Twitter Is Crumbling

I paused the chore of tagging every Tweep in order to take care of some other tasks, and see what was going on with Twitter. It's not looking good, Gentle Readers.

Twitter says it's no longer filtering tweets from private, free individual accounts out of my feed. So why is my Twitter feed still a lot of slick corporate rubbish full of graphics?--Did I say that?--Yes, I said that. The first accounts I followed on Twitter were newspaper accounts. For years I used Twitter mainly for the links to headline news from around the world. The real Washington Post and Times, which I would read every day if I still got them on the same day, and the real New York Times and Los Angeles Times and Guardian and other newspapers from far-away places, which I would read every week or two if they came free in the mail, would not reach me on the day they're printed. The headlines from all those papers do, via Twitter. I'd miss the headlines, too, if they disappeared, but a funny thing happens when I open Twitter lately. I'm looking for my Tweeps, who were censored en masse a few weeks ago. A respectable newspaper tweets a legitimate news headline--freak weather here, celebrity funeral there--and I catch myself thinking "Oh turn it off, who cares if some movie star's dead, WHAT'S HAPPENING TO TRACY DOE?" Real news items blur together with ad-garbage in my mind as I scan for Tweeps' tweets and find jolly few of them.

Well, we've had a holiday weekend. Despite the officially solemn nature of Memorial Day, the timing works against solemnity. Most Americans now pay people to tend graves and, even if people do trudge out to lay a wreath on a stone and remember a grandparent, in the morning, mostly Memorial Day weekend is about picnics, boats, and barbecues. When the weather is favorable, as in much of the U.S. it has been, people take week-long vacations, go to the beach or the mountains, and unplug. This accounts for some of the drop in individual Twitter activity...but not all of it.

When people opened New Twitter and saw that their Tweeps had been declared "low-quality" because they weren't paying to advertise their store locations on the Internet, we were insulted. Admit it, Dorsey, that's an insult.

Current reality is that in much of the United States, certainly in my home town, even most of the private businesses aren't paying to maintain phone lines that any random person can call, any more. Blame the telephone companies that raised monthly fees, allowed employees to talk back to customers, failed to maintain public computer centers, then left business phone numbers out of the local phone directories, all of which made people feel that paying a monthly phone bill was more trouble than it was worth. If you don't have a physical store that takes a lot of phone orders, you don't have a phone line, any more. (I'm sitting in a cafe that does have a phone line, looking out toward a row of businesses: one still has a phone, four don't; one has a phone line but makes and takes calls only for about an hour a day, only three days a week.) Individuals have cell phones. Most of those cell phones don't pick up most of the signals for ordinary conversation-type calls during the warmer two-thirds of the year. Probably a majority of them are either tax-subsidized "Obamaphones," for which the service can hardly aspire to reach the level of "pathetic," or else very fancy "smart phones" purchased by their children, for people who want to live alone in their own homes after age 80, most of whom have never figured out how to use even the normal phone functions on their "smart phones." (Two of my elders, after trying to call and chat with each other for about a year, broke down and disclosed their phone numbers to me in hopes that I could make it possible for them to call each other. I got each of their phone numbers plugged into the other's phone. I've yet to hear whether they've succeeded in calling each other and making conversation, the way they used to do every day when they were paying for traditional wall-mounted phone lines.) Most of the cell phones that are actually being used run on prepaid minute plans, and if you waste a phone minute even on social pleasantries when talking to a friend, you are likely to be punished by having your calls ignored when they do get through, the next time you try to call that friend. New phone etiquette bars the older conventional "How are you all doing?--Well, Grandpa's out of the hospital, Grandma's still trying to get the sink re-plumbed, etc. etc. etc.--Well my mother-in-law's still sightseeing in Italy, Grandma's put the car up for sale, etc. etc. etc.," that used to while away a happy half-hour or an hour before any two Southerners got to the actual reason for a phone call. Now, when a friend's call does get through, a polite conversation sounds like "I'm at the corner."--"Right."--Click!

So I've received a few plaintive letters and e-mails lately from people who "would like to talk about this or that, but don't have a phone number for you." One of them appeared to have been hand-typed by one of Congressman Griffith's office staff. And if I still had a phone they could call, I would take the time to talk about bills with Congressman Griffith's office staff. Actually I know a few Republicans who would be chuffed to host a phone date for me with Congressman Griffith's office staff--but even the ones who still maintain phone lines that reliably receive incoming calls, for no extra charge, would have to schedule time in advance to be nearby when those phones ring. Telephone culture has changed a great deal in my lifetime. Now I'm not even in a super-frugal minority when I say: I don't have, and unless a client pays for it I probably will never have, a phone that people can call.

I can just see Twitter's corporate sponsors' eyes crinkling and teeth clenching with frustration. "But now that everybody carries a cell phone, we should be able to bombard everybody with sales calls, all the time!" I saw an advertisement yesterday--"Why let your message be lost among 800 e-mails? Let us help you send text messages directly to people's cell phones!" No waaay. People have to pay for unwelcome text messages and, if businesses do start advertising by text messaging on a large scale, next year's legislature will undoubtedly have to choose one of a dozen different bills, by popular demand, imposing a fine on anyone who sends unwanted text messages to private people's cell phones. You can't communicate with me by phone, people. Deal with it. Even if you are one of a few stores I've invited to e-mail me notices of what's going on sale from week to week--and, funnily enough, for some reason those e-mails never have come through; try typing text only, with no live links and no pictures--that in no way implies that I'm willing to pay actual money for letting you waste expensive cell phone minutes, or memory, either, for that matter, are you out of your flippin' MINDS?! 

So, no, there is not and will never be a live phone number connected to my Twitter account. Nor to most of my Tweeps' accounts. Calling us "low-quality" for that reason is an open, shameless, trashy insult. Twitter might as well add remarks about our mothers to our account pages. And so, not too surprisingly, after people went to their account pages and saw that, people are staying away from Twitter in droves.

What could Twitter possibly do to make up for that? I have no idea. I've continued to use Twitter, in spare minutes while watching for developments; but then, I'm both a writer and an activist, so I've grown a few emotional calluses my Tweeps apparently lack. I don't know how much grovelling Twitter needs to do to get them back, but my advice would be for Jack Dorsey to maintain contact between his forehead and the floor or ground, when communicating with the private free users who are Twitter's reason for existing, throughout the next year or two.

