After putting it off as long as I possibly could, I have now seen that the rumors of a large cat colony across the street from me are true. Man are they true! Our neighbor, unbeknownst to us, has been feeding stray cats in her yard for who-knows how long. There are currently some 20 cats and kittens that we saw. Many are little kittens so we think we can nab them manually and focus the real efforts on the adults. We will be undertaking a TNR effort to get all these guys fixed up as soon as we can. I've done lots of TNR work in the past few years, but every one I have done has been pretty low-level compared to what I'm facing now. The good news is I finally have enough cats to book a mobile spay clinic, so a truck from either the ASPCA or The Toby Project will park right in front of our house and fix all the cats in one fell swoop. We've already decided to recover all the cats in our house to take the burden off our neighbor. I want to make this as low-impact to her and her family as possible. As I may have related in the past, I think the neighborhood already views us oddly, so I want to do everything possible to keep it from blooming into "absolutely insane-crazy." Though my one neighbor has said I don't get hassled in the neighborhood because I look like Bernie Goetz. Well, he IS a vegetarian too!

The next steps are to get the van booked. Once that date is set we can mobilize everything else (securing enough traps, preparing the recovery space, making sure we have enough food and supplies like newspapers!) I'm a little annoyed because if I had found out about this 6 months ago I could have focused all my attention on it. But now I'm employed again so my time is limited. Which sucks, but my job doesn't give me a hard time if I have to take a day off here and there. More info as the plan progresses!