When I opened the door to the basement to check on Beep Beep and the kitties, I found Beep Beep sitting in the basement window at the stairs.
She immediately bolted through the door.
She had to go through the several cats that were trying to bolt down the stairs at the same time! :-D
It’s a good think I was intending to leave the door open for a while, anyhow.
The babies are definitely getting more curious and mobile! Beep Beep is getting more comfortable with leaving them for longer periods, too.
The girls are calling Butterscotch’s baby “Nickypants” because his fur pattern makes him look like he has white pants, just like Nicky the Nose. :-D
After a while, I had to go hunting for Beep Beep to bring her back down, so I could close up the basement again. I found her on the kitchen counter! Bad Beep Beep! ;-)
We’ve been having some very chilly nights lately, so I’ve been keeping a close eye on the seed trays. I was happy to see some new growth.
More pattypans/sunbrust squash are emerging, a few more of the zucchini surprise mix are showing, too.
It’s funny how there is this one large sunburst squash that showed up next to the zucchini mix. If I hadn’t put those straws in to mark the different groups, I would have thought it was part of the mix!
Still no sign of gourds, though. There were no new seedlings emerging in the other tray.
I was supposed to presoak the carrot seeds a while ago, but things got busy and it just didn’t happen. Now I’m glad it got delayed, and I think I will delay a few more days. We’re supposed to get a couple of centimeters of snow tomorrow evening! It looks like things will warm up and stay above freezing, even overnight, by Tuesday, so I will aim to start the seeds soaking on Saturday. The video I’m using said it should take 3 or 4 days for roots to show, so we’ll see how that goes.
The kittens seem to be away more often, and squirming around their nest a bit more. When I first came down to tend to their mother, the tuxedo was well away from the others, and close to the outside end of the box. My being there seemed to disturb him, because he quickly squirmed his way back to the fur pile. :-D
My morning escort! :-D
Of course, I tried to spend time with the goat. When I got some feed in the container I use as a scoop, she was willing to stick her head right in to eat, and let me pet her.
As an aside, the Costco popcorn containers are really useful. I’ve got several that I used to scoop up feed or cat kibble. These ones have the bottoms cut off and the lids left on. I use others, without any parts cut off, for water in the winter, instead of the pitcher we used before. The heavy duty plastic of the containers make them better for scooping the feed out, and the size lets me keep a rough consistency in portions.
As for the goat, she was really interested in the feed while I carried it, but once I added it to the feed container in the pen, she still wanted to check me out for feed and followed me around. She let me pet her again, but only while she had her face in the feed. :-D She did go into the pen a couple of times, and at one of them, I swung the “gate” closed a little more. I probably should not have done it while she was in there, as it spooked her out, but I didn’t think of it until it was too late. If we can keep closing the “gate” end, little by little, so she gets used to it, is should make it easier to close her in .
Theoretically. She might simply refuse to go in at all, if it’s too closed up.
As I walked around the yard, she didn’t quite follow me, but she did move further away from the doors. She has been going into the old kitchen garden and finding things to eat in there, which is good – for now. There are plants coming through the layers of mulch we put down to build up the soil that we are trying to kill off. This includes some spreading roses. I had hoped to not have to dig them out by the roots, but it seems I will have to, to get rid of them. There are a couple of rose bushes that will stay. It’s the spreading ones that are going to make using this area more difficult. I was happy to see that she will eat the stems that have come up. The thorns don’t seem to phase her at all.
Of course, she also tried to come closer to the cats.
She followed Pumpshack cat up onto the clothes line platform, but when the cat went around the bin, and she could no longer see him, she decided to give Mary a kiss on the head! :-D
She is also very curious about the sun room! She knows this is where the feed bag is – or at least that food comes out through this door! It’s too bad we can’t use this room to contain her, since she seems much more willing to go into here than the garage. If we did close her in and she tried to escape, though, I could see her knocking my seedlings all over, or even breaking her way through the glass.