Maybe a campaign of segregating accounts associated with publicly traded corporations, identifying them as "lowest-quality accounts," might help. Lowest-quality accounts' home pages should feature headers continually reminding the corporate employees, "You are PAYING for the privilege of interacting with your Lord and Master the Honorable Prospective Customer." Every time these wretched people log into their lowest-quality accounts, at the top of the page they should see a "Promoted Tweet" from a private individual whose account Twitter insulted this spring, and until they have responded to that tweet to the satisfaction of that private individual, even though they're paying, the lowest-quality accounts' tweets should not be visible to anyone else. The purpose of this rigmarole would be to make it clear to the corporate social media consultants that old-school social bullying is no longer an acceptable way to advertise anything. Nobody has to read what you're saying about your product, Sony, Burlington, Zulily et al. You have to type, by hand, "Thank you for sharing your lovely flower picture. Please may I share a picture of this cell phone or guitar or raincoat or whatever else I'm selling?" And you have to wait, lowest-quality account that you are, for the Honorable Prospective Customer's permission to do that.

Y'know, before this censorship deal came out, I had no particular feelings toward Merck. Companies make mistakes. Some companies' mistakes are more disastrous than others. If the Ace Gift & Toy Company sells you a yo-yo that fails to yo properly, you may or may not bother demanding your money back, or just tell the kids to let that be a lesson to them not to spend money on stupid toys. When Toyota had to recall some cars because the rather endearing fast acceleration feature had got out of hand and become dangerous, that didn't make me feel that all Toyota cars are unsafe even when stalled at intersections and need to be banned. I imagine that Boeing, which built a lot of good planes before building a few not-so-good planes, is building good planes again by now. I imagine that Toshiba, which built laptops that were worth their little weight in gold before building some not-so-good laptops and then a few laptops with a flaw that allowed some of them to explode from overheating, is building decent laptops again by now. And I would have assumed that Merck, which unfortunately sent out a batch of vaccines that were contaminated with something that caused a few patients to die, would have reacted in a normal way--huge insurance-funded payoffs to the bereaved, recall of that batch of vaccine, destruction of the equipment on which it was manufactured, probably razing that wing of that building to the ground, and then rebuilding and getting back to producing safer vaccines...if Merck hadn't publicized that, instead, it was demanding censorship of complaints about its toxic contaminated vaccines, even to the point of advocating discrimination against entire religious groups.

Well, now I hate Merck. I'm neither a Jew nor a Jehovah's Witness but I am an American. Like most Americans I feel some sympathy even for Jehovah's Witnesses, and quite a lot of sympathy for Jews, who don't even go around annoying people with silly little tracts. Scum who bash either of those religious groups? Y'mean our fathers and grandfathers did not all but literally pound them into the ground, driving them into their underground bunkers to commit suicide, in 1945? Hey, we have a job to finish here!

By "lowest-quality tweets" I mean the ones from the stores that sell legitimate merchandise I don't happen to be buying. I do not mean Merck, and I do not mean Bayer, and I do not mean Lilly. Some things need to be beaten into the ground like the venomous snakes they're worse than.

As of yesterday Twitter was still "promoting" tweets from loathsome corporations, my Tweeps were not on Twitter, and a Bayer shill whose Twitter name is @29aatea was gloating (in French) "The anxiety-producing tweets are going to disappear." Rrreally? Ecoute bien, mon petit...Twitter may well disappear; if it continues to consist of one big clamor of news reports and advertisements screaming at each other, with no audience listening to either, Twitter will disappear. I've already checked out two web sites that aren't well enough designed to displace Twitter, but honestly, if Google + or even Tsu came back to life tomorrow, New Twitter would be dead by Monday. An intelligent adult has seriously proposed Mylots as capable of displacing New Twitter. I don't think Mylots can, but if Live Journal can keep its glitches from popping up every day or two, Live Journal could easily displace New Twitter.

So, yes, #GlyphosateAwareness is going to e-mail. I'm working on that today. I expect most of our e-mail will go directly into people's Bacon Folders.

If you don't have a Bacon Folder set up, here's my rant about why everybody needs one:

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/07/unplugging-is-vacation.html

And this long rant about how to keep your bacony e-mail out of the Spam Folder is still something several correspondents need to heed, too:

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/01/how-or-how-not-to-turn-your-bacon-into.html

Anyway: In the post-Twitter world I may resume posting Link Logs as LJ blog posts, "friends-only" until they're sponsored, at which point they'll appear here. Another blog idea I've been mulling for a while, because some correspondents like it and others will haaate it, may spin off into a separate blog and generate a separate e-mail list: that's the one where I (and you, if you feel so inclined) blog our way through the Bible in the "daily devotional" format (limited to one printed page per day, traditionally a standard book page with room for 200 to 300 words).

I'm off to work on the e-mail chore now. I promise a maximum of one pithy, linky glyphosate-related batch e-mail per week. I promise not to send out e-mails I would not want to receive...no hype, no duns, no suggested contributions through sites that demand access to your Paypal password. The best way to help expand Glyphosate Awareness to the masses, should you feel called to do so, is to send a U.S. postal money order to the Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City. All funds raised for Glyphosate Awareness will be used exclusively for printing and mailing newsletters to people who don't do e-mail. I encourage sharing everything we learn about glyphosate with your elected officials and their staff, and may print out postcards for that purpose, but Glyphosate Awareness seeks to influence elected officials by reason alone--no "schmoozing."

Sadly, because already I sorely miss Twitter...

Today's Amazon link is a Very First Book on communication, in audio format for those who don't know how to read, recommended to certain geeks with names like Dorsey who seem to need it.

Knitting the Sestina Afghan

First I read a book by Kenneth Koch called Rose, Where Did You Get That Red.

Among other poetic topics, Koch explored with students the odd fact that, for him, the phrase "red rose" was so worn-out it didn't bring an image of a red rose to his mind, although "yellow rose" did. So he played with other ways of writing about roses, as in the title of his book.

He also played with poetic forms, trying to steer the kids away from familiar rhymes. (Perhaps he forgot that, for children, "The moon shone bright / on the warm June night" is still interesting.) One poetic form he invited children to play with was the sestina.

This traditional poetic form is relatively long and very hard to use well; for that reason, nobody expects it to be used very well. If you can assemble a sestina that makes sense in any way, cheers, you've made a sestina. In Renaissance Europe sestinas had rhyme--often all 39 lines had to rhyme with each other--and meter--the most "classical" meter for the language, and they were usually about Romantic Love and/or flattering the poet's sponsors or hosts. In the modern United States sestinas can include anything that has 39 lines, each of which lines ends with one of six words, in order.

