update

Birds, gardens, kittens and pain

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Things were definitely all over the place today!

I was out doing my morning rounds pretty early. That’s always disorienting. By the time I’m done and settling it, I feel like it should be 2 or 3 in the afternoon, only to find it isn’t even 9 in the morning yet!

Our permanent trellis may only have the vertical posts so far, but it’s already being appreciated by birds.

I zoomed in with my phone’s camera, before getting closer and startling it away, so the image quality is not very good. It’s still enough to see that this is a type of bird I don’t recognize at all. Pretty, whatever it was, and it enjoyed a nice little rest on top of one of the trellis posts.

I also got a tiny harvest in this morning. I picked what is probably the last of our garlic scapes.

You can see one is starting to split a bit; the consequence of not harvesting for a couple of days. The scape was starting to straighten out again, and getting ready to form bulbils. I didn’t notice it when I finally did a larger harvest of scapes, yesterday, thinking the straighter stem meant it was too early to pick, rather than getting almost too late to pick! That’s okay. It’ll still taste good!

As I was getting ready to head inside, I managed to get this adorable picture of Havarti.

He’s more feral than the other kittens but is starting to clue in that when I pick him up and carry him, it usually means I’m putting him next to a bowl of kitten food. We make a sort of cat soup for the littles, but some of the adult cats have discovered it and can get pretty aggressive about eating it before the littles have a chance!

Havarti’s two siblings are still missing. Every day we don’t see them, the more convinced I am that, wherever Caramel took them, they have not survived. She is always here, and I sometimes see her in one of the cat beds in the water bowl shelter, covered in kittens and napping. This is not the behaviour of a mama cat with babies in another location.

I managed to get a picture of Captain Hastings this evening.

Poirot has been diligent in keeping her babies close to the sun room, and we’ve often seen her picking up Inspector Japp and carrying him back to the house if he goes too far! Hastings and Miss Lemon tend to stay closer, though.

It looks like Hastings will be another blue eyed beauty!

I just got back from chasing a racoon and a skunk out of the sun room. I found Caramel in the water bowl house, snuggled with Havarti. She definitely is down to one kitten.

This time of year is normally when the more feral cats are starting to wean their kittens, bringing them to the house where there is reliable food, water and shelter.

That isn’t happening.

Just now, I saw Slick – aka: Octomom, as she had a litter of 8, two years ago. She was one of the pregnant ones that would come close to the house for food, but we couldn’t otherwise get close to. She is one of three ferals, for sure, that were definitely pregnant and suddenly were looking skinny again.

Slick is looking pregnant again.

Which means, she lost a litter.

As for the other two ferals, I haven’t seen any sign of kittens with them, either. At least neither of them are looking pregnant, though!

I don’t quite know what to make of it. I suppose I should be glad I’m not finding remains to bury, as happened so often last year, but it does make me wonder.

Oh, there is another possibility.

The nearest farm to ours that has someone living there full time is our vandal, and I know they care for a colony, too. I can see on our trail cams that some of our cats head in that direction, too.

Perhaps they had babies, but took them to our vandal’s place, instead?

It’s possible, I suppose. Not likely, but possible!

Anyhow.

When I first headed out this morning to get the food ready for the outside cats, I realized something.

There was a cat stuck in the old kitchen all night!

The old kitchen is our “buffer zone” between the house and the sun room. It’s sort of tacked on to the original log portion of the house. When heading out or in, we make sure to close the doors. That way, the inside cats don’t end up outside, and outside cats don’t end up inside, but if they do get through, they’ll only get as far as the old kitchen.

The problem is, the door from the main part of the house to the old kitchen is an antique door. I love it, but it doesn’t always close properly. Sometimes, I’ll be convinced it’s closed, but when I open the first door to the sun room, the air pressure change pushes open the door into the house.

Well, I guess something like that happened during yesterday’s evening feeding. My daughter was helping me and, as she started back into the house from the sun room, she discovered a whole bunch of inside cats in the old kitchen!

We thought we got them all out.

Unfortunately, the old kitchen has been used for storing things temporarily. One corner was full of cardboard set aside all winter, to be used in the garden. It is also where we put our garbage bags until we can go to the dump. Which we haven’t been able to do properly, since the box cover was blown off the truck. Without a cover, there are too many lighter bags that would end up blown into the ditches. Between that and things coming up to prevent us from getting to the dump, we have way too many bags of garbage in the old kitchen. With those, the cardboard, the furniture, chest freezer and old wood burning cook stove, there are a LOT of places a cat can hide.

This morning, while getting the kibble ready, I started hearing meowing, but couldn’t see anything. My daughter came to help with the cat feeding, and she couldn’t see anything either. Once the outside cats were fed, she and I started passing things out of the old kitchen, mostly through the door with the missing screen (which has been SO handy!), to clear space. A few garbage bags, stuff for the burn barrel we can’t burn because we’re under a fire ban still, and all the carboard I was setting aside for the garden.

The old kitchen feels down right huge, now!

Still no sign of a cat.

We did eventually track the meowing to coming from under a dresser. My daughter ended up removing its 2 drawers completely, only for the cat to run out and under the couch. We did figure out it was Tiny. No wonder we didn’t realize she was missing. She is one for hiding away on top of the closet in the entry, or other secret places, because some of the other cats bully her.

So I continued my morning rounds while my daughter made sure to unlock the other door, so I wouldn’t have to go through the sun room and potentially scare a cat into hiding again.

By the time I finished and was back inside, I found my younger daughter on her knees, trying to persuade a cat out from under the couch. Her sister had already left a bowl with the contents of a squeeze treat in it, but the bait wasn’t enough.

My daughter did find a way to get Tiny to come out voluntarily, though.

A tin of wet cat food, and David.

Tiny loves David. The two of them get along incredibly well.

My daughter put a bowl of wet cat food in the middle of the floor, then brought David in, leaving the door from the house into the old kitchen open, standing guard to make sure none of the other cats went in.

Tiny saw David and immediately came out.

She saw the food bowl he was at and ran over to eat.

She saw the open door and ran into the house!

I strongly suspect Tiny is not going to sneak into the old kitchen again. At least not for a very long time!

Very glad my daughter was able to take care of that!

Meanwhile, my husband had his appointment at the new pain clinic today. I was finished my morning rounds so early, I was actually able to try and lie down and close my eyes for a couple of hours, before trying to drive.

My husband also tried to go back to sleep. He had a horrible night last night. Ozempic side effects. He’s been on it for years and they keep increasing the dose. I don’t know why he’s still on it. It is not working. Oh, and the weight loss side effect everyone is being prescribed it for these days? He has lost zero weight, but he HAS lost muscle mass. Which is the “weight loss” of Ozempic, though in his case, the number of the scale hasn’t changed in years. One of the other side effects, however, has sometimes been a problem. That particular side effect had my husband taking a shower and doing laundry at 2am.

Nasty stuff. I can’t understand why anyone would take it, if they weren’t diabetic – and even then, I don’t think it’s worth it!

Neither of us managed to get much sleep before it was time to start heading out. I had deliberately made a point of resting my injured left arm as much as I could yesterday, so that I would be okay for driving.

I forgot something.

The broken handle inside the driver’s side door. The one that requires opening the window and twisting my left arm around to open the door from the outside.

*sigh*

After moving the truck closer to the house for my husband, I had to give it a go, and it was way more painful than it should have been. I was still okay to get his walker out of the entry and down the concrete steps so my husband could use it to walk the rest of the way to the house. He used a cane to go through the old kitchen and sun room, to avoid the steps he’d have to taken using the main entry.

In working with his walker, however, we discovered a problem.

