The power went out again, today. I was in the middle of doing a blog post, too! Ah, well.
It’s been more than an hour, as I write this. Not sure if I have enough signal to post this. I might have to go outside again.
I did that earlier to try and log into the power company’s app. There are outages reported all over our municipality.
Then I heard the noise.
Long story short, we found four kittens, just a few weeks old, under a junk lawnmower under parts of a collapsed roof. They are in the cat cage in the sun room, with some wet cat food. They are too young for it, but the mama’s all come to the sun room, eventually, so it will be a treat for her!
Hopefully, the mother will accept the soft and comfortable nest they are in, too.
The power went out again, today. I was in the middle of doing a blog post, too! Ah, well.
It’s been more than an hour, as I write this. Not sure if I have enough signal to post this. I might have to go outside again.
I did that earlier to try and log into the power company’s app. There are outages reported all over our municipality.
Then I heard the noise.
Long story short, we found four kittens, just a few weeks old, under a junk lawnmower under parts of a collapsed roof. They are in the cat cage in the sun room, with some wet cat food. They are too young for it, but the mama’s all come to the sun room, eventually, so it will be a treat for her!
Hopefully, the mother will accept the soft and comfortable nest they are in, too.
Yes! They finally came in! My last two orders from MI Gardener. USPS tracking simply told me they had arrived at a facility in Canada. That’s it. Not even that it arrived as destination. Just… Canada. Somewhere. 😂
I picked the packages up before I headed to my doctor’s appointment, so it was some time before I was home and able to open them up. I went ahead and did a seed haul video as I got them out.
I just realized I goofed in the video. The first order of seeds I did was on July 8, and there were no sales when I placed that order. Then I placed an order on August 1st, for a 25% off sale. Then a 40% off sale started the next day, so I placed a third order. If you visit the links, you can read more about each item. Links will open in new tabs.
With that caveat, here is my seed haul video.
While the video was uploading, I headed outside for my evening rounds and checked out a few things.
The first image is the Jebousek lettuce in the bed that self seeded in the garden bed by the chain link fence that was basically destroyed by cats getting under the mesh cover. There will be plenty of seed to collect, soon.
The next two images are of ripening Turkish Orange eggplant. Whether we enjoy these or not, these are not something I will be growing again until we have a polytunnel or a greenhouse or something. They are way too sensitive to cooler temperatures!
In the last image, we have our FIRST luffa flower buds. These clusters are the male flowers. The female flowers have a single flower on the end of a teeny developing luffa gourd. Who knows. Inside the portable greenhouse, it might still have time to fully develop. Unlikely, but one can hope, right? 😁
While out there, I even managed to pick a small handful of purple bush beans.
We’ve been having a fair bit of rain in the last while, so I haven’t been watering the garden. When checking it last night, things looked a bit dry, so I figured I’d do some watering. With our Dark Grey Zone soil, overwatering isn’t really possible.
I couldn’t belief how dry things were! It really showed when I was filling the upside down plastic jugs by the summer squash, and the collars around the winter squash. It took a shockingly long time to fill them with water, it was draining into the thirsty soil so quickly. Almost faster than the hose could fill them! I refilled them two or three times before it finally started to drain more slowly.
It got dark before I could water the old kitchen garden, so I did that, this morning. It, too, was really dry.
They should be good for a while, though. We weren’t supposed to get any rain today, but as I was driving back from my appointment in the late afternoon, I drove into a wall of rain. It was coming down so hard that I was seriously considering pulling over to wait it out. It let up a bit, though, but as I drove the last couple of miles to home, I was fully expecting to get completely soaked while opening the gate.
But then, it was gone. When I reached the gate, had all but stopped. By the time I closed the gate up again and was heading for the house, the clouds parted and the sun came out!
The deluge was welcome, though. We still have a lot of wildfires right now. Most are in the “monitored” category, so nothing is being done about them for the moment. Some are listed as either “being held” or “under control”, with a few that are still listed as “out of control”. We are no longer under any alerts for air quality from the smoke, so that’s a good sign.
Tomorrow, I’m off again to the city for our Costco shopping trip. A good time to be doing it, as we’re going to be getting some really hot days coming up. Depending on which app I look at, we’ve got a couple of days that might even exceed 30C/86F! I’ll see if the garden will need watering in the morning; if it doesn’t, I’m pretty sure it’ll need it by evening! We might be watering twice a day again, if the forecast is accurate. By next week, though, it’s supposed to drop right down, and we’re supposed to get overnight lows of 5-6C/41-43F We’ll be covering some of the garden beds again, in that range. They’re no longer predicting overnight lows at or below freezing in the second week of September anymore, which is when we would typically expect first frost.