Kids can do sestinas about as well as adults do. To prove this, Koch had classes of children, some still learning the primary colors, fill in the blanks and write sestinas in which the lines ended with six color names: pink, aquamarine, green, blue, purple, red; red, pink, purple, aquamarine, blue, green; and so on for the full 39 lines. He included about a dozen of these poems in Rose. Though none of them is among the Best Poems Ever Written in English, each of them does describe a child's world in vivid, colorful images.

I read these sestinas--years ago--and thought, "One of these days I will knit those colors into an afghan, and write my own sestina about it." So last Christmas I found the yarn on sale, knitted the afghan, and wrote the sestina. Here is...

THE COLOR SESTINA (for Kenneth Koch)

I picture roses red as well as pink

or yellow. I can picture aquamarine

buttercream icing roses, with mint green

leaves, buttercream, on a cake that’s blue

vanilla. And the platter, of course, purple.

I wouldn’t bake it, though. I’d prefer red

in berries, cherries, on a cake, to red

of roses. Garden roses can be pink.

Most flowers in that pink-to-blue-to-purple

range are blue where I live. Aquamarine

is rare in nature, unlike green or blue.

Nature will juxtapose bright blue with green

with plenty of brown and grey, and shades of green

to make a backdrop for anything that’s red.

The trees are mostly green, the sky some blue

or other, except sunrise or sunset pink.

Blue and green paint blend to aquamarine.

Blue and pink mix to tint the violets purple,

and likewise iris, hyacinths, snowballs, purple,

a shade that’s lovely against any green.

But nature seldom mixes aquamarine.

Many times nature mixes white with red;

hence flybush, roses, rhododendrons’ pink.

And air itself always takes on a blue

tinge, whether light or dark or faded blue,

that soft and modest blue that shades to purple

in flowers that are purple, blue, or pink.

Nature can go almost too far with green.

Nature is usually temperate with red.

A few birds’ eggs are sometimes aquamarine

and the gem itself, of course, is aquamarine.

Nature mostly favors true blue or no blue.

Nature’s never minded mixing shades of red,

but spares the overall use of red or purple.

If one, why not a hundred shades of green?

Roses, azaleas show a single pink.

Hardly anything is really aquamarine.

The sky is rarely just one shade of blue

but a rose is often just one shade of red.

Then I knitted the blanket. Though shown here on a single bed, it's big enough for two people to snuggle under, or for one to wrap up in like a sleeping bag.

Then I wrote an article about how to knit your own Sestina Afghan. I offered it to a printed magazine that had asked for crochet patterns. They made an offer on this knitting pattern, then decided they didn't have room for it after all. So I'm publishing it here for copyright purposes. The instructions below were written with new, occasional, or very young knitters in mind:

1. Choose a size and shape. I knitted 14” squares to make a full-sized bed/couch cover. You might knit 6” squares to make a crib blanket, or 8x12” rectangles to make a kid-sized bed cover.

2. Choose yarn. Here are six options:

* Red Heart Supersaver acrylic is easy to find in aquamarine, blue, green, pink, purple, and red. I used 14 ounces of each color to make 39 14” squares.

* Cotton is available in bright colors too. Knit cotton squares separately to wash out surplus dye before sewing them together. One 50-gram skein of a cotton yarn like Sugar’n’Cream is more than enough to make a 6” square. Use the extra yarn for sewing.

* If you don’t live near a wool shop, you can find wool yarn in six colors at a wool spinner’s website. Ask how much wool you’ll need for the blanket you want to knit.

* You can change the colors in your Sestina! For a luxurious, sophisticated, non-scratchy blanket, use six shades of undyed Shetland wool.

* The Philosophers’ Wool Company sells undyed yarn that picks up bright pastel colors when it’s simmered in unsweetened Kool-Aid. This process is explained in Fair Isle Sweaters Simplified.

* You could use only one color and repeat six different stitch patterns, instead of colors.

3. Choose a stitch pattern or patterns. Just knitting every stitch in every row makes an interesting, colorful blanket. If you use different patterns, knit the first and last two stitches in each row in the first strip, making a garter stitch border.

You could crochet some or all of your squares. I didn't, but you could. Crocheting generally makes a denser fabric that takes more yarn than knitting.

4. Check your gauge by knitting about 30 stitches and 30 rows. Multiply the number of stitches per inch by the number of inches you want across your squares (or rectangles). Cast on that number of stitches. I cast on 54 stitches in pink to make a 14" square.

5. Make a pink square. On the next right-side row, change to aquamarine. Make an aquamarine square above the pink square. Then add a green, blue, purple, and red square. Bind off in red.

6. Hold the strip with the pink square nearest to you (“at the bottom”), right side facing up. Attach red to the cast-on loop at the right side of the pink square. Cast on as many stitches in red as you did in pink. Work across these stitches until all the red stitches are on the right-hand needle and you come to the bottom edge of the pink square. Each two rows of the garter stitch border at the right side of the pink square form a “bump” of yarn. Beginning at the top, run the left-hand needle through each bump.

The bumps form a line that's perpendicular to the cast-on or knitted row from the next square, on which you're now working. 

7. Now turn your work so the working yarn is facing you, and slip one of those loops of pink yarn onto the left-hand needle. Use the right-hand needle to purl this loop together with the first stitch in red. Knit the next stitch in red. Finish the row. Repeat this procedure to join each wrong-side row of the red square to the edge of the pink square as you go along. When the red square is complete, change to pink and join every wrong-side row of the pink square to the aquamarine square.

8. Work the remaining squares in the same way, in order:

(1) pink, aquamarine, green, blue, purple, red

(2) red, pink, purple, aquamarine, blue, green

(3) green, red, blue, pink, aquamarine, purple

(4) purple, green, aquamarine, red, pink, blue

(5) blue, purple, pink, green, red, aquamarinne

(6) aquamarine, blue, red, purple, green, pink

9. Now make three more squares in a separate short strip of aquamarine, blue, and red. Fold two of these squares together and sew up both sides. Fold the third square over to form a pouch pillow.

10. Use remaining yarn to decorate the edges of the blanket. Knit, crochet, or embroider a border around each edge. Embroider flowers, initials, or other motifs if you like.

RESOURCES

Here are some books that explain more about the techniques I used in the Seamless Sestina Blanket:

How to cast on and knit: (The Usborne Guide to) Knitting, by A. Wilkes and C. Garbera. (This is not the prettiest first book of knitting, but it's the most concise and likely to be the best bargain. Well, likely...I just checked...the hardcover first edition, which is what I have, is listed for $280 on Amazon. Consider this paperback reprint.)

