Samhain to All Hallows Eve to...What We Have Now

 Halloween is one of those morphed holidays, like Christmas, that started with the Celts.

The celts celebrated it as Samhain (sow-in).  Originally it was just a gaelic festival celebrating end of harvest and winters start.   They beleived the curtain between the living and the dead blurred on this night.   They lit huge bonfires and wore masks to disguise themselves from evil spirits free roaming.

The Christians had other uses for the date.   November 1st became All Saints Day, where saints and martyrs were honored.   Later on, November 2 became All Souls Day, to include the dead in the mix.   The night before All Saints Day became All Hallow's Eve, when Christians prayed and fasted.  All Hallows' Eve, once a time of prayer and fasting, among Christians, and a time of masks and bonfires, to hide out from evil spirits by the Celts, became Halloween.

Trick or treating came from the medieval tradition of souling, where the poor went door to door, to receive food in exchange for prayers.

People initially carved faces that held hot coals in turnips and potatoes to ward off evil spirits.  Now we carve faces into pumpkins and mostly we're hoping gangs of badly parented teens will stay away.  Now some wear masks to scare people but the Celts wore them to disguise themselves from evil spirits.  I think evil spirits would sprint not just run from some of today's costumes, like the dinosaurs and kids in banana suits that make me laugh out loud to see.

Whatever its history, today's Halloween is fun for kids of all ages.  If we got to trick or treat at all, as kids, once home, we could choose one piece of candy collected only, to eat.  The rest my parents would take and claim it was for later and put it into the locked basement freezer.   We never would see it again. We also sometimes wondered what else might be in that locked basement freezer.  Halloween was not fun in our house.

This year, not many houses I've passed have decorations up.   I figure its the tight economy.  Nobody has extra money these days around here.   Not anyone I know at least.  Even Halloween candy is very expensive at the stores.  I got a small mixed bag of candy last night, in case kids come by, to hand out, and if too many come by, I'll shut out the lights once what I have is gone.

I saw a story about this broom maker business down in Eugene.  They make functioning brooms and also brooms for witches and warlocks or anyone that would like or needs a real broom.  It was such a Eugene story.  Eugenians like their oddities and are good at supporting local businesses.  

Check out Eugene's broom makers.

13 Cats Fixed This Week

 My little nonprofit fascilitated getting 13 cats fixed this week.

On Monday, it was five cats from Albany, but all I did was get the appointments and loan the traps.  The caregivers trapped, transported and even paid for their five to be fixed.   I never even saw them.

Yesterday, it was four cats from Lacomb fixed, a mom and her three kittens.    This lady had contacted SCR to adopt barn cats.  This was when Tempest, the river path mom, was needing a barn home.   But instead SCR asked me if I had any appointments available, because the lady had discovered cats in her own barn, trapped them, and held them in large collapsible wire dog crates, until she brought them to me Tuesday night.   I'd gotten four more appointments in Salem at a spay event OHSS was holding.

I held them here the night, transported them up to the clinic and picked them up also, since she works.

I took them to her straight from the clinic and she put them back in the dog crates for recovery and they will become her barn cats.  She also paid all costs for them to be fixed.

Spicy, the mom, an older girl

Fireball, the only boy

Sweetie, a girl tabby tux

Mimic, a torbi girl kitten

As I backed out of my driveway, yesterday morning, to take the cats to the clinic, I saw something under my apple tree in the front.  I couldn't believe my eyes.  It was Huckleberry--my oldest most frail kitty.   My heart fluttered.  How did she get outside. It was cold and rainy. I stopped my car and tried to herd her towards and into the garage but she vanished.  

I left my garage door propped open and left for the clinic.  I was  heartsick and so worried and also could not figure out how she got out.   Then I remembered the accident with the doors.   I'd been working in the cat yard taking out tree sprouts, some that had grown up and into the cat wire at the top.  I wanted to secure the cat yard after the raccoon incident.   I'd taken some of the branches out through the garage cat room door, then outside from the garage.  I was sure I securely closed the cat room door but left the garage door open.  It was very windy and the doors don't latch properly sometimes due to sinkage.   I got a phone call while putting the branches in the bin, and sat in my car to answer it.  When I went back into the garage, I saw the cat room door was open.  The windy condtions pushing through the open garage door or from the cat yard out probably played a role in the cat room door being pushed open.

I couldn't find any cats missing and never thought about old Huckleberry getting out.  That had been two days before and I was sure I saw her the day before.  I always check on her since she's so old.

But the night before, when the lady brought  the cats to me, she brought them to my front door, which also doesn't close well unless I really make sure it latches.  I  think she got out then, in the back and forth, hauling them into the house, then to the bathroom.  I don't think the door latched shut.  

