Today we made a trip into the city to play tourist, run a few errands, then pick up some stuff for my husband’s birthday.
It made for a very long, but enjoyable, day.
We started off with an early lunch, taking advantage of being in the city. It turns out that Le Burger Week started today (I’d never heard of it before), so I tried the burger offering at an Asian fusion type place.
I can’t even remember what it was called, but it was SO good! Even better after I realized it had jalapeño in it, and took it out. I love the flavour, but don’t do spicy well at all, due to damage to my tongue. :-( That spiral cut potato in the background was delicious, too!
It was really hard to choose from the menu, though. I had originally intended to have a bento box, and as good as the burger was, I’m still not sure I made the right choice.
My daughters both ended up choosing a sushi and sashimi bento, while our guest chose the shrimp one I had been eye-balling. The only sushi we have available out here is grocery store sushi. I’ve tried it. It’s pretty… dry.
Choices like this is one of the things we do miss about city living!!!
While playing tourist, one of the places we visited as a prairie garden filled with native plants.
It looks a lot like our outer yard, except with all the varieties in a much smaller space. :-D Mind you, there were a few things I’ve never seen before, but most of it was quite familiar. I’ll post some of the better pictures I got, later on.
As we ran errands before heading out, my darling daughters found, then got, something for me.
Meet my new friend.
I think I will call him Yorick.
Alas, he is too big for my dash. As I write this, he sits on my printer, looking at me.
High winds last night. Lost the internet a few times. A bit of a storm, later on.
Several times, I took a quick walk around the yard to check on things and picked up downed branches (one of the apple trees in the west yard lost a big one).
I paused to take a short video, during which my heart was in my throat.
Can you see those power lines?
Can you see those branches, whipping about at the power lines?
When we can finally get those cleared, it’s going to be so much better for my blood pressure.
Though it’s only the end of August, everywhere we look, we see the signs of autumn.
This is one of the crab apple trees in the West yard. The apples are smaller than usual. Though the apples are not ripe yet, the tree, like so many others, is turning colour and dropping leaves already.
One of the plum trees has completely changed colour already, and the plums…
Most have already dropped, and what few remain on the tree are looking like these.
Today was our day for heading into the city for our monthly shop. Along the way, we saw flocks of Canada Geese in the fields, taking a break from heading south. We’ve been seeing them in fields on the way to town, too.
On the drive home (when it was warmer), the snakes were out. I was able to avoid a couple, but the highway had many squished snakes on it that others did not miss. They have been making their way to their hibernation dens to the north of us for at least a couple of weeks, now.
I had seen a news article about how it’s expected to be a mild winter this year, but earlier, I’d see that The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a long and bitterly cold winter, with possibly a late spring as well.
From what I’m seeing, I think The Farmer’s Almanac is likely to be the more accurate prediction. :-(
Either way, we’re going to have to start our fall preparations for winter over the next few weeks.
Beep Beep and her Tuxedo were around the house yesterday evening, so I decided to get a bit more aggressive about this whole luring of kittens thing.
I brought out the cat nip and the cat treats.
They ignored the cat nip.
They went nuts over the cat treats! Beep Beep was after them to the point that she would eat what I gave her, then find the one I gave to her kitten and eat that one, before he even figured out where it was. She’d even push him away!
We have a house guest for the next while, and she and my daughter came out to help, and to play with the cats. By the time they came back in, Rolando Moon, Teeny Tabby, Butterscotch and one of the calicos made a showing, too.
We did actually get to pet the tuxedo. He’d jump a bit and look, but would quickly return to hunting treats. He’d even try and take them out of my hand, sometimes, but he was slower about it and his mother would usually push her way in and take it first, no matter how we tried to distract her with others, so on the ground they went.
While in the area, I paused to take a look at my mother’s white roses. They have the darkest rose hips! So deep a read, they are almost black.
They are also not exactly intelligent creatures, though I know some breeds are smarter than others.
I was sitting in my office when I started to hear the sound of cows, mooing nearby. I realize the renter has cycled his cows back to our quarter section, and they are nearby. Happily, I go outside to see them.
The cows are spread out around the barn, including some in the old hay yard.
The hay yard is now cluttered with a number of abandoned vehicles and equipment. Including several old snowmobiles, I’m told are being kept for their parts.
Hearing an odd sound, I look in between various items.
Can you see the cow’s nose in there?
It took me a few moments to see that the noise I was hearing was of that cow, trying to eat the snowmobile.
To be more specific, the remains of the seat on the snowmobile.
I ended up going through the barn to the hay yard, to get them away from the snowmobiles. Which turned out to be a good thing, since I found the door to the lean to was open. There is a tree growing near it that blocks us from seeing it from the house, so who knows how long it was open!
This is what the cow was chewing on and licking. In the second video, you could see the cow going for something on the far side of the seat, too. That would likely be the foam from the seat that it was trying to get at.
Afterwards, I went out the back door of the barn. Some cows were around where an old shed had collapsed, and I could hear them getting into the metal roofing material that’s in there, so I wanted to check on things.
