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Thursday is the day for topics chosen and funded by readers. We have a series running, "Meet the Blog Roll," and one that's been proposed for launch on the Presidents of the United States. Readers have not funded either series or any other topic for today. 

Status Update: No Web Log for 11.5-6.25

I'm still here. I am deeply disappointed in my State. 

Not that the most stupid handout-dependents voted for the party they think sends them their pensions, while that party was withholding their pensions from them--that's to be expected; these people are not encouraged to use whatever brainpower they have. Not that the stupid men voted for the blonde; that also was to be expected. Not that some men stayed home because they didn't want to elect a woman; that also was to be expected, and is only further evidence for the case that males shouldn't vote. Not that some women failed to anticipate this and inform their men, "You will vote for our Winsome, and I will see you vote for our Winsome, or you will sleep alone for the next four years"; even that was probably to be expected. 

But that, when Our Winsome and the Governor decreed that our emergency funds would be used to ensure that our handout-dependents could eat breakfast before they voted, and then the Trump-stuffed Supreme Court said, no, federal emergency funds would be used, and then Trump screamed that only some handout-dependents would get their pensions, our State government failed to secure the handouts. I went into a supermarket and saw a sign warning food stamp shoppers that their cards  would not have been recharged with money. The next day a disabled man told me that although he still had food in the house, his pension check had not come through. Our honor has been besmirched. 

Party politics are always disgusting. Failing to feed the poor among us is a positive sin.

I'm with Trump in thinking that a large number of people need to be told that, for good and sufficient reasons, they personally will never receive a handout again, not even if they develop quadriplegic paralysis as a result of driving the way they do, so they'd better sober up and get to work. I'd even add that another large number need to be handed vouchers to buy up all the socks, or pencils, or floral arrangements, in Wal-Mart and resell them in the parking lots instead of receiving handouts. But it has to be planned in advance. They have to be warned. Some people who receive handouts are in fact unfit to work, are young children, or nursing mothers, or disabled, or just not called back when they apply even for burger-flipping jobs because too many young people are out of work and the managers owe other unemployed youth's parents favors, or are  the veterans to whom we owe wages and/or the indigenous people to whom we owe rent; their payments should be sacrosanct. We cannot allow the Party of the Stubborn Jackass to hold them hostage, and lie to them about who exactly is holding them hostage, as we have been doing this week.  

Trump well and truly scored an own goal; we'll now have four years to regret that, and who knows what damage it may do. All of us have sinned against our own poor. All of us will bear the consequences.

I've not been too despondent to use the Internet, but I have spent my online time avoiding all news and doing research on obscure languages.  

Status Update: Finally.

This is a Sunday post, though a late one. So let us pray:

Father in Heaven, we give thanks to You for Your great glory. For the incredible beauty and complexity of the Earth, which You could burst as easily as a bubble and build again, a day being with You as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. For the very cool, slow spring season we have had, and the hot weather the marvels of the Internet are sure to tell us someone else has had...

The Internet. Lord, we don't know whether it is good for us humans to have such a thing as the Internet, but some of us certainly do enjoy it. We want it to continue. Wherefore we pray, Lord, that You will defend it from the hubris of such as Microsoft, who in their greed, their vanity, their contempt for their customers, have inflicted upon us a season of confusion and discontent. If everyone who works for Microsoft were stricken with a strange new disease compelling him to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or else remain silent, that would undoubtedly serve the purpose, and watching it would undoubtedly give joy to those who have been robbed and defrauded by Internet Service Providers who know not whether they are coming or going.

I couldn't believe the jolly boys from the company had honestly intended to restore service here when they refused to reclaim the thing they said was a router, and put in a router that worked. I knew that the little bits of fluff at the telephone company had consistently displeased both of my grandmothers and my mother before me, and I never felt that they were doing their best to provide good service when I still used a phone, either. Such stupefyingly stupid service had to be intentional and discriminatory...I showed my sponsors a copy of an e-mail that asked them some questions to which they had not replied.

"Likely they don't know the answers," a sponsor said mildly. 

I had asked some questions at Wal-Mart. Nobody there knew the answers; but they were not "service professionals." They were minimum-hourly-wage types who were or ought to have been in high school. They whined that the store was in the process of hiring someone who could tell me whether a new device had a chance of working, but had not hired one yet. None of the stores within a half-hour's drive had hired such a person. 

"The store in Rogersville has one," they said.

"So, you can e-mail this person?"

"We're not allowed to use e-mail in the store."

"I don't suppose you're allowed to use the phone, either?" The receipts indicated that the manager still had one. "Aha! You, over there. You reached for something. They give youall cell phones now?"

"It's my own phone. But I'm not allowed to call other stores. We don't have their phone numbers. We can't look them up online, either. If customers have phones they can call the Rogersville store."

"I don't remember seeing a Wal-Mart when I was in Rogersville," I said. "Do you know how to get there?"

They did not. It's a small-and-smaller-town thing. The drive is only about thirty miles but nobody in Kingsport would admit knowing anything about Rogersville.

What I knew about Rogersville was that the sort of people with whom Mother did business when she had rental property there would not approve of the disreputable old truck that can get things up to my front gate, nor of the Goth-style driver. What I soon learned was that it was mutual. "I caaaan't go to Rogersville! I could go to Norton. Why don't you want to go to Norton?"

"Norton is twice as far from here as Rogersville is," I pointed out.

"Yes but I know people in Norton. I have errands to do and people to talk to up there. I don't mind going to Norton. I have nothing at all to do in Rogersville. Anyway you don't know where to find this store, and I don't know where to find this store. We'd probably use more gas looking for the store in Rogersville than going straight to the store in Norton."

So I sat on my cash and gave Wal-Mart a month to hire someone who knew the business. 

By the time I went back to look for the person who knew about the current state of the technology., everyone was in agreement. "The service maps change from day to day. You can look up an address and see which devices are supposed to work there--this week." 

Microsoft in their hubris had decreed that no computer so "old" as to be infested with Windows 10 would be able to connect to the Internet after October. Microsoft had also supplied the company with shiny new cables and boxes that were meant to replace routers. The company had been installing them wherever routers had to be replaced, and wherever else they had got to. People had bought all sorts of things that didn't work for them.

Hello? What's my city of choice, again? Washington. Who gave me my first grown-up job? Ralph Nader. Need I even say what I'm thinking?

We need laws. We need a law requiring the corporations to keep all intact electronic devices in service, indefinitely, toward the goal of reducing plastic waste and toxic waste with a policy of ONE ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS DEVICE PER PERSON PER LIFETIME. (And even if someone were backward enough to want that device to be a phone, the manufacturer should have to supply it with a solid keyboard and a printer, free of charge.) We need a law not only preventing Microsoft from trying to force sales with these technological changes-for-the-sake-of-change (Microsoft Office has certainly not improved since...I know a few people who will allow Vista, but I say since Windows ME), but holding Microsoft responsible for "updating" the first and only computers people have bought, at Microsoft's expense. Seriously.

"Not a 1978 Tandy from Radio Shack! That little box never did connect to the Internet!" Microsoft employees should have to whine in court.

"If you want to sell your new "update," it will now!" a judge should tell them. On television.

Once in a while I would like to see our federal government earn its keep and protect hard-pinched students, not to mention underpaid writers, from creepy corporations who think people can be forced to buy things. 

We don't have that sort of federal government. Trump's not been a Christian long enough to have read the parts about oppressing the poor. We The People have to assert our own power. 

"You have to buy new computers! You have to! You HAAAFFF to!" Microsoft greedheads are dancing around, rubbing their hands together.

"No," we have to say loudly and clearly, keeping our hands on our money and all of them firmly in our pockets. "No, that's assuming we choose to keep the Internet going. Maybe we don't. A lot of us need jobs, and there were more jobs without the Internet."  

"You HAAAFFF to keep the Internet!" Bill Gates should personally be dragged out on camera to exhort my generation, who used to be his fans.

"Sez you, senile White man whom nobody loves," we should say back. "Libre Office cannot keep up with an Underwood typewriter. We are not even talking about Royal Standards or Smith-Coronas. We are talking about the Underwood. We want to bring back real typewriters and get some work done." 

Well, I made more money with a Royal Standard typewriter than I have with a computer. And I still have, I think, five of the original seven. I could do without the Internet. Probably I could do better without the Internet, economically, than with it. 

I'll miss it, though. I'm hoping that enough people are prepared to drop the Internet that Microsoft sees the error of its ways and publicly pledges to eliminate electronic waste by preventing obsolescence, Computers are subject to physical decay like everything else--the Original or Practically Perfect Toshiba really did crack while sitting on a shelf, and when taken to the shop its outer shell continued to crack and crumble, because it was made of plastic and it was forty years old. They will eventually reach a point where they do have to be recycled. But the corporations must be brought to heel, first by the customers, then by a law. They must not be allowed even to try to force sales. 

We must beware of the simple but wrong answer. "Here is an I-Pad," someone might beam. "It works with the new cable! It runs Windows 11! You can 'update' to an I-Pad!"

Hello? That silly thing doesn't even have a keyboard. Serious writing is not done by pawing at touch screens, even if, as a matter of national security, all North Americans didn't need to avoid ever touching any touch screen. Writers need separate keys we can feel under our fingers while looking at a vertical screen. So, actually, does anyone with any common sense. 