At this point, my focus is getting more on being ready for next year. There isn’t much more we can do about this year’s garden if the temperatures drop. Things are just too far behind.
As soon as I get up from my office chair, or go near it, Clarence runs ahead of me, jumps onto the chair and does this. As if to say, you can’t be mad at me! I’m adorable!
Then he goes all rubbery when I try to take him off.
Sorry, Clarence. You ain’t THAT cute! 😂
I fooled him this time, though. I didn’t need the chair. He was so disappointed. 🤣
Today, my daughter and I went into the city for our first stock up shopping trip. This is the one where we hit multiple stores along one strip.
Just as we were pulling out of our driveway, though, my cell phone started ringing. My first thought was, oh, no. It’s home care calling to say they can’t do my mother’s med assist.
My daughter was thinking the same thing.
I was able to pull over immediately – one advantage of living off of gravel roads! It turned out to be the autobody place. They wanted to book the truck in for the insurance claim repairs. That is now scheduled for the 26th to the 30th of September, and they have a courtesy car for me, so we can still do our stock up shopping. Yay!
Our next stop was at the gas station in town, where we picked up $40 in gas. Prices jumped 10¢/L overnight, a few days ago. Since the town nearest us is a resort town, they have the same prices as the city, at $1.449/L My CAA card gave me a whole 83¢ discount. Better than nothing, I suppose.
From there, we headed to the city and our first stop was at Walmart. The main thing we needed there was cat food.
This is what $200.23 looks like.
We did get a few other things to, of course.
For the dry kibble, we got a different brand because we could get three bags, about 21kg (a little over 40 pounds) for about the same price as two bags of our usual brand, which would have been 18kg total (a little over 36 pounds). Those were for the outside cats. We also got two 32 packs of wet cat food, one for the inside cats, one for the outside cats.
There was a really good price on some boxed cereal my daughters like, so we grabbed two of those, along with some feminine hygiene products I’ll be paid back for later. We got a 4 pack of Monster drinks for now; we’ll be getting a case at Costco (which I will be paid back for as well).
I grabbed some water flavours for my husband, and a pound of butter, as we were out this morning. We’ll stock up on butter at Costco, in a couple of days.
That’s it. That’s $200.
*sigh*
Our next stop was the Canadian Tire, with a side trip to Michaels. My older daughter needed a certain size of envelop we haven’t been able to find anywhere and really hoped we’d find them at the Michael’s! These are to fit some prints, among other things, my daughter sends to some of her higher tier Patreon supporters. They come in two sizes and we haven’t been able to find anything that fits both!
Thankfully, they did have a size that worked. We got her two packs of 50. That should last a while! They cost about $36, but I will be reimbursed for those, too.
Next, we drove across the lot to the Canadian Tire and picked up two bags of stove pellets for the litters. They weren’t in the usual place, so I asked staff. They directed me to the BBQ pellets. Which are fancy woods and really expensive. I found someone else and she tried to direct me to the same area. After looking it up on the devices all the staff carried, she finally saw what I was talking about, but had no idea where they were.
They turned out to be in the exit vestibule.
All we needed were two bags! That came out to $16.78.
Finally, we were off to the international grocery store. It shares a parking lot with a Dollarama, so we went into there, first. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but they did have more of those metal fence posts that I am currently using to fence around our corn and squash bed. I got four more, for a grand total of $21.25
Looking at the receipt, though, I see they have them listed as “flower stand”. ??? I have no idea how they would be used as a stand for flowers. I just tried looking them up and, after tweaking the search terms a bit, finally found them – being sold as fence posts. Which is what they’ll be used for!
Then we finally went into the international grocery store. It was past lunch time by then, so the first order of business was food! I got a three item dim sum meal that was so loaded, I only ate half of it, and the rest will be my supper. My daughter got some fresh sushi (they were in the process of making more while we watched) which turned out to be available for free with points, so I used them. So my meal, plus our drinks, totaled just over $16.
This place is where we get a number of things we don’t find anywhere else – at least not anywhere we go regularly. Since we have to make special trips into the city, we won’t have the luxury of hunting down specialty shops, nor harder to get to locations. I was happy that we made it today, because it was the last day for some really good deals.
This is what $248.54 looks like.
Pretty much everything in there was on sale.
The main thing I really wanted to get was the frozen sushi grade Ahi tuna. They were only $1.99/100grams. I ended up getting to two biggest frozen chunks of tuna they had left. My daughters really loved it, the last time they had a sale like this and I was able to get one. They enjoyed it both raw and as steaks, lightly seared.
