update

Our 2024 Garden: Veseys order – I went for it! (plus a Wolfman update)

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Yes, I placed another order. 😂

It’s a small order.

When my old computer died, I had an order ready in the shopping cart of another seed company. By the time I got my new computer and was able to log in again, the cart had been dumped, of course. I placed an order with what I could remember of it. There turned out to be some squash varieties my daughter had asked for that I had forgotten about.

Veseys has a “wish list” function, which comes in very handy! They also had the same varieties. So, I took advantage of the Maritime Gardening promo code and placed an order with the forgotten seed varieties. Photos belong to Veseys.

The first variety is the Mashed Potato Winter Squash. From the website:

A new take on a traditional favourite. Switch up your next holiday meal to include Mashed Potatoes acorn squash! The white exterior and interior closely resembles traditional mashed potatoes when baked and mashed. This compact plant produces 3-4 fruit approximately 1.5 lb maturing in 90-95 days. Approx. 15 seeds/pkg.

We have a 99-100 day growing season. We could direct sow these!

This variety is the Baked Potatoes squash. From the website:

Warm up the oven! Baked Potatoes is an Acorn type squash that has high yields of 6-8 fruit on a compact bush plant. They mature into beige coloured 1-1.5 lb fruit with creamy white flesh in 100-110 days. Approx. 15 seeds/pkg.

At up to 110 days to maturity, these ones would have to be started indoors.

We might not actually start either of them, this year. We have so many winter squash seeds. Having said that, the only package we have that we want to plant all the seeds is the variety pack. We don’t know what seeds are actually in there, and we got it as a way to try some of the more interesting varieties we don’t want to buy entire packages of seeds for.

Having said that, we have things like the Pink Banana and the Georgia Candy Roaster, which we really enjoyed, that we would want to grow again. Plus, there are other varieties that we tried to grow that didn’t succeed, because they got baked in the sun. So we will probably try to start other varieties, but we can’t do too many. We just won’t have the space this year, unless we manage to build a LOT of new beds early enough!

Ordering these seeds with the promo code got me free shipping for the entire order, and my last item was these.

These are the Albion Everbearing Strawberries. From the website:

Fragaria. Sweet homegrown berries all summer long. Albion is a day-neutral type that produces berries all summer and into the fall. In autumns with late frost we have picked berries well into October. These plants will produce large, sweet strawberries. Great for growing in hanging planters and pots. Produces fruit in first year. Strawberries are planted 12-18” apart, in rows 4 feet apart and are hardy to zone 2 if covered. No. 1 sized root.

This is a package of 8 roots, which will be shipped while still dormant, in time for immediate planting, based on our hardiness zone. We have some strawberries now, but haven’t been getting a lot of fruit. The transplants we’ve had for a couple of years are still in recovery mode, first from being flooded out, then from being eaten by deer! The ones we grew from seed last year did start to bloom and form tiny fruit near the end of the season. The growing kit they came in did not give the name of the variety, so I don’t know of the tiny fruit was because they were not really mature plants yet, or if that’s the size the variety will always have.

Either way, we want a lot more strawberries, so these everbearing ones will be a good start. I do plan to get other varieties over the next few growing seasons, but we will also be saving new plants from the runners to increase our numbers. There are a few areas I want to plant strawberries in to create a sort of groundcover, but I’m not going to get very far with that, with only 8 plants! Depending on how things go later in the season, we might buy some transplants, too. We shall see.

On a completely different note, I contacted the Cat Lady about Wolfman, asking if she knew what it might cost, if Wolman’s damaged eye needs to be removed. She had messaged me letting me know she has some cat food to donate to us, and brought up getting Ginger. When I told her about Wolfman’s status, she ended up phoning me. She suggested that they might take Wolfman instead of Ginger, and get him to a vet, since Wolfman is also on the adoption list. She’s had cats that had to have an eye removed before, and it had cost $1800. !!!! I can’t believe the cost for that at a city vet would be higher than getting an amputation done at a small town vet! She will be seeing her regular vet tomorrow with another cat, and said she would talk to him about it. She asked for some photos that she could show him. As a rescue, she can sometimes get better pricing, plus they might be willing to do a payment plan, though she is already making payments on other bills at that clinic. She tells me that all the rescues are really struggling to cover vet care right now. The donations just aren’t coming in, when so many people are now struggling to pay their own bills and still have money to buy groceries. Which means she’s offering to cover Wolfman’s care out of pocket!