I expect, during the second half of this year, to receive a serious laptop that runs Windows 11. I expect to have a use for it; the Unsatisfactory Toshiba's memory is filling up. But I'm tired of piling up laptops because their memories are full or they "can't keep up with the Internet these days." The companies need to expand their memories and keep them up with the Internet. 

For the moment, for four more months if all goes well, the Unsatisfactory Toshiba is connected to a new device. The device was paid for by individuals whose screen names are not "Priscilla King." They know, the company know, and the police know, who needs to be kept indoors at night, to avoid suspicion.

Status Update: I'm Alive, the Internet's Dead

The only interesting thing about this half-week's news is that the first thunderstorm of the year zapped the Internet in an unusual way. I'd closed and covered the laptop when lightning appeared to be striking a tree up in the woods; the hot-air fan wasn't running but I'd pulled a blanket up around my face and made a bid for some sleep at a normal time of night, about 4:30 a.m. Minutes later, when I'd got deep enough into slumberland to think "Whatever" instead of bolting up in shock, lightning appeared to strike something closer than the woods. Either it went down with a loud, lasting rumble or it was close enough that the thunder and lightning occurred at the same time. 

Then I peeked out from under the blanket and saw the surprising thing. The laptop's little running lights were steady red, one staying on and one blinking in rhythm--not blinking fast to tell me the flow of electricity had been disrupted. Not even by the computer's draining and recharging the battery, as Microsoft's sinister machinations have finally got it doing. The electricity was on! Nothing had been touched, on the screen porch, by this near miss with The Storm and Its Fury. 

But the Internet was completely dead. No "emergency only" connection was available. Not on Monday morning. Not this morning, either. So I packed up the laptop and came into town, where I find even McDonald's connection limping along on "emergency only" wireless hardware. Apparently the storm took out all of the regular Internet connection-ware. I e-mailed the company to report the outage and then noticed that, funnily enough, their web site wasn't working properly either.

So this web site is in for another hiatus. How long this one will last, or how much private Internet connection owners' rates will increase as a result of it, I have no idea. I'm taking it as another reminder that we're all better off with just a few public-access computer centers, all connected up to the teeth with multiple servers and generators and all, instead of private connections that take so much more wiring and repairing. 

I had written the blather for this week's Petfinder post. I don't know whether I'll be able to find current Petfinder links on Friday. So this week's Petfinder post should appear, if McDonald's emergency connection lasts, this evening. A few more thought pieces and butterfly posts will appear on schedule. The next Status Update will let you know when I'm online again.

Animal Status Update

Serena is a celebrity cat who's been threatened, attacked, and badly injured. She might prefer to stay down cellar with her grandkitten if I go to visit friends during the February Freeze, but I can't let her do that any more. I've never found out, but I'm guessing she's not in the minority of cats who enjoy travelling and visiting.

And Serena's not complaining about being kept indoors, although she's starting to recover her bounce and sass (while still being sniffly, and threatened). She has, for example, progressed from wanting to maintain contact with me at all times to finding it easier to snooze on the other side of the bench. She'll curl up on my lap to show good will, then stand up with a reproachful look and move to her own side when I change positions. I can gauge her level of boredom by the frequency with which she changes sides or positions while dozing. She is getting bored. She seems to have some idea of what she's up against, which helps. I think she understands why she has to endure more boredom than she's ever tolerated before. Overconfidence and rebellion may come later. For now I'm still, as so many times in the past eight years, awestruck by Serena's practical intelligence. She has a different kind of brain than a human has; she never will really speak, or talk, or write, but she certainly uses what she has.

Drudge is still here, healthy, adorable, adoptable. He drank out of the same water dishes Pastel used before she died, because that's how social cats are; when they have a dish apiece, they'll still take turns sampling whatever is in each dish. If Pastel's trouble had started with panleukopenia, Drudge would have shown some sign of infection by now. There is none. Here he stands to testify that Pastel was deliberately poisoned with something whose effects on cats may destroy immunity to, or may simulate the effects of, panleukopenia. (Not including the watery yellow diarrhea the word "distemper" brings to mind, even if virologists say panleukopenia is the strongest form of the same virus.) 

This does not mean that Drudge may not have been exposed to natural panleukopenia. There's no way to be sure without blood tests. He got the benefit of the full lactation cycles of three immune carriers, since Serena and Silver used lactation for birth control after each lost a litter to "New Roundup" vapor drift last year. In theory that could mean that he has some immunity to the virus, is currently an immune carrier, and might come down with the disease later on--if natural panleukopenia had anything at all to do with this winter's events. 

But I'm still inclined to suspect chemical poisoning that simulated the effects of the deadly virus. Charcoal is wonderful stuff for any undesirable chemicals or bacteria in the digestive tract; I don't see how it could have any effect on virus in the bloodstream. It seems to me that if Serena had been starting to froth at the mouth from the effects of a natural virus, even if charcoal could have done her any more good than it did Pastel, it would have taken more than an hour for any good effects to have shown. I'm still not confident about saying that Serena's been cured of what was probably a small amount of poison. I believe the prayers that have been said on her behalf may have helped, and I've certainly been praying; she is still sniffly, and sleepier than she was before. If she survives she may be an Old Cat, as distinct from the mature but still bouncy cat she was last year.  

Drudge's only flaw that I can see is that he's starting to smell like a tomcat. He likes having his fluffy coat groomed and petted, even being turned upside down and tickled, which few cats will tolerate for anything like as long as Drudge and his brothers do. He's big for his age, and will still grow a little bigger, but I'd be surprised if his healthy weight ever got over fifteen pounds. While his brothers were here, Drudge tagged along, but didn't really participate, when his attention-craving brothers tried to stampede into the house or climb up my coattails to grab food out of my hands. As the only remaining kitten he's lonely, but mellow and polite. His general affect is like, "Will there ever be mild evenings when a human sits on the porch and shares water with us cats and trails switches over the ground for us to chase, ever again?" All kittens have to learn how not to bite or scratch; Drudge learned fast, because he wants to be loved, and would probably be a good first cat for a family with a child. He does seem to have learned, as Diego refused to learn, that scent-marking the porch is not a way to make himself loved. I don't know whether he recognizes individual words; he doesn't answer to his name, whether it's pronounced like The Great Matt's full family name or shortened to "Dru," because he answers to human voices or footsteps. For anyone who doesn't mind a bit of tomcat odor he'd be very easy to love.

And, after the February freeze, will Silver come back here again? I hope she will. If  Trumpkin's humans really want to keep her, I can say that she's worth the cost of a veterinary hospital if she does go down with panleukopenia. She and Serena have been a fantastic team of social cats, all these years. It's rare to find a cat who's as good a Queen as Serena; it's also rare to find a cat who's as good a Loyal Follower as Silver. Despite Serena's "Don't give yourself airs!" act when Silver's come home, full of food treats and full of herself, I really think Serena misses her. So does Drudge. So do I. So, if they're still alive, will the possums Silver made it her job to supervise. And there are other cats, equally pretty if not equally loved, in Kingsport who desperately need the good home Trumpkin's humans clearly have to offer.

Meanwhile, the really stupid animal in this story, the one without the capacity for common decency,  sent his hired man around...not to pretend that he'd not trespassed on a better neighbor's property to poison my cats (and me, and the eighty-year-old gentleman who may have failed to meet an obligation for the first time during that week), but to assert that he was, too, a veteran and he still lives, part of the time, in his original home. The Trotter Lane address is merely the one published in the telephone directory. No doubt this information will be useful to anyone who has found anything at the bottom of the deep freezer, or dead beside the road, or similar, that they think would look good on a pet killer's vanity vehicle. I take his silence on the important question as an admission of guilt.

I don't want Wrymouth Calhoun dead, actually. I want him to suffer. I want him to spend years trying to die, and being prevented from dying and punished for trying, behind bars. And I want him to know before he dies that he'll be commemorated in history by a law that recognizes "pesticide" spraying as poisoning any neighbors, human or otherwise, that are harmed by it, and basically ensures that any lazy landowner who would rather poison road verges than prune shrubbery will be paying two-thirds of everything he has to his complaining neighbors for the rest of his life. 

Some have opined that Wrymouth resents me more than other neighbors because, before I was "the child prodigy," he was sometimes described as "the smart one"...I think adults should try harder to avoid mislabelling children's intelligence, which depends so much on their health and the way adults deal with them. I suspect the old beekeeper who died so mysteriously, who made a career out of having been "retarded" by a childhood injury, may have had a higher IQ than either of us. Still, let Wrymouth Calhoun be remembered as the biggest fool in the history of our town. So much evil he's done just to destroy the peace of a real Christian community, and so much money spent...to gain nothing, to die sick and disowned and disgraced in an institution. Thus be it ever to bullying, cowardly evildoers.

Perhaps, when he's locked up, the rest of us can put the rich uncle's estate behind us, too, and become a real Christian community--an extended family, with generations of friendship among the neighbors who were not physically related to each other--again. Perhaps my Nephews' children can grow up, as I did, in a neighborhood where all children can safely roam over all the land. I hope so.

Status Update: Serena Hangs Tough

It's hard to tell whether my grandmother cat Serena is shaking off the effects of poison or just dying hard, but she's still hanging in there. She knows what's going on. 

