I headed outside when things started to cool down and gave the garden beds another watering. I also snagged the trays of Spoon tomatoes and “potted them up”.
Which was just taking off the lower leaves and adding more soil to the cups. These were all so tiny when they were transplanted from the Jiffy pellets, the cups were barely half full of soil. Even now, a couple of them are so small, the cups still couldn’t be filled to the top. A few of the largest ones, however, actually seem to be showing the beginnings of blossoms!
We’ve got 30 of these, plus the Romas, and I still don’t know where they will be planted. It all depends on how much progress there is on the new trellis beds that still need to be built!
Next, I transplanted the lemongrass.
I treated the pot a bit like filling a raised bed; on the bottom, I put a layer of grass clippings, which got a good soak, then potting soil. The potting soil was really dry, so it took quite a bit more soaking to get it moist.
For the lemongrass, I decided to break them up and plant them individually, instead of in groups. That meant breaking up the biodegradable pots. These had been started in smaller, square, biodegradable cells of the same material, so when I potted them up, I just put the whole starter cell into the bigger pot.
For biodegradable pots, they sure don’t break up easy. They were still pretty rootbound in the original cells! So I pulled those pieces out, too. Considering how much handling the roots got, I really hope they survive!
Once transplanted and watered, I very carefully mulched with grass clippings. This pot is set up on the concrete landing of the stairs in front of the main doors. A good, warm microclimate for an herb that needs much warmer temperatures than what we usually grow here. It’s going to get pretty baked, though, so the clippings will help moderate the temperatures as well as protect the soil and transplants. Once the clippings were in place, I was going to give it one last watering.
The handle broke off the sprayer.
*sigh*
I bought is at part of a 2pc set, so I did have another nozzle I could use. I just don’t like it very much. It’s the kind where the spray is adjusted by turning the tip of the spray head. It doesn’t spray very well. Ah, well. Something else for the list of broken things to replace!
Then I finally!!! finished the cover over the shallots bed.
The ends are now closed off, so no cats can walk through and use the shallots as a bed!
As I was finishing this off, I could hear thunder that seemed to be coming closer, so my daughters and I quickly got the rest of the transplants inside. According to them, we did have smatterings of rain today, while I was in the city, and even had a very brief downpour last night! I never heard a thing. There sure wasn’t any sign of it when I watered the garden beds this morning.
Whatever system I was hearing this evening, it passed us by. A good rainfall really would have been nice! It got so very muggy out there!
Tomorrow is supposed to be another hot one, with no expectation of rain at all, so I plan to get an early start. The largest tomatoes need to be transplanted, but I want to put in the supports for the indeterminate Indigo Blue Chocolates first. The Black Beauties can be staked individually.
Which means an early bed time for me, and hopefully a good sleep!
It was too windy to start taking down trees, though from a direction that allowed me to take the transplants out. So instead, I started mowing the driveway and outer yard. The inner yard really needs a mow, too, but not as urgently as the outer yard. That and I had the gate open for a prescription delivery, so that gave me a chance to mow all the way to the road, which is behind me in the picture above.
You can really see how far I had been able to scythe and mow the grass last year, and where I couldn’t. I was basically mowing old hay with fresh grass growing through it, which meant constant back and forthing in small sections to get it done.
This will need to be raked up so it doesn’t smother the grass below. I am quite happy to have it for mulch!
I mowed until I ran out of gas a second time and then just stopped. I was physically done for the day! Thankfully, today was a cooler day – as I write this, we’ve reached our forecasted high of 18C/64F – making it much more pleasant to work in. That’s about average for this time of year. The next couple of days are supposed to be in the 28-29C/82-84F range. The record high for today is 30C/86F, but the record low is -3C/27F, so I’m not about to complain!
Before I started on the mowing, I had to head into town to get more cat kibble. We ran out of outside cat kibble awfully fast for an 11kg bag. I had gone into town a couple days ago and looked for some, but a 9kg bag was almost $44, so I figured I could wait. This morning, however, I finished off the bin for the outside cats – and that was after adding the last of the kibble from a bag for the inside cats. They still have enough in a bin to last until I can do the big shop, plus wet cat food, but there was no more spare for the outside cats.
