Windy Weather and the Seafront Road

I took a moment to take a mini-vid of the latest weather.  It's been cold and wet with very strong winds.  You can also get a feel for the speed at which people drive along the seafront road I live on.  We have five feeding stations for strays and ferals, each of which is located along this road or just off it, because that is where the housing is, and, therefore, where the majority of cats tend to gather and breed. 

Hard Decisions

So yesterday was a holiday here, Green or Clean Monday, when the Cypriots dine on vegetables in the fields with their families to mark the start of the Lenten fast.  Nik and I spent the afternoon with our English friends and stopped to feed the cats at the park on our way home.  We were distressed to find Tweeny in the parking lot near the road where we have never seen him.  After our feeding he followed us back up to the parking lot.  As we were driving back home we saw him crossing the street and decided to go back and get him. 

We have 13 cats in the house at present, two of them handicapped, and we haven't felt right about crowding them or stressing them anymore, otherwise we would have brought Tweeny home with us long ago.  Then there is the issue of his mom, Cindy.  She would lose her best companion if we took Tweeny.   So why not get Cindy, too, you ask?  Well, as  mentioned in the previous post, Cindy is very dominant.  It would be a long upheaval for our cats to bring her in.  And it would bring us up to a total of 15 indoor cats!  ¡Ay, caramba!

So should we take them to the Paphiakos Shelter?  Would they be better or worse off?   I wish I had the answers.  Questions like this haunt us all the time. 

Meanwhile, we did grab Tweeny, at the moment he is temporarily upstairs with the young cats.  We have decisions like this to make every day.  And they are hard.

I am off to feed the park cats now, it's raining and the winds are terrible.  I will see how Cindy is getting along without him.

'Tweeny', a drawing I did of him, January 2012

Where to Begin?

Where to begin?  I guess we have to jump right in, and then slowly, slowly (siga, siga as they are so fond of saying here in Cyprus) we'll catch up on the history.  There are lots of cats for you to meet, a whole cast of characters, a few logistics to explain, but in the meantime, we will just say hello and welcome by introducing you to one of them, Cindy Lou Who, a fine specimen of a cat, I suspect a Turkish Angora, we feed at our local park.  I guess you could call her the Queen of the Park Cats, well, she was, until we, ahem *cough cough*, put her out of business.  She is still bossy, spunky, and dominating, but she is not nearly as mean as she used to be, to us or the other cats since we spayed her:

She's gorgeous, no?  Cindy is not feral.  In fact, when she first started coming to our feeding station at the park, she had a collar on - a cute little plastic collar with happy flowers and a sweet bell.  She rubbed up against us and let us touch her.  But the problem was, she was completely emaciated.  She was starving.   So who did she belong to?  And where were they?  And why weren't they feeding her?  It was sad.  And that happy little flowered collar just made it all the more sad. 

That was two years ago at least, and at least a few litters of kittens ago we first met her.  (When we took her for spaying our vet said it looked like she had been having kittens every three months since she was able.)  The collar has long since disappeared, and Cindy had her last litter of kittens late last summer.  One remains with her, a young adult now, we call him Tweeny.  They are good company for one another, and good playmates.

Cindy on the right with her boy Tweeny on the left.