Best Films to Watch When You're Having a Bad Day, and Status Update

Some might argue that, if you're free to watch films, it's not all that bad a day...

Anyway, I vote for anything likely to provoke laughter. Laughter works the diaphragm muscle and relieves pain, so it'll make the day less bad.

This post is a stub. Other people's nominations.are linked at LongAndShortReviews. 

I don't have a real favorite, but in case anyone is aggregating replies to this blog question, I'll pick Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep in She-Devil. 

Now the status update. I'm not having a bad day, yet, though there are ominous indicators of a sad day in the near future. Maybe. 

We're having a cold snap; the last two nights' temperatures dropped to or below the freezing mark, depending on your exact location, though at the Cat Sanctuary temperatures didn't stay below freezing long enough to damage any flowers or leaves. Prunus, which react to temperatures, bloomed and leafed out long ago, and are vulnerable. Dogwoods and redbuds, which react to light, have passed their peak. Some people have azaleas in bloom.

Yesterday, on the second day of the cold snap, Serena all but audibly said to me, "Let's do a Tortie Tuesday post."

"No time," I said. "I have three urgent errands to do in town, and I've already posted something."

"On Tortie Tuesday?"

"Yes."

"Well, shame on you!" Serena nonverbally said. "Because News is coming out! My kittens are coming out!"

A tiny calico kitten and a tiny peaches-and-cream kitten were dozing in a corner on the porch. A stack of newspapers had been piled up about a yard away. On inspection, the newspapers had been used to bury a larger kitten, pale calico, dead. I removed it from the porch and proceeded on the way. Serena ran out after me, for the first time in years, meowing as if she were her mother. (Samantha Scaredycat always meowed "Don't leave me alone!" as I left.)

"My babies! Didn't you see my babies?" Serena insisted, pointing back toward the porch and leading me to the corner where they lay.

"Beautiful," I said. 

"Aren't you going to help with them?" Serena insisted, meowing. Then she ran to the kittens and cuddled them. 

"Of course I am," I said. "It'll be warm for a few more hours, so with your kind permission, I'll run into town and do these errands as fast as I can. You can watch them for a few hours, can't you? Then I'll come back and bring them inside when it's dark and cold, if that's all right with you."

"Must you leave us?" Serena meowed. This is not typical of Serena. If she thought the babies were at risk from insects--but it hadn't been warm enough--or bigger predators, she knows how to use storage boxes and their contents to build dens and nests with an ingenuity many humans could only envy.

"Why so clingy?" I said. "Aren't your daughters going to help you?"

"I am," Silver said, by bounding into the corner to curl up beside Serena. "Pastel and Crayola are nice but they're not really our kind of cat."

I went into town. I was late and missed seeing someone. The mail I was looking for had not arrived. When I came home a third tiny kitten, also pale calico, was lying beside the other two on the porch. Silver and Serena reported that all was going well.

Then dicamba vapors drifted past and prickled my throat. Besides making throats raspy and killing the plants people want to keep alive, the other common immediate effect of dicamba vapors is to slow down people's thyroid metabolism. I felt lazy and dozy all last week and had looked forward to not feeling that way this week.

The sun sank low in the west. I went out, as promised, and scooped the kittens into the Serena Box. I set up the old Samantha Box, which was sold as a humane trap, to use the dead kitten as bait to catch anyone that might attack the living kittens. I brought the Serena Box where Serena spent much of her early life into its old place in the office. Serena came in to check on the babies.

But all was not going well. Serena and Silver now refused to cuddle the kittens. They became chilled and began crying. The cats refused to keep them warm. When I came back and felt how cold they were, I scooped them onto an old flannel shirt and set them on the cot beside me. 

"Why are you not nursing and snuggling your babies?" I asked Serena.

"Try it and find out," she nonverbally said. "They are not doing well. That's why I wanted you to look at them sooner."

"They're so little, they can't possibly have any resistance to germs, and I've been in town and probably picked up new ones," I warned.

"If they don't live, they don't," Serena nonverbally said. "If you can keep them alive, do, and if you can't, you just can't."