The other proteins we got was some regular ground beef, applewood smoked bacon slab and regular smoked bacon slab, which was on sale. I also got a salmon for the girls that wasn’t one sale, except that it was a deal connected with my loyalty card’s special offers, so that got price reduced when we scanned it through.
This store has an excellent cheese counter. They had lactose free brie that was one a “buy two and save” sale. I also got a pesto gouda, which is something new to try. Yes, it was on sale, too.
Let’s see. What else…
There is a bag of pearl barley – something only my husband and I like in this household. It was not on sale. I can’t believe these now cost over $4 each! We got the soy sauce my husband likes and, after much searching, my daughter found some liquid smoke I remembered to pick up, for something I want to try later on.
There is a clamshell of nectarines that was on sale, and the sale for the instant milk tea was so good, I got two. The Kraft Mac and Cheese was on sale, as were the granola bars and Greek yogurt. My daughter also spotted some hair accessories on sale, so we picked those up as well.
Finally, we got things for immediate eating when we got home. A huge Lumber Jack sandwich for my husband (that’ll be at least two meals!), plus my daughter chose three different sushi for herself and her sister that was part of a multi-discount, so they came out to only $5 each. Last of all were a couple of drinks for the road.
So my total for all that was $248.54 after taxes. I got bonus points that largely made up for what I used to get my daughter’s lunch sushi for free, plus I got $54.94 taken off with loyalty card sales. It doesn’t include the savings from items on sale that are sold by weight. Including those, it was probably closer to $65-$70 off.
In the end, counting the items not pictured, gas and lunch, our total expenditure for the day came out to just over $578, some of which I will be paid back for.
There were a lot of things we would have liked to get. They were even on sale. The problem was, what is considered a sale price now for these things is what used to be a high regular price, just a year or two ago! We stayed in budget, but even if we wanted to go over budget, we would not have been willing to pay those prices, sale or no sale.
It should be interesting to see what the prices are like at Costco, when we go in a couple of days!
Tomorrow, however, I’m heading out again, this time to my doctor’s appointment. If things go as I hope, I’ll be getting X-rays on my left hip to find out what the heck is going on there of late. It has actually gotten better, in that I can put weight on my left leg to go up a step or two, but it’s still really unstable. While I am ambidextrous with most things, I’m left dominant. Which means I’m more likely to step forward with my left leg rather than my right. I made the mistake of stepping up a curb with my left leg today. I really should not have done that! It messed me up enough that, even when I was stepping up with my right leg, I needed to grip my daughter’s hand to stabilize me as I did it. I know I have bone spurs in both my hips, along with the OA. It could just be that the OA in my left hip has gotten worse.
No way to know without getting X-rays done.
I’m quite curious about what showed up in the X-rays of my left arm. They wouldn’t have called me in if everything was fine, but it can’t be too bad, or they would have had me either come in earlier, or told me to go to a hospital.
I’ll find out tomorrow!
Then it’s back to the city the day after, for the Costco shopping.
We need to focus on stocking up. I’m seeing more long range forecasts for this winter, and the general consensus seems to be a mild fall (ha!) and winter (double ha!), with lots of snow and blizzards. Which means a higher potential of getting getting snowed in.
At least this year, my brother’s equipment is all out here. Including snow blowers and a snow clearing tractor attachment. None of which we can use ourselves, though. Some need repairs, and some have “tricks” to using them, that only my brother knows! I expect they’ll be out here pretty much every weekend, once their grandson is back home. I know my brother has a lot of stuff he wants to get working on, including repairing a tractor that got damaged when they were moving their stuff out here. Plus, things need to be organized, just to be able to get at some of the equipment. When their property sold, they only had so much time to bring everything they were keeping out here, and were just shoving things wherever they could find the space! It’s not even something we can help him with, either. With their “new” mobile home/caravan they recently picked up, they will at least have a winter worthy “home” to use in the winter, though being an older model, even that has some work my brother wants to do on it to make sure it’s winterized and no rodents or wasps or anything like that can get in.
So while we can expect to have a much better winter when it comes to things like snow clearing, that can only happen while my brother is here. Which means there is still the potential to get snowed in. At least the truck is better able to get through the snow than our previous vehicle, but even that only goes so far.
Some of the littles have discovered the inside of the cat house. Much better than hiding under it!
I’m happy to say, I’ve been able to pet and even pick up more of the littles today. Ar least, among the ones near the house. The ones that use the shrine feeding station are still totally feral. Alas.
One of my goals for today was to get some mowing done. I wasn’t up to doing the overgrown area with the push mower, so I broke out the riding mower my brother went use. I was able to get lots done with it.