Her daughter Pastel died. There were ups and downs, but mostly downs, for a few days before Pastel wanted to go out and lie in the sun in the Late January Thaw That Turned Into the Early February Thaw. Then Pastel wanted to walk down to the branch creek for water. She had crossed the road, moving slowly and taking it easily, and then--you could tell by the way her eyes had dilated, looking up into the sun--everything went black. I found her minutes after she died and wasn't sure whether she might wake up from a healing coma, so I brought her home, but she was gone. 

Serena and Silver observed Pastel. Silver and Drudge and the visiting nuisance I call Trumpkin kept a vigil over her body that night. Then the cats reached a mutual decision that since I have one warm room and Trumpkin's humans have another warm room, Trumpkin could petnap Silver again. While occupying the warm room and being ill Serena liked having my undivided attention, or at least sharing it with things like sleep and writing, rather than Silver. So Silver went home with Trumpkin. 

I had learned something about Silver I'd never known before. As an outdoor cat she never overate, but when kept indoors she will overeat--from boredom. She'd been overeating at Trumpkin's house. It had not done her good; she came home fat and wheezy, but when kept indoors she prowled around showing boredom, wanting to overeat or else damage my property. She's not good at being an indoor cat. Trumpkin's Humans will need to spend a lot of time entertaining her, with good active games and not a lot of food, and if they're trying to work from home they'll probably find keeping her to be a nuisance. But, considering the probability that Crayola and who knows how many other neighborhood cats may have been poisoned, until the danger passes they may keep Silver indoors if they like, and I'd recommend keeping poor lonely Trumpkin indoors too.

We need, of course, to get the Bad Neighbor out of the neighborhood. I'd like to hope it can be done without violence. If enough people present a united front and deliver the message that anyone who cares about him needs to keep HIM confined (and sterilized, and doped up if he doesn't seem to like being kept inside and closely supervised), it's probably possible to prevent the sociopath escalating to more direct attacks on human beings--though he has already used legal methods of poisoning that have killed human beings including his own immediate family. 

This web site does not publish identity or contact information for living private persons, but since I think a sociopath is not so much living as undead, here we go. The Neighborhood Blight in my neighborhood is Larry Ricky Calhoun. That is his real name--not short for any more formal names that were "traditional" in the 1950s. I've never heard him called Larry, only Ricky or Wrymouth. He used to display photos of himself on Facebook but, after gaining weight and losing hair, has pulled them down. He still has the crooked mouth, a lifelong birth defect. Strangers have been known to describe it as a cute lopsided grin; my brother's phrase when we were kids used to be "crafty and calculating," and some would go so far as to call it evil. Well he does evil. Anyway he's about 5'10", wears #8 men's shoes, used to have dark hair but if he has any hair left now it's white. He used to live out below Bray, among relatives who shared the old family property, but after they all died and he inherited their land he apparently found the place sad and lonely, and moved closer to Gate City, on a back road called Trotter Lane, on what older people may remember as Oscar "Junior" Peters' land. He lives in a trailer house that has a land phone, 276-452-4042. Even on dirty back roads he likes to drive big shiny-new pickup trucks, and try to tell people to ditch their roads down to bedrock because it's not his problem if the rocks destroy their trucks--only if mud or dust get on his. As you'd expect from a cat-killing sociopath, he may seem pleasant enough in public, but basically he is scum.

This web site does not advocate violence, or property destruction, especially if animals might be harmed, and on Trotter Lane a fire would harm a lot of cute little wild animals. This web site would, however, display photos of Wrymouth's trucks covered in any sort of rotten, sticky, slimy garbage anyone might happen to find in a deep freezer after a long power outage, or similar, in the interest of encouraging him to repentance. This web site has no real hope that Wrymouth Calhoun is capable of sincere repentance but we do hope he can be persuaded in that direction, in the same way we hope Serena-cat can survive. 

Other nonviolent ways to encourage an evildoer to repent include things like nobody speaking to him, even if he speaks first, or waiting on him in any place of business, or buying anything he sells. (He has been known to sell food in open-air markets. Here I stand to testify, I once bought a bag of fresh corn on the cob from him, shared it with friends and relatives, and we were all sick.) Things like people going to a different church if he starts going to one. Things like people warning anyone seen still talking to him, out loud, in public, "Why would you want to talk to a cat poisoner?!" Things like, if anyone who cares about Wrymouth as still alive, their urging him to sign over all his real estate to the people he has harmed as evidence of repentance, then take a very long bus ride away from here and try to find a nice, safe place with bars on all the windows where he can spend the rest of his worthless life praying for forgiveness. 

God's forgiveness, I mean. I do not believe that anyone who remembers the very mysterious diseases that killed our beekeeper and his bees, which were not caused by any virus, bacteria, or fungus known to medical or veterinary science, because they were caused by deliberate chemical poisoning, will ever want to look at Wrymouth again. 

But this was supposed to be a post about Serena, who is still, as she's always been, a source of delight. She's not well. She's still likely not to survive this incident, but she's still sassy and sweet and more intelligent than some people want to believe a cat can be.

Serena never, ever, wanted to snuggle up on anyone's lap before this winter. As a kitten she took many naps beside or against me, but on waking she always wanted a good fast game. She might chomp on me in a friendly puppy-like way, or just bound away, waving her tail and looking back--"Chase me!" As an adult cat she could be a nuisance when I was doing anything outdoors, running out into the road in hopes that I'd chase her back toward home. (She didn't want to go away from home and would come back, disappointed, if not chased.)

But during the Big Freeze this winter, she started making a display to her daughters--"I'm still the Queen Cat around here! I get to occupy the human's lap, day or night, and you don't." It started while they were all active and healthy. 

Little we guessed that short occupations of my lap, before she went out to hunt or eat or check her territory, would turn into days spent coughing and sneezing on my lap.

She seemed to be shaking off the effects of whatever she'd eaten, and gaining some weight while taking all her meals indoors, up to last week. Then she started smelling streppy. Amoxicillin might have helped, or might have killed her, if I'd had any, but I did not. Charcoal, which I have, had cleaned up Pastel's breath after she collapsed on my lap smelling like a sack of bacteria. Serena, who has had charcoal for food poisoning before and recommended it to her kittens, didn't want any. Her temperature rose. She even made a puddle, not on my lap but on a blanket folded up a few feet away. Then she stayed on the site, concealing the damage. She went into defensive mode when I moved her away. She didn't want me to find out.

"Oh, Serena," I wailed, finding the wet spot. Old female cats and humans probably do get away with a few minor episodes of incontinence because, most of the time, most of our urine doesn't have a strong odor, but this was not the case last night. "I'm so sorry that happened, you poor dear cat..."

Serena really snarled, making an uglier sound and display than I've seen her use with unwelcome visiting cats. She hated pity. 

"But if you're going to become a bedwetter you can't sleep here any more," I said, and brought in a cage, lined it with newspapers, and shoved Serena inside.

I slept in the office, as I often do in winter, after hand-washing the blanket in one of those wonderful enzyme formulas and drying it in front of the hot-air fan. Serena woke me a few times, rearranging the newspapers, making a big display. "See, I still wake up and get up and bury my own bodywastes! I am still a competent cat!" I prayed earnestly that she might either recover or die overnight.

In the morning I set out some food for Drudge. Serena was on her feet, bright-eyed, with a bit of a cough but a dry, slightly warm nose. She ate some breakfast, too. I left them to it for fifteen minutes. A little snow had started to stick to the ground before being replaced by a cold steady rain, the sort of rain that tends to freeze into black ice at sundown.

After fifteen minutes I went out and called. There was no sign of Serena. I went around the house, calling and searching, in the rain. "You can sit on the cot," I said, returning to the porch, "on newspapers, not on my blankets."

Serena popped up from behind a storage bin. "Deal!" she nonverbally said.

Needless to say, she sat on newspapers for about fifteen seconds before she was back on my lap, curled up in a circle, making her almost inaudible purr. She purrs audibly only when nursing kittens, but she does purr. Usually I have to touch her to know when she's purring. (Yes, I can still hear most cats purr.) 

Enzyme formulas aren't cheap but it's worth the price if Serena's last days are as pleasant as they can be...especially if her last days are still ten years away.

Status Update: Pastel's Last Days

It's hard to believe that the junior cat Pastel was still only edging up on her third birthday. It feels as if she'd been here for a long time. Though not long enough.

The Queen Cat, Serena-Seralini, has a wide frame because she had a Manx great-grandfather. When she was growing up I thought she'd have to be spayed, to prevent any more Manx kittens being born. They're often born with birth defects that eitther cause a painful death in the first month of life, or doom them to a miserable life. Serena outsmarted me. She gave birth to four beautiful, perfect kittens, and one that wandered out into the snow and died, on a snowy night before other cats had started thinking about starting kittens. 

The COVID panic was still going on. There was no reliable Internet service. I had lots of time to watch Serena rear those healthy, mannerly kittens. When they were sick and needed medicine for a day or two, they stayed in their basket for exactly four hours, then lined up and waited for their medicine. When they were bouncing around outdoors in the daytime but needed to come in at night, they waited outside the door. People couldn't believe kittens could behave so well until they'd seen it, but they did see it. There are still people who want one of Serena's kittens.