She will let me know what the vet tells her when she gets home tomorrow evening. Hopefully, it won’t be too bad. Either way, when my return comes in, I want to make a “donation” to help cover at least part of the bill! We should find out more by the end of tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’ve already received an email from Canada Revenue confirming my tax return was processed and the amount I’ll be getting automatically deposited, so hopefully, that won’t be long now.

Then I got my daughters to help me get a picture of Wolfman’s eye. It took some doing, but I managed it.

It’s the first time I’ve been able to get a good look at it, and wow. Yeah. I understand now, what the girls were trying to describe to me. It looks really bad! It may be possible to save it, but I think that’s highly unlikely. The Cat Lady, however, has dealt with this a few times, and she’s had cats that she was sure would lose a damaged eye, only to have it heal completely, while others she thought were not as bad, ended up losing it. Until a vet sees him, we won’t know, but the sooner he gets to a vet, the better.

On another note, she’s frustrated with trying to adopt out Ginger. There was the one person who was all ready to take on a three legged cat, filled out the application, etc. – then suddenly decided to get a kitten.

At least she was able to adopt out a couple other challenging cats, though, so that opens up a couple more spaces, too.

We shall see how things go with Wolfman. He’s such a handsome, fluffy boy, I can see him being adopted out rather quickly, even if he end up loosing that eye.

The Re-Farmer

This is what $624 combined looks like, plus an update

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$623.68 to be exact.

Ouch.

Today I did our first stock up shop in the city. While our temperature is a balmy -6C/21F, the windchill is brutal. My weather app says it feels like -22C/-8F, but at least a few times I was walking in it, it sure felt much colder!

The drive in was good, though. Swirling snow on the highway, but the wind wasn’t letting anything accumulate.

I decided not to do Costco today, in order to take advantage of some sales that end tomorrow. My first stop was at the international store, where I could first enjoy some dim sum for breakfast.

I didn’t feel like bagging at the truck with this wind, so I brought bags into the store with me, for a change.

I balanced the weight in the insulated bags poorly, though, so I shifted things around a bit. This is what I got.

For our Easter basket, I picked up a flat of eggs. We’ll get more at Costco, but I want to get some pickling right away. I also got a Polish sausage, a cheese ball, a jar of cheese stuffed olives and a small dinner ham for the basket. Oh, and the whole cloves, which are used as a decoration. We’re running low.

The frozen turkeys were on an excellent sale, so I grabbed two – and then got one of them for free with my loyalty points. The Honeycrisp apples were also an amazing sale, so I got two bags of those. They were $1.99 each instead of $6.99.

The Stash teas were also on sale, and I ended up getting 4 boxes of those altogether. We normally buy our toilet paper at Costco, and we still will get their big house brand package, but the house brand TP here was also on a good sale, so I got one for our stock up supply.

There’s some cleaning vinegar (10% acidity) and laundry detergent. Normally, I’d by detergent at Costco, but I don’t normally do the laundry and hadn’t realized we’d run out completely! I got some marble and Old Cheddar cheese as well, because the sales were good, but will likely get more at Costco. We use cheese a lot.

The Soy and Oat milks are for my lactose intolerant daughters, along with the coffee creamers, which does bother them, but they don’t use enough of it at a time for it to be much issue. I got a smoked ham for general eating, plus a slab of salmon for the girls that was on sale. There’s a slab of smoked bacon, the soy sauce brand my husband likes, and some bananas.

The grand total, after taxes, was $216.10, after just over $50 was taken off for the sales and deals.

My next stop was Walmart. I was really after just two things there. Cat food and supplements.

I did have a few extras that weren’t on my list. My “splurge” of the day was a small plastic shelf and 4″ plastic plant pots. I really didn’t want to use peat pots again and, with the larger seeds I want to be starting next, I went with these. I do have similar plastic plant pots that we found while cleaning up the basement, but they’re pretty old and the plastic is getting brittle, and the price was right on these. They had the giant bottles of shampoo and conditioner in stock, so I got one shampoo and two conditioners.

Then there was my supplements.

