Tuesday, October 28, 2008, 17:07
Snow . . .
Monday morning the ground was covered with white here at Rural Route 2. It was just a dusting of snow, but still, it was snow. Winter is definitely on its way.
The bird water pans were frozen solid Tuesday morning. The low temperature was 20 degrees. The horse water buckets had a thick layer of ice on top, so I had to use the ice fishing skimmer to get the ice out of the buckets. Once the sun came around to the back yard, the bird water pans thawed out enough so I could dump out the ice and fill them with fresh water.
I took all five of the barn kittens into the vet Monday morning for vaccinations (distemper, feline leukemia and rabies). In spite of newspaper ads and Randy posting ads on the Internet on the local Craigs List listing and local Freecycle listing, I have not been able to find homes for them. I have spay/neuter surgery scheduled for them on November 19. They will have to stay in the basement for a little while after they come home until they have recovered somewhat. They might be in there a couple of weeks. Depends on how they are doing, I guess.
It took me a while, but I have figured out names for all of them. The tom, who is the biggest at 7.5 pounds, is Sir Thomas. He's the only tom cat in the bunch. The girls all weigh 6 pounds and some ounces. The tortoiseshell -- and my, does she have a sense of humor and a sense of impishness about her -- is Petunia. The little one that's blind in one eye is Miss Kitty. And the other two are Rosie and Violet.
The only way to tell Rosie and Violet apart is by the amount of white on their chests. Violet is the calmest of the bunch. She wasn't particularly upset about the trip to the vet clinic. The others were frightened (don't blame them; it was their first trip in the kitty carrier and their first vehicle ride), but still, none of them tried to bite me or claw me when I pulled them out of the kitty carriers. When we got home and I let them loose in the barn again, they all went back to eating their breakfast, so the effects of the experience could not have been too horrible. Petunia was purring up a storm at that point. They were all happy to be back home.
Monday, October 27, 2008, 07:10
Scenes from the Weekend
"Why is there a tomato on the cupboard?" I asked.
I have eaten half of the tomatoes that I picked before we got a hard freeze. I put the tomatoes in a big casserole dish that is now sitting on the counter top. One cherry tomato had somehow escaped.
"Sophie flipped her mouse into the dish. She must have gotten the tomato out while she was trying to get her mouse out," Randy replied.
Sophie, the gray cat my nephew found as a kitten under the granary three years ago, had found a rabbit fur mouse and was having a very good time with it.
Blustery
We got a taste of winter here at Rural Route 2 on Sunday. It was gray and cloudy all day with a west/northwest wind blowing from 20 to 40 mph and a high of about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. It was spitting snow on Sunday too. I kept expecting that we would get some good old-fashioned snow squalls, but it never snowed that hard. The weather forecast said it would rain all day Saturday and Saturday night, but we only got a few sprinkles out of it.
Photo album
I had written a blog Sunday afternoon and had taken some pictures off the camera, intending to post a blog with pictures. I went to my Rural Route 2 website -- and the photo album link was gone.
"Randy? Did you take the photo album off Rural Route 2?" I asked.
"Yes, I did," Randy said. "If you thought it was broken before, it's really broken now."
Ever since our ISP changed a server months ago, the captions have been missing from my photo album. Randy says that from time to time, he has been working on trying to restore the captions. But now the photo album has really gone AWOL. He is working on making a new one. It will take some time. I don't know how long. A few days? Weeks? Months? But eventually I will have a photo album again so I can upload pictures to the Internet with captions. Yipee! I have missed by photo album.
Yee-ouch!
One evening last week, I was minding my own business and carrying hay out to Isabelle. There's only a couple of feet of room between the 460 Farmall and the fence in the barn, and as I walked past the tractor, I whacked the heck out of my shin on the draw bar. I mean really whacked it. I could barely walk.
I came hobbling out of the barn with the hay, and Isabelle actually stopped eating her grain to watch my progress. I suppose she was afraid I was so injured I wouldn't be able to get the hay out to her pasture. It was a good thing I was wearing a thick pair of socks, or it might have been worse that it was. I've got a faint bruise on my shin now and a big lump.
Once the pain had subsided to a dull roar and I could put more weight on my leg, I hobbled up to the house to get some of Randy's old white socks. I tied them over the draw bar. The socks serve two purposes. They put padding over the draw bar. And since they are white, I can easily see them, which reminds me to watch my leg when I walk past the tractor. I have a plastic bag full of Randy's old white socks. They work really well for washing walls. And for covering draw bars.
LeAnn R. Ralph