Sunday, October 28, 2012

Goodbye Snow and Rose

Snow and Rose left today, adopted together by an Albany woman unconcerned about their shy natures.  She herself is good natured and easy going, exactly who they needed.  Thank you Mary for giving them a home and a chance.

The woman said, when she met them, they look so much smaller in person, than the impression she got from their photos.  They're still very young.

Snow and Rose were the last two kittens caught out at the Bone Pile colony.

Forest, formerly Terminator, then Freddie, remains a wild boy and here with me.




Good Luck my precious babies!

Saturday, October 27, 2012

12 Cats Fixed Yesterday and I Know Why I Hang With Animals!

I took up the 12 cats I trapped in S. Salem yesterday to the FCCO.  I was so exhausted, without a moment's time to catch extra winks.  I want to hibernate away the winter!

I did end up in a movie theater parking lot during the day, yesterday, and fell fast asleep.  I woke up just in time to go pick up the cats.

I don't want to hear anymore tales of cats dying horribly.  People like to tell me.  I don't know why.  It hurts me and maybe that's why people tell me, to hurt me.  I don't want to hear the stories.  How much do you think a person can take?

Just as I was leaving for the FCCO clinic, a woman I helped about three years back, between Albany and Lebanon calls me.  Why, I wonder, would she even still have my number.  We had a falling out.  She's a drug addict.  She doesn't think I know.  Prescription drugs.  She'd go nuts about 15 minutes after taking those pills she'd carry around like a gun, to ward people off, send them packing!  She'd move traps and just act crazy and get abusive.  Her husband hates cats and would act like an ass.  I bailed out finally, could not take it.  She'd leave threatening accusatory phone messages.

Anyhow, so yesterday's call I knew would be no different.  Unless like magic she'd changed.  She hasn't.  She claimed neighbors were shooting her cats and her husband was about to commit her.  Not much I can do about either, so I excused myself from the call, although she hung up on me, like usual, before I could do even that.

Then, after a terribly long day yesterday, still not home, but parked in the Circle K parking lot, my cell phone rings.  It's the Bone Pile colony woman.  I can't figure out why she's calling me.  I think I did my share for her.

Well her old cat is laid out sick, from an abscess, dying, and outside no less and she seems to want me to take her to the vet and pay for it.  I tell her "no" but that she needs to do that.  She claims the cat is kneading and purring while barely able to move.  I say "She's trying to comfort herself and that's your job, as her owner.  Get her inside and help her."  But the woman wants to chat, mainly, and tells me she should have been a vet, yada yada, and I'm steaming inside, this damn woman, who let all those cats breed and suffer, calls herself a Christian and now won't even care for her own elderly cat, letting her lay outside, injured, dying, in the cold and rain.  I cut the phone call short after again telling her to get the inside and warm.  AT THE LEAST!

Today, I return the 12 cats.  Seven girls, five boys.  Then I go straight to mowing fields.  I get some exchange in car repair for jiggling and vibrating around and freezing my butt off for six and a half hours on that tractor.  Strangely, I love mowing with a tractor.  No phone.  No people.  Just that god awful noise and the awful smell of diesel and oil and the pouring rain. It's pure Zen!  Beats out most of what I do in my life.



I'm resigned to my hard and lonely life.  I still got it better than 99% of the world's humans.  Not that I care much.  I got a nice cozy place to come home to, with my cats waiting for me.   I'm so lucky.

I'm finally home after my long day.  Snow and Rose might be leaving tomorrow for a home together. Am happy about that.   Seems like a real nice woman who is not concerned they are still shy.  She'll just let them be, if they want, she said.  I told her how grateful I am that she called and is the way she is about them.

I may end up with Forest, their brother, for good. He's the wild thing.  He might come around.  You never know.  He'll be very lonely without them.

I love animals because people are mean and judgemental and vindictive.  At least the ones I run into mostly.  Animals, they just love me as I am and I love them and everybody needs love.  I do.  I don't have family or anybody else to love me.  But Miss Daisy screams for joy at the sight of me coming home.  How do you beat that?
Another black teenage female fixed yesterday.