I was sick to my stomach with worry on the drive back from the clinic.  When I got home I quickly went and checked around the yard for her.  I used the phone camera to check inside a couple cat shelters I have outside.  She was in one of them.  I quickly went to the garage, got two of my nets, went back out, covered both holes in the cat shelter at same time and she instantly shot out into one net.    I had  a soft blankee around my neck and used it to cover her and scruffed her through it and carried her inside.  While I had her, I updated her on flea treatment and worming, then released her in the warm house.

She was so happy to be back inside.

My old old gal Huckleberry, eating tuna after I got her back inside.

I then did an inventory to be sure there were no other escapees, laid eyes on all the cats, to be sure, although they thought I was nuts doing it, but too bad.

After I returned the cats to Lacomb, last night, it was already late and dark, due to a late pickup time.  I then went straight to Lebanon and picked up the four that were to be fixed today in Corvallis--another mom and three kittens.

This is from the Lebanon house of cats.  12 fixed there already.  Now 16 fixed.  All tame.   Just preventing it from becoming a massive issue this spring there.  

They had them ready, in carriers, even labeled.

The mom cat

Felix, a very sweet tame boy kitten

Willow, a tiny little girl, she said Willow is the runt

Callie, a faded torbi.

I took these four over to Corvallis to be fixed today.  But their owners picked them up this afternoon, so I was done once I got home.

13 more cats fixed this week.  A good number!   .A lucky number for the cats of this area.

Recliner Cat Fixing

 

It's Black Cat appreciation Day but Otto isn't into it.

Oh my I've had it easy lately, with cat fixing.

This month, already, as of today, up to 29 fixed, with 8 more on the docket for tomorrow and Thursday.

I've barely lifted a finger.   I now loan out traps and sometimes transport and try to raise funds.

Mostly I arrange fixes and trap loans, transport, from the comfort of my recliner, using my phone.  Yup.  It's descended to that.  But its highly effective and when people have to do more of it themselves, I don't get burned out and the people get to see how it works so just maybe they'll leave me out of the equation the next time.

Ooops.  In the count, I forgot to add in 6 others, who came down from Milwaukie to be fixed and HCC paid half their bill.

So that puts us up at 35 helped so far this month.  

9 of the cats are from an Albany colony.  They trap and transport their own.

12 so far, come from an overrun house in Lebanon.  Getting them all fixed (4 to go, scheduled for Thursday) will prevent this from becoming a hoarder house.   The old woman is beyond happy.

They're all tame cats.

With that group of cats, I pick them up night before and transport them over.  They pick them up. 

I intensely dislike manipulators.   Mid summer a lady wanted help with five cats, one already pregnant again.  I approved funding for her and offered traps.  She put it off time and again.  I told her to at least get the  mom in to be fixed or there would be more.  She did not do that.  Then she claimed the mom disappeared.   One of the four teens died to of a tragic accident.   After the three teens were fixed, whom she had told me were ferals and they were not at all, she adopted them out.   Afterwards, she kept in touch, giving me compliments, asking how I was, by text.  I thought "somethings' up".   People don't do this cause they're nice.  They want something.  Sure enough, turns out mom never disappeared and has eight kittens and she was hoping I'd say HCC would pay for all 9 to be fixed, over $1000 cost.  I gave her the link to the FCCO instead.   Lady, I'm out.  When you have religious views about cat abortion, that's fine, but you can pay for the cost of your beliefs, not me.

Tabitha, from the Sweet Home 7-11 colony

Sure, I still trap now and then, but not often, which is fine.  I'm old and I want my joints to last til next summer so I can head out to the mountain lakes again.

I had a great summer, despite my knee blowing out.  I didn't do anything but day trips, to the reservoir and to Waldo lake but I went far more frequently than I have in past summers.

I have photos of all those adventures and will look back at them over and over again all winter long.

Now I need to stockpile more books for the winter.   Time to head to library sales.  I skipped out on garage sales this summer because last thing I need is more junk.   I love garage saling/treasure hunting.   But its easier to bypass them than say no to stuff I see if I stop and look.

By and large my knee isn't bad.  My back is even better.  It hurts now and then after over use but my leg and foot no longer go numb.  I still do the exercises given me for my back.   I raved so much about the pt place I went to for my back, my old neighbor wants to go there.  She's been referred for pt for her back and leg issues.  I told her the name of the place but I also thought to myself, "its not magic.  You'll actually need to do the exercises given."  

Today is rainy and icky out.  Gloomy, gray, moldy wet air.  Yeah.  Tomorrow will likely be the same.

Gigi is climbing up on the bed and thinks its a great day to just nap.  She's right.

Celebrate

 Very very soon now, the US mid term elections will be over.