Or: Kids Knitting, by Melanie Falick

How to use math to design anything you want to knit: Knitting Without Tears, by Elizabeth Zimmermann

How to dye wool with Kool-Aid: Fair Isle Sweaters Simplified, by Ann and Eugene Bourgeois. (Note that Kool-Aid was not used to make the cover sweater. You use quite a lot of Kool-Aid to dye wool in bright pastels.)

How to knit lots of different patterns: A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, by Barbara Walker. (This is actually the first book in a set of four.)

How to knit seamless pieces by knitting into the bumps, or, failing that, how to sew washed cotton squares together invisibly: The Knitting Experience, Book 1, The Knit Stitch, by Sally Melville

Here are some yarn spinners’ websites:

Red Heart acrylic: https://www.redheart.com/yarn

Philosopher’s Wool: https://www.philosopherswool.com/

Brown Sheep wool and mohair: http://www.brownsheep.com/

Jamieson & Smith Shetland wool: http://www.shetlandwoolbrokers.co.uk/

Alafoss Iceland wool: https://alafoss.is/

Tahki cotton: https://tahkistacycharles.com/product/yarns/cotton-classic/

Lion Brand spins lots of different kinds of yarns. Their selections vary from year to year, sometimes including good cottons and wools as well as Vanna's Choice acrylic. Their prices depend on how much you order, so stores that sell yarns tend to be able to resell yarns at a better price than the company gives online shoppers for just a few skeins of yarn. After viewing the selections at www.lionbrandyarns.com, compare prices with www.michaels.com.

Tortie Tuesday: Traveller Reaches End of His Road

Once again I, the human writer known as Priscilla King, am writing this Tortie Tuesday post in my own voice rather than those of Samantha the Tortie and Serena the Calico Cat. I know Serena is grieving; I don't feel confident that I know what grief feels like to a social cat.

I know what loneliness is like, for a social kitten, such as Serena was for the first three months of her life. Having no siblings, she got all the nourishment she could take and was big and healthy and full of energy, with instincts telling her to use that energy to practice fighting and hunting...and she had nobody to bounce and pounce with. This brought her very close to her human godmother, me, in ways that weren't the best or the safest for anybody. She'd snuggle against me to take a nap, then wake up and want to practice killing and tearing up my hand.

Serena is bigger now than she was last summer; her attitude's not changed. She's the Queen.

Then, miraculously, someone sent a feral cat with a tame kitten the same age and size as Serena to the Cat Sanctuary. Little black Traveller didn't have siblings to play with either, and had become obsessively cuddly with humans.

Traveller was named for a fictional family, of "outrageous whiteness," who dressed in solid black. Under his solid black fur Traveller's skin showed outrageous whiteness. 

Those kittens looked at each other and instantly wanted to adopt each other as siblings, although their mothers and I made them wait a few days while combing the fleas off Traveller's back end and making sure he didn't have anything contagious. When allowed to make contact, right away they started bouncing and pouncing and racing and chasing. "Where have you been all my life?" they silently said.

As only kittens, both Traveller and Serena had paid a lot of attention to humans and made lots of different noises they used to "talk" to humans. As they bonded as foster siblings, they stopped using most of their "spoken words." I was bemused by the way each kitten continued using one "word" to communicate with me. Traveller's was the annoying whiny "meow" that most cats use to beg for food, or sometimes for attention or other things. Serena's was a noise I hear as "urk, gurk," which she used to solicit tickling and play-fighting. She became much less interested in play-fighting with me once she had Traveller, but play-fighting is still her main way of showing affection (other than actually nursing kittens).

Like some real litter-mates during the first year of their lives, Serena and Traveller were inseparable. What one did, the other did. Even when Serena had kittens of her own...Traveller probably helped Serena set up her neat little nest among layers of fabric drawn out of storage bins, definitely helped her keep it warm for the kittens on cold March nights, and baby-sat the kittens when they crawled out of their nest and started exploring the porch.

It's an old family tradition, ever since Serena's feral ancestors were brought in from a city alley in Tennessee, that mother cats curl up on my lap while nursing their kittens. When Serena did that, Traveller did too. He didn't let the kittens try to nurse on him, but he did snuggle up with them in cold weather.

The feral cat rescuer who sent Trav to us sent a two-week supply of canned cat treats, warning that he wouldn't eat dry kibble. Serena's mother Samantha helped Traveller adapt to eating dry kibble by letting him have a little of her dwindling supply of milk in exchange for a lick at his canned goodies. He ate chicken, turkey, or fish when I cooked those, and rice. He learned to like pepitas (shelled pumpkin seeds). He ate his share of the mice, crickets, and other little prey animals that are a cat's natural diet. And he learned to eat kibble and like it--but he did seem to have a weak digestive system. As the price of cat food rises, other Cat Sanctuary residents had accepted cheap store brands of kibble as long as they contained more animal protein than corn bran. Trav ate cheap kibble, but couldn't keep most store brands down.

The Dollar Store's kitten chow, a generic analog to Purina Kitten Chow, was the cheapest food Traveller seemed able to eat. As its price rose above a dollar a pound we tried "Dad's," a small name brand that seems cheap because local. "Dad's" kibble cost, last week, less than half as much as the Dollar Store's generic (I know they changed the name from "Heartland" to something even smarmier, but forget what). Trav didn't gain weight on it but he seemed to keep it down. Huzza.

After they're about six months old male cats are normally bigger than females of the same age and breed, more muscular. Females who give birth before they're a year old normally stop growing while nursing kittens. Serena's growth may have slowed down a little, but she did not stop growing. Right after giving birth she was about the same size as Traveller, bigger than Samantha. By last week she was conspicuously bigger than Traveller, such that a visitor said, "You mean the big one's not the mother of the two little ones?" By last week even Samantha was heavier than Traveller. A year-old tomcat normally weighs ten or twelve pounds. Samantha got up to nine pounds before she started nursing. Traveller was down to seven pounds or less.

But although he was skinny Trav seemed healthy--a week ago. He scarfed up chicken and rice, jumped onto my back or shoulder when I bent over to weed and pick the strawberries, minded the four little kittens. He wasn't much of a hunter, but sometimes he team-hunted with Serena.

Traveller is the black blob in the foreground, hoping to be petted. Serena is on the far side of the path, looking hardly bigger than little Black Stache, in the middle. Nobody ever had to coax Trav and Serena to act like a couple of humans minding their children. What one of them did, both of them did.