That's because the ones who were exposed to glyphosate vapors, before birth or while young, have not survived. Serena didn't show a significant glyphosate reaction. Her kittens did. That's the Seralini Effect: some female bodies, sometimes against the stated wishes of female humans, survive exposure to poison by storing the toxins in the placentas during pregnancy. That may be enough to kill a fetus at once. Or the fetus may be stillborn or deformed. Or it may live until it's exposed to the same poison again after birth, and no longer. One year Serena gave birth to one dead kitten and eight living ones all at once. (She bulged, and seemed impatient to get them out, but they were all normal-size.) The eight kittens had been fed, and shown to me, and adored, and then a blast of glyphosate vapors blew over the Cat Sanctuary, and all eight kittens died. 

Serena loves kittens but she's selective. Why did that first kitten wander into the snow? While tending kittens Serena has cleaned some with licks that pushed them in to their nesst, and some with licks that pushed them aside. Smell and taste allow mother animals to perceive several things about their young that aren't apparent to the eye. Often they can recognize conditions that will make a baby animal hard or impossible to rear.  Serena has a tendency to give birth to normal-sized kittens and large kittens, and reject the large ones.

In 2022 someone had the idea that it would be terribly cute to name the kittens after writing tools. Biro, Pastel, and Crayola were the large kittens born that year. There were some small ones called Bic, Sharpie, and Ticonderoga (Tyke). Pastel was the one I saw Serena pushing away from the others. She had already pushed Crayola.

"I want to keep the calico kittens," I said to Serena.

"Well I don't," Serena nonverbally said. "They're overgrown. They get it from their father. They'll grow up stupid and weak like him."

"If you want to rear kittens in the office, you have to rear the calicos," I said.

So Serena, and her older daughter Silver who had kittens later that week, reared their kittens in the office. Several kittens died in the first glyphosate spray poisoning that year. Pastel and Crayola survived; Crayola was very pretty. Pastel had a prettier, more distinctive coat, but what people noticed about her face was almost always how bleary her eyes looked, because of her glyphosate reactions. 

"If you want to rear kittens in the office, you'll have to rear the two calicos," I said.

So the two cats reared their kittens together. Both cats showed the Seralini effect. Biro, Pastel, and Crayola moved outdoors. The others died and were removed from the office. Biro was adopted. I kept the calico kittens.

Crayola grew up quickly, and was a small adult cat when the neutered orange Manx tomcat I call Trumpkin led her back to his home. Pastel had sex with him, too, but stayed at home. I don't know who Trumpkin's humans are or what they call him. I started calling him Trumpkin because he was orange and annoying and refused to go home. 

Pastel is about as long and tall as Serena but not quite as broad-framed. The spots of white and colored fur form what I consider a pretty face, but her beauty has been marred by her watery eyes. Her reaction to glyphosate, and no doubt to other things, involves watery eyes. 

After her second birthday, last summer, Pastel had four "mixed hair" kittens, one of whom is still with me. Pastel has never seemed especially intelligent, as Serena and Silver do, but she showed that this was partly due to shyness and a wish not to offend Serena or me. She didn't do several things other cats instinctively did until Serena or I had demonstrated them, or pushed her to do them; then she did them easily, clearly having the same instincts but feeling inhibited to act on them. She was a good mother cat and, like Serena and Silver, taught her kittens to wait outside the door to be taken indoors at night. She was social; Serena and Silver, having no viable kittens of their own, shared the rearing of her kittens, and the three who lived through their first summer are big healthy fellows. 

It was just after Thanksgiving when our Bad Neighbor was heard talking to a laborer he sometimes employs. The laborer is not quite a deaf-mute, but has poor hearing and a speech impediment. It is possible to have a limited sort of conversation with him. In this conversation they were discussing a coyote trap the Bad Neighbor had set. The Bad Neighbor, a sociopath who shows no obvious disabilities, had taken it into his head that "wildlife"--foxes, if not coyotes or bears--could be trapped and killed; but whenever an animal was in the trap, it was a cat. Not one of mine, but apparently, two or three times in a row, it had been Serena's preferred kitten-daddy. The laborer had chased him away, again, and volunteered, "If I catch him again I'll take him and dump him out around 600," referring to a paved two-lane road several miles away. 

"I'll drive up and throw out some meat," said the Bad Neighbor. "Then there'll be no more cats."

They laughed, but the laborer stopped to warn me. I warned him that killing other people's pets was a crime. The laborer said, "If you catch him."

One night during the week before last I caught the Bad Neighbor sneaking around the neighborhood at night. He stopped short of my property line. I watched, but did not see him trespassing on residential property. A disturbance seemed to come from small wild animals, possibly released from another trap in another neighbor's woodlot. The Bad Neighbor's evil errand might have been spraying New Roundup along the road.

Last week all of my cats were sniffly. Trumpkin had been running around the neighborhood, day and night, wailing loudly that he was lonely; apparently Crayola had died. Silver had gone off with him and spent days and nights away from home. I had thought Silver's being "petnapped" by another cat, who had obviously prevailed on his owners to bring her into their home and overfeed her, was at least amusing, though after most of a week at Trumpkin's house Silver came home so overstuffed she wheezed when she walked.

Actually, last week, all of the cats seemed to have "cold" symptoms. And on one cold night she spent indoors, Serena demonstrated that a meal of human food she had tolerated before was hard for her to keep down.

Then Pastel stepped away from the house--oddly, before a meal--and came back, hours later, looking very ill, gushing watery bubbles from eyes, nose, and mouth. I brought her in, dried her off, and gave her a charcoal solution for food poisoning. 

It was not as quick a cure as it had been for natural food poisoning in the past. Still, Pastel had some natural food poisoning, from which she seemed to recover; the first night she stank, the second night she smelled like a damp cat; and she seemed to be feeling better, and to want to go out and enjoy the February thaw. I had some misgivings. She hadn't even started to eliminate whatever she'd eaten. In view of her past, though, I thought it was possible that she might be holding in toxins because she felt inhibited about vomiting or defecating indoors, even in a box full of newspapers.

It occurred to me that the meat might have been deliberately poisoned, but I wasn't sure how to proceed with that. Would a local vet have a way to identify and treat chemical poisoning? Would the police? I sent out e-mails. They weren't answered. Nobody was prepared to deal with that possibility. And meanwhile I was hoping not to have to be among people while I was an immune carrier of Pastel's germs. On Saturday I thought the load of bacteria I was likely to be carrying would be conspicuous and dangerous. By Tuesday, however, a day out in the sun seemed to have burned off the bacteria; Pastel's breath smelled clean to me and nobody seemed especially revulsed by my breath, either, when I ventured into town in the evening.

But if Pastel had been recovering, at least from the strep infection, she'd overburdened her strength. I found her beside the road. Rigor mortis had not set in; it was hard to tell whether she was dead or in a coma. She had been thirsty. She had gone down toward the branch creek, and suddenly everything had just gone black. In the bright sun her eyes looked completely black, pupils fully dilated. She had yellow-green eyes, but nobody will ever see their color again. She had had cramps, but not been able to move any toxins up or down. She had suffered before she died. 

She had not died of a strep infection. The odor and fever were gone. She had not had symptoms of distemper or feline leukemia. She had been fighting something off before she had gone out, away from food, as if she thought she were going to eat a better meal. 

While Pastel had been ill Serena had first seemed to be trying to help, snuggling up beside her. Then she seemed to give up hope and resent the attention Pastel was getting. I could only hope that emotional resentment was all Serena was feeling. She never was a cuddly cat. Growling when touched might have meant she was feeling physical discomfort, or meant she was feeling emotional dissatisfaction. I backed off and said "It's only because Pastel's been sick," though, strictly speaking in my native dialect, Pastel never was sick; she was ill, and died, because she was unable to be sick.

Now at least I had some idea what we were dealing with, something to tell a vet if one of them wanted to try to help Serena and Silver...because, yes, they'd ingested some of the same stuff. Their eyes and noses were watery. Serena seemed unusually thirsty. Silver was unusually distrustful of me. She's never been cuddly, either, but that's because Serena scolds her for indulging me in soppy behavior unbecoming to adult cats; when Serena's not looking Silver is "the Secret Snugglebunny." But she refused to come into the office and share a meal with Serena. Normally any suggestion of a meal being served in the office would have brought Silver running inside.

Today, Wednesday, I watched for e-mail from a veterinarian or at least another animal rescuer whose e-mail I had in the computer. If any of them answered my e-mails, the reply didn't get through. The Internet was up and down all day with at least four "down" periods lasting over an hour each, so it's possible that a reply was lost. It's also possible that nobody else in our small, mostly peaceful town had any experience with deliberately poisoned animals. When local people want to get rid of animals they don't blather about reverence for all life; most seem to believe that humans have a right to kill animals whenever we feel like it, unless the animals are someone else's property--but they do use either guns or knives, and kill animals quickly. Pastel was a portrait of misery for four days and nights.

In the evening I brought Serena inside, although the air was warm, for observation. Her nose was starting to run enough to bubble. I gave her charcoal. If it's still getting into her digestive system, if her insides aren't paralyzed by the poison, charcoal can adsorb and remove most kinds of poison. If it's not, the question on my mind tonight is when and whether I could kill Serena to spare her from what  Pastel went through. I don't think I could bear to watch Serena go through that. I don't think I could kill Serena. I know I couldn't pay a vet to kill her.

Most cats will leave the house if their human is unable to feed them. I remember Serena sitting beside me, purring as if to say "Take your time, friend," when I suddenly found it so hard to walk across the floor and put out some kibble during the salmonella episode. When I'd forced myself to do that by telling myself they'd not been fed for two days and nights.