I was working on a section of the outer yard in front of the garage when I ran out of gas again. I was close to done for the day, but wanted to finish that one last bit. I refilled the tank and got the mower started again…
… it wouldn’t move.
Now, with our old mower, we had that happen when the drive chain would fall off. This mower is a very different, more modern, design. Also, it was moving just fine until it ran out of gas.
After trying several times, I finally just pushed it back into the garage. I used my phone’s camera to try and get some pictures of the underside and sent them to my brother, telling him what happened.
Then I finished with the push mower.
My brother won’t be coming out this weekend, so it’s going to be a while before he can check it out.
This place murders lawnmowers. It’s bizarre!
Nothing we can do about it for now. Tomorrow, I’m off to the city for our first stock up shopping trip, so I really wanted to get the mowing done. The rest of the outer yard will just have to wait!
Last night, a daughter and I covered three areas in the garden.
I rigged a cage of sorts around the summer squash large enough to fit around the large leaves. Our covers are old sheets, and one was large enough to cover the summer squash, though nowhere near large enough to reach the ground. Which was okay, as we weren’t expecting actual frost.
The peppers and eggplant in the wattle weave garden all have their own wire tomato cages, so we just needed to use some clothespins to keep the covers from blowing away. The way the peppers are laid out in the shorter end of the L shaped bed allowed them to be covered more than the eggplant, which are in a longer row. The cloth was just barely long enough to reach from end to end. As a result, the first and last eggplants had less coverage, with one of them being at a more exposed end of the bed.
You can see there is some cold damage to the leaves.
Depending on what app I checked, we dropped to either 6C/43F or 5C/41F last night. It’s hard to say so soon, but it looks like the winter squash, which we have no way to cover, managed okay. In fact, just this evening, I spotted two female flowers in the Mashed Potato squash that I hand pollinated. I’m not sure why I’m bothering, but at least they’ll have a chance!
Our overnight temperatures are supposed to warm up for the next while, so we shouldn’t need to cover them again for some time. In fact, some of our daytime highs are supposed to get downright hot. By the second week of September, however, the long range forecast has changed again, and we’re not looking at dipping below freezing, right around our old average frost date. The new 30 year averages have been released, which suggested our growing season has actually increased by quite a bit, but I’m not counting on that. Based on the previous average frost dates, we’ve got a 99 day growing season, and I think that’s still the more accurate one. That’s the thing with averages. All it takes is one or two unusual years to shift things quite a bit, even if they’re now showing a range of dates, rather than a single date.
This morning, I harvested some potatoes and a few other things for a supper I was planning on.
The potatoes are what I found under a couple of plants. For all that the plants struggled this year and there isn’t a lot, we do have some really nice potatoes! I grabbed a couple more kohl rabi (not too many of those left now!), some Swiss Chard, thyme, oregano, sage and lemon balm, as well as some walking onion bulbils.
All of this, plus some carrots I still had in the fridge, a Sub Arctic Plenty tomato the family hadn’t eaten yet, an entire bulb of fresh garlic (about 6 large cloves), some stewing beef and chunks of sausage, got used to make an Instant Pot one pot meal.
I do like being able to set up either the Instant Pot or the Crockpot and just leave it. Today, it meant I could get a nap in! We’re a real messed up household right now. My husband’s dealing with a broken tooth on top of his constant back pain. My younger daughter had a rough night and has been caning it today – yet she still just came back from picking the Spoon tomatoes for me! My older daughter has been walloped by her PCOS again. I’m still dealing with a wonky hip, plus my injured left arm is still causing issues, but it’s starting to look like I’m the most able bodied person in the household again!
I had thought I could use the riding mower and mow the lawn today. After all the rain we’ve had, it actually needs it again. When I went to bed last night, the forecast was for sun and a few clouds for the next week. This morning, that changed to a light rain, pretty much all day! They’re still saying we’ll be getting sun with some clouds for at least a week, but who knows what we’ll actually get. I’m certainly not going to complain about more rain, though. We still need it so badly!
It does make things hard to plan around, though. There are things I’d like to get some work done on before I start making my monthly stock up shopping trips to the city, plus my follow up medical appointment about my arm, and so on. Things that need to be done when it’s dry, or at least not raining. I have this constant sense of running out of time.
Ah, well. It is what it is, and there’s only so much we can do. Having all four of us struggling with physical limitations at the time time, though, was not something I had ever expected when we moved out here, though!
The morning started out as usual, with the feeding of the yard cats and my morning rounds.
Oddly, I seem to be seeing fewer kittens? I think? Meaning the littles that have been showing up in the past couple of weeks. They tend to hide so quickly, I’m not sure, but it just feels like there are fewer of them. The older kittens are still around, but I just can’t get a handle on how many littles there are.
