Strange!

I was looking at lost and found ads, on craigslist tonight. I see one for a black long hair cat, lost less than half mile from where the feral black long hair was caught. I thought "Boy, that's kind of more than coincidental."

Yet, the cat in the trap acted quite feral. Except. Except feral usually don't eat two cans of food after just being tranferred into a live trap, and while riding in a moving car. That was way unusual.

So I e-mailed the guy with the ad, to ask for details. I asked if the cat has, by any chance, a right eartip. He did not know what those are and said he would not have noticed. I can't tell from the online photos of his lost cat, but he also said the cat would disappear for up to two weeks routinely. When that happens, usually someone else is feeding the cat, thinking it's a stray maybe. Maybe someone moved, took the cat, then it tried to find its way home. His cat has been missing two months, which is a long time.

Cats can turn feral if they endure terrible hardships and starvations in that amount of time. Turns out he adopted the cat from Heartland. I told him to contact Heartland to see if they had original records to see if the cat came in with an eartip. The cat could have gotten an eartip later, in one of its two week missing spells if someone took the cat in, thinking it to be a stray, getting it eartipped even though already fixed.

Well, I don't know . I'll have the Wilsonville woman who has the cat get the cat scanned because Heartland microchips cats they adopt out. That will solve the mystery.

In other news, I can't sleep here anymore. I don't feel safe. Tonight, there was a pickup parked outside my place, twenty feet from my window, 2:30 in the morning, people inside, doing I don't know what, dark inside it. Finally the police came, to check them out. I was happy, because I was so nervous about strangers sitting so close in a dark pickup. They came and left. The pickup is still there. I don't know if the people in it had gone by then or what.

I think they're probably friends of the people down the block with all the cars, in the cul de sac, but I"m not sure they are. I don't have a clue who they are.

I must be getting old or something. Maybe this is the new normal, with twenty somethings out all night, up most every night, no jobs, doing I dont know what. Maybe it's normal and I should just try to ignore it and maybe safety isn't an issue.

But it's scary to me and I think safety is an issue now, big time.

However, having strangers sitting in a dark car a few feet from me does not make for sleep. They should know that, know better, unless they just don't care how they affect other people or are criminals to begin with.

When I am out cat trapping late in the night, I would never sit outside someone's window in a dark car, even if they knew I was there to catch their cats. Usually people ask me to leave when they go to bed.

Nobody understands them. They're up all night. They have all those cars roaring around and parking all over. The men ride around on little bikes in the dark. That's not normal behavior for most households. People have reason to be skeptical of their character and intent.

I do not feel safe here anymore.

The first year I lived here the worst things that happened were the Mexican kids shooting with their pellet guns that often went through the holes in the fence or over it and whizzed very close to my head. This happened repeatedly.

Then, the first Christmas here, after midnight, there was pounding on the door. I looked through the peep hole and it was two scary looking guys, one with long scraggly hair. I yelled at them to leave. They refused. I finally yelled I had a shotgun and was going to count down from five and when I reached "one" I was going to shoot. They ran. They were probably knocking on doors to see if someone would answer and if not, they'd break in. I think they were out behind my place before that. I also called two neighbors one of whom came charging out with a baseball bat.

There have been some other instances. This isn't quite Mayberry RFD. But nothing like recently, with all these people roaming through. But if they're not criminals, just bored young people, the fact they're up all night could actually make the neighborhood safer. If I could just figure out which side they're on, criminals or not criminals. I don't know them. They act like criminals. Doesn't mean they are. I suppose I could ask them, but I don't think if they were criminals they'd just come out and say, "Yeah, we got rap sheets a mile long."