The cat lady will be taking them to fosters for recovery, and then they will be adopted into forever homes. As she’s able to book dates with the vet, we’ll keep doing that for the rest of the adoptable cats (the males are already fixed, as is one female) through March and April. By then, we should be able to start snagging outside cats, starting with the ones we can catch easily (which all happen to be male). Then, once it’s warm enough to do so safely, she will lend us traps for the outside cats that we haven’t been able to socialize at all.
It’s going to be weird, to not have so many cats around!
Butterscotch and Nosencrantz were doing very well, this morning. They both seem to be enjoying their recovery period in the sun room! Nosencrantz wants more attention than Butterscotch, but not enough that I can get a good look to see how the ear mite status is. Butterscotch is still so much calmer now. She’ll come over for pets and I was even able to pick her up this morning, but she will not let me check the surgical site. I’m not about to risk injuring it by forcing her; so as long as there aren’t any concerning warning signs, I figure she’s doing fine. Amazingly, she still has shown no interest in trying to escape the sun room, which is so totally different from the past. Granted, when we were trying to keep her in the sun room for lengths of time before, it was because she was about to have kittens. Once she had them, she was more than content to let Beep Beep parent both litters while she tore her way through the screen on the old door.
If this behavioural change keeps up, Butterscotch may actually be willing to become an indoor cat!
We shall see. After all those years outdoors, it would be nice for her final years to be in comfort and safety.
By the time I’m done taking care of the sun room kitties, there’s usually a crowd outside the door, waiting for their kibble! Chadiccus, however, was much more polite about it and wanting attention before food. :-)
The water in the heated bowl was almost completely gone again, and it had been very full. It does make me wonder what other critters are coming around at night, to drink. The snow around the kibble house and water bowls is too hard packed for tracks. One of these days, it would be nice to have a spare camera set up on the area, just to see what’s going on! :-)
I’ve not been seeing quite as many cats, all at once, of late. I haven’t seen Potato Beetle in a while. Since he came back, he had been more aggressive about being the Alpha male – though he was tackling the females as much as the males. That seemed to end after I found him with that injury above one eye. It was pretty minor and healing up nicely, the last I saw, but it seems that battle lost him his status. I think I might have seen him this morning, but he slunk away before I could get a good look and be sure.
While putting the food and water out, I heard a loud yowling from the outer yard. I’ve heard it before, but when I when to check, I couldn’t see where it was coming from. This time, I saw Creamsicle Baby out by the pump shack. I’m still not sure it was him, as he’s developed a very squeaky little meow. I went to check closer and decided the pump shack door needed to be shoveled out.
This is where the cats usually get in and out of the pump shack. When the driveway was cleared, a pile of snow was made near the pump shack. While it does not block the door, there’s a ridge of snow in front that’s pretty high. With the winds we’ve been having, more snow has drifted in front of the door. The cats are still squeezing their way through, as you can see in the photo above, but I wanted to make it easier for them. It took breaking up a lot of snow with the ice chipper before I could dig a path, but I got it clear.
The door opens inward, so I didn’t have to worry about digging it out too much. Once I got it clear enough, I went in and cleared away some snow that had blown through the hole.
I had a bit of a surprise when I opened the door, though. One of the lights was on! I forgot to shut it off, the last time I was in there. It’s a CFL bulb, not very bright, and not near a window facing the house, so we never saw that it was on. :-D Ah, well. No harm done.
When repairing the south facing window of the pump shack a couple of summers ago, I deliberately left an opening that used to have the chimney from a wood burning stove running through it. The stove is long gone, but with a pile of tires on the outside, and various junk on the inside, it’s a way for the cats to get in and out. The shack itself is just a frame with cladding on the outside, and I noticed a new hole in the wall, where some cladding has broken. It’s not visible from the outside, as there are sheets of aluminum against the bottom of the wall on that side.
