We don’t have much new on the cats. If you’re keeping count at home, we have seven indoor cats and four outdoor cats (along with a few feline visitors, an opossum visitor, and a raccoon visitor, based upon game camera sightings).

Indoor Cats:

• Ajax has been extraordinarily needy lately, but Mr. L has been in San Antonio.
• Lady is taking her Prozac regularly and is mellow 95% of the time. She’s a delight with humans but it’s as if Rossie has a trigger that sets her off. Probably the running, and Lady can’t resist a chase.
• Tarzan is being treated with hyaluronic acid shots (yet, my cat drops acid) to calm his bladder, which seems to be helping with inappropriate urination.  We still have someone urinating inappropriately, but I think it’s one of the girls — most likely Rossie.
• Rossie has been out and about upstairs, but she shrinks if I ask if I can pet her, so, clearly, the answer is no. She likes Mr. L and nobody else. Lady isn’t the only one who likes to chase her. Tarzan and Daphne take great delight in chasing Rossie, too. Mr. L (and me when he’s not here) still fills a bowl with food and tucks it under her dresser in the morning. She’s filled out nicely because of this, and she’s sticking up for herself more often, but she’s not a happy kitty.  Maybe she’s the one that needs Prozac.  We just don’t know.
• Delta is more approachable. She’s most approachable in the morning when she helps me get dressed, but we’re able to pet her more often when we encounter her downstairs. Since I moved back upstairs after the knee recovery, she’s generally slept off the the side in the middle of the bed instead of right on or between my legs, so I think she knows not to do that.
• Ruby is approachable (sometimes) upstairs, but downstairs, she’s not interested in interacting with us. I like that she seems to want to be near us during the day enough to spend time downstairs, though.
• Daphne has been more accepting of petting lately, too. She and Lady both know they need to go to bed at 8:00 at night, so they come downstairs around 7:15 and wait. The trick for me is to escort them into the cage when they gather and are ready to go in. If I wait too long, they give up and go back upstairs (which tends to result in an altercation with Rossie, who is expecting them to be locked up for her to be free to roam). We’ve managed to train them to train us, I guess.

Outdoor Cats:

• Sneaky is doing very well. As I’ve reported earlier, she learned to come in a door held open for her last month. She is still very hesitant, but I eventually want her to be an inside cat. I’m trying to get her introduced to the inside cats, but that’s not coming along very well.
• Walter, the gorgeous male I trapped last July, has been neutered, but his shots will be coming due in July, and we still can’t touch him. We see him regularly. He will talk to us, and he will eat Fancy Feast while we are five to eight feet away from him, but that’s as close as we can get for now. He looks healthy and seems happy.
• Junior, a gray tabby who’s a little smaller, is very motivated by Fancy Feast.  He will eat from a bowl within a foot of our knee as we sit on the porch steps, but he won’t let us touch him yet. He’s very talkative and definitely associates us with the Fancy Feast bowl. I want to earn his trust so I can get him neutered and vaccinated.
• Boomer, who is easy to confuse with Walter, even though he looks very different now that we’ve learned they aren’t the same cat, has been around. If we find him around, we can also feed him Fancy Feast at a distance of five to ten feet. I want to earn his trust as well, but that seems like it will be more difficult than even earning Junior’s. I also fear he may not be well, so I’m probably going to have to try to trap him. I know I’ve been saying this for some time. What this means is I just don’t know what the best approach is to take.

With the caveats mentioned, everyone seems to be doing well.