I’ve been researching about goats, of course, and one of the things I’ve read is that they don’t like to eat feed or hay off the ground, and if they’ve pooped or peed near food that’s on the ground, they won’t eat it. So I took a container we found while cleaning out the basement – a rectangular bin of thick, hard plastic, with a nice, flat bottom – and put it upside down in the pen, then put the feed container on top of the bin. She seemed pretty good with that set up.
So my plan will be to spend much of the day outside, working on the new garden plot, to keep an eye on her.
The down side with all this is, we haven’t had a chance to work on the replacement door. All it needs at this point is to have the recesses for the hinges chiselled out, touch up the paint in the recesses. Once the paint is cured, we just need to attach the hinges and install it.
Hopefully, that is something we can make progress on, today.
This morning, when I opened the basement door to check on Beep Beep and the babies, I found her right on the top step!
I had a crowd of upstairs cats eager to go downstairs, and I think she was rather taken aback by the sight of them. :-D I headed downstairs and she did go up into the entryway, but then turned around and followed me, as I topped up her food bowl.
All of the babies have wide open eyes now.
No, there isn’t a missing kitty. The fifth one is just hidden away, in the corner, buried in siblings. :-D
After luring the other cats out of the basement so Beep Beep wouldn’t be surrounded by exploring cats, I headed outside to do my rounds.
Looking out the windows, earlier, we couldn’t see the goat anywhere, but she turned out to be curled up on the concrete in front of one of the sun room windows. She still wouldn’t let me anywhere near her. I checked the pen we made, and from the pile of poop in front of the open end, I could at least tell she came close. I couldn’t tell if she had been drinking any water (there was a layer of ice across the top I had to remove!), and the only food we had to give her was sunflower seeds for the birds, and that looked untouched. I know she’s grazing, but there just isn’t a lot of grass in our yard. Especially this time of year.
I continued my rounds, with Potato Beetle doing his usual.
He does this over and over. He runs in front of my feet, then throws himself to the ground and begins rolling around, wanting me to pet him. He seems utterly indifferent to the fact that I’m walking, and how close he comes to getting stepped on, every time!
Once I finished my morning rounds, I headed into “town” to our little general store/liquor store/post office/gas station. This is where we usually get our deer feed and bird seed. I knew they had feed for chickens and such, too, but have never looked too closely at the stacks.
I had swung by there on the way to picking up my daughter from work, just to let the owner – who sees just about everyone in town at some point – know about the goats. She didn’t know who had goats near us, either, but if she had anyone come in, saying they were missing goats, she would be able to tell them they were at our place.
As soon as I came in, she asked me if I’d found the owner. :-D I told her who it turned out to be, and she said she had taken a look at a map of the municipality, so see the different farms near us, trying to see who might have goats. I told her we still had one at our place, about our inability to catch her, and said that I wanted to try using food, and asked her what she had that was good for goats.
It turns out there is one brand of animal feed that has many different feed mixes, all in identical green and white bags. They each have a label sewn into the top (all the feed bags are sewn shut; this way, you just pull at one end to undo the stitching, making it much easier to open the bags). The labels give the names of the mixes, and nutritional information. Thankfully, she has a price list for these, organized by animal! :-D So she was able to tell me which ones to look for. It turned out there were two types for goats; a nanny mix and a kid mix. I grabbed the nanny mix.
When I got home and the goat saw me carrying the bag on my shoulder, she got so excited, and started running to me! I am guessing the original owner bought feed from this same store, and the goat recognized the bag. I went into the sun room to be able to put it down to open it, and she actually started to go into the sun room with me! I couldn’t let her come in, though; it’s not safe for her in there, and she’s not safe for my seedlings! I scooped up some feed and headed out, and she followed me around as I emptied her own feed container of the sunflower seeds, then added the new feed.
She almost came into the pen to get the food, but the open end is narrow, and I had to go past her to leave the pen, which spooked her away. She was clearly very hungry and eager to eat, but rather than go into the pen, she followed me, eyeballing the container of feed in my hand. I ended up leaving a bit in front of the pen, then some more near the sun room door.
Once she saw that, she came right up and started eating, even though I was still standing there.
