I’ve been Mooned

By a snuggly Rolando Moon.

Rolando Moon seems to be hanging around more often, lately. I think she’s getting ready to stay with us for the winter again. She sometimes still likes to follow me around when I’m going my morning rounds.

What a sweet, badass old lady!

The Re-Farmer

Peek!

When I’m feeding the outside cats in the morning, and I don’t see the bitty baby in the cat shelter, I usually find him here.

Peeking.

If I try to move closer, his entire body explodes in spitting and hissing.

It’s hard to be a fearsome beast, when you’re just so incredibly adorable.

The Re-Farmer

Judgement

Judgement is from one of the older litters, but I’m not sure who the mama is, other than one of the ‘iccuses (Bradiccus, perhaps) that have all disappeared.

He was busy judging a crow flying overhead as I took this photo.

What a beautiful catten!

The Re-Farmer

Plushy

What a beautiful, plushy cat!

It’s so much harder to socialize the older kittens, and Plushy is from the oldest surviving litter. We’ve finally got her to the point where she will actually come to us, seeking attention.

Must. Resist. Bringing. Her. In…

The Re-Farmer

Little Spitfire cuddles!

If this bitty baby wasn’t as tiny as he (or she) is, I’d never be able to catch him and pick him up. He does fight back! After spending some time cuddling him and managing to avoid his teeth until I could finally scritch his ears, he did calm down a bit.

It makes me so happy to see him back in the cats’ house!

The Re-Farmer

Racoons, kitties, and new phone goofs

Who’s that judgey boy?

Judement is that judgey boy!

Yeah, I’m going to like the camera on this phone.

We’ve been allowing the kittens to stay in the sun room overnight, propping the doors so that they’re just barely open, since cleaning up the glass in the broken windows. The down side of that is, other critters get in, too. It used to always be skunks, but we hardly see the skunks anymore.

I think the racoons have chased them off.

After deciding to let the kittens use the sun room for the night, I put the extra kibble bags in the old kitchen, the used my husband’s walker, with the brakes on this time, to block the kibble bin into its shelf. This morning, my husband chased a racoon out of the sun room from the old kitchen, but he never actually went into the sun room. The walker looked like it was where it belonged and he didn’t think anything of it.

Well, they did get into things.

When I tried to open the door, I had to push away some things that had been knocked in front of it. The walker almost worked, but was half pushed aside.

The racoons had got at the bin from the side of the shelf, and did this to the lid, managing to get the bin partly off the shelf in the process.

*sigh*

At least the bin was already mostly empty. I’m glad I didn’t refill it instead of putting the bags away.

As for the kitties, they were more than happy to see me with the kibble container! We top up their kibble in the late afternoon, but not too late, because we want to feed the cats, not the racoons and skunks. This time of year, the other critters will clean out every crumb by morning.

I tried to do a heat count and I got to 28! I might have counted some twice. It took a while, but I did see the bitty baby. It was under the kibble house again. I’m concerned the racoons might have scared it – and all the other cats! – out of the cat shelter. I could just see it, but couldn’t catch it. It just exploded with spitting noises at me, and went further under the cat shelter.

While doing the rest of my rounds, I took the time to pump the tire on my mother’s car. After 4 or 5 days, it was completely flat again, but it should handle the trip into town this afternoon, though I plan to leave quite early, just in case I end up on the side of the road or something.

The good thing is, we finally got my new phone set up and activated. Last night, I’d been able to get pretty much everything I needed going, but the one thing I couldn’t get working on the phone was… the phone. The instructions were simple enough. Go online, find the mobility options and activate the new phone. Simple enough.

Except the option wasn’t there.

Now, we are on a family plan, and it’s under my husband’s name. I can log in, but it’s his account, so I don’t like to mess around with it. That’s why, after I’d settled on a couple of possible replacement phone choices, I left it to him to actually go through the final details, then order the phone.

On top of that, my phone number is technically his. When he replaced his old phone, he took that opportunity to get a new, local number and was able to find one that was almost identical to my childhood phone number. So when his new phone came in, we traded sim cards. I got the new phone number, he got the new phone. That was a couple of years ago. Then we ended up trading phones – and sim cards – more recently because of the Bluetooth problem my older phone was having that was not an issue for him.

Odd that it would be the newest phone in the household that would develop a swelling battery and need to be replaced!

Unable to activate the replacement phone, I finally turned it over to my husband so I could work on other things. It took a while, but he finally found the activation option.

Under our daughter’s phone number.

Somehow, when he went through the upgrade process to purchase the new phone, he ended up doing it under her number in the group plan, instead of what the account sees as his number.

Once he got the new device activated, I got the sim card from the phone that was being replaced, my daughter got the new sim card, and her old sim card is now in the phone that’s been replaced. So we all have the same phone numbers, but I have a new phone with an old sim card, while my daughter has a new sim card with an old phone.