While I was in town a couple of days ago, which was Victoria Day and a statutory holiday I completely forgot about, my daughter gave me her wallet and asked me to pick up some hoagies for her.
I wasn’t able to do that.
The entire section was completely empty!
I was also finding other sections strangely empty – until I thought about it and realized that the empty shelves were basically all for BBQ/picnic type stuff, including certain condiments. I’m thinking some organization was having a big first BBQ of the year and cleaned out the supply!
So I went to a different store today, hoping to find kibble at a better price. The same brand name 9kg bag was even more expensive, but they did have a house brand that was a reasonable price.
While I was there, I went ahead and looked to see if they had any hoagies. They had lots, but…
… I just about had a heart attack over that price! Those bags aren’t any bigger than the ones the other store normally carries.
Yes, the labels on this brand say Smokies. We call them hoagies.
No, I didn’t buy any.
Yikes!
While I was there, I ran into someone that I know that works there, and he started asking me if I was moving.
Yup. My Facebook thief was at it again, with posts listing items for a moving sale. The same post they’ve sent out at least twice before, that I know of.
I’ve had friends send me screen captures of all the stuff I’m supposedly selling. I had sent a friend request to this person from my new account which, understandably, he ignored. Usually, it’s the friend request from someone already on your friends list that is the fake! So I told him what happened, and asked him to report my old account and any strange posts like this. He then told me that he started to suddenly get Messenger messages from someone on his friends list that were very odd. Asking for help, much like the message that fooled me. He’d been ignoring them, since this was someone who normally never communicates with him, but suddenly he was getting all these messages asking “why won’t you answer?”, etc.
I had also had a chance this morning to talk on the phone with a friend from where we lived before moving here. On seeing strange posts from “me” about giving away a PS5 because I caught my “boyfriend” cheating me, she actually DM’s “me” to ask if I was okay, and what happened with my husband. The thief tried to pretend to be me and said “I” got a divorce because “I” caught my husband (no longer a boyfriend? 😄) cheating on me. It became pretty clear this was not me, and she asked for my husband’s name and where did she live, only to have the person start playing a guilt try, saying things like “why are you asking me all these questions”. So I was able to clear that up with her, too.
When I was outside mowing, the pharmacy delivery driver arrived, and we talked for a while. He saw the “moving sale” I was supposedly having, too. I asked him to report my original page and any posts from it. By this time, because people were getting confused with my new account and old account (my new account’s name was almost identical to my old account) I had changed my display name a bit. Hopefully, people would still recognize that it’s me, but not get mixed up with the old account.
One of the things that I noticed about the screencaps of comments people are sending me, is that there are people showing interest in these items “I” am selling, but I have no idea who they are. They are not on my original friends list. Either they got added after my account was stolen, or the thief is using other stolen or fake account to leave comments and make the scam post look legitimate.
It might be working.
As I was writing this post, I got a message from another friend, with screen captures of someone commenting about the PS5 giveaway, saying he’d take it and offering to pay for shipping. This was an online friend I’d already reconnected with, but not someone I know in person, so I quickly sent him a message, explaining about the screencap of his comments. I thought there might be several possibilities: either he really did think this was me (even though I messaged him about my stolen account after sending a friend request), he knew it wasn’t me and was trying to play the thief, it was being posted by a cloned account, or his account was stolen, like mine was.
It turned out he’d been tricked!
I’m so glad I stopped working on this post to message him right away, because while we were chatting, the thief contacted him and asked for $61 for shipping.
And this is why these scammers steal accounts. Some people actually fall for their fake posts, and send them money, thinking they are sending money to someone they know.
He responded by telling them to F off. Then he sent me the response he got to that…
“You sound skeptic from your last message, that very wrong if you think am here to play you or just trying to take advantage of you. When I know how people work hard nowadays to get money, I will never think of taking someone advantages over you and playing you, please take that out off your mind that is really awful thing on the earth that I will never think about doing.”
As if that weren’t enough, while I was chatting with my friend that sent me the screencaps, and the guy who almost got scammed, I got a message from someone I don’t know, but we have a mutual friend (I have my settings so that “friends of friends” can contact me). They saw the moving sale list and were interested in the 55″ TV and wanted to know the make and model number. How they ended up DMing me to my new account, instead of my original account, I don’t know, but I’m glad it worked out that way. I told them about the stolen account and asked them to report it. When I found out about the other person getting the message about sending money for shipping, I let them know about that, too. Not long after, they let me know that they told my thief that they were reporting them, and the thief took the ad down.