Yes!!! I was able to pet her!
Not for very long, mind you. Once she’d eaten a bit, she started to become skittish again, so I let her be.
I am guessing this feed, which looks quite different from what the owner had brought over, which was not crushed fine like you can see in the photo, is what she is used to. It was very gratifying to see her eating, and being willing to come so close to me.
Once I was back inside, I sent a message to the owner, letting him know the progress. I told him about our plans to use the new feed to lure her into the pen and, at some point, gently close her in. He was very happy to hear this. (As I was writing this, I was informed by my daughter that the goat has, indeed, gone into the pen!)
Then he told me that, once we catch her and he brings her home, he will put her in with the ram. After that, if we want them, he would be willing to give us BOTH milk goats, once we have a proper pen for them.
!!!!!
Now, this would be a sort of a win win for both sides. He had mentioned that these two goats have been nothing but trouble for him. He has meat goats, not milk goats. With these two being so wild, and so many other goats to care for, he just would not be able do too much about them. We, on the other hand, have no other high needs animals. We could spend the time to get them used to people, and finally be able to do things like trim their hooves. For us, we’d get the milk goats we were wanting to eventually get – for free. If we build a moveable paddock, we can do what I hoped to do by borrowing goats, first; have them grazing in areas we can’t keep clear otherwise, that end up becoming fire hazards. We can even use them to help clear some of the bush for us. Goats can be very useful animals for permaculture.
We have to think about this, though. It’s not just about building a pen for them. If we’re going to be milking goats, we need to build/buy a milking stand, to make it easier to reach, get food grade containers for milking and storage, and a way to deal with surplus milk – cheese making had been one of my thoughts for that, but that requires supplies, too. There is also, of course, the buying of feed. Especially in winter.
There would be a pretty steep learning curve.
We can do it. I have no doubt about that. The question is, are we up to it, at this point?
I am leaning towards yes, but it’s not up to just me!
She spent the night sleeping in front of our door, ignoring the shelter I rigged up for her.
Shortly after 7 this morning, I looked out the kitchen window to see a very chilled man in a hoodie, sitting at the front step, very diligently not making direct eye contact with the goat, a container of feed in front of him. Later, I saw him almost manage to lure the goat into the garage.
No success.
Thankfully, we have multiple doors.
I went through the sun room to bring food out for the cats. When it came time to put feed out for the birds, I went around the house from the other side.
The poor guy doesn’t know what to do. He can’t catch her, and he can’t stay around here, trying, when he’s got a farm to run. I assured him again that we were okay with her being here. There is someone here all the time, so we can slowly work on taming her. The only problem is, we don’t have any feed or shelter or anything. He commented that he’s running out of the feed mix he was trying to bait the goat with and, like so many, money is tight. He won’t be able to get more until Wednesday. The goat can at least graze now, if she wanted to. Except she really doesn’t want to leave that door! He said he would come back later, and hoped we would be able to at least lure her into the garage, where he’d left the container of feed, but I think she’s already forgotten about it. As he was leaving, he commented on how he’d really like to get her back (I think our being so okay with her here has ended any notions of killing her for meat!) and had hoped to breed her, and just doesn’t know what to do. Then he made a passing comment of, well, she was a free goat for him, she might be a free goat for us. !!
We shall see.
Meanwhile, I was able to do my morning rounds, followed by not one, not two but three boys!
Yes, I was finally able to confirm that Pump Shack cat is a boy. Not only was he following me around with the other boys, he was coming closer to me than ever before.
They weren’t following me for any sort of affection for each other. Not at all, as you can see.
No, they were following me because Butterscotch was also following me. They’ve been trying to breed with her. :-( She seems very ticked off with that idea and has been fighting them off fairly easily. She’s less than 2 weeks from having kittens, so I don’t imagine she’s in any condition to go into heat right now. That doesn’t stop the boys from trying!
I noticed something yesterday that I made a point of checking out this morning, and I am very excited.
While following the goats around, I noticed that the surviving haskap bush we planted last year is leafing out very nicely.
