I'm still very disturbed about the events that happened yesterday surrounding that little scrawny cat. I just got off the phone with animal control and they said they would send someone out to check on her. I had wanted to avoid any shelter involvement for obvious reasons. The cat has a far better chance of survival outside of the shelter and better living conditions even if it is cold and wet outside. The Chesterfield County Animal Shelter is pretty abysmal. Calling the pound is like having the cat terminated just because.

I think animal abandonment ought to be considered abuse. It doesn't matter if the cat was an indoor pet or outside. If it's your pet then you take care of it! If you have to move away then make arrangements for the pet to be fed daily...not just have the food thrown down and hope that strays don't get to it before your pet does. Holy crap. There's no doubt that the cat had been cared for in the past since it is very friendly and hangs around the house waiting but it's not being cared for properly now. The owner has a moral responsibility to that animal!

For the past few days I've been feeding a poor starving cat. It's not a stray. The owners put their house on the market and moved, leaving the cat behind. She's a friendly little thing but she's not doing too well. She's dirty, one of her ears has been badly bitten, and you can feel every vertebra. When I fed her on the first day you could tell she hadn't eaten in awhile.

Today my nine year old daughter and I rode our bikes to this house to feed the cat. She was there waiting for us since this was our "usual" time. Just like the other times the cat hogged right in. We were getting ready to leave when a car pulled up. It was the owners' daughter. She was there to get the mail but saw our bikes at the top of the drive and came down to see what we were doing. I told her I was feeding the cat since it looked like it was in bad shape. She said she fed the cat every morning and that she couldn't help it if other strays came and ate her food. She was very rude. I told her we wouldn't be back and we left.

My daughter was very upset and couldn't understand why we couldn't feed the cat anymore. We were almost a block away when the woman drove up behind us and pulled to the curb. My daughter was afraid but I figured maybe the woman was going to ask us if we wanted the cat since it apparently was a chore for her so we stopped. We should have kept going. She said her mother wanted to talk to me and handed me her phone. As soon as I said hello the woman started tearing into me...how dare I tell her daughter that she was deliberately starving the cat (which I didn't), she's had the cat for 12 years, she's a county public school teacher (yikes on that!), blah blah blah. She kept going so I just handed the phone back to her daughter. I told her I did not accuse anyone of anything, that I was just trying to feed the cat and I showed her the baggie of food. The lady gets off the phone and starts yapping at me about her mother's house and she didn't appreciate me being there. I told her that my husband and I were interested in the house (it's got twice as much land as ours and a pond) and that we were just checking it out. She said we had no right. I told her she better move the realtor's FOR SALE sign if they didn't want people looking and good luck selling it with that attitude. Then we left. She didn't follow us this time.

I was so upset by the encounter I was shaking. Since the cat was an alleged family pet for 12 years you'd think the woman would be grateful that someone was looking after it. Holy smokes! It wouldn't have shocked me one bit had the woman started lobbing rocks at us. So now my daughter has sufficient reason to be afraid of people and I've personally had it as well. I don't know what I'm doing wrong!

Yesterday was absolutely beautiful. I hung laundry out on the line to dry. I worked in the garden for hours. Dh and I took a little bike ride.

We ran across a house in our sub that was for sale. I generally don't poke around when a house is empty but yesterday I felt compelled to walk to the back of the house. It was a masonite ranch with full daylight basement that sat on 2.25 acres at the edge of a pond. No landscaping whatsoever. Ugly house on the outside. Roof not in the greatest shape. Mud splashed up on the harsh red and black brick foundation. The windows were tiny and mismatched. Except for the big picture window that looked out over the pond, they served little purpose. No charm at all. The sound of the peepers in the pond was wonderful though.

The pond itself was nothing to get into a froth about. There was a tiny island in the middle covered in brush and a couple dozen little orange flags...the kind used by comcast to mark a cable line. Really trashy looking. A pair of Mallards skimmed across the top. (I love ducks and geese.) Except for the eight foot easement around the pond, the "backyard" was covered in white gravel. It was a very sterile lot. I was about to leave when dh called me over to show me the parts of a water treatment tank laying on the ground. Apparently they had the same problem with their water as we do. I peeked around the edge of the house and that's when I saw the cat.

A skinny beat up little white cat. The hair around his neck was greasy and dirty. One of his ears had been badly mauled. His backbone was like a string of pearls. And yet he was friendly. He walked over to his food dish and gave it a sniff. The bowl had been run over by a car...probably the realtor's. There was no food in sight. I looked at dh and he immediately said 'NO'. He knows me too well. I told the cat I'd be back. He watched us go.

We biked back to the house. I quickly filled a baggie with catfood and headed back out. The cat was there waiting for me. He was starving and hogged into the food. I can only surmise that the cat had been the owners' pet and when they moved they left the cat behind to fend for itself. It was not doing well. So, I'll be heading back to that house this afternoon with another baggie of food and we'll see if we can't get that little cat's strength back to where it has a fighting chance. Poor thing must have been miserable last week with the temp in the teens, six inches of snow, and no food.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism:

In the yin-yang symbol there is a dot of yin in yang and a dot of yang in
yin. This symbolizes the inter-connectedness of the opposite forces as different
aspects of Tao, the First Principle. Contrast is needed to create a
distinguishable reality, without which we would experience nothingness.
Therefore, the independent principles of yin and yang are actually dependent
on one another for each other's distinguishable existence.

Duality. Ok, I can't even pretend to know what this means. You must have a negative force if there is a positive force otherwise neither would exist? So, opposites do attract because they have to?

What about the argument that like attracts like? Positive thoughts produce positive results. Negativity breeds negativity. How can a negative aspect change without affecting the positive if they are interconnected?