Quick status update...
So the Piece of Garbage, which I expected would have died by September 2020, plodded along in its nasty Window-10-infested way until mid-June 2022. Then it did die.
Apart from that, I've been as well as anyone separated from the tools of per trade can be. There's a reason why the Bible says that, even if someone gets desperate enough to pawn the tools of his trade, of his own free will, you (the rich person who lends him money) must return the tools to him before the sun goes down. If he had sold his child to you as a slave, you could keep the child for up to seven years, until the official Jubilee when all Israelite slaves were automatically freed. Presumably the child would have better prospects as a temporary slave than as the child of a parent as desperate as that one, anyway. But the tools of a working person's trade could not be separated from the person overnight. Clearer thinking went into this than you might initially have imagined.
Anyway the wonderful wizards of Compuworld found me a better laptop. Improving on the POG did not take a great deal of time or money. Unfortunately the POG tried to take all of my Internet passwords with it as it went, and it's taking some trouble to recover those.
I still have a Professional Bad Neighbor.
Serena's three lovely kittens, Biro, Crayola, and Pastel, are still living with us. Serena has expressed no interest in finding homes for them. They are social cats who hunt as a team, but...Serena has a long history of giving birth to mixed litters of normal and oversized kittens, and rejecting the oversized kittens. If she hadn't wanted the little one, last spring, to be reared indoors, she probably wouldn't have let me persuade her and Silver to nurse the three oversized ones. So I've finally learned why. They are cute as all-get-out and even seem healthy, with high tolerance to glyphosate poisoning, but they seem to have inherited their father's intellectual powers. Serena doesn't bring him home. The kittens are friendly, playful and sometimes cuddly, but don't seem to have learned their names or to understand other words. They're none too bright at picking up cues given them by Serena, Silver, or old Sommersburr, either. They don't even pick up survival messages from the world, such as that butterflies aren't good to eat.
Old Sommersburr positively loves these kittens. Last night, as he came meowing up to the gate, Biro was the first to bound out and sniff noses with him. Normal tomcats don't usually like kittens. Though dumped out by someone who didn't appreciate him, Sommersburr is a social cat, probably a cousin to these kittens.
We have new cardinals. The male seems to be an early spring chick, son of the male we lost early in the spring. The phoebe was starting to lay claim to the orchard when the male cardinal popped up flashing his bright new feathers and calling "Peep! Peep! Peep!" He has yet to decide whether his grown-up call will sound like "Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!" or "Pretty, pretty, pretty" or "Birdy, birdy, birdy" or something else. Each male cardinal likes to have a different "word" he repeats three times, though many of them sound alike to humans. Other birds (and cats and dogs) can hear some high notes in a bird's warbling that humans miss, so different cardinals' "Cheer" probably sound like different words to them.
Johnny Wren is still here; he tried building some nests the kittens could knock down. I kept one of them, not solid enough for use, as a souvenir. Male wrens do this, apparently to demonstrate to female wrens a message like "See, I want to help, and I have lots of energy. I can't help being an idiot. I need you to show me how to build a nest." Once Jenny Wren has built a reasonable nest, Johnny will sit on the eggs and fetch food for the young, suggesting that he does have a brain after all. Building impossible "dummy nests" is merely an act he does to activate Jenny's protective instincts.
And, despite the Professional Bad Neighbor's efforts to destroy Mother's flowers, including the gorgeous orange jewelweed that I try to let fill a good half of the not-a-lawn, we still have Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds. When there were more jewelweed flowers, last summer, we had a regular flock of them.
What made Mother love jewelweed so? Jewelweed is a tall, rather pretty native plant in the touch-me-not family. Different species' orange or yellow flowers are as bright as jewels, and are an encouraging shape for hummingbirds. Mother liked flowers and hummingbirds but also her paper-white English skin was unreasonably sensitive to poison ivy, and jewelweed is sometimes also called "soapweed" because the sap will cut oil like a weak solution of soap, so Mother hoped it would protect her from poison ivy in the garden. Considering that she had nasty-looking rashes on both wrists for a month or so, most of the summers, the fact that she thought washing her hands with crushed jewelweed helped is alarming. I keep the jewelweed in memory of Mother, in case any of her pure-White relatives visits, and because I am partial to the hummingbirds.
The Professional Bad Neighbor has sneaked into the not-a-lawn and sprayed the jewelweed at least twice, such that walking past it caused a nasty-looking rash to form on my arm. This gave me some more information. I know now why an innocent piece of old wood caused such a nasty-looking rash on my arms, which tan enough that the scars are still prominent, and legs, which tan less. And I have some new insight into how it was possible for Grandma Bonnie Peters to have had that rash she had in 2006, when everyone expected her to lose her left leg, and for the rest of her life her left leg was hardly half the size of her right leg. She walked without a limp throughout the ordeal, but an ordeal is what it was for all who knew her. That rash baffled medical science. It was ugly, and it stank, and because it was so mysterious GBP had a horrible habit of pulling down her socks and showing it to anyone who was careless enough to ask about her health. It was displayed, documented, and remembered from Florida to Maryland and at many points between. It was a frightening rash. It looked remarkably like the rash on the young man's chest in that document showing the effects of glyphosate poisoning at epa.gov, which would explain why it responded so slowly to treatment for either bacterial or fungal infection.
GBP lived and walked for another fifteen years. There is still enough jewelweed to supply at least some of the hummingbirds. There is a special place where those who "help" the Professional Bad Neighbor with the "little pranks" he is losing the special ability to do, this year, will spend their eternity.
So many times different people have said to me, "Well! If I knew someone had done that to me or my animals, he wouldn't have one cow left alive." One cow is what the Professional Bad Neighbor has. I am mentioning this expressly for the benefit of those people. Cattle pastured near the Cat Sanctuary are being boarded for a much nicer person. Personally, as much as I might enjoy sharing a bit of kerosene with the Professional Bad Neighbor if he happened to be on fire, I wouldn't take my revenge on a man out of some innocent animal. If you have a grievance with a man, which I'm sure hundreds of people do with the Professional Bad Neighbor, you take it out of him. Not his wife, not his children, certainly not animals and certainly not the land. This web site officially recommends lawsuits, with which members of this web site will help. If one lawyer is compromised, we can help find another. The man needs to be locked up with a metal key, and the key melted down. The animals have done nobody any harm.