This is the male plant. I’m impressed with how large those leaves are. All the other trees are just starting to show buds. I’ve read about how cold hardy these are supposed to be, and it definitely shows!
It was the other one that I was most happy to see.
This is the female haskap. It is very hard to see, but it has leaf buds! Each spot that has the remains of leaves from last year, when it suddenly just died off in the fall, has tiny leaf buds under them.
I don’t know what happened to it, but I am glad it survived!
With this spring actually having real moisture, unlike our first two springs here, the sump pump is doing its work to keep the basement from flooding. It doesn’t turn on often, but enough to notice. While the new part basement, with its weeping tile, is dry, the old part basement is showing some moisture this spring.
This is where wood for the furnace used to be store, and I remember well how very wet it would get, when I was a child. This is very dry in comparison. On the other side of the little wall is the sump pump reservoir, and there is a bit of a puddle there, but again, not much at all. Hopefully, it will stay that way.
On the other side of the old basement, where the floor drain it, is is drier, but still shows signs of seeping water.
Some of it is following the concrete patch over what I now know covers the weeping tile drain pipe from the new basement. There are also patches at the base of the wall shared with the new part basement. I’m glad we were able to clean that area out and elevate the things we put back.
Beep Beep and the kitties, meanwhile, are dry and cozy on the other side. I just wasn’t able to get photos this morning. Beep Beep was keeping them all warm with her own body, and I wasn’t going to disturb them. :-)
I’m a little frustrated by the long range forecasts right now. Even just yesterday, I was seeing that we would be chilly for a few days, but only a couple nights would dip below zero. Then the temperatures were expected to warm right up again. Well, the forecasts have now changed dramatically. We’re supposed to continue to be chilly for longer, with lower temperatures overall. Even when it is supposed to warm up, it’s no longer expected to warm up as much, and the nights are all expected to dip below freezing. The warm temperatures we were to expect by the middle of the month have been pushed back to the end of the month, with not a lot of sun. Which is not good for our seed starts. Even in the sun room, they will have a hard time getting full sun, and while the room is certainly warmer, I’ve still taken steps to keep them even warmer. I considered moving them back into the house but the house is actually a bit colder than the sun room is. :-/ I even turned the furnace back up a couple of degrees so it would turn on during the night.
Well, we shall see how the seed starts do. If they won’t work out, we’ll manage.
For now, though, we’ll be focusing more on taming a goat! :-D
The kittens have been getting noticeably more mobile, of late. I found this one – the only kitten without its eyes open, yet – trying to squirm out of their nest!
For the most part, though, they spend their time in a big, sleepy pile.
For the past few days, I’ve been letting upstairs cats into the basement while I tend to Beep Beep and the babies.
This morning, I decided to just leave the basement door open.
Oh, the excitement that created!
Even DahBoy crept his way down to sniff a bit, though he didn’t stay – and his mom had zero interest in leaving her perch in the living room. :-D
Of course, the things that interested them most were the things they couldn’t get at! Like the old basement, and the unfinished bar/storage area.
Keith was the only cat that showed any curiosity towards the kittens, and sticking his face around the corner was as far as he got.
We didn’t leave them down there, yet. After a while, they were lured out and the basement door closed up. In time – when the kittens are bigger – we’ll move all the food, water and litter boxes down to the basement, and keep the door open all the time. For now, they’ll just get to visit. ;-)
I think Beep Beep liked having some feline company.
That tiny little nose peeking out from under an orange kitten is just hilarious. Beep Beep’s kittens have clearly had no problem absorbing Butterscotch’s baby into their creche! :-D
With the more pleasant conditions out, I will be starting to do my evening rounds again. Last night was quite beautiful.
There was also a cacophony of noise! Frogs croaking, birds hooting, honking, cooing, chirping and squawking, and the occasional cat meowing. Some nights we have coyotes yipping, but not last night. I did, however, start hearing the strangest screeching noise, coming from the direction of the old garden. When it didn’t stop, I went to see what small animal was being attacked.
It turned out to be skunks.
