I firmly believe that a leading economic indicator of recovery can be traced directly to the adoption of pets from shelters and foster families. We have just adopted out our third cat in the year 2010, which, I am almost embarrassed to say, is equal to the number of cats we adopted out in the whole of 2009. I don't wanna say 2009 was cursed, exactly, but … let's say I'm glad that year is in the bag.

Our latest adoptee is Carlos, who was only here as an official adoption candidate for just one week. He had been living in our yard for a few months, but he only got neutered last Thursday. When he first showed up, we didn't know he was tame, and he really kept his distance. Slowly, he would let us get closer and closer until the day I finally petted him. It is interesting to realize a cat as either feral or tame, as it changes your estimation of the cat quite a bit. A feral cat kind of needs to live outside, they will never 'get' humans, and they are most comfortable at least arm's length away from us.

But the tame ones have known humans in their past, and know they can be sources of comfort. We never find out where these tame cats come from, but they usually need some help remembering that they like people. So it was with Carlos, who met his new person like a lapcat who had never spent a night in a storage tub full of straw. It's nice to see that once you win them over, they're usually all right in their new homes, more or less.

I'm excited to finally adopt one of our fosters out to a neighbor, in this case a couple who live next door to us. I feel sort of bad, in that I had never really thought of my block as a potential source of adopters. After all, this neighborhood and its environs are the source of most of the cats we take in. But clearly not every person on this block is an irresponsible pet owner.  Carlos' new family are recent transplants from the south side of Williamsburg so we can be sure they haven't contributed to the stray cat population. But I will be more aware of this nearby resource and hope to adopt out more cats to my neighbors.

So good luck, Carlos (or whatever his name ends up being)! I took him over to his new home and he immediately took to it, in no small part I'm sure because the place wasn't crawling with cats like our house.

After a hiatus of cat-fixing of several months, I was finally able to get Jumbee and Carlos done last week, thanks to the help of NYSeiler and Lari from Care for Cats, Inc. My access to the mobile spay vans that had fixed most of our cats was essentially lost, so I'd been scratching my head as to where to find new sources of help. We have a constant parade of cats coming to our feeding station, and the severity of this winter brought many new faces out.  As many as 7 new cats have been regular visitors this season, all more or less adults, some tame and some feral. It's a lot of cats, but not nearly enough to book a spay van of my own. However, other folks out there have the requisite number of cats and are able to schedule the van to come to their residence.

But a van can usually process some 25 cats a day, so there are usually some empty slots.  Such was the case last Thursday so I got the two most prominent members of the new crew up to Corona, Queens. They were neutered, vaccinated and tested (all clear!) They're back home and doing awesome. Now all the usuals around my house are fixed, I can focus on the remaining drifters.

The 5 or so remaining cats don't live in the yard, but come by often. I am hoping to continue this cat networking to find more upcoming open slots to get these guys done as well. The hope is we can build an informal network of concerned cat people who can alert each other as spots come up.

Don't forget we still have some cats to adopt out!

Journeyman, another new (enormous) face