On our list of things to work on is to fix up the pump shack. The concrete floor is badly cracked up, and the old cladding – which would be quite a bit older than I am – is looking water damaged and has gaps. It would be awesome to turn this building into a little workshop and, of course, we want to get the old well repaired. There is a lot of stuff in there I just don’t know what to do with, including bags of ancient clothing and rolled up awnings stuffed into the rafters, broken furniture, an old fridge that I remember my parents using for cream cans, and even an old, tiny, two burner electric stove sitting in the corner where the wood burning cookstove used to be. That old cookstove was what we used to heat water for baths, before my dad had the well dug next to the house and got running water and an indoor bathroom. If we can fix the well and fix up the pump shack, we could turn it into a summer kitchen for canning.
That would be very handy.
After clearing a cat path to the door, I put feed out for the deer and birds – interrupting two deer that were at the feeding station! I had to interrupt them again, to go switch out the memory cards on the trail cam by the sign.
That location is a real pain to get to in the winter!!! At least I don’t have to switch the cards as often, there. Between the snow and the plow ridges, I’m not at all concerned that our vandal will fight his way over to the sign and try to steal it, like the old one, or damage it.
Not even the deer will go through the area in front of the sign! A nicely plowed road is so much easier. :-D
Coming back to the house, I found these two babies, bellies full and watching the world go by in warmth and comfort!
These cats may be semi-feral, but they do get pampered as much as we can! :-D
Rolando Moon had claimed the prime real estate! She’s such a meany to the other cats, they don’t even try to fight her for this favourite spot.
Gosh, that expression! :-D
While still a bit chilly today, we’re supposed to warm up quite a bit tomorrow – perfect for taking Beep Beep and Fenrir in to the vet. My Weather Network app on my desktop has suddenly gone haywire, so I used the app that came with my computer.
Of course, all the apps are showing something different, since they all seem to be connected to different weather stations, even though they’re all supposed to be for our specific area. This is the only one that is showing us going above freezing, in the long range forecast. Above freezing in the middle of February? Yeah, I’ll take that, thanks. It’ll make things messy, but I’d rather have a nice, slow melt of all this snow, then for things to warm up all at once, later on. With the amount of snow we have this winter, as much as it’s needed, if it melts before the municipalities get a chance to clear the ditches, we’ll get flooding. Where we are doesn’t get too bad anymore. When I was a kid, there were a couple of sections of road that would get washed out every spring. Since then, a network of municipal drainage ditches have been dug through farmers’ fields that have been doing a good job of preventing that, as has taking trees out along the sides of the roads in strategic locations. There are still a couple of spots that are at risk of being washed out, if there is enough snowmelt all at once, but we are able to use alternative routes to avoid them.
If we have a wet enough spring, we might even be able to do a controlled burn in some sections of the outer yard this year. Wouldn’t that be nice!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Seeing those warmer temperatures in the forecast has me looking way too far ahead right now! :-D
The Re-Farmer
If you would like to contribute to our fundraiser to reimburse the cat lady for Cabbages’ vet bills, click on the button below, or click here. If you would like to read more about it, click here.
We got some wonderful updates on how Cabbages is doing today, and I am beyond thrilled.
She has regained 2 pounds!
At her lowest, she weighed in at 1.65kg/3.63lb, and today she weighed in at 2.55kg/5.62lbs
I don’t think she ever weighed as much as 3kg/6.6lbs to being with.
She is still on medication and is not allowed out of the cat cage she’s kept in, unless she’s being held. She should soon be allowed out to wander around, though.
Next month, she will be getting spayed by a special vet, due to her neurological history. She will then spend 2 weeks with the cat lady and her family, before moving on to her forever home. She will be living with someone who has been in the animal care industry for 44 years!
Which means Cabbages will be with the cat lady and her family for at least another month. I’m just blown away that they took her – and her unexpected expenses! – on without hesitation, and fought so hard to keep her alive. The costs must be well over the $1200 she last mentioned to me, and not a penny of it is from the organization she is associated with. They would have contributed to the euthanasia cost, though. :-( Cabbages was such a very sick kitty, it’s amazing she was able to pull through!
The cat lady has never asked for anything in return, but she and her family have been so amazing. Even her 5 yr old spends time with Cabbages, every day, making sure she eats and massaging her legs.