Even though I’d picked up another 9kg back of kibble for the outside cats recently, we were already running out. I was already scheduled to pick up my mother’s bubble packs and do her grocery shopping today, so I decided I would keep going from her place and hit the Walmart. Plus, my husband is having issues with his cracked tooth that won’t be worked on until the middle of next month. So I wanted to pick up foods that were safer for him to eat.
My younger daughter was able to come along with me, which was nice.
My brother, SIL and their older grandson were staying in their trailer this weekend and were going to be heading back to the city soon after I needed to head out, so we made a quick hello and goodbye visit. My great-nephew will be heading home next weekend, before school starts, so I wanted to make sure we got our hugs in!
My daughter and I got to my mother’s town early enough that the pharmacy wasn’t open yet – but the gas station with the best fried chicken and wedges in town had their chicken ready – so we picked up a meal for my mother boxed up separately, then got some for ourselves to eat in the truck. The truck’s seats are more comfortable than the chairs and tables they have in the station. 😄
We still got to the pharmacy just minutes after it opened. My mother’s bubble packs were ready, and most of it was covered this time, so I had very little to pay for it this time. I’m glad I made sure to pick them up today. When I put them in my mother’s lock box, I checked what was there. She had only enough for this evening, plus tomorrow morning. The pharmacy’s records show she should have had enough to last until Wednesday. However, with so many messed up times with her meds, and her abusive behaviour towards the home care aids for not using the partial packs of meds because they were the wrong days, etc., I have taken a few old partial packs back to the pharmacy. They were required to dispose of the meds, which I haven’t mentioned to my mother, or she’d blow a gasket, but it was that or have her constantly harassing the care aids about them. I’ll have to call the pharmacy tomorrow and talk to them about that. They do the bubble packs on the weekends, and that’s cutting it really close for my mother at this point. Better to have her meds prepared earlier. Normally, she would have had them delivered, but that leaves her medications outside the lock box, and she’s already tried hiding a week’s worth of meds away because she doesn’t trust the home care aids.
When we got to my mother’s, it was still not much past noon. Mass was still going on in the church across the street, but I was able to find parking. I wasn’t sure if my mother would have had the energy to make it to church or not, but thought it was unlikely.
I was right. My mother was home and praying the rosary, with her table all set up in preparation for when someone from the church would come by with communion for her. The interruption of us coming when we did messed her up a bit. Which I totally get. When I’m right into something and get interrupted, the mental shift can actually be physically painful.
My brother had given me a new drip pan specifically for my mother’s model of stove, to replace one she has that is completely rusted out for some reason, so I popped that in for her while she got out her shopping list. It was really short this time! We went over it and I asked a few questions, but she said she was well supplied with everything I remembered to ask about.
She was happy to see my daughter, though, and didn’t make any of her usual rude comments, which was nice.
She told us to take our time because she didn’t want to be interrupted when the guy came with communion, but her list was so short, we were back just as church was letting out. My mother was once again thrown by us coming in when we did. I told her that people were just starting to leave church, so we were quick about putting everything away, and making sure her mild carton was opened for her (the local grocery store no longer has 2L milk in plastic jugs, just cartons, and with my mother’s hands, it’s a real struggle to open a carton). My mother was a bit upset about the rush. She had been expecting me to come later, and had been looking forward to being able to “talk for hours and hours”… ??? Especially since my daughter was with me. So she said, no more Sundays for grocery shopping! Which is fine, but I was there today, on a Sunday, so that she could get her medications before running out!
We were in and out quickly, though, and soon on the road to the Walmart. I didn’t take a photo, but it totaled almost $200. Ouch! We got two 9kg bags of kibble, and a package of XXL (30″x30″) puppy pads, plus some on sale TP. Peanut butter, bananas and bread for my husband at times when no one is available to cook for him, and hot dog wieners/hoagies for times when there is someone to cook for him. He can’t chew “real” meat right now, no matter how tender! We got some water flavour packages for him as well. We remembered to grab a couple of containers of popcorn seasoning, and found a charging cable for my daughter’s older phone with a micro-USB port. After that, it was some cheese mini-croissants to snack on for the ride home, and some $1 chocolate bars for each of us as a treat.
I keep thinking I’m forgetting something, but nope. That list is all it took, to cost almost $200.
Once we got home, it was late enough that, while my daughter put away everything else, I refilled the kibble bin and did the evening cat feeding.
Which brings me to the cuteness!
I’ll actually start with a couple of pictures I got, yesterday.
Can you spot the Little in there? One of them has figured out how to climb up to the platform and discovered the cat beds up there. Here, it’s being snuggled by Eyelet on the left, and The Grink on the right.
