Stray Cat Syndrome

As I have said before, we have cats. By many people's estimation, far too many, but they are all loved and they are all spayed or neutered. The majority of them are also older and have started developing the usual problems of age. In a sense, we are all older in this house and everybody is incapable of kittens.
All of our cats came to us in one form or another. For a while we seemed to have kittens growing in our yard in NJ and we found homes for most and adopted some of them. We only 'paid' for one kitten and that was the first thing my future husband and I bought together. We had just moved in together and we wanted to bring home something. We had only $2 between us, but the pet stand at the Collingswood Auction had stray kittens for only $2. So we agreed on a beautiful calico kitten who that night sat under the middle of the bed and cried her lungs out all night. The cat that I already had when my husband to moved in, Vanilla, was deaf, so he didn't care. Vanilla lived to be 21 years old. The crying kitten, Ms. Kitty, stayed with us for 18 years. They remain in our hearts.


More cats came and stayed and passed on since then and we never paid to adopt another kitten until Gracie, who was a rescue and the organization insisted that making people pay shows that they will be invested in the animal and will not harm them. (Just come to our house!) But two of our boys were strays and they have a different mentality - that mentality is reflected in their feelings about food. The bowls must be full, the food bin must be visible, and if these things are missing, the boys are absolutely sure that they will once again feel like they are starving to death. These 'little' boys are very rotund and there is nothing much we can do to prevent them from eating short of locking them in a room and listening to them cry bloody murder (can you tell we tried?). We let our crew eat dry food at will, and the majority are in good shape, but these two stray boys. They do not eat ALL the time, but the food has to be there ALL the time.

This Stray Cat Syndrome applies to many things, and not only to cats. In our current economic situation, I guess you could say that this mentality applies to money - it should always be there. In my case, I always want water around - I may not drink it, but if a bottle or glass of water is not nearby, I get really thirsty. This feeling applies to cars as well - I do not go anywhere for days on end, but when we only had one car and no car was available to me waiting outside my door, it just felt wrong. I feel this way about my family as well. I may not get to see them very often, but they should always be there. And they are not there anymore and that is wrong.


Thank heaven for my husband and my cats. And our friends whom we do not get to see often enough, but we know are there. And that is comforting.

Crime is Relative

It is inherently peaceful in the Poconos, at least our part in the northern tier, but we are seeing an increase in crime in the more tourist-oriented areas. Still, the amount of crime is relative, based on the reporting we see and hear on the local news. In the "If it bleeds, It leads" journalism, murders and fires lead the newscasts. However, in comparison the sheer number of reports, we still are feeling pretty safe.

Our local cable allows us access to the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia broadcasts; and we still watch those in order to maintain our perspective. Which leads me to a recent couple of crimes lately that hit too close to home. There was a murder in one of the towns on the other side of the lake and the murderer has not been found yet. And there was the child pornography ring that was found working out of our town. This says to me that there are many places to hide up here and we live out in those woods!

Being a large place with a relatively small full-time population, differences are noted immediately. After all, not to make a characterisation, but there is a large contingent of hunters up here; in other words, people who make it a point to notice the things around them. I believe that is why the fugitives who try to 'hide' up here in plain sight tend to be noticed and reported, such as the terrorists who were in training up here to attack Ft Dix in NJ. However, a source of concern is the increase in gang activity. The gang graffiti symbols are prevalent in the areas young people congregate, marking territory. It scares me that kids still think it is a cool thing - to be in a gang - when their parents moved to the Poconos to get their kids away from the violence. Pity.

So do we feel safe? Relatively, as we still have our defences up from all the years we spend in the metropolitan area. We still lock our doors whenever we walk outside, still look immediately whenever one of our motion-sensor lights go on (just the fact that we felt we needed to add those on the house is a clue to our mentality), still eyeball the parking lot when we bring our purchases to the car. We still behave defensively, but it is getting relaxed and we are becoming more open. I still want to hold on to some of the defensiveness, but I feel safe leaving stuff outside that would have gotten lifted where we lived in NJ.