*melt*
I do want to do something for her and her family, though. That is why we started the fundraiser, which is to be a surprise to reimburse her for most of the costs. I’m sure the final total she’ll be spending on Cabbages will be more than the $1500 goal we have set. We’ll be contributing as much as we can ourselves, too, of course.
If you would like to contribute to the fundraiser for the awesome cat lady that saved Cabbages, you can go to our Ko-fi donation page.
(There is supposed to be a donation panel under this paragraph. I see it in preview, but not when I publish. Please let me know in the comments below, if you see a donation panel. Thanks!
Update: trying a button this time. Do you see it?)
This fundraiser is intended to be a thank you surprise, so she knows nothing about it or this blog. Since it’s a surprise, I’ve carefully cropped these photos she shared with me today, to remove any identifying features.
Just look at her! She’s looking almost like she did, before she got sick!
The poor little thing has been through so much, in such a short time. It just amazes me, how quickly she is bouncing back. Care is still being taken, of course, and I do wonder what sort of permanent damage she may have sustained. Particularly since it was her brain that was affected.
She may have some company with her, soon. The cat lady mentioned she’d picked up another frozen cat today. It has lost its ears, but will be fine. Once the results of the blood work is in, and they get the all clear, it will be joining Cabbages. She will have a recovery buddy. :-)
So the blizzard has passed, and has been replaced with extreme cold warnings. As I write this, we have warmed up to -26C/-15F with a wind chill of -34C/-29F
In our own little front yard microclimate, however, it felt a lot warmer, and the outside cats were out in full force!
A few were holding out for the warm water before coming out, though! :-D
The sun spot at that window must be very pleasant in there. :-)
As for Butterscotch and Nosencrantz, they would not let me take photos! Nosencrantz wouldn’t stop wiggling around, and Butterscotch just moves away. They are eating and drinking just fine, though unfortunately, from the smell I walked into, they are finding somewhere other than the litter box to do their business. *sigh* I’m sure we’ll find all sorts of “surprises” when the sun room gets its spring clean up. The litter box is being used … by one of them, at least.
Once the critters were fed, I headed out to dig us out. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it might be, though. We didn’t have a lot of new snow, which helped. The high winds were mostly moving around existing snow which, with our garage, meant blowing the snow off the roof and dumping it into a drift in front. The van might have been able to go through the drift, if we really had to, but we could not open the doors to the addition my mother’s car is parked in. It has swing doors that need to be replaced. One of them drags on the ground, so that area needs to be cleared a lot more thoroughly, just to open it wide enough for the car to drive through.
The other side of the garage, where the snow blower, lawn mowers and wood chipper is stored, also has swing doors.
We can’t get into there right now.
When our neighbour cleared our driveway, he pushed aside a snow ridge that was creeping in front of the middle section of the garage, where the van needs to get through. Unfortunately, he pushed it too close to the double doors to that side of the garage. There is enough space that we could clear one of the doors, which would allow us to at least get in, but not with our usual snow shovels. They are a strong plastic, but not that strong. We’ll have to tackle the pile with the ice chipper and a steel shovel before the snow can be moved and really, we don’t need to get into there that badly!
Once the front of the garage was clear, I checked out the driveway and was pleasantly surprised. The road itself remained clear enough that it won’t even need to be plowed. The main road would have drifted over, but I’m sure that’s been cleared by now.
The drifting over the end of the driveway wasn’t all that bad. In fact, I could see the tracks of a vehicle using our driveway to turn around. With the walls of snow left by the plows, our driveway is the only one nearby that’s open enough to do that. All the other driveways for about a mile in either direction are into fields, or empty properties, so no one’s keeping them clear.
I did have to dig out the gate. I’d opened it before the blizzard hit, just in case. They weren’t drifted in place too deeply, but the snow was packed so hard, I had to use the ice chipper to break it up, first.
The bottom of the gate is normally about 6-8 inches above the ground, when open.