This is what greeted me out the back door.
Most of the cows and their calves avoided me, but these two were curious enough to stick around.
I then made my way over to the junk pile, starting to pick up and move over sheets of metal that had been blown over by the winds we’ve been having in the last while. As I get around the back side of the collapsed shed, I see…
Yeah. That black cow with its butt facing me is right on the junk. There is no grass or weeds there, so I have no idea what she’s after.
I really look forward to when we can get rid of this pile of junk!!
I continue around, which convinces the one cow to get off the junk. Some move away from me, while others come closer to check me out. I pick up and re-stack some of the sheets of metal siding, finding things to put on top of the pile to hopefully keep it from blowing over again, and make my way around between the pile and the shed.
One of the cows is braver than the others, and starts coming closer to me, watching what I’m doing.
I quickly realized that she was not chewing on grass, nor her cud.
She was chewing on a foreign object.
You might need to turn your volume up to hear this…
Now, this is concerning, because as far as I can tell, based on what’s lying around, she might be chewing on either wood or metal.
I tried to come closer to her, little by little, hoping to be able to see what she’s chewing on.
That’s one heck of a side-eye she’s giving me!
I kept trying to move around and get closer, without chasing her away, still trying to look into her mouth and see what she’s chewing on.
After a while, I start getting really concerned, because she’s got foam around her mouth from the chewing, and every now and then looked to be in some discomfort.
Then the object fell out of her mouth.
That, my dear friends, is a bone.
A beef bone.
I can’t say I was all that surprised. This is not the first time I’ve seen a cow chewing on a beef bone. When I was a kid, I remember walking past one of our cows and seeing her chewing with her head extended weirdly. She was familiar enough with me that I could walk up to her and reach into her mouth, where I pulled out one of the dogs’ beef bones. It was not as thoroughly chewed up as this one, though!
I have no idea where she found it, but I wouldn’t let her pick it up again.
She was displeased with that.
Ooh, this girl had attitude!
I proceed to kick the piece of bone away until I got it to the junk pile.
Once I was away, she started looking for it.
She wanted that bone back! She just kept snuffling and snuffling the area.
At this point, I decided it was time to head out and went back around the junk pile to go to the barn. Where I found…
This was not here, the last time I tried to clean up around the pile. In fact, I don’t remember seeing it just a few minutes before, when I went past here to go around the pile and found the cow standing right on the junk.
It is, I believe, from one of the snowmobiles.
I took it into the barn when I went in and closed up the doors again.
As I come out the front doors of the barn, I look back and see…
Can you believe it? That cow, with company, actually found where I’d kicked the piece of bone!
I’m hoping she wasn’t able to get it out, but she seems quite determined!
I know it’s a running joke that goats will eat anything.
Empty beer cans are not the only interesting things I’ve been finding in the spruce grove!
I’ve found a few different seating arrangements that use logs as the supports.
I’m at a loss as to why these bricks and… a can? are here. That they have been here long enough to grow moss on them likely means probably no one alive has any idea, anymore!
The remains a of a wasps nest still hang from a branch.
The dark grey section underneath is actually a sort of ball, hanging down from the rest of the nest above.
What a night it was last night! A night when we really appreciated what we can accomplish with our modern communications technology!
Late last night, I drove my mother to meet a family member that was supposed to arrive shortly after midnight.
Earlier in the day, I had been in contact with his daughter through a messenger app, where she had informed me that his flight left 2 hours late. We even exchanged photos, so he would know what I looked like, and we would know what he looked like.
Before leaving for the airport, I checked his connecting flight to see that it was running on time. Not hearing from his daughter to let me know if he missed his connection, we figured he caught his flight and off we went.
Shortly after arriving, she and I started messaging each other. More photos were shared.
My older brother started texting me. He and his wife were at the airport as a surprise, and looking for us.
We took a group selfie to send out.
Then I get another message, this time from my sister, who lives in the boonies, much like I do. She had just received a phone call from our relative. He had missed his connecting flight, and the airline got him set up for another flight, but not until 8am. Once we realized he would not be on the flight we were waiting for, we found a place to have some drinks. My brother started looking up flight information on his phone, while I continued to communicate with both the daughter in Europe, and my sister out of town.
In no time at all, we had all the information we needed, were assured our relative was spending the night in a hotel, and since the new arrival time conflicted with my schedule, arranged alternative transportation. While all this was going on, I got another message from my husband; unsure if she would reach me, my sister had phoned the land line and let him know about the missed connection and new times, and he was passing it on to me.
Six people. Two continents. Two provinces. Seven time zones.
Gosh, I love technology!
To top it all off, though we missed picking up our family last night, the four of us had a great visit with each other at the airport, and my drive in and out with my mother was absolutely amazing. She was having one of her good days, which was so wonderful! During the drive back, at 2am, she started telling me things she remembered from her childhood, including a couple of stories from WWII, when her village was taken control of by the Nazis, as part of a strategic route to Russia, the border of which was just a few kilometers from her village at the time. She was only about 10 yrs old at the time, but she still remembers quite a bit. She has lived through some pretty amazing experiences, and it was good to hear about some of them.
