Stray

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I have a stray cat. Gender is undetermined but I think it is a girl and we named it Cinnamon.  She doesn’t let you near her and doesn’t run up to you or anything. She barely meows, only occasional I rouse a  response out of her. Mostly, she comes up our back porch and sits by the door waiting to be fed. She sometimes lays under the table we have out there in the shade and takes a nap. We tried setting up “houses” for her. We tried putting the food in the house but she is too feral. She doesn’t want to be cornered. In the winter time especially we tried to put blankets and stuff inside a makeshift shelter but she she barely twitched  a tail. She would occasionally sleep on our front porch in a chair that has a cushion, especially when it snowed. She never even tries to come inside the house, even with us coaxing her.

We always put out cat food for her, but we also try to put out water for her. She never even looks at the water.

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Sometimes when I’m walking home late from work I would see her slinking through houses walking parallel to the sidewalk. I try talking to her while I’m walking. She would look at me but otherwise pay me no attention. Meanwhile other PEOPLE on the street start crossing the street cause I’m seemingly talking to myself.

I love animals. Strays always pull at my heartstrings. I used to feel bad feeding strays because I didn’t want them to loose their feral ways and no longer be able to fed for themselves.

But Cinnamon is strictly a flight cat. She has no fight in her. She runs fast as lighting. She would lay around our driveway and just look at us and so tentatively i started to feed her. I noticed other cats were bullying her and that’s when we started to feed her daily. She even had a cat that would sneak up behind her when she was eating and she would run away and the other cat would eat all her food. I felt so bad for her and I figured since the cat was such a bully he could find food somewhere else and so i started to chase the cat away and Cinnamon could finally eat in peace.

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So, I’m used to seeing loads of street cats around. My neighbor  Fifi used to feed a bunch of street cats. Even when she was taken away to a nursing home , the whole two years cats still lingered by her house faithfully. The day she died it was like the cats knew and I no longer seen an abundance of cats by her house.

So I was walking home from work yesterday and it was around 7pm. I see a little doggie running behind a guy. I assumed it was his dog, alot of people walk their dog without leashes. As I’m walking by it runs up to me and starts jumping on my legs and wagging its tail. I noticed the guy kept walking so I called for him to call his dog. He said it wasn’t his dog.

I have not seen a stray dog in my neighborhood before.

So, i started walking up and down blocks asking everyone if they know who’s dog it was. The dog was merrily following me around. I wanted to cry! The dog looked taken care of it, it was fed ( it didn’t have bones showing) and it was recently groomed. It had no collar on and it looked like it was bit on the neck.

So i was standing on the corner thinking ( i didn’t want to take home a dog that was someone’s else’ and my Bianca is aggressive with other dogs but I just couldn’t leave this little puppy on the street). I said fuck it I can’t leave this puppy on the street and I don’t care if my mother kills me for bringing home a stray dog.

Then a lady walks up and he runs to her. I blurted the whole story how this dog was just wandering around. We started inspecting the doggie and when you put your hands out to him he would run and lick your fingers… he was hungry and thirsty. She asked me if I wanted her to take him, he needs to go to a vet. I said sure.

Part of my mind is happy the dog is not on the street but I have no idea who the lady is or where to find her and I have no idea what happened to the dog. She was just as broken up as I was though . So I’m trusting the doggie is being taken care of. As petty as it sounds I’ve been trying to save up for Bianca’s vet bill ( with no success) and I wouldn’t have been able to afford to take the dog to the vet so that was part of my reason of agreeing to let her take the dog. I hope this lady was able to afford to do so.

But I just can’t stop thinking about my little Stray.

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Wherever you are little guy, I hope you are well. If you are not… come back to the corner. I’ll have a nice treat waiting for you.

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• The Strays of Hougang Avenue 5 (westboundlotus.wordpress.com)

And Then I looked Up

To set up the scene , here is a picture of the garage.