*sigh*

I got two boxes with 32 tins each of wet cat food, plus 6 bags of dry. The two more expensive kibble bags were about 9kg, and the others were 7.24 and 7.5kg in size. I also grabbed a couple of small bags of chocolate eggs for our Easter basket – our one non-traditional basket item is a bit of chocolate. I had run out of my supplements almost completely, so I got my magnesium, B12, Zinc and D3. D3 is the only one that was cheap! With the others, I did get the ones that were the best deal, so they should last me a while, but… ouch.

Those plant pots were a really good deal, and not even on sale. A package of 6 was $1.24, so I got four packages.

Aside from all that, I got a bottle of water for the road, for a grand total of $410.22 after taxes.

*sigh*

I’ll be doing our Costco shopping in a couple of days, and I want to make sure to tank up and get everything we can squeeze out of our budget, because on April 1st, our Prime Dictator’s new carbon tax is coming into effect, and the price of everything is going to go up. Another tax on top of a tax on top of a tax. Meanwhile, all our MPs are getting a raise on the same day! Because, of course. 🫤

On the way home, I made sure to hit a bank machine and take cash out, then stopped at the septic guy’s place to pay him for emptying out our tank yesterday. Including a tip. I will always tip the septic guy!

While driving on the highway, on the lookout for his driveway, a thought occurred to me. When I called him to do our tank and arrangements were made, he never asked for our address. He’s been here often enough to remember where we are!

When I got there, I met the lady of the house and had some questions. The guy was in their shop out back, so she called him and he came over to talk.

I told him that the septic pump it still not shutting itself off and asked what he could see while emptying the tank. The first thing he confirmed for me is that he saw nothing at all out of the ordinary. The float was not stuck.

Then he told me, it’s the pill starter. It has to be, because there’s nothing else it could be! I mentioned I’d talked to my brother about it, and that it had been changed relatively recently, but the septic guy said this is actually a pretty common problem. He was able to tell me that a new pill starter costs about $250. We won’t have a budget for that until I get my caregiver tax credit in, so for now, we’ll have to just turn it on manually every now and then. He told me that we shouldn’t need to turn it on for at least a week. That’s about how long it takes for both sides of the tank to fill. I’m glad he told me that, because I was concerned about running the pump dry, but I don’t really know how big the two sides of the tank are. Given our use of our plumbing system in general, I would still expect it to be filled faster than a week. He said to just take a look on Monday and see if both sides are full, then turn it on if it is. I won’t be doing that. Every time I look down into there, I’m afraid my glasses will fall off! And no, they are not loose or anything. I get that feeling every time I look down from a height. 😄

Then he mentioned that he could come out next week and replace it for us, before we’d need to turn the pump on again. I didn’t realize he did that sort of thing, too! I thought we’d have to call a plumber! Nope. Apparently, it’s a pretty easy thing for him to do. I suspect he wouldn’t be doing it the way my brother changed it out, before we moved out here, which was through the basement.

No matter. I would much rather get the septic guy to do it than call a plumber! I’m just really happy with this guy. He’s come out here when we’ve had septic problems several times now, and always been really fast about it. The last time we called to book the tank to be cleaned, my husband accidentally called a different company, and they wouldn’t have been able to come out for 2 weeks! They would have been a lot cheaper, but I’d rather pay extra for a guy that’ll come out when we actually need him. The cheaper rates are made possible because they arrange their schedules to do a whole lot of people in one area at a time, so there’s less driving around for them.

So that was done, and now we have more information to work with.

After I got home and everything was unloaded and put away, I assembled the small shelf I got. It’s for the cats. There’s a space in my room that currently has a stool over a circulation vent that has a cat bed on it. I want to replace that with the shelf, and set up four cat beds on it.

I found a problem as soon as took the straps off the package.

Along with the side pieces, there are foot pieces that each have a cap piece tucked into them.

There’s only three foot/cap pieces.

Without all the legs, I can’t put it over the circulation vent, so I ended up putting it on top of the foot stool that’s already there.

This must be pretty common, because it came with a sheet saying, “missing parts? or questions? DO NOT RETURN TO THE STORE to obtain replacement parts.” 😄 There’s a website to go to instead. This isn’t the first time this has happened. A few years back, after we finished clearing out the old basement, I got larger plastic shelves to use down there, to replace the wooden ones that were rotting from the floor getting wet every spring. I wrote to the company and got the missing parts very quickly. I’m pretty sure it’s the same brand.

