Soooo Slow to Change

We don’t have one of those nice, big, flat TVs. Our TV has a 32″ screen, it’s about 2-feet deep, and it weighs about 300 pounds. We had to call Sharon over here many years ago to help me haul it into the house and lift it into the cabinet where it now lives. It is heavvvvvvvyyyyyy. I dread the day we have to haul it out. We bought it at this time of year…just before the Super Bowl. At the time, we thought we’d never seen a more beautiful picture. And it’s still very nice.

But I’m getting ready for a flat screen. If we get a flat screen that attaches to our wall, we can move the armoire our current TV lives in somewhere else. If we move the armoire, I think our family room will work better.

We’re slow to change with technology, though. This shift may take another few years. And, as Deb’s always quick to remind me every single day, we’re not made of money.

Read Full Post »

Simplify

I’ve been doing a shitty job of keeping TwoHoneys updated. You’d think nothing is going on with the bees. But a lot is going on out there! And a lot is going on regarding my learning curve, Reader. It’s skyrocketing.

You know that we have one established hive; it’s the swarm hive we captured a year ago from my friend Chris and named Amazons. One other hive, a hive that originated from a package of bees we ordered, died over the winter.  This year, we installed two more packages of bees in their own hives, and those bees should do nothing but build comb and raise brood and store enough honey with which they’ll depend on to survive the winter. Those hives are named Tomboys and Girls of Summer.

The Ohio River Valley is in the thick of a honey flow, and I’ve installed three shallow supers on Amazons in which they are building beautiful comb and storing glorious-looking honey. This is the honey we’ll harvest and eat and give as gifts.

Harvesting honey, however, usually requires a honey extractor—which is an expensive piece of spinning equipment. And, as you know, I usually lean toward less equipment…I like to make and bake bread using only my hands and a cookie sheet. I’m leaning that way more and more with the bees.

So, I’ve been mulling over this extractor thing. Do I want to spend about $500 on a piece of equipment I will seldom use? Should I rent one? If I rent one, I’d have to plan when I want to extract honey, then I’ll have to drive a long way to get the extractor, and then I have to clean the thing and return it. I hate that idea. I could borrow an extractor from my friend Christy, but for some reason I hate to borrow stuff like that. And I’d still have to plan when I want to harvest, drive to get the extractor, clean it, return it, and think of some nice way to repay her, etc.

My parents are visiting us soon, and I know they are freaking excited to have some honey. And I want them to enjoy a little bit of it at the time of their visit without all the fuss of an extractor and without my having to spend a lot of time harvesting a big load of honey. It’s a bit too early to do a full-blown harvest. I want to take only a frame or two (or three or four) and get some honey from them and leave the rest alone. So, I’ve been reading and thinking.

Which brought me to a couple of quiet websites that briefly mention a honey-harvesting method called “crush and strain.” I thought, “WHAT?! I’m not about to crush all that honeycomb those bees have worked so damned hard to build because they’ll just have to do it all over again, and I’m not going to make them work their brains out for nothing.” Oh, Reader, I am sooo wrong about so many things. The more I learn, the more sense I get.

Thanks to this video over at Linda’s Bees, I have now decided to crush and strain all of our honey…some when the parents visit and the rest whenever the heck I’m ready.

No fancy, expensive, loud equipment for us. It doesn’t seem natural. I’m going rogue.

Read Full Post »

Who Wants My Old Drill?

Because Deb’s playing in a Big Golf Tournament,  I met Mary for pizza last night and then went to meet Sam, the new puppy. Murphy went with me. It was a gorgeous but very cool night, and it felt really really good to be at Mary’s house. Lots of land, mature trees (I’ve got to find a Shagbark Hickory and plant one right here), two college-aged children who chose to hang out with us, two pigs, a bunch of chickens, dogs, and cats. Murphy was all citified and a bundle of nerves around the pigs, though.

(I remember, Mary, when you first mowed on that tractor. You wore that straw hat. I think I have pictures.)

I liked poking around in the garages, too. I find it interesting that my friends with multiple  garages and storage sheds seldom park their cars in them….cars all line up outside—tractors and motorcycles and skis and bicycles and leftover bricks from the new patio inside.

Well, I’ve been feeling the need to build some shelves and install some pegboard in our garage so I don’t always have to run to the basement for tools. But first I need to buy a better drill. Mine sucks. It’s like a sissy electric screwdriver. I want a drill that will put a hole in a dense piece of wood as if it were butter. And I’m willing to pay for it.

Read Full Post »

I Will Not Dress Up for Dinner

Tommie and I have new golf shoes, and we look very cool on the course. I just kept looking down at my shoes as we all played golf together yesterday thinking, “I LOVE these shoes.”  Of course, I have that new fancy TaylorMade Burner that can really bonk the ball out there, so I may have the overall equipment edge until Tommie replaces her ancient clubs.