Many, not all, female cats will feed kittens whose own mothers can't feed them, if they find it convenient. Only Serena sat down with the mother cat and the kittens and got the other mother cat's milk going. 

Most cats find little dens in which to keep kittens away from light and strangers while the kittens develop to the point of being able to go out and explore the world. Serena built a den. In winter. With layers of doorways that didn't overlap, to create a snug little vestibule around a warm cozy shelter for the babies. 

She is, of course, a bit of fur whose color pattern happens to please my eyes, a pet...but she's also a dear friend, in the same way a human housemate might become a dear friend. Sometimes I laugh at Serena, and sometimes I admire her. Shelters are full of beautiful bits of fur occupied by dumb animals who have learned to enjoy being around humans, but there'll never be another Serena.

And Silver? Silver is avoiding Serena and me. She could be less sick than Serena; she could be sicker. I've never been close to Silver, as I've always been with Serena, but I don't think I could watch Silver die the way Pastel did, either. 

I think, on the other hand, watching the Bad Neighbor die that way would be great fun; especially the point where he'd feel thirsty and try to drink any available liquid, and not be able to take any fresh water in because so much polluted liquid was gushing out.

None of my cats ever was in the Bad Neighbor's stupid traps. I know because all of them reported for every meal I offered them, all winter. They are technically barn cats but they spend most of their days on the porch, in the yard, or following me around the place. Unlike normal cats, who like to be alone most of the time, social cats like to be together and even sleep in heaps, like baby kittens, for security. 

I'm well aware of a number of people, some even well-intentioned, who think it's good for cats to be kept indoors. I'm also aware that it's not good for cats to be kept indoors. It's not good for the doors; if kept indoors on days when they preferred to be outdoors I have reason to believe that either Serena or Silver would systematically claw away enough of a door, or a wall, to reclaim their right to come and go at will, and they'd take encouragement from working as a team. It's not good for the neighborhoods where, if cats don't stay at the top of the food chain, rats will. It's not good for humans to tolerate conditions that make it dangerous for cats to be outdoors where they belong, protecting humans from rat infestations and rat-borne diseases. If one cat has to spend one warm day indoors because a neighborhood is infested with a cat killer, the humans in the neighborhood should be spending that day working to remove the cat killer. 

This can often be accomplished without violence, by a simple agreement that nobody wants to encourage a cat killer to live another minute, and so nobody trades with him, nobody speaks to him, nobody stays in a church if he comes into one, and so on...until the cat killer gets down on his knees and begs the owners of the cats to take his property, from which he walks away, never to return, with the clothes on his back if the injured parties are charitable, and starts another life in another place, far away.

But this Bad Neighbor is not only a cat killer. The presence of a cat killer is a valid reason not to buy a house in a neighborhood, and people advertise nice livable neighborhoods by mentioning the cats visible on the street, because cat killers usually start with small animals and work their way up to murdering human beings. Our Bad Neighbor, however, may have started with small animals while living in his original neighborhood, but before moving into our neighborhood he had already worked his way up to at least accidentally killing his parents, one brother, one sister, his original wife, and their one documented child. And it would be hard to prove, but I believe he deliberately killed our old beekeeper and came very close to crippling Grandma Bonnie Peters. And he's certainly and openly displayed willingness to injure or kill me. He is not known for physical courage; he's spoken when spoken to a few times, but the way I've seen him most often, and will remember him best, is trying to run out of my sight. He worked, before retirement, at a chemical company and has consistently used chemicals to harm human beings, along with the petty property damage intended to help him cheat people out of land.

I don't know. I think he deserves to suffer much more than this, but for a start he could be tied behind whatever oldfashioned horse-drawn vehicle anybody still has and paraded through the county, up every back road and to every house door, having his crimes read out to people who are then invited to take their feelings out on him with whatever kind of parting kick they feel that his crimes deserve. Then let him go and try to get into a mental hospital, or just be a homeless beggar, a thousand miles away. 

Status Update: No Doordash Here

During the COVID panic the luxury of having things delivered, rather than walking through a store on our feet, became a real industry. Want to eat, not to cook? Call Doordash and order a restaurant meal...

That kind of service is not available at the Cat Sanctuary. Even the US Postal Service is afraid to drive up our private road. I like this.

But there are times when some sort of neighborhood-only variation, with snowmobiles or pickup trucks, might be convenient.

I ate the last human-food meal in the house on Saturday. On Sunday, I thought, I would walk to a grocery store and buy more human food. 

Well, Pastel didn't eat her breakfast on Saturday; when I came out with dinner she was waiting on the porch, but then she went down to the sand pit and then, so far as I could tell, she disappeared. Serena and I thought we might have heard a mouse, or maybe it was only a cricket. Serena came inside the office room but wasn't able to determine whether either of those animals was in the office. Giving up, she came to sit on my lap. She coughed and sneezed a few times. Her nose felt warmer than it should have felt. She slept a few feet away from the hot-air fan, showed no interest in going out for breakfast, and continued sleeping in front of the hot-air fan well into the afternoon.

Meanwhile, when I took the junior cats their breakfast on Sunday, Pastel and Drudge were "loafing" side by side on the porch. Drudge leaped up and ran toward food. Pastel didn't move. I picked her up. Her coat was wet, the tip of her tail was muddy, her muscle tone was poor, her face was tear-stained, her nose was warm, and she was shivering. Her breath wheezed and rattled. 

I brought her into the office and parked her near the hot-air fan. Serena didn't even bother acting scornful of anything resembling cuddles; she could tell that this was an emergency, and wrapped herself around Pastel, purring.

I hadn't seen Silver all week. I'd assumed she'd been petnapped, because Trumpkin had cried for her to go back to his home for hours every night when she was at her home. 

But Pastel's lack of appetite for breakfast yesterday had not been a whim.  She'd eaten something--maybe just something that had frozen to death a week or two ago, something that her nose would normally have told her to leave for a possum or vulture to find. Cats usually digest food in less than 24 hours so, presumably, after going to the sand pit, she'd gone back to finish a meal of something she never should have touched.

Maybe it wasn't just a frozen rabbit that had been slowly thawing for days. I still have a Professional Bad Neighbor, although "Long COVID" took a good deal of the wind out of his sociopathic sails. He still employs a man who is neither completely deaf nor completely mute, but close enough that some people give up trying to talk to him and write him off as a deaf-mute. And in December he told this man how he might just drive past the Cat Sanctuary, throw out a chunk of meat, and not have to worry about my cats eating bait on which he hoped to catch a coyote. My cats had not, in fact, been the ones eating the bait--they'd been here for meals, while their visiting friends had been caught in the trap; but I'm the one he's trying hardest to bully off my own property.

Well, a sane person might have observed that the confidence with which cats circulate around the neighborhood, the fact that the coyote trap had repeatedly caught Serena's preferred kitten-daddy who lives a quarter of a mile away, are pretty good indicators that there are no coyotes in the neighborhood--though they've infested some parts of the county, so one might conceivably stray in. However, although I don't think he has a treatable mental illness, the Bad Neighbor certainly is not sane; he's at least a sociopath, if not a psychopath. He wanted to do something nasty to an animal. Probably his sudden transition from "one shot, one prize" to "wasted boxes of bullets and bagged nothing" had something to do with it.

I hadn't seen him during the winter but, last week, on the first day when the temperature crawled above the freezing point even in the shade, he'd sent someone (whose name I know in real life) to spray some New Roundup around the road. So we'd all had a chance to find out how we react to this latest form of legal murder by torture. Apparently glufosinate affects my digestive system in a different way than glyphosate, more painful and more likely to shorten my lifespan, but internal bleeding is still involved. Only more blood. And my eyes were inflamed. And I had no energy all week and took lots of naps. New Roundup needs to be bought back by the government and stored for use as a weapon, though its use probably violates the Geneva Convention.

The cats had been reacting all week, which was why I'd thought nothing of Pastel's bleary eyes. Serena and Silver have the Seralini effect. When not exposed to glyphosate they've had beautiful, healthy kittens. Unfortunately they've been exposed to so much of it that most of their kittens died, or were born dead. Pastel does not show this effect. When she's been exposed to glyphosate, which has been most of her young lifetime, her eyes look watery and bloodshot. Apparently New Roundup affected her the same way. But I was surprised when Serena started coughing and sneezing.

So I spent the day observing my remaining cats sleeping off the fever as best they could, and didn't go to the store, and didn't eat. 

Serena might have tasted something nasty, or picked up some sort of respiratory virus, but mid-afternoon she woke up with some energy and appetite...and in a mean mood. I've never seen her in such a mood before. She's always been a big tough muscular cat who'd rather romp than snuggle. She's never seemed to want to scratch or bite hard enough to hurt anyone; when told that she's done that, she's seemed subdued and penitent, and she's tried to play more carefully the next time. Cats will be cats, just as gardening and carpentry will be what they are. Unblemished hands are overrated. But honestly, although I warn visitors away from Serena, I don't think she'd ever do anyone any real harm--when she's in her right mind. 