I found the remains of the rabbit on Friday evening. On Friday morning Traveller started spitting up froth, the way a long-ago cat called Bisquit had done, and then hid himself away and refused to come out, the way Bisquit did. Bisquit hid herself in a pile of rocks beside the road. Trav hid in the crawl space below the newer part of the house, which does not have a proper basement, up inside the floor. Like Bisquit he might have been helped by a home remedy for accidental poisoning, but refused to come out and take it. When I found rabbit fur I remembered that the kittens had seemed a bit off their feed on Friday morning too.

On Saturday morning I thought he might be making a breakthrough; at least he was talking to me again.

"Is that you, Traveller?"

"Meow."

"Well, come out, Traveller! Would you like a treat?"

"Meow."

Uh-oh. Traveller always said "meow," usually several times, in between hearing the word "treat" and gobbling one, but he didn't linger out of arm's length from me after hearing the word "treat."

"Treats, Traveller. I said treats!"

"Meow."

"Are you stuck somewhere? Don't you want treats?" No answer. "Chicken?" No answer.

I started searching, calling. He stopped meowing. As I got closer he growled and hissed, and so did Serena, nonverbally telling me, "Leave him alone!" I realized that the alternative to leaving him alone, since he didn't want to come out, would involve taking out a chunk of floor. I gave him the afternoon to think it over. I even hoped that by suppertime he'd be on the porch where he belonged.

He was not on the porch. He was not meowing back at anybody. Samantha and Serena tried to distract me from calling or searching, both at the same time: Serena by clawing at the wall, Samantha by calling me to pet her while she nursed Serena's theoretically weaned kittens.

On Sunday an odor told me more than I wanted to know. On Monday a different odor added more information I might have preferred not to have. Traveller had died in the crawl space; Butterball Possum had removed his body, and ignored what the kittens had left in the sand pit, which Butterball usually cleans overnight.

Serena didn't show stress while he was ill but has seemed sad since he died. I keep reminding myself that she clearly told me not to try to rescue him. I have no idea whether she knew he was going to die, that he could die, or just that he was sick and grumpy and likely to bite. Yesterday and today Serena's been more likely to bite, or rather nip and nibble, than she's been since she adopted a brother; she's reverted to chewing on my hand and saying "gurk." She's also reverted to slapping at passing ankles, which is of course her way of saying "Tag, you're It." She now weighs eleven pounds plus. I worry about being accused of harboring a dangerous attack animal.

It's hard to say whether Samantha and her grandkittens are spending a lot of time together to comfort each other in their mutual loss, or just making the most of the peak of the lactation cycle Samantha let them induce. That's like asking whether social cats nurse one another's weaned kittens (or whether I encourage them to do so) because cats don't conceive new kittens while nursing existing kittens, or because kittens get some extra nutrition from an additional cat's milk, or just because blended cat families are cute. The answer is probably "all of the above."

Anyway it's been hard to get in and out of the office, this weekend, because the frequency of Samantha's foster-mothering behavior has increased so much. I think she hears/feels my feet approaching the door and takes that as her cue to flop in front of the door and nurse Serena's kittens. All of whom, by the way, eat kibble. Possibly they're telling me that the glyphosate-soaked grain in "Dad's" brand is not nourishing the kittens, even though so far only Swimmer has complained of any difficulty digesting it...what the possum failed to remove from the sand pit did look yellower and more fibrous than cat excrement normally is.

I stepped over the pile of fur around the door and walked out to work this morning. On the way I saw young people mowing and trimming the gratifyingly green, litter-free verges of the highway, a splendid sight.

(Last week a local lurker had seen one of them passing by and muttered something about "the one they got for prostitution." The young people cleaning up the highways, without spraying poison on them, have been "recruited" from local criminal courts after convictions of nonviolent crimes--mostly public drunkenness, underage drinking, or failure to pay child support, but a topic of great interest to some local gossips was the claim that one of the current crew was busted for prostitution. "That wasn't you, was it?" old geezers snark, enforcing peer pressure against walking, picking up litter, recycling, and similar things these geezers feel guilty about lacking the public spirit to do. "You wish! Think I'd tell you if I knew who was doing that?" I snark back.)

Along the railroad some of the "weeds" were already rebounding, while other stretches were brown and dead.

Traveller, the cuddliest feral-born kitten ever to become a real house pet, is already being recycled back into the environment...thirty-six hours, or forty-eight, after eating a double dose of glyphosate-tainted foods.

Privet and Other Non-Problems

(This was actually meant to be Friday's post. By now the privet and roses have peaked, though a few white flowers are still exuding scent.)

Here are two pictures, the best the cheap cell phone camera could do, of the dominant fragrance perfuming the air in my part of the world.

The tangle is a mixed clump of privet and white roses. Lovely for now...though doesn't it ever need pruning, later, after the flowers are gone and the green branches spread out over the road.

This is privet (Ligustrum) alone, almost life-size.

Roses, honeysuckle, clover, iris, and locust blossoms are also in the mix, and both fleabane-daisies and real oxeye daisies have been seen, but this brief-blooming feral shrub from England is the sweetest of the flowers--this week. (Privet blossoms, like iris blossoms, delight the eyes and nose for just a few hours. This bush, photographed on Friday, is bloomless now. My own privet, budding on Friday, is starting to bloom now.)

Privet is not native to North America. Because it's hardy and thrives on heavy pruning, people worry about its being an invasive nuisance that will crowd out native plants. Well, my ancestral home is located on a shelf of land in between two thinly covered steep banks of crumbling limestone, where grasses or vines would not hold the land in place, and here I stand to testify that the privet hedges above and below the house have not crowded out anything. They're vulnerable to predation by carpenter ants, so the challenge is to keep them growing in the right places. Their main function is to provide food and shelter to the cardinals, and we've always liked watching the cardinals flit around, eating their little black tasteless berries in winter, and singing "Cheer, cheer, cheer!"

You can buy privet that's been selectively bred to be seedless, so it won't replenish itself if the carpenter ants get into the roots in a wet year, which they will. I wouldn't, but some people do. Personally I like the challenge of maintaining my nice orderly hedges. Seedless privet would have nothing to offer cardinals.

Allergies? Hah. Though all these fragrant flowers, along with celandine, oak, pawpaw, and other spring blossoms, have been exuding layers of pollen in which kids can write "Wash me" with their fingers on the sides of cars, nobody was sniffling on Sunday. Monday morning, right around 3:30 a.m., I woke up with the sneezes. I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed for about fifteen minutes. Then one of those little rain clouds off the edge of the storm further south did its thing, and I was able to get some sleep. The privet had nothing to do with it; hardly a blossom at the tip of a cluster had even opened yet. The roses that had been blooming all week were not the problem, either. What I was reacting to was the poison spray that left that swath of browned-out grass alongside the railroad this morning.