I was mostly concerned with this side. While swinging it open and closed, we noticed it started to shudder and vibrate. When our vandal busted up the hinge pins, my brother replaced them with pairs of J pins, so that no one could simply use a jack to take the gate off anymore. My concern was that a pin had snapped in the cold. I was able to check the top ones before, but couldn’t see the bottom ones. So this morning, I used the ice chipper and shovel to clear it away to check, and they were fine.
The shudder was also gone when I swung the gate back and forth, so it looks like it was the build up of ice and snow that was causing it.
On this side, I had to dig things out a bit more, just so we could swing it open further – and dig out the little path to the mini solar panel powering some decorative lights we have on the fence. We used to have several strings of white LED Christmas lights all along that fence, but they got very weathered and I finally just took them off. At some point, we want to have lights along the fence line again, but until then, the mini string of solar powered LED lights will go. The solar panel just needs to be kept clear of snow, and it’s resting on the hub of that wagon wheel in the fence.
Interestingly, the hardest area to dig out was the path to the trail cam. Talk about hard packed! I had to use the ice chipper on almost the entire path. But I got to it, and was able to switch out the memory card – and got to see the vehicle that used our driveway to turn around it! :-D I don’t know who it is, but it’s a truck I see regularly, and I am jealous of the plow attachment. ;-)
On my “when we win the lottery” shopping list is either a RAM 1500 or an F150 (the top two highest rated trucks for winter driving, last I looked) with a plow attachment.
I should probably buy a ticket… ;-)
So we are now cleared out enough to get the van out of the garage and drive. We’re expecting a delivery from the pharmacy today, so the gates are being left open. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of our vandal in the trail cam files, so it looks like he’s actually avoiding using the roads past us entirely. Which is not something I intended as a condition, as that’s just not realistic in our area, but who knows what the judge or his lawyer managed to drum into him! Anyhow, between the court order, and the weather conditions, I think we’re okay to leave the gate open for a while, though I’d rather never have to close it at all.
The paths around the yard are pretty filled in. I’m leaving that job for my daughters to do, later!
For now, I’m going to call our mechanic back and book that oil change again!
After doing my morning rounds, I contacted the garage to let him know I wasn’t going to make my appointment with the van today. We are under blizzard conditions right now, which are expected to continue until this evening.
There actually isn’t a lot of snow, but the winds are insane. There is a drift in front of the garage door we will have to dig out before we can go anywhere though, at the moment, the driveway is still mostly clear.
There is supposed to be a path around the back of the kibble house, and a kibble tray at the end. Under the drift. The cat path to under the storage house was also filling in.
Temperature wise, we are at only -17C/1F, but with 50km/31m per hour winds, the wind chill is at -31C/-24F. The winds are coming from the northwest, which we are normally protected from, but at these speeds, it’s just swirling around the house and all the outbuildings.
The path to the compost pile is, once again, mostly gone.
Even right up against the house, the path to the feeding station is mostly filled in.
I opened the gate to check the road, then left it open so that it would not be drifted over in the closed position. Right now, the only thing keeping the end of our driveway from drifting over completely, are the walls of snow made by the front end loader when it was being cleared. They’re acting a bit like a snow fence, for the moment. The road past our place is actually looking quite clear, but it runs from north to south, and the winds are just blowing the snow along. The main gravel road, and the highway I would be taking to get that oil change done, would be drifted over, and the winds would be hitting our van broadsided. I checked the Facebook group for local highway conditions, and some people were reporting that they were in the ditch – and the roads they were on were mostly clear! It was the winds that did them in.
Smart kitties. They came out when I put food and warm water out, ate and drank quickly, then disappeared into their various hidey holes. One is visible in the window, but I think there’s about 5 or 6 in there.
I saw Rolando Moon emerge from the junk pile. She’s a tough one, and has seen many cold winters. She knows how to handle it. She stayed out to eat longer than the other cats, then went into the insulated shelf shelter to get out of the wind. Which, as you can see, is even managing to blow snow into the opening!
We need to build more little shelters like this. Especially when we finally get that junk pile hauled away. They use it for shelter, a lot.
