Brother Visits. Bat Encounter. I Still Make My Cat Quota for Today.

Late Saturday night, my phone rings. It's my brother! You know, my landlord. He wants to come up and do some repairs, try to get the cat yard project back in motion. I am ecstatic just to hear from him, and to hear he's coming up? Woohoo! I hang up and promptly fall asleep on the couch.

Sunday, he arrives early. I have already delivered traps to Hate Thy Neighbor, recycled a bunch of stuff and cleaned the house a bit.

He tries to fix the bathroom outlet by replacing it---again. No go. Still doesn't work. He tries to figure out why. The outlet won't reset. There's no outgoing power, although there is incoming. He decides, in the end, that the ground for that circuit is somewhere messed up. Why would this happen when it worked originally? He doesn't know. Might be weather related. Shifting, pulling and expanding and contracting caused by weather changes. But he got it to work by disconnecting the outgoing hot and neutral wires, since that affected nothing else. That outlet is the end of the line on that circuit.

We go to Home Depot in Corvallis and get some horse fencing and some chicken wire for the yard and deliver all the things the Neuterscooter folks left here, a pile of stuff, to the woman who had volunteered to store it for them, but could not be contacted the day they left to return to Indiana. So they had left it all here, on the fly, headed for Portland to catch a plane. I had intended to get it out of my garage to her last week, but never did. With his pickup, it was easy.

Back here, we work on creating a run from the house to the garage room, for the cats. We only got part of it done before the Corvallis woman, who lives a few miles south of town, called back. I had called that morning to see if she still had my cinder blocks. When I was evicted from the shack in Corvallis last December, she had graciously offered to help, by hauling off my cinder blocks. I had collected them over a couple of years, mostly had for free, some dug from a foundation near OSU when the property was taken by imminent domain and some of the houses were sold for a buck and moved by the proud new owners. I used them to line the bottom of my cat yard fence. I needed to do the same here.

So out we went to get my good old long lost cinder block friends. They were heavy to load into my brother's truck after a long day of labor. I had gloves on. The first thing that happened was wasps swarmed out of the stack. The woman brought us a bucket of warm soapy water, which killed them, organically. One had flown up my pants leg and stung me already.

Then I was moving a block at ground level, and heard a chittering as I moved it. I thought it was a cricket and tried to shake the block, while swinging it over to the truck. Instead of a cricket a bat fell to the ground, alive too. It chittered at me from the dead grass then flew off. I was glad I had on gloves. A, the property owner, then told me it wasn't far from her property where the people lived whose dog brought in an alive bat, that had bit the dog and the bat tested positive for rabies. The dog had to be killed. She had, since that was so close, had a mobile vet come out and re-vaccinate all her cats and dogs, which is wise. This bat wasn't sick, just roosting in the block pile, which had been there for 8 months. We had not only disturbed the poor bat, but also poured warm soapy water down the pile, because of the wasps. I'd be pissed. he was pissed, but he just flew off. It wasn't quite dusk yet. Bats sleep during the day. But the incident startled me and made me realize the importance of wearing gloves when moving a stack of blocks that have been there awhile.

Got back here and unloaded them all and as we did, we hauled them to the inside of my cat yard to be, plunking them down along the inside of the fenceline like old friends.

It was 7:00 p.m. and my brother headed off. Long drive home for him. I worry about him working too hard.

I headed out trying to get cats. I went to Hate Thy Neighbor. He had no luck himself trapping. But we ended up just chatting. He's a nice guy. I got home just before 11:00 without a single cat. But I had an ace up my sleeve. This morning I went and trapped six cats easily at another colony.