Glyphosate has been carelessly flung around as if it were as safe as salt for about ten years now. It's a deeply weird chemical. Individuals react differently, depending on their genes, health condition, how and how much of this "weed killer" they were exposed to. Because even close relatives' reactions can look different, manufacturers want us to believe that each of these reactions is "statistically insignificant," surely not even caused by their "safe" product. Wrong. They want us to believe we're doomed to a short life full of painful chronic illness produced by reactions to their profitable products. Wrong. And they want us to blame flowers when we wake up sneezing in the middle of the night. Wrong.

After the rain, when the sun came out, the computer heated up the office a bit so I opened a window. The privet and roses and other pretty flowers smelled delicious. I didn't even sniffle. I'm not allergic to flowers, and unless they're inhaling great choking wads of pollen, I doubt that most other "allergy sufferers" are, either. What we are is sensitive to chemical pollutants.

Last week on Twitter, glyphosate apologists started claiming to be Greener-than-thou because they nee-ee-eed to poison the land to get rid of "invasive nuisance" plants.

(Hint: Nuisance plants, like ailanthus and Bermuda grass, tend to be able to absorb a lot more of any poison than fragile, endangered plants, like rock lettuce and ladies-slippers.)

In addition to privet, they wailed that you need glyphosate to get rid of honeysuckle. Hah. Honeysuckle (the invasive kind, Lonicera japonica) is a nuisance to lazy people; it's a relatively small, brittle vine that little kids can yank up off the ground and use to practice basket weaving. If you don't want to yank your own honeysuckle out of your trees, no worries, in Virginia at least. Leave it there. It may reduce the yield of berries and cherries, but the deer will clean it out. If you don't have deer (will somebody please remind people in Virginia why we used to think we wanted all these deer?), you can always get goats, which are sassier but generally smaller, and less likely to break a rib if they disagree with you. Though classified as grazing, meaning grass-eating, animals, most goats won't touch grass if they can eat honeysuckle, or poison ivy or any of several other "weeds."

Even the dreaded kudzu is a plant goats will eat...although you might not want to let any individual goat eat as much kudzu as it might want, because the phytochemicals in kudzu may affect lactation and reproduction.

Some guys on Twitter posted a photo of a patch of kudzu and claimed nobody could clear this weed out and make room for native species without glyphosate. Woo-hoo! Three hundred dollars, I said. No takers. One guy hesitantly tweeted about a bulldozer. Well, obviously he never was one of those little kids who hang around the fence and learn the differences among construction devices...

https://www.dieselforum.org/news/is-it-a-bulldozer-backhoe-or-excavator-diesel-technology-forum

Kudzu removal demands strength and energy. I happen to have a White relative who has plenty of those things, especially when any combination of helping a neighbor and beer money is involved. Kudzu removal can usually be classified as helping a neighbor and is usually good for beer money. Anyway, here's Kudzu Removal 101:

1. You don't just tear up the weeds with a bulldozer, as such. Bulldozers are good for clearing away rocks, logs, etc., on the way to the kudzu. They're used to "make the road." However, you pull carefully at the kudzu by hand, once you get to it, not because you want to spend more than a day clearing it off five acres, but because you need to find the roots. Kudzu has soft, tender, sappy stems that pull off easily; if the root remains in the ground it'll send up more of those stems by morning. So you follow the vines to their point of origin.

2. After locating all the roots, then, if the ground is damp and not too rocky, you can go after the roots with a spade, shovel, mattock, or post-hole digger...but kudzu roots, which can be as big as a man's leg, may be deep in the ground, sometimes lurking under large rocks. So, if you want to win a bet fairly and squarely, you bring out an excavator, the diesel-era version of a steam shovel. Use it carefully, because however much sweating and swearing kudzu roots cost you, they are valuable

It would be possible to clear kudzu vines from a field, while leaving the roots in, and claim you'd cleared the field (five acres a day? Easy!) and collect the money. It would be cruel, and it would be cheating.

3. Remove the vines from the soil (once they're dry they'll burn). Collect money from the bet. Then take the roots home and collect money for them.

Energetic, enterprising people could probably make a lot of money betting people in the Deep South that they can clear kudzu out of fields. In the Blue Ridge Mountains the kudzu problem is slightly different. We do have soil erosion problems. Some people need kudzu, nuisance though it is. Their neighbors just have to keep cutting back the encroaching tendrils day after day.

Kudzu is a problem. So is cinnamon vine (Dioscorea polystachya), which the CCC introduced to my neighborhood as a less daunting kind of soil erosion blocker. I will now pass on to The Nephews what my grandfather taught my father and my father taught me: "When you see that nuisance plant, pull it up by the roots, remember the Roosevelt Administration and all their mistakes, remember the Law of Unintended Consequences, and think long and hard about what may appear to be a simple solution to a problem you have created for yourself, e.g. soil erosion." Well, they were Army men and said it in Army language, but that's the general idea.

Cinnamon vine in summer, with its weird little fruits forming around the bases of the leaves. Polystachia means "many fruits," and does this vine ever produce many fruits. Photo donated By James H. Miller, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org - This image is Image Number 2307129 at Forestry Images, a source for forest health, natural resources and silviculture images operated by The Bugwood Network at the University of Georgia and the USDA Forest Service., CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18252361. 

I grew up hearing that cinnamon vine is inedible, although its little fruits do look remarkably like miniature potatoes, complete with eyes. The vines don't produce conspicuous flowers but they do produce "bulbils" that range from lentil-size to mulberry-size. The "bulbils" drop off the vines in autumn, send roots down and shoots up, and form yamlike tubers as they grow over the summer. I was warned that these "cinnamon'taters" are toxic.

According to Wikipedia their toxic content is oxalate, which interferes with the metabolism of some nutrients and may trigger some people's allergies, so eating one "bulbil" would be unlikely to do anybody any harm. (The most likely allergic reaction would be a flare-up for an arthritis sufferer.) The Wikipedia article further claims that soaking the grated tubers in vinegar reduces the oxalate content enough to make the tubers a favorite vegetable in some Asian countries, where they are eaten raw, stir-fried, or made into noodles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yam

Well, the Japanese and Koreans can have mine, thanks. Anyway, the article makes it clear that solutions to the cinnamon vine and kudzu problems don't involve glyphosate at all. Both plants are, in fact, Free Money. What we need to do to clear them out of nature parks is offer a lot of students, retirees, starving artists, etc., the chance to harvest these vines for use or sale.