Shanty and old-looking and poorly painted by my mother who splashes paint around. Don’t mind all the leaves and branches, this was a picture taken after Sandy. There is actually half a tree that fell down on the side of the garage but I was just taking all sorts of pictures for the insurance.   Anyways, It’s a regular one car garage but chock full of… stuff.. so no car can actually fit in there. Tools and machines and storage. It’s a typical …old… garage.  Things accumulated over the last 20 years.  I didn’t have a picture of the garage open, and I’m far too lazy to take the five minutes to walk down the stairs and snap a picture so instead I’ll spend this five minutes typing about it instead 😉

As you can see there is an attic portion too. We have two ways to access the attic. All the way in the back of the garage a wooden ladder that is attached to the wall leads up through a cut out access hole.  Also, some space before the hole is a a typical drop down wood stairs. It looks similar to the following picture, just picture older and less craftsmanship and think more backwoods macgyver.

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So picture walking straight in the garage and the back wall under the access hole is just bins, storage bins which stop just before the drop down stairs so we can still take the stairs down and go up into the attic if needed. In the far right corner is a big freezer.

Omar and I do our own food shopping.  But, we hide our food.  People in my house hold are inconsiderate. They don’t want to share what they bought but if you buy something they’ll be more than happy to take it all. Since Omar and I are on strict financial terms, it’s a problem when you spend the little money you have on groceries and for other people to use it all. Sharing we don’t mind. But to use it all? Yeah that’s a problem when you don’t have money to go replace it.  So Omar keeps a box full of stuff in the room all the non-perishables . His spam, cans of chef boyarade,mac and cheese,  his bags of rice( the one you boil for 8 mins and its done )…those sorts of things. All the meat products and frozen goods we stash in the big freezer in the garage. We leave it wrapped in the plastic bags from the supermarket and put it all the way in the back of the freezer separated from my parents stuff.  Because my mother is lazy , she never walks to the garage to go into the freezer and bring stuff up. In fact, she’ll send me to do that stuff. So, I know it’s safe there and no one will touch it especially since I’m the main one to go down there.

I sent the hubby to go bring up something to cook last week. He was taking awhile but it was morning and pre- coffee so i said eh, I’m not going to check on him yet.

He finally comes back inside and told me he saw a kitty cat!  He said he was in the freezer digging around and then he just felt like he should look up and so he did. Staring back at him was a cat poking its head out from the access hole.

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Being the Animal Whisper  that he is, he stopped looking through the freezer and started coaxing the cat down. It was vertically climbing down the ladder.

Then it tumbled down the ladder.

So the hubby was trying to move boxes and look behind everything to find it. Since it was a young stray he figured the cat was scared and wouldn’t come out until he was gone so he left a space for the cat to run out through the bins and we left the garage open for a while so it could run out if it needed too.

The next day, I go into the garage full on crazy cat lady style doing my best cat calls and climbing over the storage bins to see if the cat was still there.

I would have brought cat food but we have a raccoon problem and I didn’t want to attract any of those.

I can’t recall if i shared all the raccoon shenanigans on my blog so I’ll write a separate post on that  sometime in the future. But, we had raccoons in the garage attic before. After Sandy, we had the garage roof repaired and so animals that had been living up there were evicted.

Raccoons are the only animal I do not like. True, I have grown softer towards them having encountered a mother raccoon desperately trying to take care of her five babies.  But, still raccoons and I don’t have a good relationship.

This is how you all view raccoons.

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And this is how i see them

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So it occurred to me ,while I was directly under the access hole, that if a cat got inside the garage than maybe something else did too.

Maybe a raccoon got inside as well.

And Then I looked up….

As I’m in the process of looking up i hear a thud and start screaming. Okay cursing is more like it. I said “SHITTTTTTT” to be precise and ducked and covered my head all the while hopping over the bins and running away.

I thought a raccoon was going to drop on my head.

What really happened. My dad decided at that moment to pull down the drop stairs.

-__-

What the hell dude. I told him ” What the hell dad! I thought an animal was going to fall on my head! No sudden movements!”

I’m not going to lie. I was pretty fricking scared.  The only animal I do no like ( raccoon) and I have an abundant encounters with them. I’m glad this wasn’t one of them.

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• Raccoons In The Attic (thecottagechronicles.com)
• Raccoon Deconstruction Macomb, MI (mibatcontrol.wordpress.com)
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• Toronto ‘daredevil’ raccoon a YouTube hit (cbc.ca)