At first he didn’t want his picture taken.

Then he kept moving around.

Really! He was there when I aimed the camera!

And moving.

Finally he sat down to groom.

And moved to a more comfortable place.

He’s a friendly boy (well, I’m 99% sure it’s a boy,). . . friendly . . . as long as I don’t try to verify his gender, or don’t try to pick him up, or don’t stop petting when he’s done, or don’t get up to leave before he’s done.

He’s been coming around for at least a year. Possibly longer, but I don’t really remember since it was not very frequent at first (maybe when he still had a family). In August, my neighbor, who lives in a corner house, said the he’d been abandoned, by the people across the street from her, when his owners moved. [[GRRRRR]] She said she had made a cozy, dry bed box for him in the winter and that she fed him. She called him Whiskers. For some reason I’d been calling him Hector. I thought I’d heard someone else call him that.

But then in early September I noticed that he had lost a lot of weight. That’s when I started to feed him. Not the greatest food for a skinny cat (the diet food my sister’s fat cat wouldn’t eat), but it’s food. And he can eat as much as he likes. He doesn’t seem to like it much, but he has been eating it. Every day. I’ll get him something better when this is gone. I don’t know if the neighbor still feeds him, but if so, I suspect she just puts a bowl of food outside. I left a bowl for half an hour and it was crawling with ants. Plus there are a lot of squirrels who eat anything/everything edible they find. So, he may not be getting all she puts out. He’s learned when dinner time is here, so I don’t need to leave it out too long. (Although the ants seem to leave it alone now, so it’s just squirrels I need to watch out for, and maybe other roaming cats, though the only other cats I see, I know have homes.)

I also gave him a flea treatment. He needed that badly! And I want to see if any of the vets here do charity cat care. I can pay a little, but probably not what I paid when my last cat was sick. Except for the weight and flea issue, he seems okay right now.

If I can get my rear in gear this week enough to get away from computer, needle & thread, and books, I also want to build him a tiny sleep shed filled with straw (and flea powder beneath). I have a board with a cat door in it that I’d had in the window of my laundry room so my cats could go out on their screened “porch” whenever they wanted. I’d love to let him inside, but (so far) that’s where Iqbal draws the line. He had more cats than he ever wanted when we had ours and doesn’t miss having them in the house. At all! Hector Whiskers has adopted me, but I can’t adopt him. :^(

But I’ve been reading about “alley cats” and apparently they do all right on their own if they can get food and shelter. Hector Whiskers has at least two people who provide that. He is officially a “Community Cat.” From what I’ve read there are lots of Community Cats around the world.

A lot of cats–domestic, homeless, or feral–are a lot more sociable than people realize. Cats were self domesticated animals. Man did not decide “We need cats” as they did with farm animals. Cats chose to be with us. I think that explains a lot about cat personalities.