Autumn Needs Some Help, and, Another Big Bad Boy

Autumn, who lives in northern California, needs some help.  She has breast cancer, and was disabled to begin with.  She supplements her income working as a caregiver, but now can't do that, as she recovers from a mastectomy.  She feeds a lot of outside cats, besides having her own.  She got those cats all fixed herself, most originating from her own landlady.

She adopted two Albany girls, abandoned cruelly at a complex on Oak street.  Both are muted calicos.  I had gotten them fixed for the people who owned them when I had Poppa funds still and reluctantly returned them, because the people who owned them had no character at all.  The look one of those cats gave me, when I turned her loose back at her "home", filled me with grief.  She didn't want to go back.

Sure enough, a few months later, I received word from a tenant there they'd been left behind.  I was so angry I could have spit nails.  But also relieved.  Because I could now go get them out of that terrible life.  I did.   And Autumn drove all the way up from northern California to meet me in Bandon, to adopt them.

She wanted them to stay together.  And they are together still.

Mary Margaret and Butterscotch

Autumn was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and just had a mastectomy.  She could use help feeding the cats for awhile.    She's started a GofundMe to help.

Here's the link to Autumn's Gofundme page.

If you can help, even a tiny amount, THANK YOU.   I think it is important to help one another as we struggle.  It can be a big mental boost too, to know you're not alone, when you face something like cancer.

In other news, I was out at the farm colony last night, to feed, and didn't see a single cat.  I was disturbed, of course, and shone my light around.  Eyes glared back at me from a woodpile.  But they were not familiar eyes.  I knew immediately  what was going on.

A week ago, when I was out there, as I drove in, I'd heard growling and tiffing in a woodpile.  As I got out of the car, cats exited the area, staring back at me, eyes shining in the beam of my flashlight.  But I caught the eyes of someone I did not readily know.  My mind clicked back through the list of cats I knew of out there.  Nothing came up.   A newcomer.  But was he?

When I first started trapping that colony, the very first cat I saw was a big short hair black.  It was dark and that was the only time I saw him.  I mentioned it to the workers, but they said I'd caught them all and I must have seen the long hair black adult, and was mistaken on his hair length.

I should have trusted myself.  Last night, I saw him in full view.   I'd had this feeling when out there the last weeks, a presence unknown, that had been bothering me.  I'd been checking for ear tips in the dark.

The other cats finally emerged but were hyper alert.  And then out he marched, a HUGE male, and the cats vanished.  He was already growling at them, swatting, swaggering.  That poor little teen girl kitten who hurled herself at me, out of the dark, would have been his first "take" and that's probably how she sustained bite wounds and he is probably the reason little Benji was limping a couple weeks back.

Somebody needs neutered.  Badly.

And somebody is going to get neutered, too.

Guess who.