No more slick ads, promoting this person or that person, mostly lies I'm sure.  They tell you what you want to hear. And show black and white ugly photos of their opponents.  They all do this.   Like its a template for really annoying all of us poor souls.

The TV ads are constant.  Now if I watch TV, its caption only.   I can just look away when the politicos start pushing themselves and all they will do to improve everyone's life tremendously.  Sure you will.

Being a penny pincher, the ads make me literally hurt inside because I can see piles and piles of money burning in the background.   And I can think of what that money could do, if it wasn't getting donated to politicos and their gleamy eyed visions of how to better control us.  Did I say that?  I meant make everyone's life unicorns and smiley faces.

The mailbox by now, being close to election time, with money in politico PAC's left to spend, are filled with candidate's eye catching expensive to print "slicks", which I recycle immediately.  

I can't wait to celebrate the end of it all.  

I voted already.   I didn't want to vote for some of the candidates, but I'll be more considerate of who I vote for when the person I voted against, in every choice, is out of office.

Raccoon Adventure Morning

 I didn't want an early morning adventure.  But I got one.

I'd had an odd night.  First, just after I went to bed and was reading, there was what I thought to be a cat squall, under my bed.   I yelled at the cats, as i do when that happens, "Be Nice!" turned out the light and went to sleep.

I had a weird dream.  I thought I heard a large animal in the house, maybe a bear, but it wasn't a nightmare that woke me up, just a sleepy dreamlike memory.  But I do remember it clearly.  Maybe it wasn't a dream.

This morning I woke up.  It was 7:00 and that's when I usually wake up.  I heard a wheezing squeeling noise in the hall.  I half expected to see one of my elderly cats laying flat out dying.   But my most frail cats were not dead or dying.  I quickly checked.  But one of them was up on a cat run wide eyed.  That's not the usual I see mornings.   But I let it go, thinking there'd been a tiff of some sort between cats.  It happens this time of year.  Its been freezing nights, and the cats get active in different ways when the weather changes.

I don't have that many cats anymore.  In fact yesterday I was thinking I could remove one of my large plastic storage benches that I turned into litter box hiders.  Each one holds three litter boxes.  I cut holes in the sides so they're like three seater outhouses.   I have way more litter boxes than cats now.  I can downsize, I thought, and should.

I have way more beds for cats now too than cats.  Oh well.  I'll get around to it, I thought lazily, yesterday.

So about 7:30 this morning I take out some trash and glance up into the cat run under the eaves.  And my heart stopped.  

Three raccoons, two of them young, were eyeing me as they exited the house through the cat run into the  cat yard.  

I nearly croaked!

After initial panic subsided I knew I needed a plan to get them out.  At first I thought I'll set traps.  Nope, not a good plan.  They needed out immediately.  They're nocturnal and need to get to wherever they spend the night, before traffic starts up.   I bet they live in the neighbors garage or under their shed, I theorized.  Many people have slightly open garages, so their own cats can come and go, or because their garages are so packed in junk they no longer can close them.   Or sheds, on cross beams or cement blocks, to protect from rot, but that leaves gaps beneath them that animals use as access points to great hideouts.

I'd not seen raccoons around for a long time.  Doesn't mean they're not around, just that I don't see them.

Or see their poop.  Which is what generally alerts me to them.

I closed off the cat runs to the house.   Then I took out wire cutters and cut a small hole in the side of the cat yard wire up by a run, where the young pair had been huddled.   They'd moved off down the run.  And their mom was in the pergola in the cat yard, worn out and scared.  I went back into the cat yard and herded just by my presence, the young pair on the run towards the corner  where I'd cut out a hole.  One found the hole quickly and exited, then the other followed.   Now to get mom to that corner.

I tapped on the side of the cat yard pergola and she exited through a hole near the top and quickly scrambled up to a run but she kept bypassing the hole I'd cut.  Too scared to notice it.   I got a can of cat food from the garage cat room and put some at the hole.  Then I herded her just by moving slightly this way or that.  When she went by the hole she stopped, smelling the food, then saw the hole and exited.  Yes!!!

Well I hope that's all that got in.   I zip tied shut the hole, cleaned up some raccoon poop and that was that.  I hope.   I need to reinforce the top over the cat yard.  It's age old chicken wire held together with old brittle by now zip ties.   Raccoons are heavy and the cat yard top wire was never meant to hold their weight.  I didn't envision that need, when  I made it.  But over the years, I've had to catch both possums and stray cats who have dropped in through the top.   

This is a first for raccoons coming through!  And three of them no less.  I guess my dream wasn't a dream.  I did have a wild animal in my house last night, roaming around, scared maybe and maybe thought they'd found shangri la.