This leaves a few weeds that really are problems...Bermuda grass is the toughest weed to get out of a garden; Spanish Needles are the most annoying, ailanthus trees are the biggest mess to handle. They really can choke out native plants, as privet, boxwood, the showier breed of dayflowers, etc., cannot. Glyphosate actually encourages those invasive nuisances to take over fields.

Farmers who've started spraying poisons on fields do, of course, suffer a withdrawal reaction (of reduced crop yield) when they break out of the Vicious Spray Cycle. So it's possible that some of the people wailing "I'm a farmer and we nee-ee-eed glyphosate to cope with invasive nuisance plants" really are facing a problem. Only wheat farmers ever had a real need to poison weeds--other crops can be weeded more efficiently by hand--but, having destroyed the natural predators on the weeds, many of which grow aggressively bigger, faster, after damage, these farmers may have to do more digging and chopping. But why postpone the misery? All poison sprays lose their effectiveness. As glyphosate, like other "weed killers," does more damage to humans, it does less damage to weeds.

Then there's that war on farming, on rural and small town life generally, about which our "conservative" correspondents complain. How can people not want to surround themselves with beautiful green space, and the more the better, in May? How is it possible that people don't want to visit parks? It's possible for people who don't feel sick enough to rush to the hospital, after breathing outdoor air with traces of "pesticide" vapors in it, to feel just generally uncomfortable, unhappy, uninterested in hiking or farming. They don't like being outdoors. They suffer from "nature deficiencies" because, when the parks, farms, and gardens they've visited have made them just a tiny bit ill, they've been conditioned to associate walking and gardening with feeling tired, depressed, ill at ease, with generally wanting to go in and lie down and watch television.

The idea that "we can feed all those hypothetical future billions of additional humans if we pack everyone into slums and drench all the farms with poisons" is not a product of clear realistic thought. Even when embraced by people whose real thinking is "I won't be around to see how bad an idea this is," it probably is a symptom of the damage glyphosate can do to the brain. Serious farmers need to be making the transition away from all the "'cides" now, and one good way to do that is to let ourselves realize how useful the "invasive nuisance" plants can be. Kudzu, like honeysuckle and cinnamon vine, can be a real nuisance...or it can be free money.



(What's that? you might ask. It's the latest style in weeding tools. Not built for kudzu, but it'd be a cool way to pick smaller weeds out from between roses or raspberries. From Fiskars, it's a hot seller and highly rated on Amazon.)

Now, today's own, proper post will contain an update on the consequences of that railroad spraying. That is not a happy story. If you're depressive, why not go directly to Amazon and order that nifty little weeding tool instead of reading the Tortie Tuesday post.

Morgan Griffith Remembers D-Day

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9), some seasonal reading for your holiday weekend:

"
Friday, May 24, 2019 –
Honoring D-Day This Memorial Weekend
On the last Monday of May, Americans remember those brave men and women who died defending our country.
We honor all Americans who fell in battle on Memorial Day, but this year it also falls close to an important anniversary of a great battle. Seventy-five years ago, on June 6, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in France to bring about the liberation of Western Europe and the final defeat of Nazi Germany.
The events of D-Day still inspire us, and some of its heroes were our friends, family members, and neighbors. As a result of our area having so many there, we have the National D-Day Memorial. They are holding “The Final Salute” program this year, which will be broadcast live on WDBJ. Details can be found at https://www.dday.org/75th/.
On that day, the Allies faced a daunting challenge. Nazi Germany had spent months preparing its Atlantic Wall of defenses to fend off an assault. It meant to push any Allied soldiers who dared land back into the sea.
On Omaha Beach, the 29^th Division would lead the way. It included the 116^th Infantry Regiment, an activated National Guard unit.
Before the war, the 116^th’s Company A was based in Bedford, B in Lynchburg, C in Harrisonburg, D in Roanoke, and H in Martinsville.
On June 4, they boarded ships to carry them across the English Channel and join the battle the next morning. Bad weather delayed the assault. It still threatened on June 6, but the Allied high command gave the order to go.
Naval and air bombardments were supposed to pound the enemy’s defenses. The men of the 116^th Infantry boarded landing craft to ferry them to shore, with Company A scheduled to be first ashore at 6:36am.
They motored over rough seas to the landing area on Omaha Beach. As the first boat disembarked, the German defenders opened fire. Unfortunately, the bombardments had overshot Omaha.
Some men never made it to the beach, weighed down into the sea by their gear or killed by German fire in the boats. Those who did had to cross hundreds of yards at low tide while sniper fire, machine guns, and artillery targeted them. Little cover between the surf and a sea wall protected them. Craters that were supposed to be there because of Allied bombardment were not. Instead, obstacles such as mines and barbed wire were strewn about.
The men who made it to the sea wall were pinned down by the German defenses, which were stronger in this area than anticipated, and hindered by rough terrain moving inland.
Brigadier General Norman Cota, the 29^th Division’s assistant commander, led a breakout from the sea wall by exploding an opening in a barbed wire fence. Soldiers, including Bob Slaughter of Roanoke in Company D, advanced in small groups off the beach along the wall.
The 116^th established its beachhead, but at a frightful cost. There were 2,500 casualties on Omaha Beach. Bedford was the American town hardest hit. Nineteen of its sons who had landed in the first wave did not make it off the beach.
Over the ensuing years, the country’s memory focused on Bedford. I met the advocates for establishing a national D-Day memorial, including Bob Slaughter and Lucille Hoback Boggess, whose brothers Raymond and Bedford Hoback were killed that day.
I was at the National D-Day Memorial dedication on June 6, 2001. It is a great place to learn about the heroes of D-Day and reflect on the things they did.
As Company A medic Cecil Breeden said of all who landed with him, “Every man was a hero.”
They were heroes like Bob Slaughter and his comrades in the 116^th.
They were heroes like Talmadge Seay of Martinsville, who landed with the 474^th AAA Automatic Weapons Battalion.
They were heroes like Bill Dabney of Roanoke County, who landed with the 320^th Barrage Balloon Battalion. In a segregated army, he was part of the only African-American combat unit to land on D-Day and received the French Legion of Honor.
And they were heroes like the 9,380 military dead buried in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France. They fought to protect our country’s freedom and to restore it to others, and they gave their lives for that cause. Now they lie in orderly rows of crosses that face west, toward home.
I was honored to introduce my daughter Abby to Bob Slaughter.
I was honored to introduce my sons Davis and Starke to Talmadge Seay.
And I am honored to be part of a congressional delegation that will commemorate the 75^th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. I look forward to paying my respects where these men changed history.