It’s been a long time since my husband has had to go anywhere, so his walker has been in the entry for a while.

The cats climb it, of course.

Well, one or more of them decided to pee on the cushioned seat, even though the walker was folded up. While getting it in an out of the truck, folding and unfolding it, we realized it was even still wet.

Once at the hospital, we were directed to the new pain clinic, which happens to be sharing the same area as the outpatient clinic my daughter will be going to for her surgery. We went through the registration process and my husband settled down to wait. Typically, to take pressure off his back, he will sit in a chair and lean forward onto his walker, stretching his back out.

The smell of cat pee was so bad, he took his cane out of the holder and asked me to put the walker back in the truck.

!!!

When I got back, he was already taken to see the first pain clinic specialist. This guy turned out to be a physiotherapist. My husband had a questionnaire to fill out, along with a list of his medications, and send in some time ago. They were going over that first. We went over the many things attempted before we moved, and how things went at the city pain clinic in this province he managed to get to (that was a waste of 2 years on a waiting list!) in 2020.

After going over all that, he left to consult with the doctor, who then came to get us for the second part of the appointment.

The doctor was looking at the husband’s CT scans from November, and we appreciated that he was honest with us.

There really isn’t anything they can do for him.

Which is pretty much what my husband expected to hear.

Everything that could be tried, has been tried. He’s on the medications. He’s had the various treatments. In the end there were just two things they could offer. One was information about scheduled workshops they have available online, though in person is also a possibility, for those who are able. They cover a variety of things to help cope with and live with chronic pain. My husband has been living with is for so long, he’s probably tried or has been doing them already. Still, there might be something he hasn’t tried, yet.

The other is physiotherapy.

My husband did the physio route pretty much from the start. It kept him going for a long time, and he even started to get better. He started out seeing a physiotherapist three times a week. She got him down to once a week. He was still able to work at this time, too.

The insurance covers physio 100%, but with an upper limit, so once that limit was reached, my husband had to stop physio until the fiscal year started again. Without the equipment used on him, his condition deteriorated during that break, but then he started up again and things started to improve.

Then the physiotherapist was lured away by a rugby team. The therapist that replaced her was… not as good.

There was much more going on that affected his condition as well that I won’t get into here, but it wasn’t much longer before my husband couldn’t work anymore and went onto disability. Then we ended up here, on the farm I grew up on, in a province where some of the specialists that had been helping my husband before don’t even exist.

Anyhow. That’s what we both thought of, when physiotherapy was brought up. There’s no way my husband can handle driving all that way, multiple times a week. Even when he got a prescription for physio with the first doctor he had after our move, and he could have gone to a closer therapist, it just didn’t happen. With only, at best, 10 sessions covered by insurance, why even bother? Of course now, we couldn’t afford the gas, either.

Well, it turns out they can try something different.

Physio, done at the pain clinic, is covered by our medicare system, for starters. It would also be just once a month, with my husband being given a regimen he can do at home until the next session, when things can be adjusted as needed.

Once a month with a 45-50 minute drive one way, my husband can do.

We are now booked with the first guy we saw today, next week!

Beyond that, however, there really isn’t anything that can be done about my husband’s condition. His doctor is going to get a report, and she can take it from there again.

That done, my husband and I headed out. As difficult as it was for him with just a can and not his walker, it was lunch time, and he wanted McDonalds. 😄 It’s probably been more than a year since he’s been to one. So we went to the nearby Walmart and had lunch, then I left him to enjoy the fries he had been craving to do a bit of shopping. My first city shopping trip is in just a couple of days, but we were going to run out of cat food before then.

During the drive home, we actually drove through some rain! Not a lot. We still need much more! Thankfully, the kibble I got that was in the box of the truck came in plastic bags, not paper, so the rain wasn’t an issue.

We kept the girls updated the whole time, so when we got home, my daughter had the gate open for us, and was able to help me bring things inside. As careful as I was, my arm was really throbbing by then.

Oh, I discovered two things while taking my husband’s walker to the truck.

One, I really, really like using a walker.

Two, my right arm hasn’t completely escaped damage. While leaning on the walker’s hand bars, my left arm was actually quite a bit better than when my daughter brought it out to help me get back to the house after my fall. My right arm, however, seems to still have some damage to a triceps. Nothing I notice unless I am pushing down on something, though.

Once everything was inside and taken care of, my daughter took care of my husband’s walker. She took it outside and scrubbed the whole thing down, top to bottom, hosed it down, then took the carpet and furniture shampooer to it. That thing looks brand new, now!

It’s also now stored in the old kitchen, where the cats can’t get at it!

Unless they sneak in and hide overnight, like Tiny did!

With all this, my husband is completely worn out and drained, and in so much pain. Hopefully, he’ll be able to actual sleep tonight, and not end up feeling sick again.

As for me, I’m happy to say the arm is doing better. I was able to get a bit done outside this evening. I went over the pink rose bush again, looking for any scale insects I missed. There were a few! I treated it with another soapy water spray, too. It’s only been a day, but I think the rose bush is already looking less droopy than it was, yesterday! We only have the one pink rose bush, so I would hate to lose it.

While checking on the rest of the garden, I noticed insects on the winter squash again – possibly thrips. They got the soapy water treatment, too. The winter squash are trying to bloom like crazy, but the plants are not looking very healthy at all. The transplants were very strong and healthy, so this is disappointing.

So, that has been our day today! It’s been a wonderfully cool and, at times, rainy day today. The only downside is, our overnight low is currently expected to drop to 6C/43F tonight – which is actually an improvement! This morning, they were saying we might drop to 4C/39F. With temperatures that low, I’d be looking to cover some of the garden beds to prevent cold damage! Meanwhile, the 10 day forecast has us looking at temperatures approaching 30C/68F, soon.

Good grief. It’s hard to believe we’re almost at July already.

Oh! I forgot one bit of good news!

We got a call from the door guy at the hardware store I went to last week. We now have an appointment for three days from now. He’s going to check out the damage, take the measurements he needs, and we’ll start talking what options we have, and how much it’ll cost.

I know it’s going to be painfully expensive… well… everything is painfully expensive right now. However, once that door and frame is fixed, it’s going to be really nice to not have frost showing up on the bottom of the door every winter!

So I’m both dreading and anticipating getting that door fix.

What to do with the cats while the work is being done is a problem we’ll have to figure out when the time comes!

😄😄

The Re-Farmer

Finally! Rain! or not…

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Plus an adorable photo shoot.

My daughter was able to get the most adorable Eyelet pictures when she joined me for the evening walkabout.

Eyelet really loves to be carried and cuddled. So does Sir Robin.

Now for the boring stuff.

I’m happy to say my left arm did rather well during the night. I was pro-active on the pain killers and getting my husband to rub the joints with the Voltaren cream, from my hand to my neck. Oddly, it was less painful on my arm to sleep on my left side, which seems rather backwards. I wasn’t going to complain, though.

All day, I was practically crawling out of my skin, wanting to do stuff. It was a gorgeously cool day out, and it would have been perfect for so many jobs that need to be done around the garden beds and yards. I kept having to stop myself. I had to get my older daughter to do most of the work with feeding the outside cats; basically, I passed the kitten food bowls out to her. I didn’t do my full rounds, but we did walk around the garden beds closer to the house.

I’m glad we did because, as we were in the old kitchen garden, she spotted something odd about the pink rose bush. The stems, in between all those thorns, were covered with little bumps. They were the same colour as the stems, so I didn’t really see them, but she realized they were bugs.

There were so many of them, the rose bush was starting to droop, and the roses that have started to open were showing browned edges on their petals.

