I was returning to the house at the end of my morning rounds, when I found we had a visitor!
My brother’s dog had come by, and he really wanted to play with the kitties!
Nosencrantz set him straight with a half-hearted swap to the nose, while all the other cats stayed away. :-D
My brother’s dog wasn’t the only visitor. When I first came out with the kibble, I startled a deer that was in the south yard. It bounded through the snow a bit, then stopped to watch me for a while. Later, there were two of them that ran off as I went to empty the kitchen compost onto the heap.
They are so pretty!
As for out cats, we have still been trying to adopt out as many as I can, with no success. This morning… well, let’s just say I’m quite frustrated, but I’ll save that rant for my next post!
Doing the morning rounds is much more pleasant! We’re at a mild (relatively speaking) -15C/5F right now, though the wind chill of -21C/-6F made it a bit nippy. The wind was coming from the south, so it’s basically funnelling between outbuildings.
Not that it stopped the cats, any!
I counted a total of 17 this morning.
I’m happy to confirm – now that there so no longer frost on the windows – that the cats are using their house. Yesterday, I’d seen about five faces watching me from the main window. This morning, however, I saw something different in front of the window.
Something shiny.
It was the disposable aluminum pan that we had mounted above the fixture holding the heat bulb. The cats had somehow knocked it down!
I had been wondering for a while now, if the heat bulb was still working.
It is.
You can see that cats have been sitting on the warm spot above it!
That spot is there, even with the heat shield in place. At least it is, if it isn’t so cold out, the bulb can’t make a difference to the outside.
I am not too concerned about the shield being down; it was more an extra layer of protection, and to reflect heat back downwards to the cats. Like the smoke detector we also installed in there, it’s more just that one extra “just in case” bit. The bulb itself has a limited heat range, and the fixture has a steel “cage” to protect the bulb itself. The girls and I will still go out and fix it. In the summer, I could do it myself, thanks to the counterweight making it easier to lift the roof, and keeping it from dropping down again. This time of year, it’s a 3 person job; two to carefully lift the roof and hold it open, since the snow prevents it from being opened completely, and one to climb in and put the shield back.
Until then, it remains unshielded.
In the summer, we’re going to have to give this a thorough check and repair. It’s getting old, and when we lift the heavy roof, I can feel it twisting and cracking. The down side of the heat bulb is, it’s very dry in there, and I found the wood of the frame, at one of the roof hinges, has already split. It’s been screwed together again, but that was just a stop gap measure until we can work on it later. Once we do as many repairs as we can, I want to at least give it a new paint job on the outside. Hopefully, we’ll also be able to replace the shingles. They’re getting a bit beat up and worn out.
I’m so thankful to my brother for giving us their old dog house. He really went all out, with all the windows, as “porch”, the power outlets inside, the light fixture, and so on. The cats just love it, and it may well have saved a few lives. Farm cats tend to have short life spans, but at least we can keep the cold from getting them!
Oh, how lovely today it feels outside today! As I write this, just before evening, we are at a lovely -8C/18F. the wind chill is -13C/9F, but the wind is from the north west, so the yard is well sheltered from it.
The outside cats were quite enjoying the warmer temperatures!
Creamsicle Baby even followed me when I went to change the memory cards and frozen batteries on the trail cameras.
With the cold and snow, I hadn’t gone to the corner camera in a while, but today was nice enough to finally get out there.
Oops.
Well, that wasn’t going to be much use.
The last time I’d changed out the card and batteries, I’d noticed the nut at the plate was getting loose. I also noticed a lot of thread showing. The fixture has a nut on the inside, which is supposed to be threaded as far as possible, but these are not lock nuts. Every time I had to tighten the nut on the outside, that meant the nut on the inside was getting closer to the end of the threaded post. With that in mind, I made sure I had the tools I needed to fix it. After removing the camera, I had to take the plate off completely, tighten the nuts as they needed to be, then put it all back together.