They make some of the oddest noises, but it was the first time I’d heard them actually scream like this! There were two of them, and one of them was just standing there, screeching and screaming away until it saw me and took off. :-D
Well, it’s coming up on time to head to the city for our big shop. We have our usual list of different stores to go to for different things, and I’ve heard that some have started to limit how many people per household can come in to only one person. Which is such an arbitrary restriction. But then, so much of the shut down has been pretty arbitrary. I was told about the increased restrictions in some places by the woman who was in the waiting room at the hospital with me. She said she had tried to go shopping with her husband, but one of the stores wouldn’t let both of them in. She, however, has a medical condition that affects her balance and, while she walked with a cane, she could fall at any time with no warning. Having her husband with her was a matter of medical safety. They ended up going some place else. That was a couple of weeks ago, though, and just the one store, so we’ll see how it is with the ones we need to go to.
I’ll just be happy if I can get everything on our list, and not have to go from store to store to store to find toilet paper. That, at least, has started to consistently show up on the shelves locally.
After bringing my mother home from the hospital yesterday (I called her this morning and she is doing well today, and did not have any episodes during the night), I’d gone to the hardware store in her town to pick up the paint we needed to finish the replacement door for the sun room.
I also got myself a new toy.
Since I am cutting so many slices from the lilac wood, and plan to do more with maple and cherry that I’ve set aside. I even have a couple more branches of lilac waiting outside, so I decided it was worth the splurge. With the kittens in the basement, I’m not as comfortable using loud power tools. I have hand saws that are done the job, but when I saw this saw – and its affordable price – I went for it.
This is a fine toothed, fine bladed pull saw. I hoped that it would cut more smoothly than the saws I was already using, so of course I had to test it out.
On the left are the round slices I’d cut using a regular carpenter saw, which is what I had that worked the best at the time. To the right are slices I cut using the new saw, in the miter box at 45 degrees. None of these have been sanded.
It’s hard to see, but the cut edges with the new saw are smoother than the other ones. They also didn’t leave that jagged edge that sometimes happens at the very end of a cut. The larger saw also left occasional black marks that need to be sanded away. So, right off the top, the new saw will save me on sand paper. I also splurged on sheets of sand paper in grits starting at 50, up to 220. The slices I cut with the old saw needed that 50 grit, but the new slices don’t need to be started with such coarse sandpaper.
There were a couple of other benefits I noticed. The sawing itself is quieter, which means less noise to disturb the babies nearby. It cuts faster, and with less vibration, so things are not being shaken off the shelf on the work table quite as much. :-D
The blade is so much thinner, there is less loss of wood as sawdust, and it’s easier to cut thinner pieces. However, this also means the blade bends more easily. Since it’s shorter than the other saw, I had to take greater care while sawing in the miter box, as the blade would sometimes bend and hit the inside of the miter box rather than go through the slot. After a while, because the piece of wood I was working on was wonky in shape, I started to use the miter box just to start a cut, then take it out and hold it in my hand to finish the cut. After a while, I didn’t even do that, and just eyeballed the angle and started it without a guide. I don’t know that I would have been able to do that with the other saw. Previously, I’d used the vice to hold the wood, but this branch had too many bends in it for the vice to be able to grip it.
As before, I use the last 3 1/2 inches of the branch to make lengthwise cuts in the miter box, and found an unexpected problem. Cutting the wood lengthwise resulted in sawdust clogging the teeth very quickly. I kept having to pull the blade out, remove the sawdust in the teeth, then make a few more passes before I had to do it again. So while cross cutting went faster than when using the other saw, cutting lengthwise took longer.
Of the branch I brought downstairs, I’ve now cut the two thickest sections into pieces. There are more smaller branches I’d taken off to work on later. I’m still thinking of what to make with the pieces I’ve already cut, but the smaller pieces will be of a size and weight suitable for earrings, so I know I will be making at least a few of those.
My new toy will make it much faster and smoother to cut the pieces to size. I hadn’t planned on getting a new saw, just for this project, but now that I have, I’m already glad I did. Definitely worth it.
