The Week Gone By

Projects, projects.  That is what I accomplished this last week.

I had to get the lawn mowed and the weeds gone, in the days it wasn't raining.   We had a few nice days this week.  This morning it is raining again with thunderstorms.  I planted sunflower seeds on the days it was hot, and have forgotten to water them.  They're under the eaves so don't get automatically watered when it rains.

Yesterday, darling little Cindy Lou, the long hair torti from the streets of Albany, went to a home with a friend of mine who has an enclosed garage cat room, with house access and an outside catio.  So much better off she will be than on the streets, scrounging.  She lounged around in a large containment cage in my garage while here and it was discovered she had pyometra when fixed.  And ate and ate and ate.  That's all she wanted to do.  I sent her off with a case of wet food to give her a good start on her new life.

The male cat the lady was trying to catch when she caught the little torti got himself caught last night and will be fixed Monday.

Other than him I was going to get some trailer park cats fixed Monday but the trapper living there is having a tough time catching any of the many males who have shown up in last months there.

In fact two nights ago, she said she had a line running to a regular trap with the door held up by a water bottle and a line to a drop trap also.   But she was sitting in her jeep across the street with at least one of the lines running across the road and a truck went by, picked up the line in its tread and drug the drop trap half a block before the line kicked loose from the tire.  I nearly choked in laughter when she told me about it.  I could see it.

I knew they wouldn't catch any cats there.   I jumped into gear Friday when KATA said a Lebanon man had a female with kittens under his place and the landlord wanted them out and under the house blocked.  I went over within an hour, set a trap outside the foundation hole and caught the mom and one of the young kittens.  I guess she's had quite a few litters.

I left a trap set by the hole but he decided to go under the house thinking he could get them that way but they just moved out of his way and out of reach.  There had been four kittens but he and his wife already had adopted one little guy who came running up to them in the yard.  These kittens are only five or six weeks of age.  But by 9:30 that evening, they both were in the trap left at the foundation hole.  I went and picked them up the next morning.

Tabby mom cat

Little Black girl kitten who was in the trap with mom

A boy kitten on the left and hiding girl kitten beside him

Mom and kittens in the garage cage

While at that location I noticed other strays and the neighbor said she has at least five who hang out in their yard.  She likes them but would like them fixed so I left her a trap to feed in til that can be done.   They included this handsome boy.

Saturday morning after picking up the Lebanon kittens, I pulled into the McDonalds parking lot, to remove them from the trap, syringe feed them and then put them into a carrier with a cozy blankee.  I had to then book it for Silverton.  I'd promised to help with the adults in a situation there.  Allegedly one female had six kittens, then there were five adults.

I knew nothing about the caretaker or cats and had no phone numbers, just an address.  The other trapper from Salem was going to meet me there.  I thought it was an odd time to be trapping.  9:30 in the morning.  Usually you have best success early morning, evening or night.  But the adults were out when I arrived.

The other trapper, whom I did not know, was already there.  Mixing two trappers with different styles is not productive.  I do have very different trapping methods than this woman, but I kept my mouth shut as this was her gig and we quickly caught three adults, but no kittens were seen.  The cat caretaker said they had been on the porch but much earlier in the morning. 

I asked if there was a way under the house, besides crawling under the porches and she said her landlord told her there was a basement, but you had to get to it from a closet she used as a pantry and that it was super creepy.  I said "Let's do it."  I don't mind creepy.  We moved a plastic shelf with various food items on it, then a piece of old rug and found a board that lifted up.  She pulled up the piece of osb and there, leading down under the house, was a set of wooden stairs.  The closet was narrow and the stairs began from the far side of hole, which was about 20 inches wide, as wide as the entire closet.  So I stepped over the hole and down onto the first wooden step.

And descended into the darkness of the crawlspace.