Serena was well and truly delirious, and made unsuccessful attempts to attack people and objects, during a previous episode of serious food poisoning. She seemed to see and hear what was going on, if perhaps in that feverish way that makes everything painful, during this episode of whatever it's been.  She didn't really attack anyone; she only threatened to. But she was very, very grumpy--not at all like herself. She deliberately misbehaved, climbing on things she'd been told not to touch, where she is normally a perfect guest in the office. She growled whenever I touched her, growled when Pastel moved against her, screamed death threats and obscenities at herself when she scratched her own ear. She's still in a feverish, irritable mood tonight; she's moved away from Pastel and me as if she knows she's not quite in her right mind yet.

No matter how much time I've spent around cats, most of them do seem, even to me, like "dumb animals." Pillow substitutes. Removing their DNA from the gene pool could only be considered an improvement. Serena is different from those cats. She's not human. She will never have much of the human kind of intelligence. She is definitely a person who not only feels, but thinks, in her own alien way. As a substitute for a baby (how ridiculous!) she's even less satisfactory than a normal cat. As a substitute for a human housemate, she's clean and quiet and has a good Green way of exterminating mice. If I can't ask her to read a manuscript, I can trust her judgments and testimonies about what's going on around our home.

There are people, like the neighbor who dumped out the kitten Inky because he was afraid to tell me he'd run over the cat Ivy, who think I'm just unreasonable about the fact that cats are small animals who have short lives. Piffle. I knew Ivy had formed the bad habit of running out in front of vehicles, as if everyone would always be watching for her and as if she could flag anyone down to solicit a snack or a lift. Ivy's demise made me very sad, but if anyone but Ivy was to be blamed, I was the one. And I can understand how a person who didn't know the cat Graybelle might have thought she was a bobcat; most bobcats are yellow but the ones at the local nature park, that year, were gray, and Graybelle looked about the size of a bobcat, and had a "bobbed" tail. But the thought that someone deliberately killed our Founding Queen, Black Magic, still makes me think that eleven months and twenty-nine days in prison wouldn't have been enough. That man had good reasons for moving out of the neighborhood and having people start a rumor that he was dead. I didn't want to murder him; he didn't deserve a quick, merciful end. I wanted, legally and sadistically and satanically, to ruin him. I feel very much the same way about anyone deliberately harming Serena. 

Or Silver. The idea of Silver having been petnapped by another cat amuses me, but I don't believe Silver intended to be petnapped. She intended to come and go as she pleased, as Trumpkin does. She probably doesn't know that, although she's unhappy when she gives birth to dead or sickly kittens and loses them, doing that is her best chance of surviving until we get a total glyphosate ban--and a ban on malicious use of "pesticides" to harm others, which would be most effectively prevented by either banning all spray "pesticides" altogether, or at least allowing them to be purchased only by licensed professionals who have paid a minimum of a million dollars for a one-year license. (And let's call the law by my Bad Neighbor's name, and let all the farmers know whom they have to thank, during the lean years of transition to organic farming.) Silver would not have expected humans who obviously fed and petted her, at first, to lock her up and, unless the present administration can be goaded into making the ban effective this summer, doom her to a premature, slow, painful death. Silver has always been a good cat, stayed close to home, and thus known only people who respected her personhood. She had no way of imagining that other people would treat her like the kind of dumb animal she's never been.

Shortly after sundown Pastel screamed aloud and started gagging. Nothing solid came up. I gave her the same dose of powdered charcoal in water that cured Serena's, and before that Heather's, severe but natural food poisoning. Well, it seemed to relieve the pain so she could go back to sleep. She's unlikely to feel much better than that until she's able to get a lot of bad stuff out, and from observing her efforts to walk across the floor I'm not sure that she has the strength to do that. I wouldn't be altogether surprised if she's able to eliminate the toxic material, eat, drink, and recover her strength tomorrow. I wouldn't be altogether surprised if she dies, either. She smells like eleven pounds of streptococci wrapped in fur. Neither Serena nor I have ever had much of a reaction to strep infections but some strains of strep bacteria have killed susceptible individuals.

Including humans.

Including Pastel's great-great-grand-aunt Iris. 

When Iris had streptococcal bronchitis she used to wrap her four-pound self right across my neck as I slept, and I woke up and cracked jokes about how if anyone annoyed me I'd breathe on them. They wouldn't like that because strep stinks. (It's the component of the odor that dung and carrion have in common.) Now I'm older and aware that, although strep was just about the only infection that circulated at school that didn't make me sick enough to stay home, it's like COVID--it can kill people who are old or ill or heavily medicated. With hindsight I realize that Iris had an undiagnosed immune deficiency disease. Even after two courses of antibiotics she didn't resume growing, but kept coughing and wheezing and having foul breath. One day, when she hadn't seemed sicker than she'd been for the previous six months, she just lay down and died.

Some chemical poisons, like glyphosate, compromise the immunity of bodies that don't have immune deficiency diseases. Most living bodies are immune carriers of streptococcus bacteria. Pastel smells as if her existing population of semi-friendly bacteria has exploded.

Missing one day's meals won't hurt me and may help me enjoy the sensation of my immune system mopping up the little streppy-bugs. Missing several days' meals is not such a great idea. A few years ago I would have thought, "So what? Just plan the trip to go into Food Lion during that annoying managerette's shift, and breathe on her! What fun!" (Because when the immune system is mopping up an infection that's not serious for the individual, many individuals feel "high," and I'm one.) Now the thought process is more like, "If I go into Food Lion during the day shift I might inadvertently breathe on young A, and he might go home and breathe on his father, who's had open-heart surgery. When people die from strep, like poor little Beth in Little Women, isn't it because the bacteria attack their hearts? Or I might meet young B, who's been so nice to her great-aunt, who's ninety years old..."

I don't want to live in a place where teenyboppers earn extra cash as Doordash drivers. But I would like, very much, for someone to pick up a few provisions for me. Wal-Mart would be the simplest place to pick up ten days' worth of provisions: I can eat store-brand ("Great Value") chili beans, corn, tomatoes, and chicken, in cans, say six cans of each vegetable and two four-packs of chicken, and drink store-brand caffeinated soda pop, say two liters each of GV imitations of Coke, Cherry Coke, Dr Pepper, and Mountain Dew. Monotonous, but we are talking about a quarantine, not a party.

This probably will not happen. I'll probably walk to Food Lion and grab ten days' worth of much less satisfactory provisions there, and breathe on people, and feel guilty, even while knowing that those people will be gossipping about me all day ("She looked terrible and smelled worse. Does that woman own a toothbrush?" I do; at home I use it after every meal. Bacteria infest places where a toothbrush doesn't go.) After all most of us, even if not born with resistance, built up resistance to strep infections as children and think anyone who takes them seriously, as an adult, is a wimp. Most of us need to think longer about this. Most of us are not wimps. Most of us still have some elders who survived COVID and would like to keep them for a few more years, though.

And Serena, not really a very elderly cat at going on eight years old, isn't out of the woods yet; as I was typing this status update she fell off the chair she'd been sleeping on. And then Trumpkin came around, complaining loudly of being lonely at his home...which means Silver may not even have been safely petnapped. 

I had not planned to prosecute anybody for trying to "rescue" Silver as a "stray." I'd thought that, if I found her living with a family nearby, I'd make my best pitch for the family to rescue a shelter cat, but I'd agree to give Silver a free choice where she wanted to live. I have very different ideas about Silver's being harmed--other than by "spoiling" her with a soft life and rich diet, before killing her by destroying her natural ability to excrete toxins through unviable births. That's not what I've ever wanted for Silver but at least it's something people do in the belief that it's the right thing, before seeing for themselves that it's not.

The threat having been heard and witnessed, it would be a good idea for the Bad Neighbor to sign over all real estate and all contents thereof to the living members of the families he's harmed in the neighborhood, now, the half nearest my property to me because he's done me the most harm and I've been the one to find him out, the rest to be divided among the others. Then he should leave with the clothes on his back and sign himself into a mental hospital somewhere very far from here. Just walk into a hospital and say "I am a sociopath and need to be locked up. I killed all but one of my close relatives and then, finding my old home place a bit lonely, I deliberately set out to ruin another neighborhood," and if they don't admit him as a patient, keep trying until he comes to a hospital that will. Then he can spend the rest of his life praying that Serena lives another fifteen years without another little cat cough. Every little possum treat that cat ever kicked sand over was worth more than a Bad Neighbor.

Status Update: "Snow," Said Merlin

One of the few influences of pop culture on my childhood was that I've always remembered a scene from a Disney movie that attempts to revive Merlin, King Arthur's court magician, the last of the Druids. "Snow," said Merlin, and it did. It was snowing anyway, someone observed. "Snow harder," said Merlin, and a real American prairie blizzard was instantly raging in Old England...

It is snowing. It has been snowing all week. 

Yesterday I thought, "I've been free from all specifically COVID-type symptoms for a week now. I should go to McDonald's just to show that I'm out of quarantine, and call someone who doesn't have e-mail yet from a store in town...if a store in town still has a phone." Then I thought, "It is below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The road is clear. A neighbor just drove his old heavy truck up the road, with no more difficulty than usual,  hauling in more hay for the cattle. Why should I leave this warm spot on the screen porch and give myself bronchitis, just to go to McDonald's? I am not craving their usually glyphosate-contaminated French fries all that much. If anyone who doesn't have e-mail wants to see me, they can jollywell drive up the road. I can always go to McDonald's on Friday, when a person for whom I work is likely to have been paid and to pay for work done."

