pyewacketsworld

Part 6:

What I’m relating here in general of all the goings that occurred in the year 2006 beginning March 2nd, is as you can guess very minimal. That whole year I was practically living on the phone, making so many phones call while I was home, and going to the internet place to use their computers every single day for a few hours reaching out to pet shelters and pet rescuers. You also have to understand, I’m not exactly a phone person to begin with, so just making all these calls non-stop practically was a challenge in itself. Let me put it this way, with all the phone calls I was making in 2006 I think I did my quota of phone calling for the rest of my life.

I can’t even count all the lawyers I was contacting to see if anyone could represent us, and at a long shot, I even called up our former lawyer who represented us first time round in 2001 over the same issue, but when I finally got the nerve to call her, well, it’s a wonder she didn’t hang up on me right off the bat. She wanted nothing to do with us.
It wasn’t until March 22, 2006 that I finally got around to calling JASA-The Legal Services For The Elderly, but all I succeeded in doing was leaving a message. In fact, that seemed to be the norm, no matter who or where I was calling…just leaving messages all around. By this time I was also getting in contact with the news media. I was actually trying to connect with some of the same people who had featured our story first time round back in 2001, including Jeanne Moos of CNN who had done a feature of me and my mother and our cat situation back then. When I finally did get in contact her, she was very kind and nice, and did indeed remember our story that she had covered about us. Unfortunately, as much as she would have loved to have done another feature on us, she told me CNN just wasn’t “into” those kind of stories anymore.

The whole idea of me trying to get the media in the first place was to see if anyone would be interested in our story again, to perhaps encourage people to adopt our cats, just as people had taken an interest back in 2001 when our story hit. One slap in the face, was I had called a major pet organization..I won’t say whom, but the person in charge had at first seemed very promising and thought maybe he and his organization could somehow help out. When I called him back again on March 27th, he did a complete 180-degrees on me and was rude and rather obnoxious. Boy talk about wanting to slam the phone down in disgust. I mean I just couldn’t figure out why he did such a complete turn around when he had sounded so nice and friendly when I had just talked to him a few days before.

In the meantime the whole month of March and into April I was still trying to find a lawyer to represent us, and as mentioned before most times all I was succeeding in doing was leaving messages…most times, I never got calls back. Same with JASA, but I guess someone must have been doing something since next thing you know the director of that organization told me to fax any court papers right away…I think what they were planning on doing was send some kind of notification to the court itself to terminate any further action against my mother and myself as far as the eviction issue went, as supposedly we were supposed to have technically speaking vacated the apartment by April 19th which was all too rapidly coming up.

In the meantime, through a few animal organizations, things were being arranged and I was being pressured to consider Animal Care and Control to start coming to pick up the cats. Oh, can’t begin to tell you how much I was against this…to me AC&C was a death sentence since this is a kill-shelter, but what could I do? With the exception of those two pet rescuers who took two cats each between them back in mid-March, none of the shelters or pet rescuers were helping us, and I’m talking about at least fifty places I had contacted, and not just in the New York City area, but upstate New York, and even had contacted some pet rescuers via email in the New Jersey area an Pennsylvania….no one was helping. So with arrangements via ASPCA and the Mayor’s Alliance I had to give the go ahead with Animal Care & Control. So on April 18th, AC&C was to begin coming to our apartment almost on a daily basis to start picking up a few cats each day. In the meantime, JASA did get a postponement of our eviction which technically speaking would have been the very next day on April 19th and a court date was being set up.

Well once again this will be continued. As mentioned I’m just brushing the surface of went on that year of 2006…if you were to see my detailed journal of all the calls, all the running around, all the emails, everything I was doing back then you would probably wonder how I survived it all…even I wonder myself. But yes, the end result things did fall into place, which is the whole theme of this series that I’m writing.

©2009~Melanie Neer aka pyewacket

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