The main thing, though, is that we now all have working phones!

Because the new phone can’t support an external memory card, I wasn’t able to transfer everything over from the old phone. So last night, I started transferring everything on the micro-SD card onto my external hard drive. I expected it to take a long time, but it stalled at 16% and stayed there for hours. It ended up locking up my desktop, and I had to do a hard shut down. Even after restarting it, there were issues. After much fighting, I got everything unlocked, then started going through individual folders on the card and transferring them. I knew where the problem was – my photos! I simply have too many of them on there. When I’d set it to transfer everything, it got to the photos folder, and just froze. I have them organized into folders by year, then in sub folders by month, and I’m now having to transfer each month over, individually. Even then, it still takes a while, but at least it’s not freezing my computer!

So that’s something I’m going to have to slowly work on tonight, when I can be around to monitor it. Then, once that’s backed up, I’ll do the same thing with files that did get transferred to the new phone, and see how much storage space I can free up. It’s not an issue right now, but with how many photos I take, it’ll fill up fast. Especially if I’m also taking video.

For now, however, I have a few things to get done before I have to head into town and get my mother’s car in the garage. Thankfully, we’ll be having a nice warm day today, so I will be able to walk around town and do some errands while it’s being worked on.

I’ll be so glad to have that tire fixed, and not have to rely entirely on one vehicle again!

The Re-Farmer

Some good news

Well, according to the Canada Post tracker, my replacement phone will arrive today. So I am delaying my trip into the city a few hours. It’ll take a while for the postmaster to sort through the packages that should have arrived by now, and scan it into the system as arrived, so I’ll be checking the tracker until I see it listed as arrived. Once I’ve got the phone activated and set up to bare bones functionality, I’ll head into the city. Once I have the time later today, I’ll finish setting it up and transferring my data from the other phone’s backup. Then I can wipe the old phone, and I should be able to send it back as part of their buyback program.

I’ll be able to take pictures again!

I mean, it’s not like I use my phone as a phone, after all. 😉 That’s what the landline is for! 😄

Meanwhile, I’ve done my morning rounds and checked on the bitty kitty. I’m happy to say that I could see him in the soft cat bed I put in there last night, right next to one of the windows. (I even put the sun room litter box in there, tucked into the corner we’ve found they usually crap in, in the winter, when it’s too cold to go outside.)

He also had a fair bit of company. I’d put some other donated cat blankets, and the box with a pillow in it that was in the sun room, inside and it looks like they were well used. I could see several smaller kittens in there with the bitty, though the smallest ones (still bigger than the bitty!) still seem to prefer being under the cat shelter, rather than in it. Among the things I did yesterday was push some larger sheets of leftover rigid insulation under there, so they can sit on those rather than bare ground.

I tried to do a head count, several times. The first count, I got 21, including the bitty. The second time, I got 23. The third time, I got 24, not including the bitty, since I didn’t want to poke around the entry too much, but he would make it 25.

Among the adults, I saw Broccoli running around from food to food, going from the roof of the cat shelter, to under the water bowl shelter, to into the kibble house, and even nibbling on the kibble I’ve been putting on the ground for the kittens under the cat shelter. I also saw Junk Pile, coming out of the cat shelter. We still don’t know which of the mamas the bitty belongs to. If it’s Junk Pile, that would make it her third litter of the year, and considering how young her second litter is (they were the pump shack babies), I just don’t see that as likely. If Broccoli is the mama, that would make it her second litter of the year. That makes a bit more sense, since her two are among the oldest kittens. It seems unlikely, though, because when Broccoli comes over for kibble, it’s always from somewhere outside the yard.

Oh, gosh. I hope that doesn’t mean there’s an even younger litter out there, somewhere!

I know it’s not Rosencrantz. She had two litters, but lost the first one. They were born so early, everything was still frozen and covered in snow. Her second litter is the older white and greys, plus a tortie. That litter is slightly older than the pump shack kittens, and I’m pretty sure they would not have been weaned yet, when the bitties would have been born. It would have been the same situation with Junk Pile’s second litter. I’m pretty sure Caramel is the mother of the youngest kittens (until the bitties showed up), and they look barely weaned.

If it’s not Broccoli, that means it’s one of the ‘iccuses – and they’ve all disappeared. The females since weaning their own litters, and the males even earlier.

Well, whoever the mama is, the little spitfire seems to be taken care of, for all it doesn’t seem to be growing. I’m hoping that, with the kibble I’m putting just inside the entry, it will beef up a bit. I moved one of the baking trays I was using as a kibble tray into the entry, and it just barely fits. Which is good, because it means it won’t get knocked about, like other containers we’ve tried to put in there. I’ve added a smaller container for water to sit on top of it, that I can reach to pull out and refill.

Here’s hoping it works out! So far, so good.

The Re-Farmer