Black Teenage female fixed yesterday.

Adult black female fixed yesterday.

Young black tux female fixed yesterday.

Gray tabby tux adult female fixed yesterday.
Lily, black tux tamish female fixed yesterday.

Young Brown tabby female fixed yesterday, from the S. Salem colony.


Big black male, Wally, fixed yesterday.

Honking huge folded ear black tux male fixed yesterday.

Young black tux male fixed yesterday.

Adult brown tabby male fixed yesterday.

Young gray tabby tux male fixed yesterday.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Skunked in Corvallis and Other MisAdventures

I got called some time ago by an old acquaintance, who has struggled severely since her divorce, to have a roof over her head and enough money to survive.  She has landed just outside Corvallis again, in a small apartment, with her cats.  Her landlord feeds some strays.  She wanted help getting them fixed.

So off I went, traps in tow.  She had a couple of her own and had fed in them.  She's not so easy to be around, full of hurtful stories of what's been done to her.  She needs to spout them off at someone.  During trapping, it was me.

Life is very hard for many.

We watched movies while I periodically checked the traps. She has no TV reception.  The cats would come in infrequently.  Finally, we had caught four.  Plus her landlord had two in the house supposedly unfixed, so she got one in a carrier, but when she finally got the other into one of her carriers, it fell apart and he ran off and hid.

Black Corvallis female fixed Wednesday.

Young black male fixed Wednesday.

Young black tux female fixed Wednesday.

Big tame black stray male who turned out to be already fixed.

HUGE black male fixed Wednesday.
So five went up but the boy from the landlord's place turned out to be already neutered.  He just showed up with a load of sheep the landlord said, so they don't know his history.  The landlord is very elderly.  He's a nice guy and walks around often with another stray he took in on his shoulder.

The woman helps him out and now she has a little place to stay.  I hope it works out.  Seems really a good deal.

The four wild things were two boys and two girls.  There are others.

First night we caught a fat little teenage possum, who skuttled off quick, (for a possum) when I let him out.  The second night I was sure I had another cat, but then I shone my light over to the porch area, and it was a skunk!  I didn't want sprayed.  No way.  So the woman found a tarp and I advanced on the uncovered trap with the tarp out in front of me.  It was a huge tarp, folded over many times, so it was heavy.

I was able to get almost up to the trap, before I realized it was a teenage skunk, small enough to be able to get his tail up over his head and spray me, if he wanted to, from inside that small trap.  I got the tarp over the trap without incident.  He was young and did not see me as a threat.  Then I just released him and off he skuttled too.

I took the five up Wednesday to the FCCO.


I returned them yesterday after dropping off four tame cats at Heartland to be fixed.  Two girls from Albany and a boy and a girl from Lebanon.  The Albany girl owners were trying to give them away on craigslist unfixed, so I contacted them to see if they could first be fixed.  They agreed.

The unfixed Lebanon cats were rounded up by a family I'd helped before up there.


Albany female Chloe, fixed Thursday, with her sister, Greasy, at Heartland.

Lebanon male Burden, fixed Thursday at Heartland.

In heat Lebanon female Lilo, fixed Thursday at Heartland.


Then it was off to south Salem to help an FCCO volunteer who raises funds for the FCCO, and lives up in Portland but her parents in south Salem and the neighbor has created a cat problem.  The situation is further complicated by the fact the junk property is owned or was, by the occupant's mother, who died, and had been talked into leaving her property to the occupants sister, who promptly sold it to a developer and gave her sister an eviction notice.  60 days to get out.  They've lived there decades.  But in the end, we decided to get all the cats fixed anyway, despite the fact the junk property where the cats live, has been sold.  What do you do?

I trapped 12 there yesterday.  The woman had told us there were five not fixed yet.  Um, double that plus a couple lady!

Off I go with them today, to be fixed.