We started to get air quality warnings for smoke, yesterday.
This time, however, the smoke isn’t coming from the fires in the west, but from fires in the east!
Driving my daughter in to work this morning, the smoke was even heavier than when it started blowing in yesterday afternoon.
I went to the lake to check it out. The fires, from what I’ve heard, are on the far side of it. There were pretty high winds, and even in the length of time I was there, it got noticeably smokier.
These guys were a bit of a surprise…
I’d seen some brownish lumps on the rocks in the distance, and could not tell what they were. As I was taking photos, I wasn’t paying too much attention to them until I got close, and realized they were ducks! Normally, I would never have been able to get as close as I did to them. They were far more interested in tucking their heads out of the wind, than in me!
This is looking to the north while stopped at an intersection.
The air was actually smokier than it appears in the photos.
The air quality warnings say it should blow over by tomorrow morning.
I would think that would depend on the state of the fires!
Normally, I would be taking advantage of the cooler weather to work outside, but my lungs are already irritated by the smoke, so it will wait. Things are going to be a bit hectic for the next few days, as I will be driving my mother to meet a family member from Poland at the airport tonight – arrival is after midnight! – and we prepare for our own house guest that will be arriving on Monday.
These, at least, are pleasant things to deal with. In today’s mail, I found an unpleasant thing to deal with. A letter from legal firm of the co-op we used to live in. They’re still trying to stiff us for the shares return the owe us, and are basically threatening us with a bill of over $20K for “damages” we supposedly did – meaning the needed renovations that were done – if we decide to sue them for the shares.
We’re talking a few hundred bucks here. It probably cost them more to pay for the lawyer to mail us the letter, than what they’re demanding we pay them. I wonder what the membership would think, if they knew their board was blowing money on lawyers like this?
When I started clearing out at the spruce grove, my husband was able to get a picture from the living room, as I was dragging the downed tree top out of the bush.
So here is me, in my grubbies. A decidedly unflattering picture, but then, this kind of work isn’t pretty, either! :-D
The difficulty was maneuvering it between two trees, when its branches were wider than the space. Most broke off, but I did have to cut one larger branch to get it through.
Since starting an Instagram account connected to this blog, I’ve been following a number of farm and country related accounts. Most heavily feature farming equipment (swoon!) or cute animals. Then there are the hashtag “women farmers” ones. The usual pictures of people holding armfuls of vegetables, or adorable baby livestock, except focusing on pretty women. I do have to admit to giggling a bit over some of them that feature conventionally beautiful, thin women in painted on jeans, perfect hair, coordinated outfits, and not a bit of dirt or sweat, anywhere. Then there’s me; short, fat, burly, wearing the sweats I stole from my much taller husband (they have elastics around the ankles; keeps the bugs out), twigs stuck in my braid, and dirt accumulated in the sweat of my neck and elbows. But I do have my sparkly, sequined, dollar store baseball cap!
I realize that, for a lot of people, their Instagram accounts are a branding tool, so they’re not going to show the grungy side of country life. Not going to gain a big following doing that!
Me? I couldn’t post pictures like that if I wanted to! LOL
It was a hot one today, so no progress on pruning and clearing the spruce grove today. My daughter was able to get some of what I cut away yesterday, hauled out, before it got too hot. It’s 7:30pm as I write this, and we’re still at 30C, and we’re supposed to hit the 30s again, tomorrow. So it was a good day to be inside!
It’s probably for the best. After driving my younger daughter to work, I was thinking of getting more work done on the grove while it was still cooler. In the end, I found I had to painkiller up and lie down for a while. My body was reminding me not to overdo things again.
Getting old sucks, sometimes! :-D
This evening, Beep Beep and her kittens were out while I did a walk around the yard. I did a bit of watering, including the grape vine, though I harvested most of the grapes, yesterday evening. Some bunches weren’t ripe yet, but I could also see that something – likely a bird – has been eating them, so I want to leave some behind. I don’t want to take away some creature’s food source.
The kittens wouldn’t let me come near them, even when the tuxedo deigned to play with the end of a stick I was wiggling for him. When I headed towards the storage house, they ran ahead of me and hid in the lilacs. When I got near the stairs, I could see a sparkly cat toy I’d brought out for them some time ago, and went to get it.
Which is when I noticed something in the dead leaves and grass.
I wonder how many years it had been there? :-D
I sat on the stairs for a while, eating some of the grapes that had ripened since yesterday. The tuxedo was watching me from the lilacs, so I tossed over the cat toy, which he immediately pounced on.
He’s pretty much right on top of where I found the shot glass.
Then there was Beep Beep.
No birds use this bird bath. I wonder why?
If you look under the grape leaves, you can see the black fur of the tuxedo kitten, sitting on the tire planter.
You know, growing up here, I never imagined I would ever someday be sitting on the steps, eating fresh grapes off the vine. I never imagined there would ever be grapes that could grow here!
Late last night, I drove my mother to meet a family member that was supposed to arrive shortly after midnight.