So it looks like, when they make these posts and tag people on my original friends list, the posts show up on their profile pages, and their friends can see it, too. Which would explain the people I don’t know being able to comment on “my” posts – they’re commenting through someone else’s page. The farther removed the viewers are from the stolen account, the easier for them to be tricked, since they don’t know me and wouldn’t recognize that these are not things I would normally post. The friend I talked to on the phone this morning told me she had gone looking through my old profile page, trying to figure out what was going on. She noticed that a lot of things that she saw me sharing in the past (I hit the share button a lot!) were gone, leaving only innocuous posts about Advent or other holidays. Even the posts she saw before, like the one where “I” was giving away a PS5 because of a cheating boyfriend were gone. Those ones get reported so much, Facebook might actually be taking them down, too.
You’d think, with so many people reporting the account as hacked, me reporting it as stolen from me, and even my finally being able to send in proof of ID, Facebook would finally clue in that there’s a problem with this account. But nope. Even with the ID part, where it says the identify confirmation is done by both automated systems and a real human being, did not seem to work. They seemed to think I was trying to recover my new account, not my original account. You have to be logged out to go through this process, but you still start from the “recover your account” stage, where I would have found my original account (which I can do because I got a notification telling me what my primary email address had been changed to, but was never able to use the “if this wasn’t us, click here” option) and gone from there.
It is such a mess, and Facebook has been so incredibly useless. If it weren’t for the fact that someone is actively using my account, pretending to be me, while trying to scam people, this would be the thing to drive me off Facebook completely.
While going through all this, I am hearing from SO many people who have had their accounts hacked, stolen or cloned, or had strange messages from people similar to the one that fooled me.
With Facebook being so useless about recovering accounts, it’s no wonder. The scammers are having a field day.
Which all leaves me with another level of exhaustion. I am wasting so much time dealing with this.
It’s so bright out right now, I didn’t realize it’s past 9pm, and I haven’t done a blog post yet!
I’m tired.
A good tired!
I finally got the chainsaw out and cut down trees that will be used to build our trellis tunnel.
I started out doing some clean up, first. Several of the apple trees that were discovered when I first cleared this area were dead or partly dead. I cut away the dead parts, which left only a couple of spindly trees.
Then I dropped a poplar on one of them!
It wasn’t supposed to work out that way. The tree was actually falling exactly where I meant it to. Then some branches got hung up on another poplar, which just kept bending and bending until the tree I cut down rolled off, directly on top of the apple tree!
I can’t say it’s a loss, though. As far as I know, these trees have never produced fruit, because of where they are. My mother says she planted them, but they were whatever crab apple seedling she found, so it’s unlikely any fruit they produced would even be edible. My mother had no understanding of how apples need to be grafted, not grown from seed, until I explained it to her. To her, it was all about them being “free”. I know my dad grafted apple trees but most of those died, and only the suckers remain.
Anyhow.
Cleaning things up opened the space to get at the trees I was after. Some of them could only fall in one direction – onto the fence! The fence is already breaking apart, so I wasn’t too worried. It actually handled having trees drop on it several times, surprisingly well! The power line that runs from the garage to the outlet on a fence post I was using had a lot of slack, so there was no risk to it.
A couple of the trees that fell over the fence had to have their trunks cut into two shorter pieces so I could get them free of the fence. I made sure to cut them in such a way that the straightest parts of the trunk were still at a useable length for both. Altogether, I’ve now got about a dozen logs, most of which are long enough that I can get at least a couple of lengths for vertical supports out of them.
While cutting down select poplars, I was also able to finally cut up and removed a dead, rotten tree that had fallen three years ago. I needed to clear it to access the last tree I wanted to cut down. While it was too rotten to be useable for building something, it was still solid enough that the wood can be used as fire pit fuel. 🔥🌭 I was even able to remove some of the little stumps I’d left all over the place, waiting until I had the tools to cut them to ground level. I kept them high, so that they could be seen and avoided, though I still found myself almost tripping over some of the shorter ones!
