Christmas Scramble

I am terrible at Christmas.

I always wait til the last minute or get very very busy and don't get any shopping done.

My shopping budget is low so I try to find something funny or sweet or useful to send the people on my list.   Well, this year is no different.  Here it is the Tuesday before Christmas and I have not sent out a single package.

I got some lights hung but only a couple strings and on the inside.

There are more lights this year across town than I've ever seen before.  I drive around at night to admire them.

The Christmas tree is still in the rafters of the garage.  Today I hope to change its position.  Not easy here.  I put up the tree, then tie it out in three directions, so its less likely to fall over when exuberant cats, righteously curious about the new decor, make tentative attempts to climb its plastic trunk.

My body is sore all over from the whole dryer affair.  I did get the Habitat dryer pushed into the car and returned, but that was much harder than I thought it would be, getting it into the car, that is.  I knew then I would be unable to get the broken dryer into the car to deliver to the metal recycler.   I took it apart Saturday, so I could put one piece at a time in the car.  But then the recycler was closed when I drove it there.  Yesterday I loaded the pieces again and took them.  I got $5 out of the old dryer's metal.

My back hurts and my neck hurts and my shoulder hurts and I am moving slowly and painfully now.  At least its over and my new dryer works great.

I also took five cats to be fixed at Heartland Humane yesterday.   My friend had two males enter her house through a cat door and begin a knock down roll around cat fight.  Neither male is fixed.  They are not her cats and both are tame but now she feeds them since they seem to have no other source but her for food.  She lives in an area of town where lots of people don't fix their cats and/or leave them behind when they move.

She could not break them apart, so intent they were on the fight.  So yesterday I took Chester, one of the two, off to be neutered.  He's a nice cat, a big cat, fluffy and mostly peaceful.  He loves kittens and he hates the big orange male who also seeks refuge in my friends yard and is not fixed.  I'll have to trap the orange guy.

Chester

Besides Chester, four kittens, all born feral to two mothers, were fixed. 

BJ and Blue, a brother and sister, were fixed.   Both kittens are in leg splints, as a local vet tries an experiment, to slowly straighten their turned in front legs.  They were born that way, under a trailer, to a gray female I got fixed last fall.  She had the pair just before her spay. 

BJ, the little girl, has the pink socks on over her leg splints while her brother, Blue, sports blue socks.

The other two kittens fixed were also a brother and sister and also born to a feral mom under a house.  A woman who lives nearby trapped all five kittens and their mom one by one.  Two of the kittens went to Safehaven after they were tame enough.  The mom went back after her spay and is being fed.  And the other three kittens, Earl Grey, Pearl and Cami, they're going to keep.  Earl Grey and Pearl were fixed yesterday.  I don't have a photo of Pearl and have only one sent to me by text of Earl Grey, just after he was trapped.

Earl Grew was fixed yesterday along with his Lynx Point Siamese sister, Pearl.

I finally went and retrieved my trap out on Harvest Drive, where I caught the kittens and Gypsy their mom and Jakarta.  A raccoon had trashed it.  So I picked it up and stopped by my friends place on Harvest too.  She said she had a Christmas gift for me but they're all sick there, like half the people in the area are sick now, and met me at their gate and carefully handed me a small package through my car window advising me to wash my hands after I touch it so I don't get sick too.

The gift is a pair of socks with little cat faces on the leg ends.   I like them!

I stopped farther down the gravel road, because the light in the distance was beautiful. The sun was trying to break through the clouds near the mountains.   My dying phone was in my purse, but as I got out of the car to take a couple photos, the phone rang.  Vicki said I'd called her.  Well I hadn't called her but my phone did, while I was exiting the car.  The phone is dying, one call drains the battery and it only really works when its plugged in now to a power source.   I assured her my phone is making these calls now at random on its own and there may be more.  Cracks me up.

I've met so many people in my life here in the valley helping cats.  Like the Harvest Drive folks.   I think of most with warmth.  All the people are very very different which is what intrigues me. Everyone goes through struggles, lifes' unexpected twists and turns, dreams crushed, new ones form.   I ran into Roger at the Habitat store.  He asked how I was and I said "sore" and motioned to the dryer in the back of the car and he said "Well, we've got to get you inside and find a chair."  Roger found Miss Daisy in the ditch along the road out by his seed warehouse.   I'd gotten about 200 cats fixed at his warehouses in years before that and Miss Daisy was to be the very last dumped out there.  Roger sold the warehouses and retired.  When the bankers were after him, and I'd see them out there in their suits walking around the warehouses I'd follow them around, tell them how wonderful Roger was, how he was a good man, good to his employees and even to the cats.  I didn't want him to lose his business.  I never told him about doing that. 

I told Roger Miss Daisy had died recently and how much I had loved her.  I was sitting down by then in a chair inside the Habitat store.  I was tired and my eyes were moist as they still become, when I think of her.  He told me about a new cat that showed up at his house all skinny and starved to death.  I asked if he wanted me to get him fixed and he said no, he got him fixed and that I should see him now, so big and healthy and beautiful.

I remember once I was trapping down south of Shedd and in tall grass full of junk stepped on a nail that penetrated up through my shoe and an inch or more into my foot.  I rigged a bandage and headed home and stopped at the Shedd cafe.  The farmers owned the cafe then.  I don't know if they still do.  Roger asked why I was limping and I told him and he handed me a hundred dollar bill and told me to go right to the doctor and get my foot looked at.

We talked about the traffic in Portland and he says he doesn't go up there anymore for events like he used to because you just can't get back home with the traffic.  I told him about the new catmobile, same as the old catmobile but a year younger and a stick not automatic and he said I got to trade that in for an automatic because I'll ruin my knees with a stick the way traffic is now.

Brought back a lot of memories seeing him.  I spent a lot of time at those warehouses when I was trying to get the cats out there all fixed. I remember climbing seed bag stacks to near the ceiling and I'd tuck wild kittens inside my shirt to climb back down.  I remember opening dark sheds out there in the night and clouds of startled bats would whisk out around me, sometimes brushing my face with their wings.

 The old watchman at night passed the time with me, as I waited on traps, telling me stories.   He'd been a chief of police in Brownsville I think it was and said he ran away from home when he was just a kid and hid out near a bakery he was so hungry until the owner gave him a job cleaning up and a bed there.  He told me about finding an abandoned baby once too when he was little and said people were just as bad in the old days as now, they just don't know how it was.

One time he checked the traps, before I arrived one morning to pick up whomever was caught to be fixed and wasn't careful and yanked the towel off a sprung trap and got sprayed by the skunk inside.  He'd gone home and his wife could smell him when he got out of the car and yelled at him to strip outside and put his clothes in the burn barrel.

I've met so many people in this valley.  I have roots now and a warmth I feel when I think about all the people I've met over cats.  When I run into them here or there, I feel it.   It's all I ever wanted in life.   I have everything.