May in Photos

RIP little Schatzie, the ancient thorn in my side.  We had to have her euthanized at the beginning of March, and somehow I never found the words to tell the blogosphere.  Her health started to deteriorate rapidly, and rather than prolong the inevitable, we made the decision to end her life in a humane manner.  She lived with us for 8 years, and considering she was 20 when we adopted her, she lived a good, long life.  I always joked that I gave her palliative care for the last 8 years, but in truth, the last 3 were very demanding.  We miss the old girl, though.

Somehow, going from a dead cat to a turkey vulture seems morbid beyond belief.  These birds are so big, it's hard to comprehend.  When they circle the thermals, they are immense in the sky, and dwarf all other birds.  I've zoomed in here - the astute will notice the light standard in the bottom right of the photo looks like it's that close, but in reality it's over a kilometre away.

I waited and waited for my swallows to return this spring.  Maybe Cappie gracing the beams in the barn beside the house didn't look like the welcome committee they imagined, because for the first year in over a decade, we're swallow-less.  I'm really, really worried about this.  We've had a hard spring so far, with a really big frost about 10 days ago that annihilated the asparagus and grapes.  As it is, it's the end of May, and for the record, it was 8C this morning, and tonight, the wood stove is on.  Things don't bode well for the swallow population with conditions like that.

Tessie's quite the character.  The three cats have found their new places in the house sans Schatzie and Cooper.  I call the new dynamic "BobCat and his Harem".  The two girls provide Bob with just enough attention, and while the younger Capucine pounces on Tessie quite relentlessly some days, it's a very harmonious, easy-going sort of peace that reigns supreme.  Tessie's our sensitive, independent one.  Capucine's boisterous and pats me on the shoulder when she needs petting.  And BobCat's staked Cooper's spot on the bed, and most mornings, I wake up to both Bob and the Cappers, staring at me from the foot-end of the bed.

Spring sprang suddenly, and at some point in April, we traded winter boots for sandals.  We went from heating to using air-conditioning in the space of a week, but then things normalized.  The heavy frost mid-May even frost-bit the tender ash leaves that had just begun to sprout.  In 12 years here, it was the first time I can remember something like this happening.

Capucine is such a regal looking cat.  Her personality is larger than life, and she loves being petted and fawned over, but only on her terms.  She has so many little chirps and meows, and is very vocal.

It's hard to believe Tessie the scrawny stray became such a chunky girl.  She has the nicest, fluffiest fur I've ever seen on a cat.  It's funny how I'd never, ever had a tabby cat, and within a year, we find ourselves with two.

We've had a lot of rain in May.  For the first time in a long time, the field across from the house is planted with wheat.  I think it's been corn for the past 5 years, and if memory serves, it's been wheat only once in the last dozen.  It seems to be the flavour of the year, since most fields in our area were planted with wheat this spring.  The fields are now verdant and brimming with life.

Speaking of brimming with life, this was our tap water about a week ago.  The town even had the gall of putting a notice in our mail saying it was perfectly potable, but there were some "clarity issues".  You don't say?  I don't even want to shower with it, much less drink it.  Since then, the quality has improved, and hopefully with the added rain filling reservoirs and lakes and rivers, we won't encounter another 5 month-long boil water advisory like we had last year.

And that's May, in a nutshell.

A Nice Glass of Well Water, Anyone?

It's really practical having a well.  This is Canada after all, land o' plenty when it comes to water resources.

I admit that I used to be pretty lax when it came to water usage.  Having spent the first few years here on well water, our motto was "let the water run".  The more we used it, the better it got.  It's full of iron, sulfur and black sediment.

Can I pour you a glass?

I don't think I need to tell you the glass on the left is "city" water, which we have in the house.  The lovely, appetizing glass on the right is from the well, which we still use to water the plants outside, and wash the cars.  That we used to cook, drink, shower and do laundry with this water amazes me to this day.  The quality of the water then was infinitely clearer, because we ran the well more, but today, as I took the kitty litter boxes outside for a good scrub (just the sort of thing I use well water for...), I was astounded by the quality, or lack thereof.

From time to time, our well water would just run black.  It happened in the shower, it happened while doing laundry, it happened while putting on water to cook pasta.  We're pretty sure it was just sediment from the holding tank, but nonetheless, it was disconcerting.  I'm also aware that what you can't see, E. coli, for instance, is a distinct possibility, considering we're surrounded by dairy farms.  We're also surrounded by lots of houses with non-conforming septic tanks, but  let's not even go there.   The previous owner was a biologist, and tested the water in his lab on a regular basis.  It always came up potable, but still - so did the water in Walkerton up until the tragedy - as Wikipedia so aptly puts it.

The day we finally were hooked up to city water was bittersweet.  It was like having an umbilical cord re-attached, a regression of sorts.  We could no longer deny the fact the city was encroaching and we're standing there with open arms, welcoming it.  Hypocrites!

I remember a bright, sunny day.  I can still picture the backhoe in the street, digging down, down, down, to reach the water main.  I also remember Eric plumbing the pipe out to the street.  It works like this here:  the city contractor digs down to the water main and installs a valve.  We're responsible for piping from the house to the valve.  Eric was in the crawl space, I was outside, and we spent a lot of time that day, shouting to each other through the thick wall of the foundation.  We needed to dig under the foundation, and at some point, Eric was excavating with a shovel outside (this pre-dates our John Deere TLB, which I am sure Eric was dreaming of at this precise moment), and suddenly, a few feet down, he hit what sounded like metal.  It was like the ghost of the house (and there is one - a good one) had guided Eric's shovel to an old cast-iron drain pipe that went along the house and under the foundation to the ditch.  It had sheared at the exit of the foundation, probably with years of frost heave.  It served perfectly to thread the water pipe through, once it was cleared from decades of mud and debris.   We've had a few moments of divine intervention, specifically, Madame Ménard intervention, but this was one of those moments where you raise your face to the skies, put on an ear-to-ear grin, and give praise to the powers that are.  Merci, Madame Ménard.

There are some things you dread, and the excavation was one of those things.  But within a few hours, we had real, clear, sodium hypochlorite-infused water.  Gone are the days of treating laundry with Rust-out.  The days of scrubbing rust stains out of the toilet and sink - adios!   The days of clearing blocked faucets with CLR - buh-bye!  The days of ironing Eric's white uniform shirts, and finding a huge yellow stain on the last panel - auf wiedersehen!

That evening, Eric and I stood beside the toilet and flushed, and flushed, and flushed, marveling at the clarity of the water.  We gingerly took apart and cleaned all of our taps with CLR and a toothbrush, ensuring that hard water and iron stains were a thing of the past.  We flushed out the hot water tank, adding years to its life.  It was a day to remember.

And on a day like today, when I use our well water outside, I'm taken back in time...

...and I'm so grateful we don't have to drink it anymore!

We've obviously changed our water habits.  We don't let water run needlessly, we have a low-flush toilet, and only run full loads of laundry and dishes.  Overall, we're cognizant of our consumption.  And grateful, too - very grateful -  for the clear gold that runs from our taps.