It was 24C/75F when I finally had to stop – and we were still expected to get warmer! The next step for the logs will be to cut them to length for the vertical supports on the trellis tunnel, then drag them over to where the tunnel will be built. We also need to cut down some of the thinner dead spruce trees, which will be used to form mid-height raised beds at the bases of the trellis tunnel. Once we have the materials, hopefully the build will go quickly.
I gotta tell ya, by the time I was dragging that last tree over to the pile, then cleaning up, I was moving real slow! I was certainly glad I remembered to bring a water bottle out with me. Getting dehydrated in this heat would not have been good.
Tomorrow is supposed to be a cooler day, but we’re also supposed to get some rain, so we’ll see how much I’ll be able to get done while using an electric chain saw.
In other things, the transplanted squash and gourds seem to be handling their transition well. Even the Sweet Chocolate peppers are showing no signs of transplant shock at all! That’s quite encouraging. If the weather holds, I might start transplanting out the biggest, oldest tomatoes. The beds they’ll be going into still need preparation, though, so we’ll see. Ultimately, it all depends on the weather.
I think some pain killers and an early bed time are in order, now!
I just spent about two hours, working on this bed.
Last year, we had tomatoes against the fence, carrots down the middle, and onions along the bricks in the foreground to about half way, then shallots the rest of the way.
The shallots got drowned, as did most of the carrots at that end. At this time last year, the vehicle gate at the far end of the photo was full of water. While the slightly raised bed meant the surface was above water, it was still too wet for the plant roots.
I set up the tripod and my “spare” cell phone to do a time lapse video of getting this bed ready, which leads me to the frustrating part. When I finished and went to get it off the tripod, I found it was shut down. Low battery. I was curious to find out when it died. I did pause the time lapse part way through, while I went to get something.
I should have stopped the recording instead of pausing it. Then I would at least have had something!
I’ve uploaded the file, but it’s been corrupted by the battery dying. I can’t view the file. Almost 2 hours, inaccessible.
That’s what I get for starting at 73%!
Yeah, it’s charging now.
What I ended up doing was removing the wire “fence” and the dried grass mulch. Then it got loosened with a garden fork before I went back over it by hand, pulling out as many roots and rhizomes as I could. Surprisingly, I kept finding onions! Most of them were even starting to grow. I even found a single shallot that I’d left because it had gone to seed. The seed head was never able to fully mature, but the bulb was still looking viable!
Once I’d cleared the weeds and roots out (including roots from the nearby lilac and elms), the soil got raked back into place, with many pauses to pull out more weeds that got missed. Then I replaced the wire “fence”, planted the onions in the foreground, along the bricks, the single shallot at the opposite end, raked the path clear of grass mulch, weeds and roots. The last step was to water the bed, including the onions and shallot, and pressure spraying the bricks and the boards along the chain link clear of soil.
After I’ve taken a break, I’ll go back to plant peas along the fence. Since the peas will eventually shade anything planted in the rest of the bed, I’m thinking this might be a good place to try planting some of the lettuces we have found ourselves with, since they can also be planted before last frost.
Finally, there’s the sad find.
Before I started working on the bed and was setting up, I decided to check the old dog houses set up near the outhouse, in the off chance one of the cats decided to have their kittens in one of them. The first one I checked, I basically stuck my phone into the opening and took a flash picture, since I can’t actually see all the way to the back.
The entrance to the other old dog house faces the other way, and when I went around to look inside, I was started to find an orange cat lying in the opening, with its head right in the entry.
It was clearly dead for some time.
At first, I thought it was Rolando Moon. We haven’t seen her in a while, and she’s an old cat, but then I realized this cat had longer fur. We’d spotted a long haired orange cat a couple of times – once when my daughter ran out to break up a cat fight. Since then, I’ve found a whole lot of long orange cat fur around the van in the garage, so clearly this cat was being given a hard time by Shop Towel (aka: Sad Face). I actually looked around and under the van to see if I would find an injured cat, there was that much fur. No blood trails, though.
Well, it now looks like the cat found its way into the shelter of one of the old dog houses and succumbed to its injuries.
Crap.
We didn’t know this cat and have no idea where it came from, but I still feel sad that it came here, only to end up dying. At least the ground isn’t frozen anymore, so we’ll be able to bury it.
