Daily Adventures

Uhm.  Yeah.

I fall prey to the impulse to mostly write then things are good, not when things are bad, or when things I decided don’t quite turn out the way I’d wanted them to.

But that’s also a part of life and not blogging about the bad stuff means that I’m only bragging about the good.  Bleh.

( So. )

Sometimes I think he's at school... or at work... or off to band practice... or at a game.  And it feels all right that he's gone, and then I remember, and it still feels all right.

He's happy, he's safe, he's with a family he finds fantastic in a situation and culture he's learning about at a massive rate, and it was like he was just in the room with us, showing us around his new house and showing us the compact city just outside his window in a video call with us.  And then he's gone again when the call is done, but we know he's doing well and learning hand over fist and loving the situation he's landed in and it's all good.

And, just like when he's away at school, at work, or even when he went off to Europe, Chicago, or other places on his down, I get back to doing all the things that I want to do with my life.  There will be more of that.  He will be back in four months, but then he'll be off to college and the rest of his life, so I get on with mine.
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And going to BigBadCon at the end of this week.

I'm a little sad that I had to miss the last of Isabel's visit to our home to get here, but I think I really needed some time away to evaluate and think about things.

My art show had gone quite well, at Mimi's studio. There are photos of my show space on Flickr, and John and I helped Mimi and Paul clean out a beautiful little breezeway that had amazing light for the display space. It was small, and the paintings were pretty crowded in there, but people got to see them, which was the whole point of it all.

There was even a very nice little table/desk where I could put all my painting materials so that I could demonstrate how it worked or allow others to try out the ink, brushes, and paper. I had an outlet so I could bring a water boiler and make herbal teas and it was amazingly nice because the weather during the show was really rainy for Colorado, days of rain, which is really unusual. But it meant that a lot of people came to the show.

I sold three paintings, and nearly all the art cards I had made. They were just blank greeting cards with pictures of my art on the front, but it was like everyone could bring a small, portable bit of my art home with them. Several of the ladies said that they were framing their little masterpiece to enjoy it in their homes. That bemused me, but it was cool to know that they enjoyed them so much.

I also got leads for three art shows. One I hung the Friday before I left for here, at the Salud Clinic here in Longmont, it's a free clinic for low-income people, and they really needed some art and beauty for their waiting rooms and some of the staff's offices. Nine paintings went there that would otherwise just gather dust, so people are enjoying them.

Another show will be for the Denver Taiko group when they come to the Longmont Museum. I get to hang half a dozen paintings, bring my art cards, and demonstrate before and after the performance. It'll be exposure to people, and some small sales, perhaps. The third show will be at our church, which should be fun, as always. There is a registry at ARTS Longmont that should allow for more such endeavors, and I now have the paintings for them, what with getting ready for this show.

The Saturday before leaving I was at a Women's Retreat with the women of our church, and it was really good, but I, and two of my carpool mates, had to leave a little early so that I could get to the 4:30 performance of Jet's marching band. They'd decided not to do a competition in order to practice the whole show all the way through. So they did that, and I got to see it and eat at the taco bar after. *laughs* That was worth doing.

On Sunday, I met up with Simon Bisson and Mary Brascombe for breakfast with my family, here in Longmont, at Lucille's. It was so amazing to get to see them and talk with them! And even better Mary pointed me at a Cloud of FPGAs that can be rented, accessed, and reconfigured on the fly. That will be interesting to explore. The rest of the day and Monday was mostly taken up with packing things, playing with the gamer boys as I was able, and dealing with a surprise snowstorm, which shouldn't have surprised us 'cause whenever Isabel visits it snows. But I had to close up the bee hive, to keep the drafts down, and so that the girls could keep themselves warm. I also found that the hive was so heavy with honey that I couldn't even think of shifting it into a sunnier spot, which was probably for the best.

So I'm kind of tired, still, and trying to catch up in hotel rooms, which isn't terrible, but isn't that easy, either.