Once we get the missing parts, we’ll set it up without the foot stool under it, and secure it to the wall more effectively. We’ll probably wrap the verticals with jute twine, too, for the cats to scratch at.

Meanwhile, I’ve got cat beds, caves and blankets on it now, and the cats have been exploring it. sometimes, even staying on it for a while.

They still prefer gathering into massive cuddle piles on my bed, though!

Which is fine. That’ll give me a chance to wash the cat beds and blankets, so they’ll be fresh and clean for tonight.

But first, I need to contact that shelf company about the missing leg/cap piece!

The Re-Farmer

Well, crud

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I’m back from helping my mother with her shopping. The septic guy came and went while I was gone, so as soon as I got home, we went into the basement to turn power back on to the pump. With that tank having just been emptied, is should NOT have turned on, if it was just the float being stuck.

It turned on, and won’t turn off.

When I talked to the septic guy and mentioned what was happening, his first thought was that it was the switch. That may be true. We’ll have to get a plumber in to look at it, though.

Until then, we’ll have to manually turn it on and off, regularly, and do things like turn it on before starting to shower, then turning it off after. Same with doing the laundry. It takes a while for the solids side of the tank to fill and overflow into the greywater side, but we’ll have no way of determining that.

*sigh*

Sometimes, I think this place is going to be the financial death of us.

The Re-Farmer

He roooollllsss!

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Judgement decided to join me while I did my morning rounds today.

While I was penguin walking over the icy driveway, he kept running ahead, then flinging himself to the ground in front of my feet! Except sometimes, he would fail because the driveway is so slippery, he paws would start skittering, instead. So he’d just run ahead and try again! 😄 I finally got to a patch of exposed gravel, where I could stop and pet him for awhile. At which point, he started running around my feet, then rolling like crazy, making it hard to pet him – or get a decent picture!😄

I counted 24 yard cats this morning, then spotted a couple more in the outer yard as I went to the gate, so my headcount was 26 today.

I contacted the Cat Lady this morning, but she has heard nothing back from the woman who was a potential adopter for Ginger. She did adopt out a cat to someone else today, and another 3 legged cat is coming in. She was talking about having them together in the separate cat room they have (along with the cat with no eyes, I believe), but they are going to the US for a while soon. I told her, no worries. The less disruption for him, the better, so it can wait. He’s stressed out enough as it is.

Plus, I don’t mind his sweet company for a bit longer. I know it’ll be better for him, but gosh, we’re going to miss him!

The Re-Farmer

The cuteness!

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I managed to get a really good picture of the little puffball outside!

I was able to get within a couple of feet of her. I’m just going to assume she’s a she, since we’ve had no luck socializing the females. Peanut Butter Cup being the one exception.

Hmmm…. there’s a roofing nail in the grass that I missed. The cats knocked things out of the top of the shelf shelter, including a container of nails, a few days ago. This one is a lot further away than I expected to find any!

I tried to do a head count this morning, and got a different number each time. The highest was 30, and I think that one was right.

As for the indoor cats, Wolfman’s eye is improving, but looks horrible! He’s opening the eye and looking around, but we can see the inner eyelid is still very red. The eye itself is cloudy. I’ve been chatting with the Cat Lady about it, and she says this is pretty normal. We can expect the cloudiness to stay for at least two weeks. A month is more typical. Her cat that had the same thing still had a touch of cloudiness over his pupil, and it’s been about a month for him. We just need to keep monitoring it.

We’ve had to start dosing the inside cats with lysine lately. Some of them have started to sneeze a lot. It seems that bringing in PBC brought in a new strain of feline herpes. As the vet explained to my younger daughter, a while back, the outside cats and the inside cats will settle into a particular strain that they get immune to, but they wouldn’t be the same strain. Once PBC was settled in and accepted enough to be part of the cuddle piles, she exposed them to her outside strain. They are strong and healthy cats, though, so they’ll be able to fight it off. The lysine will just help them get over it faster, by strengthening their own immune systems.

As for Ginger, the Cat Lady is having a hard time with her schedule right now, so it looks like we won’t be able to connect this week. Next week is spring break and Easter, so it might not happen until after Easter. We shall see.

The Re-Farmer

Nothing to complain about!

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Wow. I thought we had high winds here!