So this morning...I looked out the window. It was snowing. "Why should I risk destroying the laptop by hauling it to McDonald's in falling snow, when the Internet is still crawling along on the screen porch? I need work. I need wages. I need to pay the bill for all this lovely electricity I'm using to keep warm. But the person for whom I work can drive out the highway, which is specially treated so that it freezes about twenty degrees Fahrenheit lower than ordinary roads do, so it should be clear. We can meet on the highway, or on the private road. The person worries about bears in summer, but everyone knows bears hibernate through weather like this. I enjoy walking in fresh snow and will do a little of it around the time this person would drive up, if the road were clear, tonight...unless the electricity goes out, in which case I'll probably do more walking to get to a warm place, or the Internet goes completely out, in which case I'll probably go to McDonald's after all." 

The Bible tells us that a virtuous woman is not afraid of snow, because her household is full of warm snowproof clothes and blankets. So it is. 

I am concerned about my cat Silver. Regular readers may remember that she went home with a neighbor's tomcat last week. She hadn't done that before. The tomcat's calling had been loud and full of distress, and from a quick inspection when Silver came home I knew what had happened at this neighbor's house. This is the tomcat I call Trumpkin, because he is a little orange Manx mix who won't go away when he's told to go away. He is a persistent nuisance but not all bad--it depends on your tolerance for tomcats. Trumpkin is quite social. He had persuaded my calico kitten Crayola to elope with him a few summers ago. Evidently something happened to her, because he was very lonely at home, but didn't want to stay here; he wanted someone else to go home with him. Silver's coat smelled like someone else's household cleaning supplies--she had been in a warm, clean room. She had just eaten a full meal, before walking more than half a mile. Trumpkin must have presented Silver to his humans as a new friend of his, and they'd accepted her as a stray or outcast and tried to adopt her. This is not adoption. It is petnapping, I told Silver and Trumpkin. 

"You have a home, Silver," I said aloud, because Silver seems to understand a lot of words. "You are supposed to stay here. We need you here."

"Meow meow meow meow meow MEOW MEOW MEOW," said Trumpkin, aloud. He seemed to be saying, "Don't leave me alone with my humans! I have nobody to talk to!"

"Serena and Pastel have each other," Silver was clearly thinking as she nibbled uninterestedly at the kibble served here. "Trumpkin is all alone. His humans want to spoil a cat with lots of attention and overfeeding. They may have stuffed Crayola to an untimely death, but wotta way to go."

Silver is not a greedy cat but she is a gentle, tenderhearted one. She gets kibble regularly, and fish, chicken, ice cream and sometimes even beef as a treat every few days, at home. She's always interested in an extra treat; she does not overeat and grow fat, even when the opportunity is available. She is very social and more likely to respond to considerations a normal cat wouldn't even notice. Serena has never approved of Silver seeking human attention; only when Serena's not looking has Silver ever purred or cuddled, but she clearly enjoys being petted when it doesn't seem disrespectful to her own mother. Trumpkin's howls of neediness seemed to prevail on her good judgment. She went home with Trumpkin again. She is being snuggled and overfed and spoiled. She has been petnapped, if only by a cat friend!

The first time she strayed off with Trumpkin, around New Year's Day, Silver may honestly have thought I'd dumped out some extra kibble and gone inside to die. I had not, of course. I'd gone inside to sweat out COVID in quarantine. It was cold, and sweating-out makes people vulnerable, so I stayed inside for about sixty hours, but all is well now. Regular meals have resumed. Silver came home and observed that for herself. She is not reacting to food insecurity at home, now. I could see and hear that she was persuaded by sympathy for poor little lonely Trumpkin.

If I knew which house to approach, I'd knock on the door and explain things to Trumpkin's humans. I can help them get a cat of their own to spoil. Maybe two. There are far too many nice cats languishing in the shelters in Kingsport. Silver has a home, and duties, from which she is being Led Astray. We don't need to quarrel about Silver. Those other cats need and deserve a good home. We need to choose a companion for Trumpkin. A nice young lady cat who has already been spayed...the Blountville shelter has set up web pages for half a dozen, with several pairs of sisters and several single cats to choose from.

Silver has not been spayed. I think Silver needs not to be spayed. She has clearly inherited the gene for the Seralini Effect from her mother. She has given birth to very few kittens,  in her lifetime, and only one of her kittens has survived, but unsuccessful pregnancies are her body's way of flushing out glyphosate and keeping her healthy through these years when we've all been regularly poisoned by glyphosate vapors. Spaying Silver before glyphosate is banned just might kill her in a year or two. I don't know that that's what happened to Crayola, but I know what Crayola's immediate family have been living with. 

Trumpkin's humans undoubtedly don't want to go through the drama of living with a cat who's surviving glyphosate poisoning thanks to the Seralini Effect, so they should get a cat who is already spayed, no kittens, no drama, and just take their chances on that cat surviving until we get the ban we all really need.

I am more concerned about Silver, and about poor lonely Trumpkin, and about the shelter cats who so need to be spoiled, than I am about the snow. Or about the virus, which I think I've whipped by now. I am actually feeling full of energy, looking forward to walking in fresh snow tonight.

Happy Pub Date, S.F. Williamson

Today we celebrate the actual, official publication of A Language of Dragons, which should be in your local bookstore by now.

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2024/12/book-review-language-of-dragons.html

This is what reviewers mean by "pub date"--date of official publication of a book we've already read. It would be impossible for all of us to have a date with the author at a pub, or "public house," or bar-and-grill. Some publishers want the reviews to go live on the pub date; some want the reviews to generate advance publicity and reminder posts on the pub date.

And today's book review is a rerun...I'm sorry. My New Year's resolution was to recover from COVID in quarantine. Due to complications from deliberate poison spraying (because we all know unwanted plants just tend to make roads impassable when temperatures are below freezing unless it's actually raining or snowing for weeks on end) I'm still working on that. The computer's connection depends on a box that's out in the rain, snow, and freeze, which makes the computer about as weak and peevish as the human operating it. Actually the two handicaps fit together nicely. The computer now says it has no Internet connection; when it behaves as if that's true I lean back, pull blankets up around my neck, and take a nap. I have now nibbled my way through two days' provisions in the seven days of this year. I'm not doing much, nor is the computer doing much, but holding on until we're able to do more.

So please reread the review and support the new book. For those who can stand science fiction dystopias, I repeat, it's a good one.

Status Update: How Bad Is Yougov?

As the first real heat wave breaks over the Cat Sanctuary...

So many days I looked at the kitten Dora and thought "She's not going to live. Heavy-duty medication for internal parasites might help her but she's not going to grow big enough to take it."

So many days, after that sort of morning, Dora was still bubbling and squeaking and bouncing about with big brother Diego at the end of the day. There was something special about those two. All healthy kittens just like to play with anything and anybody, but Diego seemed to notice that as the biggest kitten in the litter he was the one the smallest kitten trailed after, raced, chased, tried to copy, tried to out-wrestle. He seemed to be careful about playing with Dora. If their other brothers wanted to play more roughly than he did, he'd show them the rough stuff. Dora would stay in a game--chasing a stick, e.g.--up to the limit of her strength. Sometimes she walked away from a game with me. I never saw her walk away from a game with Diego.

So on Saturday morning, when Dora woke up bright and early, bounced out of her box in the office without waiting to be carried, and rushed out to do her part to keep her aunt Silver's lactation cycle going, I expected she'd rush up with the three tomkittens when the kibble was put out for breakfast. Right?

Wrong. 

The Professional Bad Neighbor drove up and sprayed poison somewhere. Sheer spite; he has to know by now that John Hinckley might have a better chance of getting a real estate deal around here than he would. I sneezed for a few minutes. When the time came to go out and dispense kibble, the tomkittens' eyes were watery, the mother cat Pastel looked bleary-eyed too, and Dora was nowhere to be found. I called her, specifically. Dora didn't always actually come when called but she did always notice being called. But surely she wanted breakfast? I called her again, and Serena, my non-demonstrative cat, came out and jumped onto my shoulder and purred and licked me. Then she jumped onto my knees and purred and cuddled. She even chomped my hand a few times in the friendly way she did when she was the office kitten, before she grew up and decided chomping humans was not a game worth playing.

She knew.

There are still a few Vespulas on the porch. The trouble with squirting alcohol and Listerine, instead of spraying poison, is that although you can saturate fungi with Listerine you have to kill insects by ones. There never were many on the porch and, when I see that they no longer even post guards around what they were starting to make a nest, I keep hoping that they've decided to move somewhere else. Even for wasps the Vespulas seem stubborn and stupid, though. I keep squirting and thinking that, although they seem to have been introduced to our ecosystem at the same time as two other unwanted species that might have moved in from other parts of the neighborhood, at least they do seem to be making a dent in the mosquito population.

What has this to do with Yougov? Hopefully I say, nothing at all. It is to be hoped that the things that made last week unpleasant are separate and discrete inconveniences. But it can be hard to tell. It remains to be learned whether the Bad Neighbor's pranks are just free-floating malice--he was one nasty little brat of a boy who's grown up to be a nasty brat of an old man--or are associated with any other haters' ill will toward me personally.

I've often posted about Yougov, the survey site. Always before I've posted good things. Good things can be used for bad purposes.

Yougov has a very good reputation--in the United States, anyway. (I've read that some of its foreign branches had bad reputations.) They don't send out spam or sell your address to spammers. They pay what and when they say they'll pay for the time you spend taking surveys. They deliver good, representative cross-sections for market surveys, product (including celebrity-image-as-product) ratings, and opinion polls. 