We weren’t too sure what to do about it but, just to start, we got the spray bottle of soapy water and sprayed it down.

It was still quite early when we headed back inside, so I tried to lie down again.

That didn’t work.

I finally realized I was getting light headed, so I got up and made myself something to eat. While I was doing that, I started getting some messages from my SIL. I knew my brother was coming out today, so she said she’d find out when he planned to be here.

He already was.

He went into ninja stealth mode and left without her even hearing him – then got here shortly after my daughter and I came in, so we never saw him drive in! He parks by their trailer, which is blocked from our view by trees.

As soon as I could, I headed out to say hello. He was still unloading from his car and hadn’t have breakfast himself, yet, so once everything was in, we chatted in their trailer for a while, as he ate. It gave him a chance to show me the new security camera he picked up for the gate, along with a wi-fi booster.

Over the next while, he plans to do here what he used to have at their house that they sold; add security cameras all over the place. The main thing, though, is the main gate and driveway, since that’s been our vandal’s primary trigger for rage and vandalism. Now that they have so much of their equipment here, our vandal can see bits and pieces of it from the road, and it’s driving him bonkers that he can’t come onto the property to see what’s going on and help himself to things. So I’m quite content with my brother wanting to set up more security cameras!

My brother had lots to do, though, so as soon as he was done eating, I left him to it.

I did head back out and harvested some things from the garden and put them together in an insulated bag for my brother to take home. I finally harvested the garlic scapes, so there was plenty for them, as well. I was also able to pick a couple of turnips, lettuce and chives, with blossoms for them. My younger daughter had cleaned up and smoothed out the stuff she made in her blacksmithing workshop. She set aside her two best ones as a thankyou gift for my brother and SIL for the gifts of that workshop, and I was able to add that in, too.

My brother wasn’t at his trailer, though, so I left it on the step for later and headed back in.

Which is when I got the phone call.

From home care.

*sigh*

Yup. For the third day in a row, no med assist for my mother. Yesterday (Saturday), it was the two evening visits, which get done by the same person. The day before, it was the morning visit. Today, it was the evening visit again.

During our family chat about how things went with my mother, my brother said he was planning to visit my mother, so if it happened again, he could take care of the med assist. Which is great, but I really wasn’t expecting us to have to cover med assists, three days in a row! Yes, we’ve had that happen before, but what was because someone was sick. These visits were all different people.

Before calling my mother, I went to talk to my brother. He wasn’t sure if he would be finished before her first scheduled visit – he had a lot he needed to do before the predicted rain hit. So when I called her, I told her that it might be either me or my brother, but one of us was going to cover her med assist tonight.

My mother wasn’t impressed (none of us are). The weird thing is, she got a double visit on Saturday morning. She had mentioned it to me while I was getting her supper meds out. The last time she said this happened, when the second person came in, my mother said she’d already taken her morning pills – but her morning pills were still in the bubble pack. So I checked, and that was not the case this time, and promptly forgot about it with all the other stuff going on.

As we talked on the phone, my mother was able to tell me when they’d showed up and who they were, though she can’t quite remember the name of the second person.

Then she told me about the 17th, and things got confusing. I thought she was still talking about her double visit, but it was about something else entirely. She said that someone had given her her meds for the 18th instead of the 17th.

???

So she kept her morning meds from the 18th, and stashed them away for the next time no one shows up in the morning.

???????

What I was finally able to get from her is that, when the second person came in for her med assist on the 17th, she noticed a mistake the morning person had made in the form they have to fill out. She had marked the date as the 18th, when it was the 17th.

Which my mother has concluded means that she got the wrong day’s medications. Or something. She’s been furious at me or the home care workers for not giving her the medication from the days that that were missed for some reason, so it’s not really getting the medications from the “wrong” day that bothers her. Basically, she thinks her medications were messed up, even though it was just the date that was wrong.

So when she got her morning medications on the 18th, she didn’t take them, and the home care aid left without making sure she took them.

She then started going on about how we are worried about her messing up her meds (she did that quite a bit), meanwhile the home care workers were the ones messing up her meds…. Except they didn’t. Someone just wrote down the wrong date in their form.

A lot of this was new to me, so I couldn’t get into it too much with my mother at the time. I needed to get off the phone and write it down, while I still remembered the details!

So all that got passed on to my family.

None of us is happy, and my SIL is planning to write a letter to the provincial government, which runs the home care system, about it. I don’t expect that to make any difference. This sort of thing has been going on for as long as the system has been around.

That taken care of, I spent some time doing some research, then tended to a rose bush. From what I could find, the first recommendation for dealing with scale is to prune away the infected branches. Which would cut away too much of the bush. We can cut it back severely in the fall, and it’ll come back, but not this early in the spring.

We don’t have anything like Neem oil or other suggested sprays, but one site I looked at mentioned dish detergent.

Well, we already started that.

A few other options came up that were not of any use to us, but apparently, using an old tooth brush to take them off can work.

So that’s why I tried.

I then spent the next while searching the rose bush, wetting it down with the soapy water, and using a tooth brush to get rid of the scale. This rose bush is a mass of short thorns, so I used a scrap of rigid foam insulation to stabilize the sections I was working on. The thorns could get pressed into the foam and stay in place, while also protecting my fingers from being ripped to shreds!

Once I got them all (that I could tell), I sprayed it down with a hose, then gave it another dousing with the soapy water.

I’m hoping this actually works.

The other thing we need to do is get that ornamental crab apple tree cut back. Sunlight is another thing to help prevent scale!

While all this was going on, I could hear the sounds of power tools being used. My brother had installed a post near the stand I have our trail cam on. He told me he was going to put in a post, and I was thinking “fence post”. Instead, he dug out a 4×4 post from some of their lumber that they brought over before the house sale, and set that in.

The camera is something like 10 feet off the ground.

He even added a few extras, some decorative, some practical – like a little roof over the camera to keep snow from building up on it. The camera itself is solar powered, and the solar panel could be mounted separately from the camera, unlike my solar powered trail cam, which can just pivot slightly to get a different angle. The solar panel is now mounted at the top of that 10′ or so post.

Which means we don’t need to have our trail cam at the gate anymore!

I’m thinking we can move it to record the cat shelters. I want to see how many “visitors” we get (as I have the critter cam up and have used it to chase out a racoon).

But not now, when I can only use one arm!

My brother was rushing to get things done before the rain started, but the rain wasn’t starting. I kept getting weather warnings on my phone about how, the rain will stop in about half an hour, or the rain will start at… but at most, we got spit on a bit.

Which was driving me nuts, because the garden needs to be watered, but I didn’t do it because we were expecting rain. In fact, we were supposed to get rain from about 1pm to about 2 or 3am!

We didn’t.

Later on, when my daughter and I were walking around with Eyelet, it did start to finally rain…

…only for it to stop soon after we got back inside.

I’ve just been itching to get outside, and watering is really about as much as my arm can handle right now.

Currently, we’re now expecting to get a thunderstorm between 7 and 9 this evening. It’s past 6:30 as I write this, and I see now sign of a storm. All of that seems to be passing to the south of us.

I did manage to finally try out those biscuit mixes I picked up at the dollar store. I ended up using two of the four packets. With the first one, I added a lonely piece of Prosciutto, chopped fine, and a garlic scape, also chopped fine. It was so fast, while the first batch was in the oven, I got another one going – this time with cheese to go with the garlic scape – waiting to add the water at the last minute.

I got enough biscuits out of the packages that I was able to bring a bunch to my brother. He was using the big riding mower, trying to clear the tall grass closer to his equipment, and could neither see nor hear me, so I just tucked it into the trailer for him.

When we did finally connect, he told me which app I needed to download and what I needed to be able to log on.

