And then there were 12

As I’ve probably mentioned many times, I’m supporting not only my own cats but the ones who used to eat at my late neighbor Hiram’s house, many of whom were born there. One of the cats has been especially troublesome, as he’s not part of Samantha’s family (despite probably fathering many of its members) – rather, it turns out, he was an early kitten of Bella’s, making him a much older brother of Ambrose and Azalyn. I named him Derwood, as Samantha made it clear from the start that she cannot stand him. He’s made it hard to feed the others, being more feral than the rest of them, and hostile – at every meal he’d be more interested in attacking them than settling down to eat. I’d always have to serve him extra food, very carefully, and first, on one side of the porch, and then all the others would huddle on the other side and try to eat as much as they could before he tired of his own plate and went to see what they had. All this is by way of explaining that when we discovered today that the poor fellow had passed away (in his favorite cardboard box, on J’s porch), my sadness that his life wasn’t better than it was is offset by my relief that the other cats’ quality of life will be much improved. (We hope whatever was wrong with him wasn’t contagious.) So now I have six porch cats, plus Ambrose and Azalyn (who spend most of their days inside J’s house though they do come out to socialize), plus the three “kittens” who live in my extra bedroom, plus of course Ajani.

Derwood was so much more aggressive than usual this spring that I was wondering if there would be any point to going out and buying a trap, to get him neutered, or if he was so old (8-9) and set in his ways that it wouldn’t help. (The others are all spayed/neutered except for Twobacca, but I was able to get them each into a cat carrier, although it did take two hours with Blitzen.) Thankfully he never attacked me, but he certainly could swipe at me when I was putting the food out for them. He sure made Parker and Blitzen miserable, and was even more aggressive toward Oberon, who is the biggest, and sometimes Theo and Twobacca wouldn’t even try to eat; they’d just watch from afar. Only Samantha, who knows she’s entitled to food, would go ahead and eat regardless, and she wasn’t thrilled that he was always hanging around. Now they can relax.

Meeting my friend P

Today I finally got to meet my online friend P, who knew J briefly in high school and more regularly in college. I knew them both from the same online game but was friends with P first. We’d somewhat lost contact with him – we knew he was living in Hawaiʻi and doing volcano-related work, and that he was married and had kids. We didn’t know that his wife is from Oregon and that they regularly visited her family in the Portland area, but this year he had time to come down to see us! We spent about eight hours in conversation, catching up, and we ate Thai food for dinner and took a walk and introduced P to the Hollow Knight game. As it happens he’s become locally famous in Hawaiʻi for his work on volcano preparedness and emergency community response – he’s running an online site with 160,000 followers – so the anonymity of visiting Oregon is quite welcome.

Azalyn, who has been very shy of visitors in the past, apparently decided she could cope with yet another new-to-her person within days of the last two, although she was wary. Ambrose, however, was horrified – he had evidently maxed out on JM and NW – and not only refused to come inside while P was here but got into a great loud howling fuss directed at his friend Oberon, who was quite bewildered. He was making such a racket that we thought he might be sick or injured. However, when P headed down the driveway to go back to Portland, Ambrose let J pick him up and was calm and normal thereafter.

Now we expect things to be back to normal for an entire month! J will be home, and we won’t have any special guests. It should be quite relaxing.