So that was my early morning raccoon adventure.  By 8:15, they were out of the cat yard.  By  8:45, the hole was patched and the mess cleaned up.   

Now for my coffee.

Fall Color

 

We had some dramatic lighting yesterday evening.

Otherwise, things are uneventful here.   A Lebanon friend again helped me change car oil.  He has a tool that is extremely helpful in loosening a tight oil filter in hard to access space.   I plan to get one soon.  He said I can still come over, after I do get the tool, because its fun to chat with him, and I can just change the oil there.  Despite having changed it a few weeks ago, although not the filter because I couldn't get it loose, the oil was black and dirty.  That's why I change it frequently in the cat carrier car, to extend its life, since it has hundreds of thousands of miles on the odometer.  Trying to keep it going long as I can because its really nice to have the other personal car that doesn't make my eyes water from carrying a zillion cats to spay neuter in it.   As long as I can keep the cat carrier car running, I only use it to transport cats, and keep my personal car nice smelling inside, to use for myself. 

 I dread the day the cat carrier car gives out.  It now belongs to the nonprofit, not to me.  I've had my personal car on a few long drives but not many.  I drove to my brothers southern Oregon place in it for Christmas day last year and took it to Waldo Lake several times.  But I haven't put a lot of miles on it thankfully since I don't do much personal driving. It already had about 150k on it when I got it.  I know a lot of people think its time to get rid of a car, not get a car, if it has 150k miles.  I wanted to go places out of the valley this summer but my bad knee prevented me driving a few months.

I replaced the master door lock/window control switches in both cars.  While it fixed all issues with doors not locking via the switch in the cat carrier car it didn't fix the problems with using the switch to lock all the doors in the personal car.  AI says this breed of car is notorious for actuator failure in the door lock systems so both front doors in the personal car could have had actuator failure but also it could be a broken wire.   I'm not worried about it much because I can manually lock the doors.   

The only other issue is the window in the cat carrier car often won't go all the way back up, if I open it.  It will go up a little, then I wait awhile and it will go up a little bit more, which is a problem with the window up/down motor inside the door.  The thermal safety coupler gets hot, when the motor isn't working well, breaks the switch circuit and it has to cool off a bit before allowing the window to go up a little more.  Anyhow, I watched video on how to replace it.  Doesn't look hard, just a bit time consuming and the new part is not very expensive on amazon.   Will I do it?  Probably not.  Car has too many miles to warrant much expense in replacing vanity parts. I can just not lower that window.  Wouldn't it be fun to see if I could convert it to manual operation!

I keep trying to find someone I can turn over the nonprofit to one of these days, who will continue its mission with gusto and integrity but that is not an easy task.  Doing what I've done the last few decades to help cats is hard on a person, mentally, physically and financially.  Normal people would never want to do it.   

Different

 Looking for something different?   In music?

How about a Quebec band who call themselves "Chest Pain".  In french of course.

Angine De Poitrine!

They dress in paper mache masks, like aliens.   

Darla, what do you think?

Our weather here is 'all in' fall.  The sun, so low in the our skies, blinds drivers with its glare.  The days start late and end early.

The animals and birds scramble to fatten up while they can before the hard season, the season of scarcity.

Kittens are still being born.  Yesterday the seed warehouse couple called and texted.  They'd found another kitten in the warehouse, screaming its distress.   I didn't see their texts for two hours, since I was snoozing in my chair.  By then, a friend of theirs helped them get the little guy into Safehaven.

This little guy's screams no doubt saved his life.  He looks pretty rough, like he could use a lot of chow and some fluids.

They had hoped to catch the other unfixed cats a few weeks back but were unsuccessful.  They already caught a mom and litter of six.   My nonprofit got the mom fixed and they tamed the kittens, who were just six weeks old when caught, the ideal age to be tamed, and got them into Safehaven eventually.

The mom cat turned out to be a terrific mouser, catchiing five or six voles per day, and returning to their house with them, for the kittens.  They kept her.

I'm sure they'll be successful catching the other adults at the warehouse too.

Not this week, but the week after, we have a total of 17 appointments at two clinics.    And approved 8 more cats, to be fixed, that the clinic tech knows need help, for just that--financial asistance.

When we have the money, cats get fixed, because the money isn't worth as much if we wait.  I'm talking cat inflation.  Get the cat fixed now or get six to ten or more fixed later that have resulted from that first cat not being fixed.

Yes Cat Inflation is a thing.

It's Sunday.  We had rain yesterday morning, then the sky cleared and it was cool but beautiful.  Today the sun is out, which I will go out and enjoy, even if its a cold sun because we don't know just when here in the PNW it will vanish mostly for months.

If you'd like to experience some Chest Pain, click that link at the first of this post.