By then, he really had to hurry to finish and get to my mother’s. There was lots more he wanted to do, but they have decided they will come back next weekend – both of them – and stay the weekend to catch up. My brother was telling me what he really wants to do is to stay here, full time, for 6 months so he can get things done.

I’m practically swooning at the though. There is SO much we simply can’t get done, but he can, he has the equipment for it, and if he doesn’t, he has the ability to get it. With the stuff we’ve got going right now, we’re barely treading water and going into debt to pay for necessary repairs. Stuff like this is why we have credit in the first place, but to have so many things expensive things needing to be done, all at once, is good at all.

Well, we’ll see how things go. While I was at my mother’s, yesterday, she started talking about how she’ll pay to get her car fixed up. Which is great, but we can no longer afford to keep two vehicles insured at the same time. Our insurance has actually gone down, thanks to my excellent driving record (which will not be affected by our insurance claim due to wind damage), but everything else just keeps going up and up and up. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind selling the car, so we can use the space it’s in, in the garage. My brother thinks he can fix it.

Ah, well.

My brother is probably still at her place as I write this. He always goes over her banking with her in detail, leaving the printouts for her, all of which she promptly forgets as she throws away the printouts. She’ll keep some political party donation request letter from 5 years ago, but she won’t keep last month’s bank statements. Which is really, really frustrating for my brother!

Meanwhile, I’ve tried to log into the new security camera, and it says it’s offline, so I think I should go check on it.

Tomorrow, my husband has an appointment at the new pain clinic that’s closer to us. I think my arm will be fine for driving, but I might have issues getting his walker in and out of the truck!

Hmm. According to my weather app, it’s raining right now.

It isn’t.

I should ask my daughters to water the garden while we’re gone. Tomorrow is supposed to be a lovely, cooler day, but no rain.

Well, what we get, we get. Not much we can do about it.

*sigh*

It sure was great to see my brother, though, and we can look forward to seeing them both, next weekend! Yay!

Meanwhile, time for some more painkillers, then one last walkabout outside… and maybe cuddle a few kittens in the process.

The Re-Farmer

I am so NOT a morning person

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Not that I’ve got much choice. If it isn’t the morning light, it’s the cats suddenly going bonkers at 5am, expecting me to top of their kibble. Even if there is still plenty of food!

Of course, today, I had to get my morning rounds done earlier, since I needed to be at my mother’s before 8am.

After a daughter and I fed the cats (Poirot stayed in the carrier with her kittens all night, and did not leave while we were putting food out!), I did my usual garden bed checks while on my way to the trail cams.

Alas. It begins.

The Chinese elms are starting to drop their seeds.

This is while they’re still green, too.

Over the next while, there were be more and, when they get to their dry stage, they’ll be falling by the millions.

The netting on this bed will protect it, to a certain extent. Unfortunately, the cats keep managing to slide the netting on the wire hoops, bending them flat, getting inside and so on. So seeds are still getting inside. It won’t be so bad as to smother everything planted in there, at least.

No, that cats are busy doing that, instead.

I had spotted one pea sprouting a while back, and it’s gone. There are some possible beans sprouting, and I’ve spotted some onions sprouting. Plus weeds, of course. While the netting has stopped the cats from using the bed as a litter box, or just digging around because they like to dig, they still either lie on top of the netting, get under the netting, and generally just crush everything in that bed. They really, really like this garden bed, and I don’t know why!

Speaking of cats…

That tabby has all sorts of attention – including from a cat that ran off when I paused to see what was going on. The tabby had caught a bird, and the others were looking quite eager to steal its breakfast!

I’m seeing a lot fewer cats these days. This morning, I counted “only” 16 or 17 adult cats, and I may have double counted a couple

Once everything was taken care of outside, I headed to my mother’s early enough to stop for gas first. She was up and about, making herself breakfast when I got there. This included some of the instant oatmeal I’d bought for her a while back. I ended up sitting in an armchair, basically behind where she sits at her dining table in her very tiny apartment (my bedroom is probably bigger than her entire apartment), with just a half-wall between us. Mostly because I needed to close my eyes for a while, but I was also in pain, and needed the more comfortable chair. I didn’t take my T3s this morning, which can cause drowsiness and dizziness, since I was going to be driving, and just took some extra strength Tylenol. I was already tired, so taking a pain killer that could cause drowsiness didn’t seem like a good idea.

I was quickly reminded of something. My mother isn’t very good at following instructions.

I’ve shown her how to make the instant oatmeal, but she skipped over an important part. Letting it sit for about 5 minutes to absorb the liquid. She basically just started eating it right away, like it was some kind of soup.

My mother has never been a quiet eater. Now that she has had a tooth pulled, but refuses to have her dentures adjusted to fill the space, it’s gotten even worse. Thankfully, she was behind me and I couldn’t see what she was doing, because the sounds alone were making feel absolutely ill. I’m not normally bothered too much by stuff like that, but it was really bad today!

Thankfully, she was done rather quickly, and had a chance to chat about the upcoming call from her doctor. I knew it would be about the results of her blood tests, and she could ask related questions, but anything else would require a separate appointment. She started saying that she wanted the doctor to get her into a nursing home. I tried to explain to her that the doctor has already done as much as she could; she got the ball rolling, my mother got the Xrays and EKG readings they required, and then it goes to home care. I told her again about how the case coordinator and I went through all the panel questions again, to update information on how much more difficult things are getting for her. My mother thinks that a doctor can basically just order her into a nursing home, but it’s the home care department that makes the decisions but, even if she’s approved, if there’s no space, she basically has to wait until enough people die to free up beds, and even then, the spaces go to those are are considered in the worst condition. We’ve all explained this to her, many times by now. The problem isn’t that she doesn’t understand it. She simply refuses to accept it. I ended up telling her that this is because she’s doing it through the health care system. There are privately run nursing homes that she could go through, but she’d be paying a lot more (even through the system, nursing home residents are charged “rent”, based on their income, just like where she lives now). Then she started complaining that the home care worker wasn’t there yet, even though it was barely past 8am. I commented that she’d told me they come closer to 9am. Oh, sometimes they come at 8… they come at all times.

At which point I realized that the time the “usually come” is the time she notices it is, and that they should be there is when she wants them to be there. Nothing to do with schedules or having to go to other homes.

Which got her talking again about how there should only be the same two people coming to do her med assist, not so many. I told her again, this is how the system works. It’s how they have to do it. Otherwise, she would have to hire a private home care company and pay for it out of pocket.

Which actually caught her attention.

We didn’t get far into the conversation, though, as the phone rang.

It was the clinic, but the doctor’s assistant, not the doctor. We’ve spoken with him before.

I put it on speaker phone so my mother could hear, but the volume was a bit low, and the guy had a strong accent. My mother’s response was basically to start yelling at him to speak louder. I manage to get her to stop, tried to turn the volume up, and explain to the guy that she couldn’t hear him, all at the same time.

There wasn’t a lot for him to tell use. Her test results hover around the same ranges, with minimal fluctuation. My mother really seems to want to be diagnosed diabetic, though. She keeps asking about her blood sugars, which were on the high side of normal this time – barely. He basically just said, eat less carbs. It’s not an issue. Her kidney function was also fine, which is the monthly test she’s been doing since leaving the hospital, back in March.

Before the call ended, I asked if my mother had any questions, and the launched into saying, she wanted the doctor to put her into a nursing home.

*sigh*

We both responded with basically the same thing; the doctor can’t do anything about that. She’s done as much as she can.