Before heading outside, I treated Butterscotch and Nosencrantz with some wet cat food. Nosencrantz has been staying on the top shelf of the frame the heat bulb is in, which means sitting on top of the board the fixture is attached to. That puts her under the light we’ve got, hanging under the peak. It’s got a full spectrum bulb that we were using for seed starts. It’s incandescent, so it’s also warm, so we’ve been leaving it on. She was there when I came in, and I helped her down so she wouldn’t have to jump and jar her body.
Butterscotch has been using one of the box beds we have set up, and very languidly emerged when I brought the food out. I can see some things knocked about a bit, so I know at least one of them is trying to jump onto shelves and explore a bit, but it’s not too bad.
When I was done my rounds, I paused to spend time with them before going into the house. Nosencrantz quite enjoyed being held and snuggled.
When I put her on the swing bench, she was comfortable enough to roll around and let me see her roly poly belly!
She is such a big sausage!
I was able to pick up Butterscotch and cuddle her a bit, too. She even purred at me!
After hearing from the vet, what the condition of her uterus was when they removed it, I have a suspicion that Butterscotch is going to undergo a catonality change. She’s always had a bit of a mean streak at times. I now wonder if it was due to physical discomfort. Right now, she’s moving around more slowly (or course!), but while I was holding Nosencrantz, she still came over and wound around my feet. When I picked her up, she was a lot calmer than I normally expect her to be. Even as I was going in and out of the sun room, she made no attempt to escape, though that might have more to do with having just had surgery, yesterday. Perhaps, once she’s healed up more from the surgery, she’ll go back to her more ornery self. However, I have a suspicion she’s going to be a happier and more pleasant cat to be around.
It should be interesting to see how it goes for Beep Beep, next week. We don’t know if she is older or younger than Butterscotch.
So today is a day to stay indoors. We shall see if we can make the trip to the city tomorrow or not. The winds are supposed to die down, but the temperature is supposed to drop quite a bit.
Times like this are exactly why we’ve been working so hard to stay stocked up!!
Having said that, one of the things I was hoping to do while in town getting the oil change, was to come home with some Chinese take-out. Now that it’s no longer an option, I am craving Chinese food like crazy! :-D
This morning, we got Butterscotch and Nosencrantz in to the vet.
There’s a storm on the way that’s supposed to start with sleet, then 6-10cm (2-4in) of snow. It was supposed to start about 8am, and drop off time was 8:20, so we headed out early, just in case. Not that these forecasts are accurate for where we are, most of the time, but why take a chance?
When I came into the sun room, I found Butterscotch and Nosencrantz had been using the swing bench, completely ignoring the beds we made for them, and even the space under the heater bulb. Clearly, it never got cold enough for them to give up those soft cushions! :-D
Butterscotch was not a happy camper when I put her in the carrier! I’m actually surprised she let me put her in so easily, considering she’s had this ride before, to get stitches on a gash we found on one of her back legs.
Nosencrantz was much, much calmer about going into the soft sided carrier. She is a much more easy going cat, and I think she will transition into an indoor cat very easily.
Once they were safely tucked away, I could quickly take care of the outside cats.
It’s been a while since this was done while it’s still dark out!
Tuxedo Mask is looking at the water, and the water is looking back! :-D
Once the critters were taken care of, my younger daughter and I headed out. We got to the clinic quite early, but they were okay with an early drop off. We’re expecting a pick up between 4 and 5pm, but they will phone us if the cats are ready earlier.
Once at home, I finished my rounds before heading back in. Things are still looking good out there, and we’re only at -12C/10F. We are expected to reach a high of -3C/27F by late this evening. Looking at the weather radar, the Alberta Clipper heading our way looks like it has already dissipated a fair bit. We should get bit of snow this afternoon, but it will likely have passed over us by the time we have to go pick up the cats. The rest of the system is looking like it will hit us in the evening and overnight. Where we are, I don’t think we’ll get any sleet at all, but who knows. We tend to have a strange climactic bubble over us that seems to push away a lot of these systems. I think it’s part of the lake effect where we are.
As long as we can get the kitties safely home today, we’re good with whatever the weather throws at us. :-)
The Re-Farmer 