An election year naturally generates lots of opinion polls.

This year I've noticed a problem with the election-related polls. "To verify that you are a registered US voter," the survey authors whine, "what is the address where you are registered to vote?" Why are no warning bells going off in Yougov's office? They don't need to verify that people are registered voters. They want to know where people are registered to vote in order to manipulate election results. This can be done by legitimate means, like selecting campaign ads, press releases, and news broadcasts to appeal to the interests of voters in different districts. Or it can be done by less ethical means, like mailing out disinformation about where and how to vote, or sabotaging digital voting machines...or physically interfering with people's being able to vote.

I think Yougov needs a policy requiring that only office, school, post office or other mail drop addresses should ever be allowed on surveys. If people don't have a place to receive mail that is far from where they live, they should program their computers to remove anything that's not recognized as a workplace or post office address from the system, perhaps replacing it with a line like "Never type anyone's home address into a computer." That's a basic common-sense precaution, like "Roll up windows, lock doors, and find another place to leave children or pets, when you step out of the car." 

And they need one reminding their clients: "Any attempt to identify individual voters, such as asking even for a post office address that might be associated with voter registration information, will be reported to the police as evidence of possible involvement in election tampering and/or voter harassment."

("No such!" a client will wail. Truthfully or truthily. "All we want to do is talk to the swing voters and make sure they know what Our Candidate has done about the issues A, B, C, and D..." There used to be a place to do that in a perfectly legitimate, ethical, even mutually enjoyable way. Twitter used to be its name...before censorship. We badly need uncensored social media where people can chat and debate about whatever interests them, on their own time, in real time. Meanwhile, the crucial thing you must not do, if you want to communicate with people, is try to get information about them before you have given them--and verified that they were interested in having--the same information about you.)

Following the attempt to murder a campaigning candidate last week, I think Yougov needs to tighten the restrictions on questions that can be asked on election-related surveys. No, you don't need to know whether surveys are being taken by registered voters. Deal with it. The ones being taken by children are at least being taken by people who talk to voters. It is better to work with information that might be provided by children than it is to have information that might be used by someone who wanted to murder a candidate or his supporters.

"But it can only hurt 'conservatives' if mature property owners, who are presumably all 'conservative,' are allowing surveys to be filled in by their illegal Mexican housekeepers, who..."

Basta ya! In the first place I do not have a housekeeper, Mexican or otherwise, but if I did she would be legally authorized to work in the United States. And she would probably be a radical Christian, and we'd probably have talked about the religious reasons to support some causes the "conservatives" try to claim, and some the "liberals" do. And whether she was a legal temporary resident, as it might be a student, or a natural-born citizen of Virginia, I'd encourage her to use or acquire a legal right to vote. It's a vicious and outdated stereotype that anybody in any demographic group intentionally depends on cheap illegal foreign labor. Most of the mature property owners I know don't hire housekeepers until we acquire a disability that qualifies for a pension. Then they hire US taxpayers with, if anything, a preference for young relatives of people who want to go all the way back to Grover Cleveland and say the federal government shouldn't do pensions. Or else the really pathetic ones prefer to hire people who look like the types they used to want to date. 

In any case a criterion for any housekeeper I hire is that she must be able to explain why raising the minimum wage is likely to hurt her more than me. She's free to vote for whichever presidential candidate she thinks is most likely to avoid war, no questions asked, but she needs to be immunized to that specific political lie.

Anyway, back in June I was "selected for a survey" purportedly about how people read and react to different kinds of tweets on Twitter.The survey claimed to need access to my Twitter account to assemble a selection of "fake tweets," several of which I recognized as old tweets, from people I follow or used to follow. 

If I'd had my wits about me I would have said no, right there, because that amounted to authorizing a stranger to impersonate me. For all I know the person may be a scammer and may be using my Twitter identity to ask my Tweeps for money. Some poor idjit, undoubtedly the son of one of the legendary Nigerian scammers though I don't know whether he's still in Nigeria, has been using the name "Elon Musk" to try to ask me for money. I should probably report him but he is such a laugh...

But at the time I thought, well, none of us use Twitter much any more anyway....

So this survey proceeded to show me old tweets from individuals I followed for more than an hour. Since the contents of most of these tweets were clearly news stories from bygone months or years, and the survey said that whatever respondents "liked" or "retweeted" would show up on our Twitter pages, I made sure to pick only pictures, jokes, or quotes that hadn't gone out of date. People who followed me on Twitter used to know they could expect to see pretty flower pictures, no matter whose flowers or when they had bloomed.

Then the survey switched to a selection of old tweets from corporations I used to follow. Aye, there's the rub. The corporate accounts I followed were cut down, first, a few years ago, to newspapers and the BBC. Then after the "Trusted News Initiative" I cut out them, too. So the survey was picking old news stories from newspapers. Oy. It might have taken all night for newspaper accounts to have posted a half-dozen tweets that hadn't gone out of date. Newspapers do occasionally post an evergreen article about "How to Clean Behind the Refrigerator to Keep the Refrigerator Working Longer" or "Bird Species That Are Occasional Visitors to Local Parks," but I kept scrolling past tweet after tweet about stories that were no longer news. "Where to View the Solar Eclipse," for pity's sake. I might have retweeted that if the system had allowed me to type in a comment like "The story's old but the picture's still cool," but it didn't.

I started scrolling down whole screens full of tweets I was not about to retweet. There had to be an end somewhere. I started taking the survey at nine or ten o'clock and it was well past midnight when I finally pulled up something other than unusable tweets about no-longer-news stories. It was a sarcastic demand that I prove I was still human. In all that time I suppose some people might have been able to program a bot to scroll through the fake tweets for them. 

Then the survey closed. Say whaaat? Yougov surveys are worth a predetermined number of points that add up toward giftcards or, if you do online banking, deposits into banks. This was supposed to have been the one that paid for my next yarn shopping spree/ It hadn't even added the points to my account!

I sent Yougov a strongly worded e-mail, that night, and got on with my life. I received no reply from a human at Yougov. Over the next two or three weeks I took a few more surveys and clicked through a few screens to request a giftcard. The system was set up to encourage people to request digital e-cards. I don't buy things online, so I sent them another e-mail requesting that they just put the card in the mail as they've always done before, and mentioning that this would be a good time to add a substantial payment for the bogus survey. 

That got a human reply. "What survey was that? When?"

Since I'd e-mailed Yougov from within their system I didn't even have the copy of the e-mail I sent them. More to the point, at midday today, was that it had taken from 7 a.m. to midday for their e-mail to open because my Internet connection seems about two-thirds dead. It has ever since that storm, a week ago last Friday. By last Friday I'd checked the company web site for an explanation of why it was taking them so long to restore full connectivity. The company site gave no indication that they were aware of a problem. Whole towns lost connection for a day or two after the storm, which was understandable, but apparently during the week everyone else's connection had been restores except mine.

Mine is still failing to open the regular Windows "network & internet access" screen, just flashing a condescending little warble about how the company "tested and verified that you are able to access some web sites." Some web sites. Right. Enough for the copy editing job, which is what I've been doing with most of my online time during the past week, but not enough for serious research, not enough for listening to the "vlogs" of various blind bloggers on my list, not enough to get e-mails open within one hour...

And so it inevitably occurred to me that there might be a reason for this.

I can think of more probable reasons. I can think of trees with limbs that I've been telling company employees they needed to prune for many years. The first limb I'd cut, just to test this theory, if I were a young man with a truck equipped with a lift and provisioned with saws and suchlike, is on a walnut tree just below the house, above the road, easy to reach from a lift mounted on a truck and just about impossible to reach from the ground. Then I would follow the line and prune the others. 

I can think of a Professional Bad Neighbor who may or may not have bothered wiretapping either the old telephone line or the Internet connection line, but certainly had both means and motives. I've reported the sounds of suspected trespassing to the police before. 

But until one of those possibilities is confirmed, and I emphasize that I hope it's just a tree limb or two that the young men can get rid of in an hour or two, I can't rule out the possibility that someone who wasted so much of my time worming about in my Twitter account might have been hostile enough to have traced the Internet connection to the house, also. For the purpose of interfering with my vote.

I like Yougov. I've liked Yougov for a long time. I don't like thinking that they're to blame for anything worse than attracting boring surveys. (:Which of these brands have you ever bought?" "None of them. I don't buy that kind of thing. I don't hang out with people who do." "Which of these brands do you have a good impression of?" "Aaarrrggghhh." The kind of thing that must be expected if you eke out an Internet writer's pathetic income by taking surveys online.) 

I still think Yougov need to be reminded of the potential danger to them in allowing clients to snoop into the identities, locations, ages, of survey respondents. I want them to think long and hard about the possibility that they've allowed people with criminal intentions to find out where I live, and then I want them to redesign their system so that, if a client tries to sneak in a question like "What is your date of birth?" in a survey, the computer flashes red for thirty seconds and then displays a message like "You may not attempt to identify individuals taking these surveys. You are allowed to ask in which decade respondents were born."

Or they could simply say, "For any question you ask the respondent, the respondent is entitled to a verified answer to that question by you. So, if you ask for anyone's address, your real name and home address must be displayed in full-sized type above the quesdtion." That tends to motivate people to withdraw any inappropriate questions, online, in a hurry.