Can you believe The Grink is about 2 years old? He’s barely bigger than Eyelet!
That black kitten was absolutely snuzzling its face into the tabby. This cat bed is in the back of the water bowl shelter.
When opening the door into the sun room to do this morning’s feeding, I found a while pile of kittens – large and small! – waiting right under the threshold, making it very difficult to step through! I need to be careful, as Sir Robin in particular REALLY wants to be inside. He managed to sneak into the house while my older daughter and I were bringing the cured garlic in, after covering the eggplant for the night, and my daughter found him in the kitchen!
Most of the kittens scatter as I step through, but one kitten didn’t. It stayed loafed and moved its head around, as if confused.
It turned out its eyes were stuck shut, so it had no idea what was going on around it!
I finished putting the food out but, when I got back to the sun room, I couldn’t see the stuck eyed kitten. I finished my rounds and tried looking again before heading inside. That’s when I spotted a little white kitten bum through the opening of the new cat cave.
It’s a bit difficult to get close, since it’s in a shelf, and I need to step around food trays and the little plant stand that’s there for the cats to use to get to the platform. I was able to reach in and felt a couple of kittens in there, but managed to get the white butted kitten. Once I got it out, I could confirm it was the one with the stuck eyes. It wasn’t happy, but I was able to get it to the bathroom and into the bathtub to chill a bit, while I ran the hot water in the sink while getting something to wipe its eyes with.
The kitten wasn’t happy about being picked up again, but stopped fighting me once I started washing its eyes. Once both eyes were cleared, it just started up at me for a while. This kitten is mostly white with grey “eyebrows”, like Button, Eyelet and Grommet – but where Button and Eyelet have blue eyes, and Grommet has yellowish eyes, this one has really dark eyes!
Once done, I took it back to the sun room and tucked it back into the cat cave. Then I used my phone’s camera to take a picture and see who else was in there.
There were AT LEAST six kittens in there! Including another one that could have used an eye wash. It’s amazing I was able to grab the right kitten right from the start!
That little tabby with white in the foreground… he always looks so furious! 😄
As we were getting ready to head out, I went to open the gate first and spotted this adorableness, under the truck.
This is the garage kitten that will sometimes let me pet him and pick him up.
Still no such progress with his sibling (I’m about 98% sure the smokey one is a female).
Yes, we ALWAYS check the truck before starting it and driving.
After we got back from errands and the evening feeding was done, I did my evening rounds. As I was heading in, I spotted Lady Hypotenose on top of the cat cage… and what was that not far from her?
We already have a cat we call Ink, because she looks like she got into a pot of ink with her mouth and paws. This one also looks like it got into some ink.
We’re debating whether to call it Spot or Blot.
What do you think?
I did try to do a head count of the littles this morning, and I think I counted twelve but, as I mentioned earlier, I’m pretty sure some are “missing”. Especially the ones that showed up in the junk pile by the chain link fence, instead of the sun room or cat shelters by the house. It could be that they’ve been moved on by their mothers, or they simply didn’t happen to be out while I was putting the food out.
The next few weeks will be ones to keep an eye on them. This is the stage where, if they are going to get hit with the local variant of herpes, now will be it. That’s the ones with the leaky eyes, and that’s what did in Kale and, I’m sure, Zipper. This year, though, not all the kittens got it. Poirot’s babies have had zero issues, nor have the outer yard kittens that started out coming to the shrine feeding station (they are now willing to go right into the sun room!). The garage kittens have shown no sign if it, either. It looks like some of the littles are resistant.
From what the Cat Lady told me, that would be because of the lysine we’ve been adding to their food for the past year or two. For the cats that are already struggling with the virus, I’m told it’s “lysine for life”, and if they stop getting the lysine, they can get really sick again. BUT, it benefits the next generation, and they can not need it at all. That’s what I seem to be seeing now, with the littles. In fact, at this point, it seems like more of them are resistant than not.
Still, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen over the next few weeks. Which means we might start finding losses.
Well, it is what it is, and there’s not much we can do about it, that we aren’t already doing.
The Re-Farmer
[addendum: I was curious as to what WP’s AI image generator would come up with based on the contents of this post.
This is not actually our first zucchini, but it is the first one that made it to a size that could be harvested. The first zucchini I spotted withered away immediately, which means it wasn’t pollinated. I hand pollinated the one beside it and thought it was going to make it. When I saw the blossom end starting to turn yellow when it was just a couple of inches long, I knew it wasn’t going to last much longer. So I picked it, bit off the ends, and ate the middle, right in the garden. It was a two bite zucchini! 😄 This one was on a completely different plant; the only other one that’s been producing female flowers.
