since it’s a long time coming (over a year now), and since it’s all rainy and gross out, what better time to talk about a cat named schmoo?

one morning last september i was headed out to work as usual when i saw a grey striped cat in our backyard standing there and looking at me. i didn’t recognize the cat, and while the cat seemed to want to approach me, it also was a bit skittish and didn’t seem to know if it could trust me. after a moment it ran back behind one of the other cars in our backyard just as dad came outside; i told him about the cat and we looked around the cars but the cat had disappeared.

later that evening after i got home from work, the cat was back! i can’t remember if i saw the cat when i first arrived home, but the cat definitely was making its presence known while we were at dinner – it was pacing around outside the dining room window meowing nonstop, and then after it did that for several minutes it went over by the front door and lay down on our porch and meowed some more.

“isn’t that weird? this cat knows what windows and doors are!” i remember thinking. and then it struck me: this cat must be a domestic cat since it seems to know what doors and windows are for! it wants to be let in!

we looked at the cat outside on the porch some, but it didn’t have a collar or anything like that on. i figured i’d go check craigslist to see if perhaps, just maybe, someone posted a lost cat ad on there. i poked around in the lost and found section and found this:

that cat looked awfully like the one we had sitting on our porch, so i snapped some photos and compared the pictures against the photos of the cat in the craigslist ad.

poor cat! 🙁

i did my best to compare some of the stripes and markings on the cheek of the cat on our porch to the photo of the cat online, and it seemed extremely similar, so dad and anne let the cat into our sunroom so it would be out of the elements and gave it some food and water while i sent an email to the address on the ad to say that i think we had found their cat. it was around 10 PM and it wasn’t long before i got a call from the lady who received my email and said that she was pretty sure that we had their cat as well, and asked where we lived. when i told her, she said that sounded about right distance-wise from what they expected, and could they come by the next day to pick the cat up? i said “you can come get the cat right away if you want, we’re not going to bed anytime soon,” and she was over at our place not long after that and looked at the cat and confirmed that yes, if that isn’t their cat it’s a very close version of their cat (even down to the “likes to meow a lot”, which we knew since the cat was meowing pretty much nonstop at our place) and they’d know for sure once they get its microchip checked out.

while she was over at our place, she told us how this cat (we then learned her name was “schmoo”) got lost. apparently this lady’s brother or sister or somebody who lives in florida was really sick with cancer, so she and her family were taking care of the sick person’s pets for the time being. i can’t remember the specifics about all that, it was rather confusing.

anyway, schmoo, being an indoor-outdoor cat, was outside that day and the lady heard her meowing, and when she went outside she didn’t see her cat (there was a fence next to her yard and thought at first that schmoo was on the other side of the fence and perhaps that was why she couldn’t see the cat), but then she saw her neighbor carrying a box-shaped object covered in a sheet, and she heard meowing. the neighbor put the box-shaped object in his car and drove off, and the lady didn’t hear the cat meowing after that. he was gone for about 30 minutes or so, if i remember right, and she confronted him when he got back about him taking her cat. he told her some story about how he didn’t have anything to do with the cat, but that he was putting a flowerbox in his car, and she retorted that flowerboxes don’t meow.

she called the police about this scumbag neighbor catnapping her cat, and the officer that came out and took the guy’s statement told the lady that he could tell that the neighbor was lying about it, but unfortunately there wasn’t anything they could do.

they had no idea what the neighbor did to the cat, but they figured that the neighbor couldn’t have gone more than 10-15 minutes away from their house based on the time he was gone, and from where schmoo was taken to the area around my neighborhood is about 10-15 minutes. apparently schmoo had been missing for about a week so she was much thinner than what she looked like in the photos on craigslist and they thought they’d never see schmoo again.

i guess they didn’t expect that schmoo would know how to find a good cat-whisperer (yours truly) who could help get her back home. 🙂 and that’s my schmoo story, and i’m sticking to it.

This entry was originally posted at http://oboe-sama.dreamwidth.org/1366482.html.