It’s just past 8:30am as I start this, and it’s already been raining for a few hours.

Normally, when I head out to feed the outside cats, there will be a crowd of them on the cat house roof, waiting to be fed up there, even in the rain.

Not today!

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As I was coming back from leaving food for Broccoli near her kittens (I did not stop to pet them, as she was still somewhere in back of the shed), I found the kibble house jammed full of cats. Several ran off before I could get a picture. The kibble I did put on the cat house roof was being ignored. Cats like to shelter in the back of the water bowl house, so when I put kibble on the tray under it, I emptied one of the water bowls and put some kibble in there, too. They have plenty of places to eat and stay out of the rain!

Needless to say, the transplant trays weren’t taken outside for hardening off this morning!

I checked on the beds I transplanted into, of course. So far, they all look as strong and upright as when they were put into the ground, yesterday. They are handling the rain just fine.

Some of my onions, though, are having a different problem. I found a cat sitting at the end of the bed where some Red Wethersfield onions were. *sigh*

At least he was just sitting, and not digging!

On a completely different note, I’m a bit at my wits end with some of our inside cats. The two male tuxedos, in particular. Even though they are both fixed, they both spray. Not just spraying, but urinating, too. We keep finding new and different places they’re leaving puddles. Last night, my daughters caught Leyendecker peeing on my old steel toed shoes. I hadn’t thrown them out as, even broken, they could be used as a back up pair. So much for that idea.

In my bedroom, I use a vintage mirrored dresser and a night stand that my late father used (my husband uses the matching wardrobe). I discovered part of the dresser was being sprayed, and I had to set up a stool with its legs around that part of the dresser, and puppy pads, to protect it.

For the longest time, I was trying to figure out how puddles were forming *under* the floor mat I had under my office chair to protect the carpet. It was one of those rubberized mats suitable for outdoors. It recently had to be thrown out and got replaced with one of the large outdoor mats from the sun room. Even with a puppy pad on the area, puddles were still forming under that mat. I’ve been laying puppy pads down on the floor, with part of the pad up against the storage bins I have against the wall, there, but would still discover puddles under the mat in that spot.

It turns out the storage bins themselves were being sprayed, above the puppy pad, so it was flowing under the pad, instead of being absorbed by it. I now have to hang puppy pads on the side of the storage bins. Considering how tight this corner is, with the office chair in the way, it’s a very determined cat that’s doing this – and I’m not even sure which one it is!

This morning was the most disheartening, though. I was sitting on the side of my bed, when I noticed my lamp had shifted. No surprise; some of the younger cats have decided they want to get to the top of the wall shelf, even though where they try to climb is blocked by a huge box. They’ve been knocking the box right off, along with other stuff that’s stored up there, some of which is there specifically to protect them from the cats.

Well, I moved the lamp aside, and discovered the remains of a puddle under it. It had been there long enough that the veneer had absorbed most of the liquid and was badly warped and cracking.

After wiping it down, I put layers of paper towel on the spot, weighed down with a stack of books and my rotary dial phone, which is about as heavy as all the books together. I’ll have to check on it, later to replace the padding and see if the weights are helping to reduce the warping.

I’m not even sure how a cat could have done this. With both a lamp and the big rotary dial phone, there’s just barely enough room on the top of the nightstand for a cat to walk over it to get to my craft table. And how did the cat manage to spray under the lamp, with no evidence on the lamp itself, or anywhere else on the night stand? I go into that nightstand every day, morning and evening, since it’s where I store my supplements and meds, and never saw anything until the lamp itself got shifted.

Right now, I am fighting the urge to start tossing cats outside, though that would just trade one set of problems for another. It’s getting to the point that I’m thinking we may actually have to have the two male tuxedo’s put down, and we sure don’t want to do that. One of them moved out with us. The other has already had thousands of dollars in vet bills spent on him. But they are causing so much damage. Not to mention the stress of so many cats in the house.

June is Adopt a Cat month. It’s hard enough to adopt out an adult cat. Adopting out a “problem” cat (even though the problem is being around too many other cats) is almost impossible. The Cat Lady currently has 31 cats in total, and a lot of her permanent ones are there because most people want cats that don’t actually require much out of them.

On the plus side, we might be able to get an arrangement with Broccoli and her kittens. The large animal rescue that is not far from us is currently working hard to make it a family destination of sorts. They’re putting in playgrounds and a petting zoo. I was asked if we had a cat with kittens. Their cats are all fixes, so no kittens. They’d like to have a mama and kittens to socialize and rehome, as part of the things they want to show visiting families. This would be part of their rescue fundraising activities, and helping to spay and neuter colonies like ours is one of their goals. The only challenge will be catching Broccoli. She’s been letting me pet her during feeding time, lately, but that’s very different from getting her into a carrier.

Well, we can’t really complain, I supposed. Taking care of the cats is something we chose to do. The alternative would have been to simply get rid of them, which has been repeatedly recommended. I’m not quite ready to call the municipality to send someone out with a rifle. Not that we have a municipal council right now, but the province should have someone assigned to run things until they set up a new election. I hear that’s not going to happen until July, at the earliest!

It is what it is. We do the best we can.

But I’m really, really starting to lose patience with the spray boys.

The Re-Farmer