Feel free to call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or email me at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.
"

Tortie Tuesday: Raindrops on Roses, Whiskers on Kittens

So I have to be online and I have to tweet about glyphosate because we only get one Saturday, one Sunday, and each Monday to a week, but before I dive into Glyphosate Awareness I should at least get time to post about what a delightful weekend it was (except for one horrible little detail). Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Clover and privet and iris and honeysuckle and daisies in bloom. Strawberries ready to eat, lots and lots of little hard green future raspberries. Swallowtail butterflies. A dapper little Desmia funeralis got into the office, as did a few of the mostly small and drab North American Geometrid moths (the ones inchworms grow up to be). In between showers of rain, enough sunshine that I finally stopped putting it off and snapped kitten pictures.

This was the only snapshot for which Serena posed. Here she and Traveller and two of the kittens are checking out some rose prunings.

As so many times before, although cats don't show color prejudice, social cats often do seem to sort themselves by color. Serena has two gray-and-white kittens and two black-and-white kittens. More than half the time, if the four of them aren't all together, that's how they're playing or napping. I suspect they color-match themselves because a pair (or larger group) of color-matched kittens may look more like a single larger animal to predators--or even to prey?

Silverheels, shown above, is the most likely to go off on its own. None of these kittens' gender seems really obvious, but I tend to think of him as the big brother to Swimmer, the little sister. (Actually size means nothing; kittens grow in spurts. The biggest kitten in the litter this week may be the smallest cat when they grow up.) Size and "hairline" are the easiest ways to tell them apart.

Swimmer's white streak extends all the way through the patch of gray on top of its head, if you look closely, forming a narrow "parting." I don't know how much swimming this kitten intends to do as an adult, but it's already done a few laps round the washtub at a brisk rate.

From above, Swimmer's back shows just a little more white than Silverheels'. When they were younger Swimmer was the friendliest, cuddliest kitten. (For a litter of frisky kittens they're all remarkably cooperative. Serena has trained them well.) Now that they spend more time with their elders, the kittens are old enough to notice that Traveller wants to be the cuddliest feline. He likes for each kitten to let itself be stroked or picked up for just a few minutes, then scamper off to play.

The black-and-white kittens' faces are almost identical. Nearly all the cats in the Patchnose Family have had patches of different colors on their noses, but these two, I think, overdo it. I can tell that this one is Felix by the black patches on its little shoulders. Felix's back is mostly black, as shown:

Though Black Stache has accepted a name that commemorates Dave Barry's vision of the young Captain Hook, it's a rather docile, slow-moving kitten, usually the last in line as they scamper out onto the porch for breakfast in the morning.

When they're not color-matching, these kittens are likely to sort themselves by preferred pace for playing. Currently, Felix and Silverheels seem just slightly faster and more aggressive than Stache and Swimmer.

First of a Disney-commissioned series that's more fun to read than the original Peter Pan and Wendy. In this series we learn that before he became Captain Hook, when he had to have a name that sounded more sinister than "James" or even "Jas," the wicked pirate answered to "Black Stache."

They don't really show a lot of individual purrsonality, yet, to me. Although they eat solid food, bury their own bodywastes, and respond to names, and although all of them are gentle, friendly, mostly obliging and very lovable kittens, they seem more like "Serena's kittens" than like individual cats--either permanent pets or temporary sojourners. Serena and Traveller seem to have been rearing them with the intention that they'll find homes of their own. They are remarkable mostly for being well disciplined. When they were sick they lined up for treatment. Now that they're old enough to have overflowed the snug little nest where they were born, yet still small enough that other animals might eat them, after dinner they cuddle up in a heap outside the door and wait to be taken in to a nice safe cage for the night. In the morning, when I open the cage door, they run out in a nice orderly line...

Serena, who is still a playful kitten herself, has taken to running in through any door that's opened, just to get attention. "Back off! Stay out!" I say. "No, I want to run in and let you take me out; that's more fun," Serena nonverbally says, sitting just inside the door. "Once is enough! Stay out," I insist, barring the doorway with a foot. "Tag! You're It!" Serena nonverbally says, slapping my foot and bouncing away. "Botheration," she nonverbally adds, "how hard do I have to slap to get you to play?"

But the kittens don't even tease me that way. That is what good kittens they are. They can tell that I don't actually enjoy that little game.

So they're available for adoption to good homes. The Cat Sanctuary never charges a fee, although the cats gratefully accept donations (cash, cat food, or gift certificates for rabies shots are welcome). Nor do we process information about cat adopters online. The catch is that we get to know adopters personally. Social cats usually remember and recognize each other for years, although happily adopted social cats nonverbally tell us they want to stay where they are.

As the kittens mature and Serena has less milk to offer them, Samantha seems to be practicing birth control by induced lactation. She didn't seem interested in this social cat custom while the kittens were little, but from the kittens' point of view, that means all the more milk is available to them now! Cool, Gran! Like those other members of the Patchnose Family from whom Samantha is not a direct descendant, she's invited the kittens to nurse while she snuggles up with me, so the whole family can snuggle and be stroked at once.

Where did she get the idea? Young kittens, of course, always check out every new friend for any possible alternative source of milk. Samantha's closest friend, Burr, grew up in a blended family of three separate litters (he was the oldest male kitten, by five and ten days). Although I literally do talk to the cats about things they can learn to understand, in some way--"Come on" and "Back off" and "Time for breakfast"--I cannot, of course, ask them whether Burr remembered or told Samantha about nursing another cat's kittens being a fairly reliable way to extend a cat's non-ovulating winter phase into summertime. Burr is more intelligent than he looks. And Samantha's continuing to prowl and cavort with him, without being slowed down by pregnancy or nursing, is obviously a clear gain from his point of view. And also Samantha, herself, is social enough to enjoy being a grandmother.

Samantha is not available for adoption. Though much calmer and easier to live with than she was as a half-grown kitten, she's still a Scaredycat who snuggles only briefly, only with a few trusted humans, and she's never seemed completely sure even about me.

Samantha grew up fast. Bigger than most spring kittens during her first winter, she's grown bigger steadily since, but now that she's two years old and has reached her full size, she's smaller than Serena.

And here's their human, literally a little old lady in blue canvas shoes. They're not tennis shoes. During the fad, about twenty years ago, this style was called "monk shoes."

It might be more in the spirit of Tortie Tuesday if I'd written this post as a cat interview, but (ahem) a certain local lurker has yet to pay for that.