After the call ended, I went over my notes with her and explained things. She’s understandably frustrated in that she couldn’t make out much of what he said, but that’s why I’m there for these calls. Then she said, “so… the doctor didn’t even want to talk to me…”

*sigh*

When it came to explaining about reducing carbs – and what carbs are – it got more difficult. My mother makes a big deal about how she avoids sugar, which she doesn’t really. As she understands it, it’s all about avoiding white table sugar, and “sweet things”. I tried to explain to her that bread is “sugar”. Pasta is “sugar”. etc. He’d said something about eating more vegetables that I brought up, and she perked up saying “and fruit!” I had to tell her, no, fruit is basically just sugar.

I finally started looking up lists of low carb vegetables for her, then wrote out the ones that she knows and likes, dropping off the ones she wouldn’t eat (partly because they were unfamiliar to her, or aren’t available locally, but also because she doesn’t know what a lot of them are) and those she shouldn’t eat, because of her acid reflux.

What the doctor doesn’t know when it comes to my mother’s diet is that she has stopped eating meat almost entirely, because she has decided it’s bad for her (the TV told her so…) and the bulk of her diet is bread and milk. So I looked up and made another list of low carb foods aside from the vegetables list.

She wanted me to write out a list of things she should NOT be eating, and I told her it would be too long. Instead, I looked up a list of high carb foods and read it out to her.

Not that is will make much difference. And really, at her age, there are far bigger things to be concerned about!

While talking about meats, though, she suddenly told me to take the whole chicken I’d bought with her groceries, take it home and cook it for ourselves. That chicken was pretty much the only meat she had.

After a few questions, it came down to, she couldn’t cook it. She doesn’t know how to use the oven on her stove, so she can’t just roast the whole thing, and she can’t physically stand to process and cook it on the stove top.

I offered to butcher it for her, which she agreed to.

I started off by clearing and preparing the space to work in, including doing a few dishes, then cleaning the sink itself to wash the chicken in. Of course, my mother started giving me step by step instructions on what I should be doing. She suggested using a stainless steal bowl I didn’t know she had, for washing the chicken. So that worked out – except I was apparently supposed to wash the bird after it was cut up, not before.

Then I discovered my mother does not have a proper knife.

She directed me to her one larger knife to use, and it was some sort of bread knife with different sizes of serration. I did try to use it, but it was just tearing the bird apart, so I looked around some more. She told me she had this really good knife that she got at the second hand store, and that turned out to be a cheap steak knife.

I ended up using a paring knife.

Apparently, I still wasn’t going it right, so my mother came over to the sink, got the water running – hot water! – and started tearing the chicken still in the bowl apart with her bare hands, splashing chicken juices everywhere. After tossing a chunk of tail and spine into a frying pan, she started saying that the wings are small, so they could be quickly cooked right away, and she then tried to tear the chicken apart more. I tried to tell her to sit down – the whole point of me doing this was because she couldn’t stand at the counter for fear of falling! – but she ignored me.

Thankfully, the home care worker for her morning med assist arrived just then!

I had to remind my mother to wash her hands of raw chicken, with soap, before getting her meds, and once she was with the home care worker and getting her medications, I was able to finish butchering the chicken.

That left me with a carcass I didn’t want to waste, so I found a small pot in her oven (she stores her pots and pans in the oven, since she never uses it) and got a stock going, using up some older vegetables I found in her fridge to clear out. I was a bit perplexed when I asked where her salt was, and found a small lidded bowl with salt that had dark flecks in it. It turns out that any take out packets of salt and pepper she found herself with, she would empty them into her salt bowl. So it was a mix of salt and pepper! I found some dry herbs and she directed me to her very last garlic clove, which was stored in a drawer with her larger knives, and spare envelopes.

…

My mother seemed surprised by what I was doing. I don’t think she’s ever made a chicken stock on its own before.

Once that was going, implements washed and the splashed raw chicken mess all cleaned up, I started frying up the pieces of chicken in batches. When those were done, I set them aside in a container to cool, then deglazed the pan and added that to the stock, which was getting close to done by then. I had enough time to clean up again, then take out her garbage, then clean up again…

When the stock was ready and I fished out the large pieces to remove any of the meat that was left on the bones (there was next to none), my mother gave me a hard time for throwing it out instead of taking it home to the cats. I reminded her that onions are bad for cats, but she said they’d be fine.

…

The stock got drained to a smaller pot and set aside with the cooked chicken to cool and everything got cleaned up again before I could finally sit down for a few minutes. My mother actually seemed eager to use the stock – even just to drink straight!

Which was the closest I got to seeing any sort of appreciation, really, but that’s fine. I don’t expect that from her. I could tell she was happy with it because she wasn’t giving me a hard time for doing everything wrong. 😄😂

Once everything was done, I finally got to sit and rest for a bit (my painkillers had worn off for some time by then!) and we got to chat. I mentioned that the store our post office is in closes at noon, so I’d have to leave in a bit, but I did still have some time to visit.

When it was time for me to do, she was looking at the clock and saying “it’s not noon yet!”

I actually had to explain to her that them closing at noon meant I had to be there BEFORE noon – and I had driving time to consider, too!

😄

It’s a good thing I did, too, as my daughter had a parcel to pick up. I also picked up a few packets of flower seeds, since it looks like none of the flowers we planted in the fall have survived the spring.

I still got home before noon!

It was all I could do not to go straight to bed!

Today has been a much more pleasant day outside – feeling almost cold, after the heat of the past two days. We’re apparently having rain and thunderstorms right now, too.

~ looks out the window at the clear sky ~

I don’t think I’ll be able to get anything done in the garden beds today, though. We’ll see what the evening brings. I’m just glad to be home.

The Re-Farmer

So many bebehs!

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By the time I was done with my morning rounds and garden stuff, the kittens had eaten their fill and were ready for naps!

The first picture was taken just as I was starting to feed the outside cats. Poirot quickly left her babies to go eat, and I could sneak a peak.

Three tiny grublings, all piled together!

Poirot is still very nervous when I’m around, and scared to go into the sun room while I’m going in and out, so it took a while for her to discover the food bowl I set up, just for her, in front of her carrier nest, with both wet and dry cat food. Hopefully, she will pick up on the routine and learn that she can stay with her babies, and will get her very own food that doesn’t involve fighting over it with other cats!

I did have to hang out in the sun room for a while to make sure The Grink in particular didn’t eat up the other wet cat food, before the bitter kittens got to eat. The one kitten that was returned to the creche is also still new to the routine, and it took some time for it to discover a food bowl and dive in.

The second picture is of the bigger kittens in a food coma. The three white and greys are easy to stop. We’ve got Eyelet and Grommet… What should be name the third one? I’m thinking Zipper or Buckle to stay with the theme. 😄

In the middle of the three mostly white kittens is Caramel’s little grubling, who is starting to get into the solid food a lot more. She’s actually smaller than her siblings that Caramel has with her in the cat house, I think.

She needs a name. The girls have come up with something, but it’s more like me calling them grublings than a name, and I can’t remember what it is.

You can see Kale the calico in the foreground, using her brother as a pillow – you can just see his black and white hind end sticking out from under her!

We had started calling him Oofus the Brave (a play on something my husband has said), but the girls felt it didn’t suit him very well. So he is now Sir Robin the Brave. 😄

Which means that, at this moment, we have a total of 9 kittens in the sun room, plus two in the cat house, that have an excellent chance of being socialized, then spayed and neutered!! Hopefully, their moms as well. It’s really unusual to have two really feral moms that chose to have their babies at the house! They may not be socialized, but they do seem to at least understand that they are safer close to us than wherever they’ve been finding nests in the outer yard.

I’ll call that progress.