Before I could check the files, though, I had some errands to run. I discovered the end of the driveway not only had a plow ridge at the road, it was drifted over from about the gate to the end of the road. I knew I’d have troubles if I stopped in the driveway to lock the gate behind me, and I didn’t want to stop on the road, so I asked the girls to shovel out the end of the driveway while I was gone, and just rammed my way through with the van!
The dump is open only for a few hours on Tuesday mornings, so that was my first top. We were also running out of dry kibble. The outside cats are going through it a lot faster, and I was only able to get three big bags the last time I bought any, so a trip to the smaller city was in order. The difference in price is enough to make the drive worthwhile, even though gas prices jumped 12 cents per litre since the last time I was out!
Dry kibble is still in short supply. It’s been like this for months, now. I got the last two big bags from these shelves, but even the smaller bags were getting low. The really expensive brands in the big bags were almost out, too. There’s lots of wet cat food, cat treats, etc. in stock. It’s just the dry kibble that’s low in inventory.
My sister works at this Walmart. I think I should ask her to keep an eye on the inventory and, the next time a shipment comes in, maybe pick up a few bags for us!
After the shopping was done, it was one more stop to pick up some packages at the post office – and my letter from the Court of Queen’s Bench, with the conference call information I need for our vandal’s vexatious litigation against me – before I was finally able to settle in and check the trail cam files.
The corner cam had 160 files on it. Only the first 4 were right side up! Most of the others were triggered by moving shadows and branches blowing in the wind.
There is a slight down side to having the camera set to take three still shots, then video!
Still, I did find some fun shots. I flipped the images to make it easier to see. This camera goes pink when it gets cold.
I think that’s a chickadee that triggered the camera in this shot.
The internal thermometer in the above shot reads -25C/-13F, which would be a few degrees warmer than outside.
Squirrel butt!! :-D Too funny!
The camera even caught it in mid jump. :-D
There were a whole bunch of files of the squirrel moving around on the ground before it finally ran off. The next files were of me, moving the camera around to fix it. I’m actually surprised it was still recording. The frozen batteries were so low, there were many files that were completely black, except for the red text saying the batteries were too low for the infrared flash.
Oh, sweet. In the time it took me to write the above, we actually warmed up another degree. Nice!
Well, yesterday, my daughter did a whole bunch of bread baking. Now it’s my turn.
I haven’t done my Critter of the Day pictures in ages. Usually, once we’re spending more time indoors, I start them up again, but they take quite a bit of time. I do very little post processing – maybe some cropping, or fixing the lighting, but that’s it. The main thing is to resize them so they don’t take up so much storage space on my WordPress account. Even after upgrading our account, I post so many photos, it adds up.
So I don’t think I’ll be doing daily critters, but I will post some every now and then. I recently uploaded the files from the DSLR in the living room, and this one made me smile. I just had to share!
I can’t help it. I just love it when we catch tongue blehps!!! They always make me smile. :-)
In the last little while, the deer have started to show up at the feeding station during daylight hours almost every day, and the yards a crisscrossed with their tracks. Though we’re just seeing a few at a time, there are definitely a LOT more that we’re not seeing!
So pretty. :-)
At least they are, now, when there is no garden for them to get into! :-D
With the wind knocking over the bird feeder so often, the hanging feeders were getting pretty damaged. So the last time it happened, I decided it was a good time to get a suet feeder for the winter.
I think it’s going over rather well, with the chickadees!
Before things started to stay below freezing, I was able to give the bird bath a thorough scrubbing and add a bit of water. Which froze overnight, so I added more in the morning.
The cats just can’t get enough of that. Here, the top layer has frozen, so there are bubbles moving underneath that entrance them, but even while the water is freshly added, they’ll jump into it, getting their paws all wet!
Silly kitties.
They’re going to have to stop doing that soon, or they’ll get frostbite!
The Re-Farmer 