Today started out normal enough. I did my rounds, as usual, including checking on the kittens.
Beep Beep is getting more comfortable with leaving them to sleep while she gets some needed sustenance – and some cuddles! :-)
I was just settling down to upload the trail cam files when I got a phone call from my mother.
For quite some time now, she’s been complaining about her heart. Chest pains. Not getting any air. It’s been very confusing. Partly because test after test has shown her heart is in great shape. No one has been able to find anything wrong. The other part is, her descriptions are rather lacking in details. She’ll talk about how her heart is bothering her so much, but then start talking about not having any air at night, and has to turn on a fan or open a window. But it’s her heart. It is made more difficult for her to explain, when she has a very poor grasp of anatomy.
The more detail we manage to wrestle out of her, the more we’re thinking it’s a problem with her lungs. What makes it even more difficult is that her symptoms only seem to happen when she’s lying down in bed. When she’s up and about, they go away.
This morning, I could hear in her voice right away, that something was wrong. She started talking about how much her heart was bothering her, then talking about not being able to breath. Her night was bad enough to scare her, and she was wondering what to do.
Normally, I’d just take her to the clinic. The clinic her new doctor is in has walk in, but it’s also located in a hospital, so there’s an emergency just down the hall.
But we’re in shut down right now, and with all the scary stuff she’s seeing on TV about the Wuhan virus, she’s also worried that her breathing problems are related to that.
Which is theoretically possible. Even though her building is in lock down, people do still have to go in and out. It was very unlikely, but still something that would probably check.
Also, her doctor’s clinic is doing most appointments only by phone right now.
Now, there is a hospital just a few blocks from her place. I suggested she go to the emergency there, but neither of us were sure there still was an emergency room. The building is now more of a nursing home with a clinic in it. She had even tried the health link number, which is for all the province, but only got a message saying they were busy. What else was in the message, I don’t know, since she would not have finished listening to it.
So I suggested she try to get to the emergency we thought might be near her, and to do that, she would first call the social worker assigned to her building. The social worker would have the phone numbers she needed. While she was doing that, I got online and tried to find the numbers to call myself.
Well, that turned out to be useless. I called the hospital number and got an long recorded message saying, “if this, call here, if that, call there, if something else, do this”. Even I was loosing track of it all. My mother would have been completely lost. From the website, it sounded like they wanted people to go use drive through testing centres for the Wuhan virus, rather than go to any hospitals.
I finally ended up calling the clinic near my mother. My mother used to go there, before switching to where her current doctor is. After talking to them for a bit, I was told to call this other clinic. So I did.
They told me to call the hospital near my mother’s place.
*sigh*
I explained to her that I’d tried that and just got a recorded message telling me to call other places. I ended up being transferred from the clinic to the hospital it was in, with instructions to ask to be transferred to the hospital in my mother’s town. When I explained the situation to the new person I spoke to, she was stunned that I only got a recorded message. So she put me on hold and called herself.
It turns out that, at the very end of the message, there was one last instruction to hit 0 to get the nurse’s desk. I must have hung up before that last bit at the end, because I never heard it.
Then she told me, “you know that hospital doesn’t really have an emergency room anymore, right?”
Well, now I do!
Basically, if she went there, they would assess her, then send her someplace else.
After explaining the situation to her, she suggested I bring my mother to this hospital, then gave me instructions on which entrance to go to.
So I called my mom back. She had just called the hospital by her place and told me they booked a telephone appointment for her with her new doctor.
For 3:30pm
It was coming up on 10am, as we were talking.
I told her about my calls, and gave her the choice. In the end, she decided she had better get checked.
So off I went to pick her up and take her to the emergency at this other hospital with an fully functioning emergency.
I’ve taken her here before, but a few things have changed since the shut down started. Instead of going straight to the desk to be checked in, there was a lady at a table facing the entrance. She was wearing a mask, gloves and gown. In front of her were posts like used on highway construction areas, with yellow caution tape between them, plus a hand sanitizer station. On the table was a stack of masks.
She asked us a few questions about why we were there, and if my mother had other cold-like symptoms or had been traveling out of the country within the last 14 days.