The Re-Farmer

Kitty update, and… discovering unfortunate things

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With today’s heat, the cats have been splayed out in the shade absolutely everywhere!

The sun room thermometer was reading 30C/86F, which was actually the same as outside. The kittens were also puddled all over the place! I got the ceiling fan going, though, so that will help.

We spotted some excellent progress with the kittens!

They have discovered, and are using, the litter box! Something most of the adult cats haven’t figured out. So far, I’ve seen three of the four bigger kittens using it, including the adorable one above.

I had started calling this one Baby Button, because it reminds me of button so much. Today, my daughter came up with a much more entertaining name.

Eyelet.

So we now have Oofus the Brave and Eyelet named.

I checked on the cat house kittens. With today’s heat, I unplugged the power to the cat house, so the heat bulb will now be off, and so is the heated water bowl. Unless we drop below freezing overnight, we probably won’t need to plug it back in again.

I so wish we could reach into there! Once we have the chance, I want to cut a section out of the back wall and turn it into a door. That way, we can reach in and give them their own food and water, without having to lift the roof. The only other way to do it is through the entrance, which is at the opposite side of the cat house, and there is a sort of “porch” over what had been the original entrance. We can’t reach in very far, and other cats would just eat it first. These kittens look like they aren’t even leaving the cat bed yet, though they’re getting close.

My brother and his wife had come out again, today. I wasn’t expecting them at all and didn’t realize they were here until I went outside, just in time to see them leave!

With the message my brother got from our vandal yesterday, he wanted to talk to my mother about how our vandal found out they’d sold their property. He was too tired to visit her after hours working on that tree that fell on the outhouse, so he stopped by today.

Surprisingly, it actually turned out to be a good visit. He brought lunch, which turned out to be a good thing. My mother had gone to church, which tired her out enough that she went to sleep after, and she hadn’t eaten since whatever crackers she had when she got her med assist in the morning. After lunch, he set up my mother’s AC, in spite of her admonishing him that it’s too early, and then was all surprised that he got it done so quickly. He asked about the remote control so he could set it up, and she didn’t know where it was. He did some digging and finally found it, and was able to reprogram the default temperature on it. My mother does prefer things a lot warmer, as she gets older!

He did play the message our vandal had left him. My mother started going on about how he was the reason she moved away from the farm, because she was tired of his abusive behaviour (leaving my dad to be abused by him instead, but that’s another issue). Then she said that he keeps coming over and bringing her soup, and she tells him not to because his behaviour makes it taste bad.

She also said that the things he said in the message are much like what he says to her, and that he doesn’t let her get a word in when he’s there.

Yet… she doesn’t tell him to stop coming by.

When my brother asked about how our vandal knew they’d sold their property, she admitted that she might have mentioned it to him, a couple of weeks ago.

…

*sigh*

Then we found out that when he comes to visit my mother, when he walks down the hall, he tells everybody he meets all the accusations against me, my daughters and my brother about the farm and what he thinks we’re doing and saying. It turns out he even wrote out some long letter describing what he thinks we’re doing and left it in the common room. My mother didn’t see it until some time later and she tore it up. *sigh* She keeps all sorts of junk, but something important like this, and she tears it up!

Finding this out did explain something for my brother. While we was at his car and getting things to go inside, he started chatting with a guy that lives in my mother’s building. Not someone he’s met before. As they were talking and the guy realized he was my mother’s son, he said, “oh, so you’re the one who took the farm…”

My brother was so stunned and confused, he couldn’t say anything in response.

Now he knows why this guy said that.

The crazy thing is, the people in my mother’s building see me and recognize me. We’ve exchanged greetings and light conversation. I’m sure some of them have seen my brother, too. They know us.

So why would they believe the rantings and ravings of our vandal? Why would they even put up with him blathering at them in the common areas?

It’s getting to the point where I think I’m going to have to consult with a lawyer again. I’ve still got my Legal Shield membership, so any consultations are covered. It’s one thing for our vandal to be saying his crazy stuff about us to my mother or on phone messages. While I’ve suspected as much for some time, this is the first time it’s actually been confirmed that he is slandering us to others – even complete strangers. I don’t know that there’s much in Canadian law that we can do about it, but I can at least find out!

*sigh*

For someone who claims to be dying of cancer, he apparently hasn’t slown down even a little bit when it comes to his hate towards us. All because he thinks he’s somehow entitled to the property! I do understand that it isn’t even about him wanting it for himself so much and not wanting my brother to have it, or for us to be living here. In the 10 Commandments, it says “thou shalt not covet…” This is an example of covetousness. It’s one thing to see what others have an think “I wish I had that” and resent them for it. That’s your basic envy. It’s quite another to see what others have and think, “I should have that, not them,” and try to prevent others from having what they want, or try to have it taken from them. Marxism/socialism in a nutshell, really. The covetous person would rather see a thing destroyed, then see someone else have it. Or destroy the person who has what they want, and be willing to misuse the law and those in authority to do it. That is what our vandal is like.

Which makes it so frustrating when my mother just enables him and even allows him to turn her against my brother and me. He manipulated her so easily!

Another reason to try and get my mother into long term care or assisted living as soon as possible. There will be that extra layer of protection, and hopefully, our vandal won’t know where my mother will be at all.

*sigh*

The Re-Farmer

Kitty update and… what heck, WP? This can’t be real!

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First, the cuteness – and something to keep an eye on.

The kitties are definitely enjoying being outside of the cat cage, though only the tiny adopted kitty wasn’t getting out of it very easily. They are often found piled up on or near the self warming mat – and all over each other!

Brussel is often found with grublings sleeping all over her!

In the second photo, you can see she is quite the creche mother, nursing any or all of the babies that want. She does have a permanently angry expression, though!

She is not, however, the only creche more anymore!

The next photo shows the mystery mother. I was able to get the picture through the bathroom window, as she avoids going into the sun room if we are around. Later on, as I was going through the sun room, I spotted her actively nursing several kittens, not just her own! I made a point of getting through the sun room as quickly as possible, so as not to scare her off, so no picture possible.

Not long ago, I noticed that the calico had developed a sore on her leg. It looked a lot like the one Ooofus The Brave had on a back leg, that is now all healed and the fur growing back. Today, however, I had my daughter check a clump of fur on her back leg. As she tried to wash it out, she discovered it was another wound. We weren’t able to do much at the time, but we’ll have to make sure to put some cat-safe antibiotic cream on both wounds, in the morning. If you watched her running around, you wouldn’t know the wounds where there at all. She is not favouring the injured legs at all. When Oofus had his on his back leg, it seemed to me it was the result of over grooming, likely because I’d accidentally dripped some squeeze treat onto him while feeding it to Brussel while he was nursing. It’s possible that same thing has happened to the calico, but it’s hard to know for sure. Hopefully, she will heal up as thoroughly as Oofus has.

On a completely different note, I have a WordPress mystery. It has to be some kind of glitch. I got a “you’re being noticed” increased traffic notification, but when I finally actually checked my stats… honestly, it has to be some kind of error. This is a small blog, with a small but steady flow of traffic – both views and visitors. As of right now, my stats are telling me I’ve had a whole 49 visitors today – and almost 5,300 views! That many views is a good month for this blog, not one day! Over 1,500 of these views are to the Home page/archives link. The next highest is a food related post that is typically at the top, with 40 views.

According to the stats, virtually all of these 5000+ views are from the US, with almost 2000 from Michigan and over 1000 from California. The Michigan views are almost all from Lansing – and almost all these views are from a desktop, not hand held device or laptop, which is also unusual these days. Even then, the devices information is odd. The browser is listed as “other”, and so is the OS.