Carl, as always, has been an amazing host and we've planned things down to a T using a wiki page that we've changed and edited as plans have formed up. Yesterday I got in, which no problem on the flight, and we went to eat at Chef Chu's with the usual suspects, in this case Earl, Cat, Trip, Chrisber, Christy, and Theo. The food was, as always, amazing, and the company was fun and lucid on many subjects.

From there Carl and I headed to Santa Cruz, and we stayed there last night in anticipation of meeting up with Gretchen and perhaps Brad today.

The previous Wednesday I went to a little spin-in with four ladies and we dyed wool from the setup that the lady there had. But one of the other ladies was thinking about keeping bees as she’d inherited a top bar hive from a family that had simply neglected it, thinking that it was kinder to not bother the bees.

The bees had filled the hive, getting past a stopper that was supposed to keep them from the rest of the hive, and building on all the bars past that. And when they’d run out of space, they’d left. So I really wanted to make sure that my colony had plenty of space to build and store honey.

( So I went in and took some... )

When we first set up the hive, it had to be away from the house because we were replacing the roof and the solar panels on the south side of the house had to come down before the roof could be put on. So we put the hive on the North side of the yard, facing South to catch the sun in the entrance on most days.

But the entrance also faced the biggest part of our backyard lawn, and the flight path for the bees was right over the grassy area where all the kids would play if we had a party again in our backyard. So we had to move the hive.
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One of the interesting things was that when I first started down the competitive path, I lost about 15 pounds of weight from my high of about 172 lbs, during the worst of the stressful days of moderating. Then, over the course of the six months of competitive, I got down to about 150 lbs.

I'm not a small woman to begin with, I'm 5'9", and I did and still do construction, so 150 was kind of frightening. The only time I'd ever hit that weight since my late 20's was also during my moderatorship, when I'd gone four months on extreme stress and got to the point where I came down with vertigo before I could actually stop and rest for a week. I regained my weight fairly quickly with actual sleep and food.

I did that again.

Within two weeks of quitting competitive, where I was cooking again, lifting again, and went from doing about 3000 steps on average per day to doing about 7500 a day now, I got back up to 155. Now I'm at 158 and steady with the usual daily fluctuations as I had been before all these adventures. The interesting thing is that even with the weight gain, I still fit into my skinny clothes, so I suspect that a lot of the weight regaining was mostly muscle mass that had atrophied when I wasn't moving around all that much and forgetting to eat. I went from getting breathless just going for a walk to being able to do my usual three mile walk easily.

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Murdoch's called last week to say that the bees would be in town on May 1st, and that I'd have 24 hours to pick them up. Then yesterday, Sunday, they called to say that people could pick them up Sunday afternoon/evening as well as Monday; but since I wasn't actually expecting them, I didn't get the message until today. And they said that we could pick them up until 5pm today.

So we went there a little before 2pm, as I had 911 all morning. It was kind of a rough set of incidents, including one with a suicidal father whom the dispatchers called directly to get him out of the house without weapons... that worked out; but it was odd to listen through.

( But it was good to be with John and getting the girls. )

Went in today to put the MiteAway strips on the top bars of the bottom of the two brood boxes. I also took the feeder off and wanted to put the super back on with the emptied frames so that the the bees could take the leftover honey off of them.

And when I opened it up, I found very very few bees in the box. The top box was practically empty. The honey in the feeder was about half gone, and while there were a few bees up there, there weren't that many. It was a shock given how many bees there were earlier this month.

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The girls have been very productive, indeed... and I've been kind of remiss about actually recording everything.

In July, on the 25th, I actually pulled four frames, or one and a quarter gallons of honey, from the bottom of the two supers I had on the hive, and I swapped the positions of the supers, so that they'd work on the "lower" and half-full super before they worked on the upper one. John and I scraped clean the four frames, and the next morning I put them all back in to let the bees clean them off.

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My child is far more responsible than I am. I think.

This afternoon, when he was mowing the lawn, he told me, "Mom, you should really plant the tomato plants. You keep saying you should, so you might as well do it."

So I did.

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