I just heard back from the Cat Lady. She was more than happy to change when we would be connecting.

Part of their roof just blew off!

Their new house has a metal roof and one of the panels went flying. Turns out the winds are higher in the city than where we are!

Thankfully, no one was hurt, and the damage was minimal, all things considered.

When it comes to our own winds, I’ve got nothing to complain about!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: new sprouts, no sprouts, plus possible cat adoptions!

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While shutting down the lights in the big aquarium greenhouse, I spotted a bit of green. By this morning, there was more!

In one of the two cups they were sown in, all three Purple Beauty bell peppers have started to sprout.

In one of the three cups the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers were sown in, there’s one sprout emerged, and another pushing its way through. There may even be a third, under a piece of perlite, on the right. If it is, we’ll know by the end of the day.

With the thyme sprouted for so long, but nothing else, I had unplugged the heat mat some time ago and just hoped the tank would still be warm enough for the other seeds. There is NO sign of the oregano. We had issues with oregano last year, too. I’ll give it a bit longer, then decide if I want to try sowing them again, or just give up on the oregano from seed this year. It might be better to buy a transplant when the garden centres open in the spring.

In other news…

I was contacted by the Cat Lady a couple of days ago. She has been able to find open adoption spaces at a couple of shelters in the city for us. After much discussion, we’ve decided that both Ginger and Toni will go to one shelter. They have a set up just for special needs cats, and apparently three legged cats are extremely popular. In the city, at least! The other shelter specialized in Siamese or Siamese looking cats. I sent a picture of Ghosty’s face, and she was identified as a Lynx Point Siamese. My daughters figured she was a tabby with albinism! Either way, this shelter tends to have rather high end clientele, so Ghosty will likely find herself in the lap of luxury before long!

As I write this, I can see the live feed from the garage cam. There are 6 cats milling about. It’s that time of year again. There’s been a lot of baby making going on, and the males are starting to fight over the females. I’m so frustrated that we haven’t been able to snag any of the females to get fixed! They simply will NOT let us near them! I think the super fluffy little tabby that is sibling to Patience outside, and Peanut Butter Cup, the Beast, and Soot Sprite, inside, is female. It’s hard to tell with all the fur, and I can’t get close enough to check, anyhow, but the way I see her behaving around the males right now…. *sigh* Why are all the females so skittish, but the males so friendly?

Anyhow.

If all goes to plan, we might be down three indoor cats on Friday! I’ll be driving them out half way to meet the Cat Lady, and she’ll take them the rest of the way.

This morning, after giving the outside cats their food and warm water, I did a bit of shoveling. I’m much less stiff and sore than I expected to be, after yesterday! I made sure to have some Golden Milk before bed, which I think helped a lot. Lord knows, the painkillers aren’t doing much. We now have paths to the compost pile, the back of the garage, the outhouse, and the litter pellet compost behind the outhouse.

What I am NOT going to bother doing is clear a path to drive into the inner yard. I don’t see the point.

We are getting snowfall warnings for this evening, though – another 10-15cm/4-6 inches – so we might need to clear the driveway again tomorrow, so we can meet with the Cat Lady on Friday. Hopefully, the gravel roads will be plowed, too. I thought it was done already, but when I cleared our driveway, I found that what I though was a plow ridge visible on the garage cam was just tire tracks from the one vehicle that managed to make its way down our road. !! I don’t expect to have troubles with the truck on the road, but our driveway tends to drift a fair bit. Mostly right in front of the garage.

We have several packages to pick up at the post office, which closes at noon today, so I will be heading out soon to get those, then keep going into town with a couple of water jugs to refill, and pick up a few groceries. I’ll have to snag a daughter to help me bring things to the house from the garage, since I won’t be able to pull up to the house. Either that, or reclaim the wagon from the storage side of the garage. It’s got our chainsaw and other tools I was using to clear trees and work on the first trellis bed stored in it. With the paths in the snow, though, it might be easier to just carry things in. We’ll see.

As I write this, we’ve already warmed up to -13C/8F, and we are expected to reach a high of -5/23F after the snow starts to fall. We’re expected to stay below freezing for a few more days, but the forecast is now saying we should reach of high of 2C/36F on Sunday, and be staying with highs at or above freezing from then on.