I dug around for a box of wet napkins. The kittens had had a meal of milk; it was time their back ends were cleaned, they nonverbally said. I cleaned them. Only whey-like liquid came out. I mixed up a charcoal capsule in water for them and gave each kitten a drop.

"Blah! What's this?" the kittens nonverbally said. "Where's the milk?"

"No milk for them," Serena said, "until the curds come out clean."

In the corner near the heater the kittens warmed up and settled down for a four-hour nap.

Four hours later they excreted more whey and took another drop of charcoal. Years ago, after about a week of normal meals of cat's milk, Annie's kittens lived and even grew a little on three weeks of charcoal solution. I don't know whether kittens less than a day old could handle charcoal. It is NOT a "nutritional supplement." It pulls nutrients out of the body along with the poisons and disease germs for which it is an emergency remedy. So far as I know it's safe for adults and children of all mammal species, but I don't know about newborn infants. But Serena said absolutely no milk. I understood why when, after releasing the whey, one kitten--and I'm not positive which--released a curd onto another kitten's fur. It was red with fresh blood, and left a brownish bloodstain on the other kitten. 

Mother cats actually eat the curds-and-whey sort of stuff that comes out when they clean their tiny kittens; it is pure cat's-milk cheese, without the acids and bacteria that make fully digested bodywastes nasty. If bacteria or toxins, or the acids released when kittens start eating solid food, are present the mother cat stops cleaning the kitten in cat fashion. Some kittens survive a few days of apparent abandonment by their mother, shake off infections, and grow up normally. Some conditions seem to aggravate the adult cat's appetite so that she may kill and eat the kitten. Most kittens' chances of survival are not good if their mother stops cleaning them, but seem to be a little better if they are cleaned and given charcoal by a human. But that's kittens who are a few weeks old, not newborns. 

"Am I curing them or killing them?" I said. "Serena, you're their mother! You could help them better than I can."

"No I can't," said Serena. "Don't you smell it? That evil wind blew over them. They all smell like fresh blood. They're all losing blood. Probably they can't be saved."

"Oh, Serena..."  

"You should have brought us all indoors sooner. The evil wind can get inside, but it's not so bad inside. The kittens might have had more of a chance. There may be more. I didn't let any more come out after the evil wind blew. That's what I've been doing at the back of the closet. These may survive. You use your God-given abilities to help the first three kittens, and I'll use mine to help the others."

Serena had a charcoal treatment when she was a kitten, and is a believer. When her kittens have had enteritis or been exposed to chemical poison in the air, she's directed them to report to me and, if I didn't catch on right away, pointed me to where I keep the charcoal. This is, of course, food-grade charcoal, not just grated off briquets from the grill. I mix it with water in the proportion of a teaspoon of powder to a cup. This mixture can be given to animals in the amount they normally drink water. If I'm sick, I drink a cupful. For a sick cow, I'd call a farm vet, but as first aid I might give the same formula by the bucketful. For kittens that have their eyes open the dose is one to two cubic centimeters, as measured in a measuring syringe. For these infants I didn't dare give more than the drop of liquid that clung to the tip of the syringe. 

That mix of glyphosate and dicamba that stupid people use when they've sprayed so much glyphosate that they're no longer seeing any effect on the "weeds" is one thing that can cause internal bleeding in animals or humans. For kittens another possibility is internal parasites. The adult cats had regular meals this winter, but some of those meals consisted of human food, mostly plant-based, which is junkfood for cats, and more consisted of a cheap grade of kibble made with more grain than meat. Sponsors delivered the cheap kibble, and the cats liked it. When mother cats are not well nourished, they may be able to cope with their own internal parasites and maintain a healthy weight, but give birth to tiny sickly kittens who come into the world infected with microscopic but dangerous parasites. Those, like disease germs, can sometimes be starved out if a kitten survives a few days without any kind of food, or with nothing but charcoal. 

Can a newborn kitten survive chemical poisoning and internal parasites? I may find out, this week. I already know that all the vet could offer, or recommend, for that combination is euthanasia.

What I can offer the world today, in the way of information, is that anyone who is still spraying anything but good oldfashioned HOT WATER on "weeds" deserves to be forcibly fed whatever they're spraying. Boiling hot water will reliably kill any kind of "weed." Save the chemicals for use on violent criminals.