This morning has probably the most Royal Burgundy beans I’ve picked at once. There were no yellow bush beans to pick at all. What a difference from the first year we grew bush beans! The Royal Burgundy had the fewest seeds in the packet, but they were the most prolific of the three varieties we got in the pack we bought. That year was actually the most prolific of all, and I was finding bags of frozen beans in the freezer, two years later!
Hopefully, next year will be a better growing year. Personally, I think we’re looking at a shorter fall and longer winter, but I hope I’m wrong. I’m looking at the Old Farmer’s Almanac forecast for the prairies, and this is what they had to say about the upcoming fall.
The Prairies
The Prairie provinces can expect a warmer and wetter-than-normal autumn. September: Temperatures will average 12°C (1°C above normal), with around 45mm of precipitation—right on average. The first part of the month will bring isolated showers and a cool dip, but mid to late September will trend warmer with thunderstorms and lots of sunny, very warm days to close out the month. October: Temperatures rise even more to 8°C (2°C above normal), with 30mm of rain (5mm above average). Expect a warm, sunny start with light drizzle mid-month. Later, the west may see early flurries while the east has drizzle, before things warm up again near the end of October.
That would be nice, but I don’t think so. I still keep thinking about the garter snakes, already heading for their winter dens about a month early!
They don’t have a long range forecast for winter in Canada, yet.
The Farmer’s Almanac (not to be confused with the Old Farmer’s Almanac) does have a Canadian winter forecast. For the prairies, we’re told to expect this winter to be very cold with above average snowfall, whiteouts and blizzards. As usual, January and February are expected to be the worst hit.
*sigh*
Well, at least the snow will be a good insulator for anything I plant in the fall!
For now, I’ll just enjoy what we have. Which, today, has brought more off and on rain that wasn’t in yesterday’s forecast, and quite a lot of wind.
Eventually, I’ll be able to finish mowing that last overgrown section of the old garden area!!
I’ve been trying to take recordings on the same day every month – usually the 21st, as that’s usually the first day of spring. I did take recordings yesterday, but I waited too long and it was getting too dark, so some of the videos really sucked.
So I tried again this morning, and here we are! There has actually been a decent amount of growth since last month. Enjoy!
After doing my morning rounds, I made a small shopping trip to the nearer city – we were running lot on kibble again, so it was a good time to pick up a few other things we would run out of before our first stock up shopping trip next week. By the time I got home, we were getting hit with intermittent rain throughout the afternoon. Even a brief downpour that had me waiting things out in the garage until it was done!
In checking the basement, though, it really show how dry things have been. In the summer, the old basement, which has no weeping tile, can get very wet, and it’s not unusual to have pooling water that I sweep into the floor drain. Even the new basement has a corner that gets quite wet. The weeping tile drains past the floor drain into the septic tank, and we sometimes see flowing water in the floor drain from under the new basement. We keep blower fans and pedestal fans going to dry and keep things dry, and the sump pump gets quite a work out.
This summer, we have had some damp areas, but mostly it’s been in the corner where the well pump is, and that is from condensation. We haven’t been running the dehumidifier as, when I did get it going, it started making some rather unfortunate noises. It is very old, so we would be better off replacing it.
I checked the basements today, and even that corner is almost completely dry, with just one fan running. The floor drain is barely damp, so there’s pretty much nothing draining from the weeping tile under the new basement. This tells me that, while it’s been raining enough that I haven’t had to water the garden lately, the water table is still really low, and the ground is still really dry, in spite of the wonderful rain we’ve been having.
We’re not expecting rain here again for quite some time. What we are expecting, on Sunday night (two nights from now), is for the overnight temperatures to drop to 5C/41F. That wasn’t supposed to happen until the first week of September. Which means I want to at least cover the peppers and eggplant, and hopefully the summer squash, too. It’s supposed to warm up again, with very pleasant overnight temperatures, but all it takes is one cold night to kill the more tender plants.
Of course, the forecasts change so often, it might not be an issue – or it might get even colder than predicted.
While heading out to the garden again after breakfast, I noticed that the catio was unoccupied.
The perfect time to set my “trap”!
The plan is to set it up behind the garage to lure the garage kittens out. They run around the garage, but they won’t come to the house. Even if I catch the white and grey and take him to the sun room, he’s soon back in the garage.
What I’m hoping is that they will accept the catio as a place to eat and sleep. Then, over time, we’ll move it closer and closer to the house. If it really comes down to it, we could potentially close the door with them inside. That would be only once we get them socialized enough to get spayed/neutered.
Of course, it took more work than expected.
