THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON. Entry 6. I haven't even told you about the cats yet. Princess Kitty is a dilute tortie point we found under our house several years before I came here. She was checking out the storm drain and I thought she was a wild cat. Feral, you know. Wow. When Angelo wants to sit in the grass by the flowers in his recovery cone and you come outside to type in the sunshine you see exactly how nasty your computer screen actually is. Yecch. I gotta clean this thing. It looks like I've sneezed an entire galaxy of little "stars" onto here. Gross! There are also little tiny dots of red paint from when I was painting the stairway red. I did a lot of painting during the pandemic since it was a great indoor project and color always makes you feel better. I just took my acrylics and painted. I don't care if it doesn't last. Nothing does. I also painted rainbow stripes in the mud room because I was spending so much time in there. And I wrote a song about it too. That's why they call it the mud room. Something about that. I might get it up to snuff if my voice stops straining from either talking to myself or speaking loudly to dogs. I am under vocal strain too and it's worrying me. I gotta get some vocal therapy or just slow down some. Get back to a new routine. Keepin' it low and slow. Like they say on Calm dot com which is kind of trying to keep me calmer but not doing 100 percent because lordy I still have to do the rest. I've been working with two psychics on this but there is still a-ways to go. Cats don't help with the routine much. They love to surprise you. The only thing cats do to relieve stress is kill mice and little critters who want to get in the walls of your house and run around and make disconcerting noises at night. Moles, voles, flying squirrels...other squirrels...Waldo almost got into it with a rat snake but I grabbed him up and put him into his crate. This happened the other day. The rat snake just got up under the house where the rat snake belongs. I found a dead rat snake in two of the spider traps upstairs and was kind of sad that I hadn't found him while he was alive so that I could use the corn oil on the trap and release him. No such luck. I took the dead snake in the glue traps (I hate those things by the way but I happen to know that NASA uses them to catch brown recluse spiders and if NASA uses them they must be sorta efficient and/or reliable so I use them too. But I still hate them) to the garage thinking I'd bury it later out of reverence for life (before I could do that a mouse ate it...and another mouse got stuck in the rest of the glue trap) (it's just sometimes a little hard to manage everything around here exactly the way I would like to manage everything) and also knowing what I know about burying another mouse who got stuck in a glue trap upstairs TWO TIMES, I kid you not, I released him from a glue trap and he turned around and got stuck in ANOTHER one...and just flat died, probably from exhaustion...well I managed to bury him in the side yard and then something very important happened that I wanted to happen so I figure it's got something to do with it. Or maybe not. Because then I turned around and had to throw the snake and the other mouse away in a separate box...It was just too cold to go outside and bury them...and I had to get rid of them, they were in my laundry room and it was getting most disconcerting, plus the smell...then there was yet another dead mouse who got stuck in a huge bucket and couldn't get out...this also happened twice...two separate mice in the same bucket...I just don't think of these things, you know? So now the bucket is turned on its side...in the laundry room garage, which smells like squirrels have been pooping in its roof for years...because they probably have... ...well so back to when I put the snake in the garage...Tinky was snuffling around the foundation of the house outside in the back yard while I was doing that, and so I put her in the house because I had an idea something was happening...and just after I did that, lo and behold! Widget came back! He had been missing for weeks and I didn't know where he had gone...Widget was one of the two original porch cats, Tallulah/Tuley and her son Widget that is, whose mighty powers were usurped by Maja and Waldo...who came later...or were dumped out here later, whatever the case may be... ...and so I was overjoyed and went to squirrel (heh) away Waldo in the other garage with his mother Tuley and there was a joyful hissing spitting reunion and now they could be together in the garage until the warm weather came, at which point I would have to risk losing Widgie for several weeks again, but apparently he is smart enough to find his way back under the house in the back yard, and smart enough not to get eaten alive by Tinky...so maybe I shouldn't worry so much, Tuley and Widgie are feral cats anyway...they are not lap cats...they are sometimes nice but for the most part they just want to wander and hunt and have their food brought to them, and little else...they don't want much to do with me... ...and by this time I really don't mind if cats kill rodents and things because there are just so many and they're all over, you know? And it's just Nature doing its thing...the cycle of life and whatnot...I just wish Waldo woudln't toss them around and leave them on the porch for me to step on first thing in the morning before I"ve had my coffee. If he could just possibly put them somewhere else. And if he wouldn't save them for weeks sometimes and continue playing with them, that would be nice also. Also on the porch. Also where I can step on those. Waldo is a big yellow cat who is something of an a$$hole. He's sweet about 23 percent of the time but the rest of the time he's attacking your leg or attacking the dog or swiping you with his paws and he uses claws. Or whining. He has a high-pitched whine when he wants something. He's constantly taunting the dogs when I take them out on leashes in the middle of the night so that my hands/fingers/wrists/injuries get pulled when I'm trying to get them to pee so that I can go back to sleep. Dammit Waldo. A$$hole. But I love him. He's an awesome mouse/rat/vole/mole/flying squirrel killer. Great cat. He's pretty too. Big yellow cat with yellow eyes. He wanders all over this place. He gets stuck behind the fence and meows in a most piteous way. Tryin' to be pitiful but it doesn't work with me, I know he can climb trees and scale fences. What you think, Waldo, that I can just fly over the fence and pick you up outta there? Gonna take a little more effort than that, buddy...plus if I could fly, the neighbors might shoot me and then there would be no one to bring you your little fish-shaped kitty foods in the mornings...too damn bad...