We’ll see what actually happens! I just want that snow to melt away slowly, so we don’t get any flooding aside from our usual moat around the garage. 😁

Well, time to get ready to head out, and see what the roads are like!

The Re-Farmer

We have an answer

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I just got off the phone with tech support at Skytech Gaming.  I ended up downloading an app to my phone that gave me a code that allowed him to see through my phone’s camera.   As we were talking, the computer restarted it’s loop again, and I told him what had been going on.

As we went through the prompts, he said he was looking for logging into the internet, and that was the one thing that has never been part of the loop.

Long story short, by the end of the call, he very apologetically told me that we will have to reinstall Windows.  Something went wrong in the start up and this installation got corrupted.

Which means we either hook up to another computer or get a recovery thumb drive.

*sigh*

One of the things that came with the paperwork in the box was a quality control check certificate.

The date on that is August 2, 2023.  So as of then, the computer was fine.

What a pain.  At least it’s a relatively easy fix, though.  I’m just not sure if I want to hook up to another computer, or just get a recovery thumb drive.  I like the idea of having the thumb drive.  Smaller and more convenient.  I’m going to have several hours after dropping the cats off at the vet tomorrow morning, so I could probably find one.

We shall see.

Not at all the sort of problem I would have anticipated!

Having said that, I can add that customer service was good and very prompt.  There wasn’t much he could do over the phone, but he could at least give me a solution.  With that, at least, I am happy.

I love technology, but my goodness, it doesn’t take much to mess it up!

The Re-Farmer

A rough night, but much improved

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We have GOT to get more of the inside cats adopted out.

Last night was a rough one. 

With my arm still giving me grief, I tried going to be early again. While I could move my right arm forward and back as normal, if painfully, I still couldn’t get it move more than a few inches straight outward. 

When I go to bed, I often has several cats that insist they MUST be either right against me, or me, and they don’t often give me a chance to finish getting into bed before they do it! Cheddar is one of several that has decided where I sleep is his spot. He’s a big boy, so moving him with one wonky arm was a challenge! Others will move as I pull the covers back, but not Shadow in the Dark. He’s one that likes to curly up near my face or against the back of my neck, and he won’t move. So lifting the covers usually results in him being rolled over and over, then he lies there, all sprawled out, looking at me like I’ve offended him somehow!

That’s not unusual, though. 

Butterscotch made things unusual.

She’s been doing quite well, and even gotten to the point that she has started to leave my room, if only to go as far as the steps to the dining room, or peak around the corner at the basement door, to look down the hallway, before running back into my room.

Lately, however, she has taken to growling and snarling. 

Sometimes, I can see that there’s a cat nearby that she’s snarling at, but they’re usually just there, and not even looking at her. A couple of times, one of them would go at her, but it seems more a response to her snarling, and not the other way around. Other times, I’ll hear her snarling, and I can’t even see any other cats around her.

Well, it seems that having so many cats in my room, usually covering my bed, sleeping in groups, is stressing her out to the point that she isn’t going to the litter boxes. She’d have to go past the other cats to do that.

The first time I heard the odd noises, I found her squeezed onto one of the boxes I’ve set in front of the wall shelf, under my craft table. I’ve got other boxes inside the bottom shelves; with the table there, they can’t be accessed for us, but when they were empty and I thought the cats were just using them as places to sleep, we discovered they were defecating in them, so we blocked them off with empty boxes. One of those overhangs the edge of the shelf, and she was squeezed between the box on the floor and the overhanging box.

Then I started hearing a very strange sound indeed.

The sound of hard turds dropping onto the box she was on!

I managed to get her out of there, but then she went into a shelf above where I sleep; the shelf I keep my glasses in, as well as where I put my phone on a stand to charge at night, among other things.

I got her out of that, and she squeezed herself into the space of another shelf, in between my cookbooks and the top of the mattress. I tried lying down again, but more noised had me getting up again to investigate, and this time she was digging into the shelf that I use for some of my clothes. I got her out of there and tucked her into the nearby cat cave, and she stayed there.

Not for long.

I was again awakened by strange noises, and this time I found she was making a mess on my bed, between my pillow, and my leaning sheep – a large stuffed sheep I sometimes use to lean against when sitting up in bed, but is normally stored in the shelve under where I keep my glasses. It’s large enough to almost fill the space completely.

Well, this time, it was a very messy mess.