*sigh*
I really wish Shop Towel wasn’t so aggressive with the other toms. We have a lot of males reaching adulthood right now. Hopefully, he won’t start going after them, too! I’ve been seeing him around for the last few days. He looks in rough shape, so he’s not getting out of these battles unscathed, but still not as rough as The Distinguished Guest – someone else we haven’t seen in a while.
Taking care of the colony is a joy, but it does have its sad times, like today.
I spent much of the day working on the old kitchen garden. We reached highs of 16C/61F, almost no wind, bright and sunny. It got ridiculously hot, and I had to stop for a couple of breaks in the middle of it. That, and my phone kept going off with notifications that I wanted to check.
More on that later.
I was set up to do a time lapse video, and I’ll be continuing in another bed tomorrow, so this is a sneak peak of the first finished bed.
I ended up building it one level higher than I was originally expecting to, which means I’ll need to find another tree or two to work on the other one! I might add more garden soil to this later but, at this point, I’m calling it done.
Now for the idiot part.
One of the notifications I got was from a friend from high school that we’re connected with on Facebook, saying hello using Messenger. When I took a hydration and lunch break, I responded. By the time I finished up and was ready to go back outside, I could see she hadn’t looked at my responses yet, so out I went again.
When the heat started to get to me, I headed back inside and found she had responded. She was having some issues logging in with her Facebook, and was asking for my help. I knew of a security feature that allowed for approved friends to help with that. Still, I did check, scrolling up the message feed and confirming that there were past conversations. After all, I’ve had people message me from cloned accounts before. The past messages were there, and it seemed legit, so I helped out.
Then, like and idiot, I accidentally gave the person access to my own personal Facebook account, allowing them to log in with a new password. I was actually using my Facebook account at the same time and, suddenly, both my Facebook and my Messenger were logged out, and I realized what happened.
I could still log into my Re-Farmer account, and promptly changed the password. It was only later that I saw emails to my personal email, my backup email, and even my Re-Farmer email, telling me my password was changed and that my personal email had been removed as the primary email from my personal Facebook account. At least that one sent me the email address that it was changed to. The first part of it matched my back up email for my personal account.
On the plus side, other security features has ensured my other accounts were not compromised. I was able to find where to report the theft, so now it’s up to Facebook.
If I hadn’t been in the middle of things as I was, I probably would have caught on, but then again, maybe not. It’s hard to say.
Meanwhile, my Facebook, Messenger (which I used a lot) and Instagram (which I have pretty much stopped using), are now controlled by someone else.
I was able to let some people know about it. My husband was able to post a comment about my page, which is still up and unchanged, as of this writing, saying that my profile had been stolen.
What a pain. The good thing is, I don’t have anything of value as far as personal information on there. The one thing that is of value is my friends list, so I’m trying to warn as many people as I can, in case they start getting message from me like the one I got that I thought was from my friend.
We shall see how that plays out.
Until then, there isn’t much I can do but wait and see what Facebook does.
So tomorrow, it’s back to work.
Considering how much time I tend to be on Facebook, I might just end up being more productive because of this! 😄😄
Well, I wasn’t able to get progress images of what my daughters did, but I did get to set up another time lapse video later on. I was able to reclaim the bed by the chain link fence and sow one variety of bread seed poppies.
Having the rake handle break on me while I was clearing outside of the chain link fence was a bit of a downer! We had others I could have used, but I just kept using it, anyhow. It got the job done!
Also, I had a lot of cats visiting me while I worked!
I hope you enjoy the video. 😊 If you select to watch it on YouTube, you can hit the like and subscribe buttons, if you wish.
I had a HUGE and wonderful surprise yesterday evening!
Now that things are nicer outside, I’ve been able to do more extended evening rounds after feeding the outside cats for the night. My first surprise came as I was putting kibble out in the sun room. The Phantom was there, as usual, and I’ve been able to sneak some pets while she eats. I tried again, and she actually let me pet her more instead of running away! She was quite enjoying them until I left to her finish eating and continued me rounds.
I was just finishing up and about to come inside, when I saw Broccoli had finally come over to eat, and was on the cat house roof.
So, while she had her back to me, I decided to try and sneak a pet.
Not only did she not run away when she realized I was petting her, but she wanted more! She was absolutely all over, rolling around and pushing against my hands, wanting more pets. This is a cat we’ve been trying to socialize for more than two years, with no progress, and suddenly, BAM!