Once that was cleared up, she asked us to use the hand sanitizer, then my mother was allowed to the check in desk.
I was not.
There was a small waiting room I could go to, though, and it was a good thing I was handy. My mother, being scared of the virus, was talking about getting tested for it, and the staff were all “why weren’t you given a mask?” They had to come to me to clarify. Then a few moments later, the woman we first talked to came to me and asked if my mother had a history of dementia. I carefully (and quietly!) explained the situation with her, so that helped them understand a bit more on how to address her. Meanwhile, I could hear them trying to explain to her that, because she doesn’t have the symptoms, they would not be testing her for the Wuhan virus, eventually mollifying her by saying they would make that decision as she gets checked. Then she was sent to the emergency room waiting room, and I could hear no more.
Then I waited.
And waited.
Which was fine with me. I got to update my family, and had a nice chat with a woman who ended up waiting in the room with me, because she wasn’t allowed in with her husband, either. The only exceptions I saw was an elderly couple, with the husband pushing his wife in her wheelchair, and another guy with his very elderly father, and both times they were clearly expected for specific things, not an emergency room visit for something unknown, like my mother. The place was surprisingly busy, all things considered.
Then my mom came out, and that was it. We were done.
Once I got her in the van, she was able to tell me that…
…they found nothing wrong with her.
She is, understandably, frustrated.
They did take X-rays of her lungs, but will only call her if there is something found.
Long story short, I suggested waiting a few days for the X-rays to be looked at, and if she doesn’t get a call, to book an appointment with her doctor to talk about her breathing issues.
It took a lot of questioning, but I eventually got out of her that she’s had this issue for probably about 10 years, but that it’s gotten noticeably worse, recently. Which eliminated one possibility that I was thinking of, in that there was some sort of air circulation problem in her tiny apartment. Ten years ago, she was still living here at the farm. She brought up asthma, but the more I described the symptoms, the less she thought that might be the cause. She had also brought up her thyroid, but that was only because a friend she talked to on the phone takes medication for her thyroid and suggested it. I had to explain to her that a thyroid was a gland we all have, not a disease. I know people with both hypo- and hyper- thyroidism and was able to explain more about that to her. I had brought up in the past that sleeping in a more upright position might help, and maybe getting a sleep chair, and she’s starting to think that might be a good idea. She doesn’t want something with “buttons” on it (a remote), so she’s just thinking of a recliner with a lever. Sleep chairs are designed for actual sleeping on and would be much better, but are very expensive. So it might be worth trying a recliner and seeing if it makes a difference.
It wasn’t until just before I left that she mentioned something that had me thinking that she might have sleep apnea.
Whether or not she does, a sleep test would probably be a good thing to get done, but with all non-essential and elective health care not being done right now, it’s not like that is going to happen. Especially since there are already months long waiting lists for these tests, at the best of times.
At least my mother was feeling better by the time I got her home, but I can really understand her feelings about them not finding anything wrong with her.
It was late afternoon by the time we were done, but I was still able to get some things checked off on my to-do list. Her town has a hardware store, so I was able to go there to get the paint we need to finish the sun room door, plus a few other things. After messaging with my daughters, I ended up swinging by home to drop the stuff off and pick up a daughter, then we went into town for a few errands, before picking up some take-out food.
Oh, was that ever good. :-D
My daughters, meanwhile, did get some work done on the future garden plot, but that will be a post for another time! :-D
For now, I’m just happy my mom’s okay, and to be home.
I have noticed that Beep Beep is more willing – or able! – to leave the babies while they sleep. This is encouraging, as it means she is getting food and water, and using the litter, more often. She’s also getting a chance to wander around, say hello, and jump up to one of the windows to look outside.
At least for a little while.
This gave me an opportunity to get pictures of the babies. :-)
I also took advantage of the opportunity to switch out the bedding – and get individual pictures.
Three of the five now have their eyes open! :-)
Beep Beep seemed to appreciate the fresh bedding, too.
Playing with kittens. What a great way to start the day!