How on earth did I get such a huge jump in views? It has to be some kind of glitch. It doesn’t even seem like it’s from a traffic inducing bot; I got hit with one of those a couple of days ago, when several dozen “like” notifications came through at a rate of almost 2 per second.

I would not be at all surprised if, a few days from now, my stats get “corrected” to something more usual!

The Re-Farmer

We have lost that battle! Plus garden stuff

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Well, yesterday, we finally admitted it. The battle has been lost. We’ve thrown in the towel and admitted defeat – for safety reasons, really.

Despite my best efforts, Magda kept getting out of the isolation shelter. Once, I found a sliding window open, but most of the time, I could see nothing disturbed. The only way I could see how she could be getting out was through the roof, even though it was weighted down with bricks, and there is a ceiling of rigid insulation. I couldn’t see how she could be getting out the back, where it lefts, but how could she be getting out through the front, where it’s hinged?

Now, the insulation has been slowly scratched and chewed up through the winter, so there is a big gap where the two pieces meet. The gap between the insulation and the roof panels is very narrow, but Magda is so tiny. Was it possible?

Just in case, I found some boards and more pieces of scrap insulation that I slide in between the roof panels and the insulation ceiling. There were still spaces, but they were very small.

Once inside and in the kitchen, went to open the window, which is directly above the isolation shelter. I spotted Magda at one of the gaps in the insulation, scratching at the roof panel. When she heard me tell her to stop, she disappeared below.

Off and on, I would check out the window. Nothing was happening.

Then I looked out and found a very flat Magda, squeezed between the boards, the insulation and the roof panel, like a pancake. !!!

I dashed outside but, as I came closer, she slithered her way back into the shelter, flung herself into the cat bed and stretched out, looking at me as if nothing had just happened. !!!

I found some more scrap pieces of insulation and shifted the boards I’d added around, then kept checking out the window. I didn’t see anything.

Eventually, though, something about the insulation seemed… different.

I went out to check, and there was Magda, sitting on the lawn, looking at me. She had somehow managed to pull the insulation downwards enough for her to squirm through.

At that point, I gave up. She’s supposed to be recovering from surgery, and the last thing she should be doing is squeezing through tight spaces and dropping down from a height. Since we’ve finished the ear medication, and The Grink was looking fine, too, I opened the ramp door to the isolation shelter and let them out, putting the wind breaker box over the opening again.

Even so, when I came out this morning, I found that window open again!

While I was doing my rounds this morning, I had a whole lot of cats following me, including Magda! The second photo above was taken while I was checking the garlic bed. After I got the picture, she walked under Stinky to get to the other side of him.

She is so small, she didn’t have to duck at all to go under him.

Gosh, those two look alike. Given when he was neutered and how old she is, I suppose it’s possible he’s her daddy.

The garlic, meanwhile, is looking much better now!

Their finally turned nice and green and, with the netting in place, nothing it digging them up anymore.

Yesterday was such a gorgeous evening, I was able to do a few things in the garden, though I neglected to take photos. One of them was to uncover the winter sown bed in the old kitchen garden to give it a good watering. With the plastic cover, it didn’t get even what little rain we’ve had, and the sump pump that drains at the high end of the bed has yet to go off this year, so it’s not being watered from below, either. There was enough water in the rain barrel that I could give this bed a thorough watering. Once the cover was off, I could also see that there are quite a few seedlings in there, and what appears to be a couple of onions that I missed from last year!

Once the cover was back on and the plastic secured, I started watering the bed at the chain link fence that is now covered with mesh. I came back to the rain barrel to refill, and found two cats lounging on top of the raised bed cover!

I am not impressed.

The pre-sown bed at the chain link fence, plus the one among the east yard garden beds got watered, and I was still able to refill the watering cans to leave in the portable greenhouse to warm up during the day and add to the heat sink effect during the night.

Which doesn’t actually seem to be accomplishing anything. Whenever I check the thermometer in the morning, it’s reading the same temperature as outside the greenhouse. Still way to cold to be able to move our seedling trays into there!

In checking the other areas, I did some clearing around the walking onions. There are quite a few of them coming up right now. Unfortunately, so is the crab grass, only some of which could be pulled out for now. I check on the fenced off area where the tulips are and there are a lot more leaves showing now. Even the saffron crocuses look like there are more of them. While they never reached the point of blooming before they got choked out by weeds, clearly the corms have expanded.

After I finished my rounds this morning, I grabbed the turkey dinners I put together for my mother and headed out. I left early enough to swing past the grocery store to see if it was open today. It was, so I popped in to pick up a few things I knew my mother was running low on. I also picked up some instant oatmeal for her to try, since she’s having a harder time standing long enough to cook herself breakfast. I figured instant oatmeal would be better than boxed cereal. I got a package with three different flavours for her to try out. When I got to her place and was putting things away, I opened the box to read the instructions – she would have great difficulty reading them herself. Each flavour called for a different amount of water. Oops. Ah, well. I explained the instructions to her as best I could.

While today was just a day to visit, I of course did a little jobs for her, including bagging up her recycling. I noticed bean cans in there, which was something I’d got for her to try before, so I asked how she liked them. She was very enthusiastic in her response, so canned baked beans are now on the list of heat and eat things for her! 😁 Until now, she’d just been getting canned soups.

With the few things I picked up for her today, plus the dinners, plus her three days a week of Meals on Wheels, it turns out my mother isn’t going to need an actual grocery shopping trip for a while. It was, for the most part, a good visit. It wasn’t until the very end, when it was getting time for me to leave anyhow, that she started going off on a tangent. One was about how surprised she was that my brother didn’t phone her for Easter. I pointed out, he came over to visit her because they were going to be out of province this weekend, to spend time with the grandbabies. “Oh, two weeks ago”, she scoffed. Except it wasn’t; it was last weekend, and he spent a long time with her going over her financial stuff, as he regularly does, along with bringing her stuff for her basket and an Easter card.

Then she started going on about my daughters, and how terrible I am for keeping them “tied” to me (she doesn’t get that they actually chose to move out here to help maintain this place) and even back to ranting about how they “know nothing” because we homeschooled. She doesn’t know the girls at all, has made no effort to get to know them (she has only ever wanted to control them and get them to perform for her), but assumes she knows everything about them and about our life in general. Basically, making scenarios up in her mind and assuming they are true, then blaming all the bad stuff on my making parenting choices she didn’t approve of. It’s been decades, and she still does it! I swear, in her mind, the girls are still 10 yrs old or something.

It was definitely time to leave.

By the time I got home, it was getting close to when I would normally go out for my evening rounds, so I was soon back outside to enjoy the gorgeous weather we’ve been having. According to my weather app, we’ve been raining all day, but it was bright sunshine and warm temperatures. After feeding the cats – and playing with the kittens a bit – I ended up taking some April garden tour video. It’s been a month since the last ones I took, so I figured it was about time. I’ll be checking those soon and seeing if I need to do it again or not! 😄

Tomorrow is supposed to be quite a bit colder, with a mix of rain and snow starting in the afternoon. On a day when I have no outings planned and want to get work done outside, of course. 😁 We’ll see how things actually turn out. Some jobs I want to start require power tools and extension cords, so if we’ve got rain or snow, those will wait a bit longer. There is always something that can be worked on, though. I actually have a whole week ahead of me, with no scheduled outings until our first city stock up trip! What a remarkable thing! I might actually get some real work done outside! Gosh, that would be nice!

We shall see!

The Re-Farmer

Feline escape artist, and eyes are opening

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An update on the spayed ladies, and the littles.

I definitely over did it yesterday, and was in major pain this morning, so we just took care of the cats, and then I went back to bed. Taking care of Magda’s and The Grink’s ears went much better than expected.