But would it happen again?
This morning, she came out for food later again, and much of the kibble on the cat house roof was gone, but there was still enough for her nibble. When I came over, she happily accepted pets again!
She was also clearly very, very hungry, so I didn’t bother her too much.
She is such a beauty!
She is also very skinny and bony.
Yesterday, I tried to touch her belly, to see if she was nursing, but I couldn’t tell. Yes, I could feel nip, but none seemed more prominent than the others. Without actually seeing her belly, though, I can’t say for sure. Given the time of year, it would not surprise me if she lost a litter. I don’t know. I’m happy to see her eating well, though, because this girl needs meat on her bones!
This girl, however, is fine.
Marlee is a solid slab of compact muscle!
While I’m sitting at my computer in the evenings, she comes over and demands I reach down to pet her, but she will NOT let me pick her up. She’s also been spending more time on my bed, even with other cats beside her. There’s quite the difference, though. Where the other cats are relaxed and tend to turn into big puddles on the soft, comfy bed, she is a tight little ball, with everything tucked in, and looking very alert, even when she’s asleep. She’s still got those survival habits in place, that’s for sure. She still won’t leave the room. I did try taking her with me into the living room while I was working on potting things up, but she just hunkered down at the barrier door and wouldn’t move until I opened it, and then she went right to my bedroom door, wanting back in.
It’s a chilly, damp and dreary day today. You know what that means?
Gotta do something gardening related!
Today, I potted up the Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes.
I’d started them in a peat tray with two rows of four square cells. One row for the tomatoes, one for the Little Finger Eggplant. I planted 4 seeds per cell, which got me 11 plants, which is quite a good germination rate.
I wish I could say the same for the eggplant! Only three germinated, so I replanted. As of today, I have finally seen one tiny, barely visible seedling, germinating. Hopefully, that means we’ll see more, soon.
In other things, yesterday I finally saw the tiniest, microscopic oregano seedling, and this afternoon, there was an equally tiny spearmint. The Roma tomatoes sharing the tray, however, are doing great. I’ll have to get more soil for potting up. Quite a bit more. The Roma and Spoon tomatoes will need to be potted up, and eventually the peppers sharing the tray with the Spoon tomatoes will need potting up, too – there are finally more and more of the peppers germinating!
I’m going to start running out of shelf space for the plant trays! It will be good when things warm up enough to start moving trays into the sun room – and start keeping the yard cats out! Last year, we set up a surface using a couple of saw horses and an old closet door I found when cleaning the outhouse over the swing bench, which worked out really well. We’ll have to work out something better to support the lights, though. We’ve got a few weeks to figure things out.
We’ll also have to figure out what to use to protect the plants when it’s time to harden them off. Last year, we used the frame of my daughter’s market tent, with an unused, home made bed frame made out of plywood on it. This kept the plants high enough that none of the cats went after them. The market tent is being use now, though, and the bed frame got painted and is now in the basement, keeping litter boxes raised off the concrete floor – just in case things get wet again. I think I saw a folding table in one of the sheds – it’ll take some doing to access it to confirm, and see if it’s big enough. The problem will be how to keep the cats off, since it would be about half the height of the frame we used before.
We’ll come up with something!
It just felt good to do at least a little big garden related, today!
The snow on the driveway is pretty hard packed, but there are a few softer areas where tracks show up. This morning, I was seeing some unusual deer tracks.
Then I checked the gate cam files.
I watched at least 7 deer, over three videos, coming in. Later, the camera caught three of them running out again, at full speed!
That certainly explains what I was seeing in the snow this morning!
I have another slight change in plans today. I was going to meet a woman in a parking lot for a great deal… 😉 The homesteader I buy most of our eggs from is going to be in the town closer to us with a load of eggs at a certain time and place, so I figured that would be a good time to get a couple more flats
Then I got a phone call from my mother. I had bought an extra dozen eggs for my mother as a surprise a while back, and she was wondering if I would be getting more eggs. She wanted to get another dozen for her Easter basket – eggs she wouldn’t need to colour!
So I contacted the egg lady, letting her know how many I was after. She’ll have enough, so I’ll be getting eggs for both ourselves and my mother. Though it’s a bit early for Easter!