First up, I got the big food bowl off the ground inside and set it on one of the shelves to come along. It was still wrapped around with plastic that I put on for the winter and ended up leaving. I think later on, we’ll put clear plastic around the upper half of the catio to protect from the elements, but leave the bottom half open for air circulation. It’s very much a greenhouse as it is now!
Anyhow.
I had put rope handles at each corner to use to move the catio, and those were under the plastic, so I raised the plastic on one end so I could access them. There were a couple of bricks used to make sure the door didn’t accidentally close them in, and those got set on the roof to come for the ride (there are other bricks on the roof as weights against high winds). Last of all, I had a 2×2 piece of lumber under the frame at the door, so that water would drain off the roof to the other side. That got set in one of the cat shelves inside to come for a ride, too.
Then I started to try and drag it along.
The problem is, I put the rope handles too high. Because of how far apart they are, it can’t just be lifted and dragged. It would need to be “walked” across the yard. That risked breaking the frame. So I grabbed some twine and made new rope handles, lower down, threaded through short lengths cut from an old garden hose that can’t be used anymore. That would keep the twine from cutting into the hands.
That worked better, in that I could lift the end and drag it evenly, instead of “walking” it across. Unfortunately, they were still pretty far apart, making it difficult for short little me with my short little arms to pull it.
I was going to message my daughters to see if one of them could come and help me when I saw one of them had already messaged me. My mother’s pharmacy had called and wanted to talk to me about her bubble pack refills.
So I went in to take care of that and asked my daughters if they could finish moving the catio while I was on the phone. I didn’t realized that my older daughter had messaged me only because she had gotten up to use the washroom and happened to hear the phone ring. By the time I saw the message and came in, she was back in bed for the day.
Which meant my younger daughter moved it on her own!
That would not have been easy. She’s even shorter than I am! Not my much, but still…
Meanwhile, I made the call, then called my mother, then updated my siblings in our group chat. I’ll be going to pick up my mother’s bubble packs on Sunday, and will do her grocery shopping as well.
When I was done, I headed out to see where my daughter set up the catio – I’d only said it was going behind the garage.
Just by Pinky. I didn’t see any of her kittens until some time later, and even then, it was just the smokey one.
Pinky was so settled on that cat bed that when I lifted the front to put the 2×2 under it, she didn’t move! I dropped the plastic back down and set the bricks up in the door so make sure it wouldn’t close all the way, then tied it off so it wouldn’t blow around in the wind, either.
I also spent quite a bit of time petting Pinky on that cat bed. She was very, very content in there!
I set the food bowl – an old heated water bowl that burned out – just inside the doorway. Later on, I’ll find something to use as a water bowl for in there, too.
So, starting this evening, I will no longer be leaving food in the garage for the kittens. It will be in the catio, only.
I think it might be a good idea to add wheels to this. Not directly under, as that would leave a gap a cat could get out through. I’m thinking more like a pair of wheels on one side, and handles on the other, so it can be moved around like a wheelbarrow. Or a chicken tractor. We can certainly grag it around as it is now, but that puts a lot of strain on the frame and it’s more likely to break.
That done, I went back towards the house and noticed Slick under the canopy tent again. I had to use the zoom on my phone’s camera to see whether she was nursing or not. Once I was sure there were no kittens for me to scare away, I continued on my way.
Which is when I saw some ears in the window of the isolation shelter.
I see other littles in the isolation shelter, but these ones have practically moved right in.
The inside of the front window really needs a cleaning. 😄
I didn’t get any pictures while doing the morning feeding, though I did try to get a head count of the adults. I think I counted 22. I didn’t even try to count the kittens. They move too fast!
Except one.
I’ve got a little bowl set under the ramp to the water bowl shelter, which is in front of the chimney flue they use to hide in. As soon as I come near, they start dashing into the flu to get under the cat house.
One of the, however, didn’t run away.
So I pet it.
It still didn’t run away.
So I picked it up.
Which is when I saw that its eyes were stuck shut!
Thankfully, it didn’t try to hiss or spit or bite, and I was able to wash its eyes until they could open again. Then it just looked up at me, seeming rather stunned!
Hopefully, this will be the start of socialization.
We’ve got our work cut out for us, to get these guys at least friendly enough to get them to a vet, once they’re big enough! The vet wants them to weigh at least two pounds for spays.
[obligatory addendum: if you wish to donate towards spays and neuters, there is a ko-fi donation button at the top right of the page. Every little bit helps, and is much appreciated.]
Enjoying kittens was just a bonus for the morning. I got lots done, and will be writing about that in other posts. This evening, I plan to take some footage for my monthly garden tour video, too. There will be quite a few changes on there, since last month!
The Re-Farmer 