Hermit Me

I have become a total hermit. Boy. I don't go out at all here in Albany, unless trapping. There's just no reason, nowhere to go anyhow, here in town, to do anything, so I've just become this hermit person. Gas prices of course are totally inhibitive to getting out of Albany for recreation or human contact. I'm out in miles of suburbia, houses upon houses upon houses and concrete. They have parks here, but they're like fields with a bench so you can sit and stare at the grass, I guess. I'm spoiled, having lived in Corvallis. The idea of parks over there, is exercise, getting away from it all in nature, even sort of adventure.

Boy I miss those parks. The nice part about the parks over there is you don't have to have any money or even a car to have access to great hiking and recreation. That was good planning on the part of Corvallis, I think.

My favorite parks there? Bald Hill. Chip Ross. Martin Luther King, formerly Walnut park. Willamette Park, where I used to swim, off the trail between Willamette Park proper and Crystal Lake Boat Landing. When I lived downtown, I frequented Willamette Park most often, and Chip Ross, and I walked the trail from 35th street out across the covered bridge all the way to 53rd. When I moved to the outskirts, to the shack, it was Bald Hill and Chip Ross I used most. I also have hiked MacDonald Forest for decades, since I was a student at OSU, from the Lewisburg entrances, north and south, and from Oak Creek entrance. That is one cool forest!

Two more great places are Peavy Arboritum and Beazle County Park.

Guess I am waxing nostalgic today.

I plan to get over there at least once a month to use some of the parks. In the meantime, I have to figure out how to get exercise in a concrete car town. I need to figure out a way to do it so I enjoy what I do, so I'm likely to keep it up. I'm not into walking sidewalks, just hate it, and I don't swim in swimming pools due to a chlorine sensitivity. I'm not sure how to get exercise over here, but I'm trying to think of something because I also need some outdoor recreation. The quirk is I can't drive very far because of gas prices and because my car is kind of falling apart. I am saving up for needed repairs. Until then, I limit my driving.


And, I'm scheming on how to get back over there, permanently, since there's nothing here, as far as living, except a roof over my head.

So this evening I finally went out. I dropped off two boxes full of small bags of some extremely odiferous cat litter someone gave to me a few weeks back. She gave it to me because she couldn't take the smell and neither could her cats. Well I couldn't either, couldn't even stand to be near one of the little bags of it, if opened. Man alive, that's nasty stuff. So, ever since, I've looked for people with really bad smell, to offload the stuff to them, since if they don't smell well, then it won't bother them, although it still likely will bother their cats.

I gave two boxes of it to the Davidson Dazzlers colony caretaker and then tried to offload the last box on the people two houses up, for whom I took in about ten cats total for fixing, the last being a stray male. Anyhow, they didn't want it. I knew they wouldn't. I gave them the first box and they couldn't take the smell, even after mixing it with baking soda.

They are fostering a pregnant cat for SafeHaven. She's been there a couple weeks, I guess and still has probably two weeks to go. I said, "Let's just surprise SafeHaven and just get her fixed." Pat thought that might be the better way and sure it is.

Why is SafeHaven allowing every female now that comes in to them unfixed who has been exposed to a male, to have kittens? Really good question. Call them up and ask them why. As a result, they can't take in many stray kittens and so those kittens get dumped or nothing good happens to them. You let a cat have kittens, means other already alive kittens die.

So, you're making a choice between saving fetuses and saving already alive kittens. They know they are killing kittens indirectly with their actions, but, well I can't say why they do it. And they can't tell me why either and just get mad when I mention it and yell at me. The cat world would have been helped more if SafeHaven had helped this fosterer get all her cats fixed. Instead, I took them in, most on Poppa funds.

Anyhow, they're a really cool quirky couple with this brick pathway, curvy, inside their fence down to the front door. It's like a hobbit path. Then they have this interesting apple tree with one branch that grew out thick and horizontal and is perfect for their cat to lounge across, legs and paws dangling lazily, lionlike, on either side. It is a tree with character. It's awesome.

She is outspoken and can be loud and yell and I like her. He looks like Charles Manson but is funny with a huge heart. They're always just barely scraping by, but welcome anyone in to sit in the white plastic chairs beneath that apple tree. She says come fall, they get hit on the head by falling apples. I said "Well, you need to wear hard hats in the fall then, when you're sitting out here." I hope to find a couple old hard hats, put their names on them, and leave them sitting by their chairs, for a joke.

They wouldn't take that stinky cat litter, however, no matter how I pleaded. Darn it.