The funny thing is, I’ll be going to the town closer to us, getting the eggs, then driving to my mother’s place, which is in a town between our place and the egg lady. So instead of saving some driving, I’m at least doubling it! 😄 I don’t mind, though. I’m glad my mother liked the eggs I got her! Last time, though, she ended up with all brown eggs. This time, I’ll make sure she gets a few in other colours.
With that in mind, I’ve slightly postponed starting seeds today. I was able to pick up more Jiffy pellets to refill a tray, which is now set up and hydrating. Tomorrow, the rest of our peppers – all early varieties – and some Spoon tomatoes will be started. Depending on how much room I have in the tray, I may even fit in some Purple Beauty bell pepper seeds from last year. That was all I have that need to be started indoors in the 8-10 week range. We’re currently at about 9 weeks before our last frost, so next week I hope to start the seeds that need 6-8 weeks.
I’m going to have to figure out how to raise the mini greenhouse frame higher, in a secure manner, because we’re eventually going to need the shelf space. Where the shelves and frame are sitting, they get excellent sun in the morning, but the bottom shelves of the mini greenhouse are in the shadow of the wall under the window. I know how I can get it higher. It’s that “secure manner” that’s a bit more of a challenge.
Looking at the newest seedlings in the large aquarium greenhouse, I could see roots making their way through the biodegradable pots the Crespo squash are in. They need to be potted up! Right now, there are three, big healthy seedlings in one pot, and a new one coming up in the other pot. I’ll see if I can thin by diving. I’d hoped to have larger biodegradable pots to pot up to, but I’m just not finding them. I suppose I could order online, but by the time they get here, it’ll be too late. So they will go into plastic transplant pots.
We did lose that one sickly drum gourd, but the others are doing well. The Zucca melon, however, is really thriving. Both still have pots that were reseeded, so we might get more of each.
The thyme is doing so well, I’m thinking of eventually potting up one of the bunches into a permanent pot for growing indoors, while the others get planted outdoors. We have a second variety of thyme to start, but not for a few more weeks. I’m curious to see the differences between the variety. As small as the current seedlings still are, they have SUCH a strong fragrance when the leaves are handled.
I am quite happy with the new, cat proof living room set up. It’s really making things much easier this year!
A while back, I was seeing the one ‘iccus that was still around. Chaddicus? Thadiccus? I know it’s not Bradiccus, because he had a white tail tip and was… well… male… and I don’t think it’s Saddicus…). This cat was very pregnant, so when I heard a kitten squeaking that one day, I assumed it was … Thadiccus. I’ll settle on Thadiccus.
But then I started seeing the mama, and finding dead babies, and when she came to me for comfort and cuddles, I realized it was Junk Pile.
Except this morning, I saw both of them at the same time.
That’s Junk Pile on the right, sitting on the roof. She no longer lets me touch her, never mind carry her, but at least she doesn’t run off quite as much.
That’s Thaddicus in the kibble house.
Junk Pile has more white on her chest area, but if you can’t see that area, they look almost identical. We also don’t often see them both at the same time, and I hadn’t seen Junk Pile for days before the kitten sadness.
Thaddicus is not pregnant anymore.
Which means, there is a litter of kittens somewhere outside the yard. If they survived being born this early in the year.
*sigh*
Thaddicus tends not to relax when people are around, so the chances of her lying in a position where I might see if she’s nursing is very low.
Meanwhile, Rosencrantz is also getting pretty big. She tends to have her litters in the junk pile by the chain link fence. I was really hoping we’d be able to catch her and get her fixed before she got pregnant again.
At least last year’s kittens were mostly male, and the Cat Lady has been able to help us with the females that we’d been able to socialize. Still, we have three calicos and two torties that are quite feral, so we will potentially have quite a few litters again this year.
*sigh*
Well, we’ll see how many of the males disappear over the summer, and find their own territory somewhere else.
Meanwhile…
My attempt to find a new doctor has not been successful. I found a third clinic in the town we’ve been going to and called them this morning, but they are not accepting new patients. When I asked, the receptionist knew of only one doctor that was accepting new patients, and that was in the smaller city where the specialist I took my mother to see is located, and I know that would be more than my mother would be willing to put up with. My husband and I still have some options to explore, but unless we’re willing to go to the cities, there are no doctors available for my mother.