I was so happy to be able to catch them all.  The last few caught were done in the dark with my drop trap and some guess work.  "Is that the tabby or the black under the drop trap or is their fixed 19 year fat cat?"  Not so easy to tell from 40 feet in pitch black.  I yanked the cord and caught two unfixed tabbies.  They called them "gray and whites".  I call them gray tabby tuxes.  Unfixed.  The both.

Well, I hope it all works out.  I have been stressed badly over the Albany apartment complex who has decreed cats fed there now not be fed.  The thought of them crying for food and an entire complex of people cowed into ignoring their pleas has me on the brink.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Day of Rain Turns to Day of Sun. 12 More Local Cats Fixed Yesterday

I took 12 cats down to S/nipped yesterday to be fixed.  While in the midst of picking them all up, the night before, I was called by the Two Legged Torti colony caretaker.  One of the teens fixed two weeks ago, a girl, had been found dead in the parking lot, apparently hit by a car.  She was very upset.  I quickly made them a housing unit from an old carrier left in my yard, to help keep the cats off the busy streets that surround them, and out of car engines, in search of cover and warmth.

Rest in Peace little girl, dead already, dead by car.
The week before last, I took seven cats to Heartland from a house on Hill street over run.  I took four little kittens and three teens.  Yesterday the rest were fixed.
A boy named Ashley, fixed yesterday.

The mom of the four kittens Heartland took in, now fixed!


Mona, adult female from Hill street house, now fixed.
A girl named Harley.  Teen Hill street female fixed yesterday.

Smokey, a grogeous teen male, fixed yesterday from the Hill street house.

Two other prolific Albany females finally were fixed also.  Both have had kittens.  One, Vendetta, was kicked out of her house, when the landlord discovered her owner with cats, lots of them (two mothers with kittens) and now lives in a garage of a friend of hers, with her latest litter.  She had been sick with coccidia.  Finally now she is fixed, at least, but there are still those four kittens in the garage too.
Vendetta, finally fixed, at least.
And this female is finally fixed, Major Spears they call her.  She too had kittens, several dead already from flea anemia.
Black male Brother, a feral from Corvallis, was also fixed.  He really got the celebrity treatment at S/nipped.  Here, he recovers wrapped in electric blankets.  Who would even want to wake up?

Whipples, a young Corvallis owned female, was fixed yesterday also.
I had some fun too.  The weather was supposed to be nasty and rainy.  But instead, it was sunny and warm and wonderful.  I spent the day, while the cats were fixed, out at Sunset Bay beach. I took a lunch, a sandwich I bought at Walmart.  It was tasteless.  I gave up trying to eat it and gave it to the sky full of gulls, begging.  I laid out my blanket on the beach and took a long nap.  Then I walked up and down the bay, shoes off, pants rolled up, scuffing the surf water as it ebbed in and out.  It was delightful!  A lone stand up paddle boarder trolled around where the surf should be casting in waves.  But there were no waves.  The bay was still as a lake.  There's nothing sadder than a surfer waiting for waves that never come.
Gull expresses opinion yesterday at Sunset Bay.

Surfer without a wave.

Wall walkers.  Beach visitors often cannot resist the urge to walk cracks in the bay cliff around to reefs around the corner.  However, many have been caught as the tide comes in and the coast guard has to pluck them from rocks.
I also visited the Elk place outside Reedsport, a restored marsh.  I stop there to use the restrooms on the way and to relax a bit on the way back.  The ducks and geese were enjoying the afternoon as were the elk.





The Elk place yesterday morning very early.








Down at the Empire boat launch, where people also crab off the pier, two women had waded into the water with their dogs.
I was told here, in the valley, that yesterday the rain pounded down.  Where I was in Oregon, on the south coast, while 12 mid valley cats were fixed, the sun shone down on me!  The day was glorious!

Dashing

 Got a message this morning.  Was I even really awake yet?   The weather has been really winterish, with winds, pouring rain, cold, even thu...