My daughters are still timing things so that one of them is always available to help me with his, so I messaged my older daughter to help me. We wiped up as much as we could, then stripped the bed. The fitted sheet and the leaning sheep had to be washed, along with one pillow case, but the mess was bad enough that we had to strip the waterproof mattress cover for washing, too!

By then it was past 1am – so much for going to bed early! 

While my daughter got the laundry going, I started putting out wet cat food. That lured all but one cat out of my room. I set wet cat food out in the bowls I have there, which allows for Butterscotch and a few of the the shier cats to get some, without being pushed around by the other cats. This time, I was able to close the door and keep the other cats from coming back in during the night.

Of course, that meant frequent interruptions by cats trying to claw the door open.

Eventually, though, I did hear Butterscotch going into a litter box, which should have been a good thing, but… something didn’t sound right. So I used the flashlight on my phone to try and see her.

*sigh*

Yeah, she was using the litter box, finally, but didn’t quite go all the way in. 

She ran off again and hid in her cat cave while I got up and cleaned up the mess.

*sigh*

After that, things did finally quiet down, and I managed to get some sleep, but all this having to get up and check things was quite painful. 

I have discovered on thing, though. While my girth may make it seem otherwise, I’ve got some pretty decent abs! I had to sit myself up many times using just my abs, and not being able to use my arms at all. 

With just Butterscotch in her cave and what turned out to be Susan sleeping somewhere else, I actually was able to get some decent sleep, if only for a few hours.

This morning, I felt good enough that, when my younger daughter went to feed the outside cats, I went along to help out, then do the rest of my rounds and switch out the trail cam memory cards. 

I was very happy to demonstrate to her that I can now lift my right arm straight out again! While there is still some pain, I have almost full mobility of my arm again! The level of improvement since yesterday is amazing. I’m so relieved! There were times I seriously considered getting my daughter to drive me to the hospital, but giving it a couple of days of rest seems to be what I really needed. In fact, while writing this, I just tested my arm again, and I could do a full rotation at the shoulder, with no pain! Not even my left shoulder, which was not strained as badly, still has more pain now than my right shoulder does. I’m so relieved!

While doing the morning feeding, neither of us tried to do a head count. There were clearly fewer cats than usual, but they were also running around a lot, making it hard to keep track. There were these two, though…

The cats still aren’t going into the sunroom as much as usual. Checking it just a short while ago, there was a small pile of maybe three or four cats on the platform, and that’s it. Usually, we’d see about 6 or ten on the platform, and almost as many under the heat lamp or on the cat bed below, plus more in the shelf, at the food bowls or just wandering around. It’s going to take time for them to start feeling safe in there again.

These two are almost always in the sunroom. Syndol can’t get enough attention, but the little one (can you believe they’re only about a month or so apart in age?) is now getting to the point of enjoying pets and being picked up. We’d brought this one into the house a couple of times to give his nethers a thorough washing. He was so patient about it, the girls have named him Patience.

Even his tortie sister has started to allow me to pet her more often, and will tolerate being picked up more. Which is good, because it means we can bring her indoors for overnight fasting at the end of the week, before taking her to get spayed. Oh, how I wish more of the females could be socialized enough to get them done! My daughter was able to pet Broccoli this morning, but she wouldn’t let me near her. I did manage to pet Junk Pile – the first time in ages. She seemed shocked at being pet, and liking the shoulder skritches, but didn’t allow it for long. Even Caramel was around, but I only managed to touch her while she had her back to me while eating. Brussel won’t let us near her, but she will go into the kibble house and even into the sunroom. Sprout keeps her distance. If we’re around, she won’t eat at all, and she prefers to eat from the bowls under the shrine, across the yard. We’ve seen Slick around, I think (aka: Octomom), and there’s another grey tabby that’s more spotted then striped that I think is also female. That one will eat at the kibble house or on the cat house roof, but is even shier than Sprout, so we haven’t been able to confirm, either way. Another one we have not been able to confirm is one more from that late litter of either kittens; a small grey tabby with dense longer fur. It will go into the sunroom to eat, and I’ve been able to sneak a pet on its back, if it can’t see me, but that’s it. Given how it won’t let us near it, I’m going to just assume it’s female. 😕

Anyhow, that’s the current status.