So, we’ll likely wait to see when new doctors transfer to our doctor’s clinic, to replace the three that are leaving.
In between all that, I’ve been cleaning up and cleaning out this blog, to reclaim media storage space. It has been unexpectedly frustrating.
I’ve been taking out my old Critter of the Day and Photo of the Day posts. I hadn’t realized just how many of them there were! I started doing these in 2018! Most of these had only a line or two of text, or none at all. All had at least one image, with some having two or three images. So far, I’ve deleted images from and trashed over 270 posts. The first frustration is that so far, this has only recovered a little over 1% of my 13 gigs of storage space. On the plus side, 1% storage space is enough for a lot of photos!
I was going to start with the oldest posts and work my way to the more recent, since it was a while before we figured out how much to reduce our file sizes and not use up memory too quickly, so a lot of those files are larger, even though we had already started to crop and resize fairly quickly. A number of them won’t be removed, since the images in them are stored on Flickr. Flickr limits the number of files you can upload, however, so I can’t use that anymore, without getting a Pro account. I don’t want more annual fees.
The biggest frustrations I’ve been having is with WordPress’ lack of media organization. Everything that’s uploaded is there by date of upload, but if you try to do a search for, say, all images uploaded in a specific year and month, the only thing that will come up are images where the year and month are part of the file name. The only way to see all the images for a month is to keep scrolling back in time. Which is fine for the most recent couple of years, but this is a very photo heavy blog, and after a while, WordPress starts really struggling. Then I start getting pop ups saying WordPress is not responding, asking me if I want to wait or cancel, as thumbnails of images stop loading for a while before suddenly whole groups of them will appear. Then I can scroll down a bit more, and the while thing starts over again.
Last night, I did that for hours, just to reach 2019, when suddenly there was a glitch and I had to reload – but the reload put me right back at the start.
There’s a reason I was trying to scroll back through all the images to get to 2018 (I never got past 2019). What I had started to do was do a search for all Critter of the Day posts. You’d think all the posts with Critter of the Day in the title would show up, but nope. Every post with the word “critter” or “day” would also show up. Still, it made it easier to go through the old posts, and I did even get some going back to 2018 that I tried to deal with. I would open each appropriate post in a new tab in edit mode, then open the image/s I wanted to get rid of in another tab. From there, I would cut and past the file name of the image into another tab I had for the media files and do a search for that specific file. Once it came up, I could delete the image, go back to trash the post, then move on to the next one.
The problem?
Sometimes, the searches just didn’t work.
Obviously, the image is somewhere in my media storage, but they don’t come up in the search. This was a particular problem with early images, when I was using only descriptive words for the file names. I’ve since changed to starting every image file with the numerical year, month and day. That way, if nothing else, I can do a search for the numerical part of the file name and a whole bunch of files will come up. I then find the exact one I’m after, delete that one, then trash the post it was in.
Except sometimes, even that didn’t work. There are some files that simply will not come up in the media search, even though I am copying and pasting the exact file name as it shows on the image. The search cannot have the .jpg or .png file extension, or it won’t come up. Some images had an _ added to them for some reason, and most of the time, if those were there, the image wouldn’t come up in a search (but today, I had a whole bunch work, anyway!).
So while I was able to clean out almost 300 images, there are some that I will have to find the hard way. By scrolling through years of images to get to the date the post was made.
After much wasted time and frustration yesterday, I tried again today, slowly scrolling through media files in between doing other things. I still barely made it to 2019.
So instead, I’ve been going through the post files, looking for the picture of the day titles, from more recent to older. These newer posts have images that are all coming up in a media search, so it’s been a lot more productive.
But I still have only freed up about 1% of storage space total.
This is going to be a long, slow, monotonous job.
Looking through all those old photos, though… Gosh, there are some really good photos! I had fun with them, too. Especially the silly deer faces – I had a whole daily series of photos just for silly deer faces! But, this is not a photography blog and, unlike other posts that are still getting hits years later, they are just taking up space. Aside for the first day or two after being uploaded, no one sees them.
Ah, well. This is all a learning process!
I’m done with that for today, though. There’s probably another two or three hundred more posts to go through before I’m done!
