Car Troubles, Cat Troubles and Maybe a Home For Needy Boy

I don't know if the home for Yoyo will work out, but someone called who cares for a very disabled woman who lost her ability to walk in a car wreck four years back. Guess her husband then walked out too. Wreck was his fault.

Anyhows, after talking to her caregiver, one of them, who called, I thought Yoyo might be perfect, but then again, what if he becomes too needy, too selfish, which is kind of his M.O. Well, we'll see if it works.

UPDATE: I took him over. I don't know if I should have. The woman is confined to a bed. I think Yoyo will end up terribly terribly lonely there. I left him for now. No adoption donation of course, in such a situation, and I do believe I'll be getting a call to come get him.

The good thing is the caregiver who called is really an animal lover and a caregiver is there with the disabled woman most of the time. I think an older cat might have been a better fit but I was looking for this sort of situation for Mr. Needy Boy, and maybe it will work just fine for him and the disabled woman, who is incredibly sweet.

My car ignition thingy wingy I guess needs to be replaced or something. Key often won't turn in it. Sometimes it will turn, and then I can start it. Sometimes it doesn't. Hit and miss. You never know.

So the neighbor man at Collector Central caught another in the night. I believe it is the long lost Babe, who is supposedly fixed, an older female, tabbish type and this cat in the trap is an older female tabbish type. But, since collector lady is off vacationing at the lake again with collector man, I will have her here until at least Monday and at that time, I'll take her in and make sure she's spayed. I am not taking anybody's word on anything anymore. Collector lady wants her back and since homes aren't knocking down my door or that of KATA for these collector's cats, she can go with Mrs. Collector.

There should be only one more out there. That would be Tony, otherwise known as Big Balls, for his, well, HUGE balls, that hang like circus sideshow acts.

Babe in Hand. Cat number 44. One to go. Big Balls.

This has been tough and unfair and expensive, but us little shadow folk did the job and nobody else did it, did they?

Oh, and Brandon, the blotchy brown and white big male, he's tame. I thought so. He's shy, but I pulled him out and started petting him for the hell of it and began to purr. He's been on his own awhile, but he's remembering. I took the ones going to the barn home Monday, four of them, Brandon, Foxy the torti, Lynxi, the Lynx Point teen, and Betty Boop, the muted torti, up to the vet, at noon and they got both shots, rabies and distemper. The person taking them, on Monday, wanted them vaccinated and if that is what I have to do, to get these cats out of my garage, I will do it, at this point, even though it came out of my pocket.

I let them out of carriers into my trusty homemade net on the floor at the vet clinic, put a towel over them, and scruffed them while the vet vaccinated them. It was easy and quick.

These cats have needed the time they had here, to recuperate, get all the parasite treatments they've had and antibiotics, plus a lot of food. They are far more prepared now to move on to a new home, than they would have been had they been immediately put at a new barn home, straight from the collectors home. So, I guess them being here a week so far, some of them, has been good for them. Their health is improving drastically.

Some valley groups do relocation merely by turning them loose at a barn. I don't agree with this method at all. If a cat goes through my hands, I can't turn it over to the group that does it that way. I just can't, because I think that way is very very hard on the cats and wrong. The cats, turned loose in completely unfamiliar territory, fresh out of trauma, don't have any idea where they are.

Safehaven used to give out cats who might be too shy for pets. They either told people they could just turn them loose in their barn, or gave no guidance on how to relocate. I don't know if they now give out relocation guidance for barn cats. I would hope so.

They did that to a Camp Boondoggle cat. I found out where he was turned loose, talked to them about what happened to him, and she said he was never seen again after he was turned loose.

It hurts me to think about that to this day. He was a nice cat, an all black male. SafeHaven took in two from the three dozen I hauled out of homeless Camp Boondoggle. That male did not get a home and eventually became cage weary and bit at someone. They called, wanting me to "come get your cat right now". I was on my way to an FCCO clinic with about 20 cats and exhausted and I blasted back that they knew where that cat came from and taking two had been the least they could do, and I couldn't pick him up right then. They then told me he was gone, that someone took him to their barn.

It was a long time later that I found out where he went and asked that person what happened to him. She thought it was ok to just turn him loose because she's taken in lots of cats like that from SafeHaven and that has always been what she does. She said some stay and some she never sees again. He was one never to be seen again.

I still think about that little boy and feel terrible for him. But I do wish people, especially shelters and rescues, could understand the concept, that dumping a cat out somewhere new is just like dumping them along a highway. They need time to adjust. Seems like common sense but a lot of people don't see it that way. They seem to think, "If they make it, they make it and if they don't, and well that's life." Rescues and shelters can be kinder than that about it I would think.

I had it out with the one neighbor from the collector street again, via e-mail. He wants to keep blaming only the wife of collector couple for the cat problem, while he seems to hold her husband in high regard. This is so common, for men to always be off the hook for what goes on.

She was, at one point, working two jobs to support her out of work husband and, I'm told, paying rent for her adult son, even as she drifted into foreclosure and her husband got a job where he got room, with the job. Laziness is not a good excuse for a husbands' non involvement. Neither is just being a man.

I'm so tired of that talking head neighborhood. They all should have helped her. I'm not kidding, they should have. Sure, the problem resulted from the husband and wife living in that house, but neighbors helping neighbors is more normal than strangers laying out their hard to find cash to help strangers.

They don't see it that way. The neighbors have never said a word to me, except for the neighbor, and sport an attitude close to entitlement, in comments that filter through the nobody talks to anybody else except to group complain circles there.

I told them all this morning, sort of to the air, because they're a bunch of snobs, in my opinion, "I'm your little Linn County Slave Girl".

Then I laughed.