Monday, January 09, 2017

The Ten

I did not get up to Stayton to trap the trailer park cats for my ten reservations today.  The roads were too bad.  Yesterday afternoon, the messy slushy icky thaw began.

Snow is beautiful until it all melts at once, with rain coming down too.  The street looked like ice sheets between dirty snow laid out long in rough lumpy ridges thrown up from tires, but when I tried to cross it, to check the mail, my shoe fell through the crusty layers, into 3 and sometimes 4 inches of ice cold water beneath.

I switched out footwear to my water proof boots.

I took my pointy tip shovel and ran the tip down the driveway, pushing with the handle, to take off the snow and let the ice beneath melt faster.  I cleared a path, with that same shovel, as rain fell, along the curb, where water was boiling as it tried to escape the neighborhood to the river, through the storm drain, but was clogged in ice chunks and impeded in heavy slush.

As the snow melted from the roof and drained down into my gutters, waterfalls developed along their lengths, in a dozen spots.   At the curb, I cleared ice from the spot where the underground drain line dumps the water to the street so the downspouts would not back up and so then the gutter water could flow freely down them and into that line and what had been snow on the roof, now water, could race back to the river too.



I'd found a solution too, through my typing fingers, and the computer, for the unfilled reservations of today.   A Lebanon woman needed cats fixed from the sheep barn and her barn and a couple other neighbors feeding offspring.   She brought ten down last night in the back of her truck, in cages and huge kennels.

We first brought out the wire crate from the back of her truck and put it in the back of my car in the garage.  Two cats with wide eyes darted back and forth, scared.  I got into the car then, closed the doors, and transferred the two girls out into live traps.   For the next four cats, who were in a huge crate in her truck, we both climbed into her truck, using a plastic step stool to get on the tail gate, with a horse blanket across the bare metal to ease the pain on old knees.  She held the flashlight, while I pulled cats forward into the traps I'd taken into the back with me.  I had on my headlamp.  Some of the cats snuffled and sneezed.

Then she brought a big carrier with three cats inside into my garage and put it in the back of my car and this time she went in, closed the doors, and pulled each out and pushed each then into a live trap.

And lastly she had a single kitty in one carrier and easily put her into a trap, but in my car, to be careful, just in case the cat panicked and got away from her.

This morning she came back down from Lebanon to ride with me to the clinic.   She wanted to see how to check in, and where, because then she could take them up herself should more show up and they seem to there, she said, as people leave them behind, or they just arrive.

It was pleasant to have a human passenger.  She's a nice lady and we chatted on and on about this and that and everything on the ride up and on the ride back.  She'll pick them up this afternoon and I'll get my traps back from her in a day or two.

I was overjoyed that ten spay neuter reservations were not wasted because of a little storm and some bad roads that prevented me from trapping at the trailer park.

Here are photos of the cats up now being fixed:

Bonzi

Dahlia

DeeDee

Monster

Royale

Salinas

Smudge

Susie

Toledo

Tuxer
I'm very grateful for the shelving I got using some gift cards and for the new lightweight small traps.   See how easy now, clean and efficiently I can hold cats in traps?


Today, along with the misery of the slush and rain and cold, a vengeful wind roars through the valley.

Summer is a longing in my soul.





3 comments:

  1. It's so nice that you had a partner! A rare treat, indeed. Be safe! And thank you for the excellent work.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It was nice and she did a great job of rounding up cats up where she lives quickly!

      Delete
  2. I am so glad that you had a pleasant partner. Long may it continue. It sounds as if you could each help each other - which is lovely.

    ReplyDelete

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