I never saw a kitten.  A mouse darted across my lateral vision within seconds of me crawling around the side of a crumbling chimney.  The kids had said they heard something scratching on the duct pipes.  It scares them, their mother said.  Some of the ducts were rectangular and would make perfect cat runways, I could see.  I told them so, when I climbed back out of that dark hole into the closet.   I had not taken down my mirror or camera, to more easily enable kitten hunting and these kittens are allegedly older than the Lebanon ones.  They'd just elude me anyway.

The stone foundation was crumbling in spots.  It looked to be made of large flat stones mortared or cemented atop one another.  At any point along it, where it abutted the porch, the kittens could climb up those stones, from under the wide L shaped porch, over them and under the house.  It was remarkably dry beneath the house and clean although the moisture barrier black plastic covered only parts of the underground.  The heat ducts running under the house from the furnace up to vents in the house floor were in good shape too.  I couldn't help but notice.  I admire a nice a crawl space.  What can I say?

I brought the three adults home.   It's the black mom of the kittens, then two survivors from her litter of last fall, a black female and a mackerel tabby who may also be female but I haven't checked yet.  All three are terribly thin.  She relinquished them, citing landlord rules for no outside cats.   They'll go to my friend who places barn cats, who is also taking the Lebanon mom and her kittens.  She's back at it, after a break due to health issues.  You would not believe how many cats she trapped and placed from a Yamhill county hoarder colony.   The last count of number fixed from that situation alone was well over 100 and my friend placed maybe 40 or more of those, I don't know.  It was an astounding number.  She's something else.

I left then and the other trapper remained to try to trap kittens neither of us ever saw.

I told her about the Lebanon kitten pair, that it was that night, after I took their mom, that they went into a trap.   I hope she gets them.  It's an hours drive from me so I have to stay out of it and have faith.

So I have five ready to go to be fixed Monday now, with Hank, from little Cindy Lou's former hood.  And the other two reservations I have are handed over to a Brooks woman.  I hope she comes through because I hate to waste spay neuter reservations.

My lawn is mowed and the rain is back.  The weeds are pulled and more will grow.  I got carpet replaced on several cat shelves in the garage room, too. 

So far old Poppy, dancing with kidney failure and old age, is in rebound stage.  I've had a couple of times I was ready to take her on the final drive, then she rebounds.   Lucy too seems to be circling the drain. Lucy is old as the hills.  How old I don't know, the last of the old old cats I took out of Mountain Shadows to still live. The other oldies Lucy's age, from Mountain Shadows, Pepper, Joplin and Clementine, have all passed away.

 Gretal, my old feral toothless torti, now seems stricken with ibs, like Miss D got six years before she died.  Only Miss D was tame and I could give her meds but Gretal is not so this may not end well for her.  She was in my bathroom ten days getting fluids, wormer and giardia meds but that did not help her.  I am scheduling another vet clinic visit soon and Gretal will go along to see what the vet says.

My cats here are mostly very elderly and its hard to watch my friends fail.  But I've got my age issues too with sometimes swollen joints, ibs, the same things afflicting my old cats.   Guess we can fart along together to The End.

The good thing about getting old is I don't fret much about world issues, or even pay much attention.  Not a damn thing I can do about much of anything.  I do worry a lot about rising costs of living here in Oregon.  Everything is so expensive. Property taxes in this city alone skyrocketed over $300 higher from last year to this year.  I want to carry on here til I drop, not be forced into homeless life again, as a really old broad limping down these mean streets.  The world is no kinder to homeless people than it is to homeless cats.

There was an opinion column a year or so ago, in the Portland paper.  The writer had traveled to Texas to see some large shelter there and talked to "an expert" on housing the homeless who said the future would see mass dormitory wall to wall bunk bed style living for seniors since seniors could never afford rising housing costs.  The guy was enthusiastic about describing it and how there would be communal showers and services, etc.   My only thought was, "and will there be gas coming out of those communal shower heads instead of water?"

I'll add photos later of the three Silverton cats and Hank from Cindy Lou's former concrete hood.

I sit by the river at the county park a lot these days and I like it.  Now the Canada Geese have babies too.

Graffiti on a boat ramp rock