Grouchy and Tired Out

I'm still worn out from Super Bowl Sunday. I got a lot done on Super Bowl Sunday. I finally installed the water filter I'd bought months ago, on the kitchen sink faucet. I am hoping this will take some of the excessive chlorine out of the water so I will drink more water. I've tried to let bottles of water sit before drinking, on the counter, open, so the chlorine dissipates, which it will, over time, as it is a gas at room temperature. I seem to forget to refill them. There are weeks here I just don't drink enough water, because it is disgusting unless it sits out at least a day. I don't think ingesting high levels of chlorine is good for a person besides.

So I got that onto the faucet head on Sunday.

I also built the door for this little teensy hideaway room and painted it. I haven't installed it. Paint had to dry.

The other thing I did was take down those vertical blinds I have disliked to greatly. I put up three sets of horizontal blinds in their place, side by side, because the window is large. That involved a lot of arms overhead work, which is not something I should be doing at all, with my metal spine. So that caused consequences, the pain and grumpiness that accompanies pain.

But I got a lot of projects done and that's good. I don't have any appointments this week to take cats in. I got forgetful and suddenly the vets books were full up.

Yesterday I did take back in the long hair white and black male kitten, who indeed was not yet neutered and so he was yesterday. Diane of Corvallis made a donation to help cover a rabies shot and FIV/Felk test (he was negative).

I never heard from the sheriff's department again, about the situation out there with those people who demanded that starving kitten back but refused to provide food for the cats. I had hoped they would enforce the law. It is unlikely if they did nothing that I will contact them again. I have run into some horrors over the years and called the sheriff's department a couple of times, or someone there has, only to be shocked by the response.

The usual is no response or to somehow blame the person helping. The latter result happened when I was asked by Linn County Mental Health once to help a man in Lebanon with too many cats, they said. Too many? He was a collector and living in absolute jam packed filth. There was one corner of the trailer with three feet high piles of cat shit. There was cat urine pooled everywhere and he slept on a little urine soaked folded over foam pad in a corner of the back room pack ratted with useless computer parts and boxes of parts he said one day he might need.

Another woman who came to look but refused to enter the trailer or help called the sheriff's office. The deputy couldn't even enter the trailer either. The moment he tried, he began coughing and put his hand over his nose and had to get out. He screamed at myself and the woman, saying this is why he hated animal people, that they don't care about people. Then he left. And did nothing to help that man, or his terribly neglected cats.

I wrote him a searing letter, that it was people like him who didn't care about people, that nobody was helping that man except the animal people---not his church, not Mental Health, not his neighbors, not his Men With Mental Health Issues faith based group and not the sheriff's department either. I got no response of course.

I took 27 cats out of that trailer, got help with the very last cats removed from there with a couple other cat groups, and I even shovelled out that huge pile of cat shit.

I had nightmares about that little calico kitten. If they were dogs starving like that, there would have been action. When it is cats neglected, abused, starving or abandoned, law enforcement finds it easier to look the other way I think.

The only person who faced consequences for their behavior was me. I now have three more cats to care for, treat and vaccinate and house, fix and try to rehome.

They handed over to me the really really sick kittens, of course, and took back the starving calico. They claimed ownership, leaving me no choice when the sheriff's department wasn't really going to do anything. So the animal neglectors ran the show, tossing the sick kittens my way and taking back the starving calico kitten, so I could have nightmares about her fate for many months to come.

The corrections officer told me the real problem is that it is not the job of patrol deputies to enforce animal neglect and abuse laws, that that is the job of animal control but that the county has no animal control paid to do anything but pick up loose or dangerous dogs.

I suppose it didn't help much that I stopped by the rest area yesterday and set a trap for that tabby on white. I did park in a place that is no parking, but ODOT has let me park there numerous times before, to make it easier on me to set and check traps. A state trooper pulled up beside me. I was walking back from checking a trap and wanted to know if that was my car and why I was parked where I was, that that was a no parking zone.

Guess what I did. I slobbered at his feet, apologizing all over the place, saying I would move immediately. I felt it useless to say I am getting old, have a couple metal spinal plates, in pain, worn out, and just trying to trap the latest cat dumped at the rest area. I felt it useless to point out two other cars parked in no parking areas or the two people beside one of them with a big huge dog running off leash in a No Pets area and that all dogs in the rest are supposed to be on leash. But oh how I grumbled to myself as I took up my trap and got the hell out of there.

Funny how helping can turn into becoming a slave for people who are abusing animals. How pathetic it would look, from an outside vantage, to see me down there licking the shoes of people like the starving calico people. I had to, I would defend, to save a couple of sick kittens lives, and the law was not on my side. But it does affect me to always be slobbering at the feet of assholes.