In other things, my daughter was able to help me move a chair out of the living room so I have access to the aquarium greenhouses again. With my arm mobile again, my goal for today is to get the big aquarium ready for seed trays, then hopefully actually get seeds started. We’ve got the red onions, yellow onions and shallots that should have already been started by now, plus some peppers and eggplant. Possibly some oregano and thyme, too, but those can probably wait a couple more weeks. I’ll have to go through our seeds that need to be started the earliest and make some decisions. With having to build or rebuild so many beds, once things are thawed out enough, I’m going to work on the assumption we won’t have room for everything we want to plant. Especially for things that would need to be planted in ground, like corn.

We shall see how things work out. For now, I’m just glad to 1) be pain free and mobile enough to get back at it and 2) not have any unexpected running around to do, but actually be home to get my own stuff done!

Time to grab a stool and get at those aquarium greenhouses!

The Re-Farmer

I think it worked

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

Yesterday evening, we finally got a good look at the cat stuck in the old kitchen!

I put the big cat carrier on the freezer, with food and water. We had a small packet of a wet catfood treat left from a donation a whole back. Just enough for one cat, so that got squeezed into a small dish and stuck into the back of the carrier. I even put some cat nip in there.

It took a while, but eventually, the cat came out. I spotted it in the carrier, digging around the blanket inside, the food dish empty, and almost pushed out the door! As soon as the cat saw me, though, it ran off.

It didn’t quite run away, though. When I saw a pair of ears, just barely visible behind the kibble bin, I waited. Of course, one of the teenage cats inside wanted attention, and I ended up with Ghosty in my arms.

Well, that got his attention! The pair of ears became a pair of eyes, then a whole head, as the cat stretched its neck to see Ghosty through the window. Which got Ghosty’s attention, too!

For the next whole, I would stand at the window in the door, holding a different cat. The cat in the old kitchen seemed to be more comfortable seeing cats instead of just a human. I could see it was wanting to get back to the food and water on the freezer, so I didn’t interrupt too much. The way the door is oriented to the stairs, my daughters could monitor things from the top of the stairs. We did not try to go into the old kitchen to let it out, though, since we knew it would just disappear again.

This morning, while feeding the outside cats, I made sure to leave both doors between the old kitchen and sun room wide open. A daughter was stationed at the window to see if the cat left.

Of course, there was a major rush of other cats going into the old kitchen, and this time, we just left them. I finished my morning rounds, then checked with my daughter.

She did not see the cat leave, though all the others had left.

In the end, we decided to leave the doors between the old kitchen and the sun room wide open for a few hours. We did have to make extra sure the door into the rest of the house was securely closed. That one has been known to pop open, if we’re not careful!

Well, I just got back from checking the old kitchen. It seemed empty, so I went in.

I moved cat carrier to the sun room for the cats to get used to, since we plan to “trap” a cat in it for cheap spay/neuter day. I had to pull the inner old kitchen door – the one with no window – closed behind me, to keep cats from going into the old kitchen again.

I couldn’t see the cat that had been stuck overnight anywhere, but I didn’t go outside. I did stay to pet the crowd of cats swirling around my legs, vying for attention.

But not this one.

This is the one female we can be pretty sure to be able to catch for the cheap spay day, but she was not allowing contact, today!

She and her two siblings from the last litter are still so tiny! Hard to believe they are 7 months old! I did get to cuddle her fuzzy black and white brother, but her fluffball tabby sibling it the shiest of them all.

While petting the cats, I heard a commotion from the old kitchen. Thinking it could be the stuck cat, I checked. No sign of a cat – until I looked at the inside door.

Mitzy looked back at me!

She had scrambled her way up the door and was hanging off the window! What a monkey!

So it does look like the stuck cat has finally gotten out. We will keep monitoring, just in case.

Come spring time, we will have to empty out the old kitchen as best we can, fpr clean up. There was no litter box in there while the cat was stuck!

At least for now, the room should stay more or less freezing, so we shouldn’t need to worry about smell. We are at only -2C . By the end of the month, we are expecting several days at +3C. Things will be melt7ng outside!

What concerns me about the warm weather is, the ladies might go into heat early… and there’s nothing we can do about it, since we can’t catch them to get them spayed.

*sigh*

For now, though, it at least looks like the trapped cat is no longer trapped.

The Re-Farmer