Here’s what we’ve always known but rediscovered yesterday: Mary and Deb LOVE golf. They love thinking about it; they love working on their games; they love practice; they love lessons; they love playing; they love replaying every hole in conversation afterward as if we weren’t all there to see it first hand.

Tommie and I love Mary and Deb, so we play, too…and we’re good golfers (okay, we’re VERY good…at least Tommie is). But Tommie and I love to play only about 14 of the 18 holes. After 14 or 15 holes, we’d rather sit on the patio and have a cold drink and eat chips and salsa. Mary and Deb would forget the food and play until it gets too dark to see the ball.

I think we’re planning a little 3-day golf trip to Maggie Valley in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains; but I’ve heard that you have to dress up for dinner in the Maggie Valley lodge, and I’m not going anywhere where I have to dress up for dinner.

Read Full Post »

I’ll Have to Sell a Lot of Honey to Break Even

Patience, patience, patience.  No new bees got installed yesterday. As I understand it, Ohio is a state big into bees; and lots of bee suppliers order their bees from the same outfit out of Georgia. And that outfit decided the weather wasn’t quite right to ship the bees yet. I think they’re coming either today or tomorrow. I don’t know. I just sit here and wait for Chris to call me and tell me what to do next.

And that Chris is working hard to make this fun and manageable for me. He’s given me everything I need for two hives. He’s given me his bees. And everyday I come home to find a few new things he thinks I’ll need on my front porch. But Chris left town yesterday and will be gone for a few days, so if the bees arrive while he’s gone, one of his friends will come over to show me the ropes. I don’t want to be caught ignorant, so I’m reading all about it as fast as I can. And, strangely enough, so is Deb.

Yesterday after work, I headed with the dog out to Hillsboro to buy the bee supplies I still need (and I got a lot of replacement stuff for Chris). Hillsboro is way-the-hell far from here! It took us about an hour or more to get to this place. But there in the back of the huge Higgins Construction Company warehouse on Rt. 50 is a stock of beekeeping supplies that would make your head spin. And a sweating old Mr. Higgins came out from tending his bees in his stinky white coveralls to talk bees with me. His kids run the shop now while he does bee stuff. He’s kind of nutty about it all…certified bee-venom therapist. He stings people with bees to cure allergies and arthritis. Oh boy. I don’t know. I just listened.

There’s a LOT of detail work in this adventure. All the neighbors are into it. Wait till they see me in my new helmet and veil and puffing my smoker.

Read Full Post »

Too Much Fun!

Don’t think for a minute that THAT wasn’t fun!

Yesterday was the BIG RIDE. Around 300 scooterists hooked up and rode 80 miles through city streets, suburbs, hillbilly, and farm country. I can’t explain why this is so much fun for me. Deb just shakes her head. It’s way over the top for her…way too goofy, way too equipment and uniform obsessed…she gets this excited about tournaments, though.

I’m just thrilled that I’ve discovered a whole slew of really really nice people who share this obsession with me. I’m crazy about them. Really. I mean, scooter riders are a different breed than Harley riders. Scooterists are quirky and odd and have smaller egos. I mean, it’s a SCOOTER…how much of an ego can that thing feed?

Better L8 Than Never @ Fernald, 2009

Read Full Post »

Equipment Junkie

I’m a full-blown equipment junkie. There’s no denying it. For instance, once I brought home that first curvy Vespa,  I became blissfully busy buying just the right helmet, the perfectly armored and reflective jacket, the exact tools to carry in the glove box, the one-of-a-kind, head-turning, dark-brown sheepskin seat cover, the camouflage cargo pants. I could go on and on, but then you’d start to sense how really crazy I am about this stuff. Really. Maybe it’s best that you don’t know the degree to which I will succumb.

I dream about it. I spend my waking moments happily absorbed in it. I thumb through books and catalogs and go to specialty stores and pay close close attention to the details. I take my time; I am deliberate. I spend a lot of money this way, too. I just love it. And this sort of obsession makes riding the Vespa (or the bicycle or whatever’s got my happy attention at the moment) all the more fun for me.

And the people I ride with—oh, and we can ride like demons—are the same way. We hang out and talk about this stuff for eons at the Comet after our weekly rides together. We pay attention to one another’s scooters. We recognize one another’s scooters from great distances, and we know the idiosyncratic sounds of the other’s ride. I know when Dave is riding behind me because I know the sound of his muffler. I know Bob’s, too. I know it’ll take Brian a while to kick start that vintage mustard-colored Lambretta. I know Hebe’s mood when he shows up on either the VBB or on the Lambretta or on the P200.

This is getting long. I want to ride my scooter. Damned winter.

I thought I would write about shoes. Which I will do soon. I will say here and now, though, that I cannot tolerate flip flops or anything that requires threading between my toes; Converse low-cut Chuck Taylor’s on the scooter, and Chaco’s all the way in the summertime.

Read Full Post »