Then we discovered Magda is an escape artist.

The first image above was taken right after treating their ears. Since they are in the isolation shelter, they get treated with wet cat food, which The Grink has been enjoying, but Magda seems to be ingnoring.

Then I went out through the sun room to go to the post office, and spotted a very scrabbly looking cat on a cat bed.

It was Magda!

Since getting spayed, she has developed the runs and is looking very messy.

On checking the isolation shelter, I found a corner of the sliding window by the foot bowl was pushed out of its track at the top. I popped it back in place, then got Magda and put her back. After closing the window up again, I noticed it was bowed outwards slightly, so I took it out completely, flipped it so it was bowing the other way, then put it back. I thought that would do the trick.

Then I went inside to change my shirt. Magda left a mess on me while I was carrying her.

By the time I changed and came back out, I checked on the isolation shelter and found the window partly open! Magda figured out how to slide it open from the inside!

The Grink was just sitting there, looking at me. She had no interest in leaving, but she did really want attention!

I don’t like that The Grink is in there alone. We’ll have to find a way to secure the window before we put Magda back, though. When I came home from the post office, I found her snuggling with Syndol. Later on, while my daughter and I were going through the garden areas, she kept following us, when she needs to be resting and recovering!

We also checked on the kittens, of course.

In the first photo, Caramel, in the bed she moved her kittens to, had them completely hidden. I did manage to get a picture of her babies while she was out, though. They are getting very active! With the sides of this bed being so much higher, I could just see their heads bobbing around.

Brussel’s babies are getting downright rambunctious, but they still aren’t quite climbing completely out of the cat cave. They’ll dangle a leg out, or stick their heads through the opening, but so far, that’s it.

When we noticed that Brussel was out, my daughter and I took advantage to take the babies out and snuggle them. I got some pictures, though it was really hard to get good ones. Caramel’s baby’s eyes are opening now, and it seems more active than its siblings in the cat house.

We also had a chance to look at what seemed to be a wound on the black and white kitten’s back leg. With my daughter holding him, I could get a closer look, and it does just look like missing fur. My theory remains; some wet cat food dripped onto him and mama was too aggressive in cleaning it off!

So far, all seems to be well, though I was not seeing any cats going to the food bowl inside the trap today. It may simply have been too windy, even though it’s mostly sheltered by the catio. If we’re after Slick of Adam, though, we’re unlikely to catch either of them in that location. Any female we manage to get will be good, though. We’ll have to figure something out.

At least we got two more down.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: temperatures, removing mulch and solarization

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Today was my day of rest, but I did get a few things done in the garden, since I won’t be home for most of the next two days.

The first thing I made sure to do was find a plastic to cover the end of the one bed where I’d run out.

I ended up using a dollar store shower curtain I’d got to potentially use around the eggplant and pepper bed last year, but ended up using the dining table protectors instead. That should help out with warming up the soil and, hopefully, kill off any Creeping Charlie and crab grass in there. I will probably use one of these two solarized beds to plant our potatoes.

I also removed most of the mulch from the wattle weave bed and had a pleasant surprise.

In the first image, you can see the wild strawberries (or whatever they are), which I was expecting. What I was NOT expecting, but hopeful for, you can see in the next image. That is thyme! It survived the winter!

In the next photo, you can see an overview of the long part of the bed. There’s a sort of lighter colour mass about half way down; those are the self seeded Chamomile. Hopefully, it dropped seeds and will come back again this year.

The very last photo is the thermometer in the covered bed. It looks cloudy because I took the photo through the plastic cover. It looks like it was about 18C/64F in there.

Looking around, I couldn’t see much of the green seedlings I uncovered while removing most of the mulch. I likely damaged them too much. There were a lot of seeds scattered in there, though, so I expect more to be coming up soon.

The temperature inside the portable greenhouse was a fair bit higher!

40C/104F! That would definitely start warming up the water in the heat sink I set up, though when I popped the cover off to check, it still seemed cold. That would be in comparison to the very warm temperatures I was standing in!

The next image, meanwhile, is a screen cap taken right after I got a photo of the thermometer, showing what the outside temperature was at. 5C/42F A 35 degree difference (Celsius)!

It should be interesting to see what the thermometer says in the morning, after the 0C/32F we’re supposed to drop to, tonight.

Oh, I also remembered to remove most of the mulch from the strawberry bed in the main garden area – and return the chicken wire over the top. It was quite frozen under there, and there’s no sign of the Albion Everbearing strawberries we have planted there.

The next time I should have time to do anything of note in the garden will be on Wednesday, and right now, the forecast for Wednesday is for a high of 14C/57F with a mix of sun and clouds. It should be a very good day to be working outside!

Meanwhile, I moved things around with the seed trays in the basement. I had the containers with pre-germinating seeds on top of the light fixture over the heat mat, but that light turns itself off, so what little heat it produces doesn’t last long. I thought I figured out how to reprogram the timer, but it seems to have not made any difference. It’s been a while, and there has been no sign of germination. They’re just too cold. So I ended up moving the trays with the chitting potatoes to the top shelf with the winter squash, under the shop light, then set up the second heat mat under aquarium light. So now the tray with the eggplants, peppers, tomatoes and luffa seeds is on one mat, and the three containers of melon seeds are on the other.

When I checked on them before shutting things down for the night, I was already seeing hints of radicals! They will be ready to be potted up by tomorrow or the day after!

Amazing how just a little bit of warmth makes such a huge difference!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: pre-germinating tomatoes and monitoring temperatures

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So… this is me, taking a day of rest.

I started tomato seeds pre-germinating.

What I was really wanting to do what get the heater going in the basement for a while, and heaters aren’t supposed to be left unattended. I’m not one to just hand around watching videos on my phone, my hands are too messed up to do my usual things, like crochet, and my eyes are too messed up to read, so…

Tomatoes it is!

Towards the end of the video, I included pictures I took of the thermometer in the portable greenhouse today. I was really impressed!

While I was starting my morning rounds, it was about -6C/21F shortly after 8:30am outside. At that time of day, it is just starting to get out of the morning shade. The thermometer inside was about -2C/28F or so.

When I checked again before going inside, shortly before 9am, the outside temperature was much the same, but the thermometer had already warmed up 4 degrees to 2C/39F.

I came out in in the afternoon and, at roughly 1:15pm, it was about 27C/81F in there. By about 4:10pm, it had warmed up to about 38C/100F in there! At least, that’s what the thermometer read. It didn’t feel anywhere near that hot to me.

This would be a good place for a high/low thermometer!

On a completely different topic, I have potential good news.

I was able to get some photos and short video of Brussel and her babies that I sent to the cat lady, joking that if she sent them to her circle, maybe someone might be interested in adopting a kitten in 6 or 7 weeks.

Much to my shock, she responded almost right away, saying someone was interested in the little calico!

I won’t be holding my breath on that, considering how many times people have backed out at the last minute, but gosh, it would be awesome if the babies could be adopted out right away! There is some progress in socializing Brussel, too – I was actually able to sneak a pet as she was walking past me and she actually stopped and let me pet her more!

In other cat news, there’s potential good news about Button. The Cat Lady and her family have adopted him permanently and, while he started growing again and is at normal size now, after being treated for worms three times (!!!), he also became both blind and deaf. His eyes were permanently dilated. Well, they’ve taken him to a cat eye specialist, and they think it might be a hereditary type of glaucoma. He’s now getting treatment for it. She sent me a photo, and his pupils are almost normal again – you can see his electric blue irises again. It would be nice if he could regain at least some of his vision!

All in all, it’s been a very good day. 😊

The Re-Farmer