Day #96 Cleaning Out My Closet

Cats wear fur, bees wear fuzz and wings, people wear -- well, as far as I can see it, we have way too many choices. A dozen or so years ago I visited a long-lost cousin in Tennessee, and she showed me through her house. Her closet was the size of my living room. I felt completely overwhelmed. My clothes closet was half the size of her linen closet. How can anyone ever choose when there are so many possibilities available?

Still, even with relatively few choices, I've found that sometimes I put an outfit on, only to sigh and replace it with one I'm more comfortable in. I read once that we wear 20% of our wardrobe 80% of the time. I think that's right. Last week, when I was talking with my Master Mind partner, I decided that I would delete a quarter of the clothes in my closet -- all the ones I don't like wearing anyway.

I went through my closet and pulled out everything that I didn't absolutely love to wear. Loaded it all in the back seat of my car to take to Goodwill. And there it still sits, since the ice is so bad I can't get to Goodwill. Or anywhere else.

Things will melt eventually, and in the meantime, my closet has in it only what I will wear with joy.

Of course, this whole past week I've been wearing nothing but sweats. When one is snowed in, it doesn't make sense to dress up.

A quarter of my cousin's closet would fill a small U-Haul. Have you cleaned out your closet lately?

BEEattitude for Day # 96:

       Blessed are those who live simply, for they shall not be confused. 

One thing Fran is grateful for right now:

       All the room I have.     

http://www.franstewart.com

Day #30 Digging under the driveway

When Brant Keiser from Keep Smiling Plumbing came here to replace a dead toilet last Friday, he noticed that my house, built in 1985, still had the old brittle horrible blue poly pipe running from the water main to the inside of the house. He saw it because he was down in the crawl space checking out my water heater that hadn't been working well. He recommended Jeff Guinn who owns Bulldog Plumbing. Brant does plumbing inside houses. Jeff works outside. Anyway, Jeff came over right away and gave me an estimate for replacing the blue stuff. He came back Monday to dig under the driveway and down to the front of my house, bore a hole through my foundation, and connect the new pipe. Whew! I'm happy to say it all went well, especially considering the fact that on Monday, just before Jeff got here, the outside pipe sprung a leak. If all this flap hadn't happened, I'd be swimming in a sea of mud.

Blue poly has a life expectancy of 7 to 14 years. Mine lasted 25. Hallelujah!

The other good news is that I had an opportunity to clean out a lot of the stuff in my garage (Goodwill, here I come!) to make room for the new water heater. Brant said a water heater had no business being in a crawl space. I trust my plumber, and I'm glad he's the one toting toilets and water heaters around, so I don't have to learn how to do it.

Speaking of heavy equipment, on the toilet day, Friday, I had three trees removed. One had fallen across my power line; one had obviously already been dying since most of its leaves fell off in June, and the third one was leaning precariously over my roof. E-Z Out Tree Service did a great job. The logs that remain, because I asked for them, have a gorgeous sunburst pattern of dead wood in the center of each of them.

With my new cell phone, I took some pictures of the wood, but now I can't figure out how to get the photos out of my camera and into my computer. My granddaughter says I can't email them to myself because I don't pay extra to have text messaging capability. And I don't have a little USB doohickie. Technology makes our lives a whole lot easier -- except when I don't know how to use it.

What does this have to do with bees? Well, it makes me glad I don't have the bees yet, because I'd hate to think of any of them being run over by the heavy equipment the workers had to use. I know, that's stretching it a bit, to make a connection like that... but I can't think of anything else to say about bees right now. I'm too busy contemplating my weary checkbook.

BEEattitude for Day # 30:

       Blessed are those who drive slowly in residential neighborhoods, for they shall keep us bees safe.

One thing I’m grateful for right now:

       The sunlight filtering through the many healthy trees I have left.

Day #29 My new end table

Imagine this:


Rubber Duck Yellow Hive from H&L Bee Farm

                      








Imagine it sitting in my dining area where I have to walk around it every time I want to go to the kitchen.




Now imagine it sitting in my living room as an end table. Much better, eh? It will have to sit there only until late March or early April, when the bees arrive.

What did I do with the previous end table?
             I'm taking it to Goodwill tomorrow.

What will I do when I lose this end table?
             Buy another hive - maybe a blue one, so I'll be ready when my bees outgrow the yellow hive.

BEEattitude for Day # 29:

       Blessed are they who can laugh at their furniture, for they shall not be tied to meaningless things. 

One thing I’m grateful for right now:

       The new gate on my back deck.

Day #4 (only 596 to go)

I attended a meeting of the Gwinnett Beekeepers Club last Tuesday. Since there were so many of us there who had never kept bees, the leaders went through ALL the equipment needed for a beekeeping operation. This is, of course, assuming that one wants to harvest honey. The equipment is for the convenience of the keeper. It is not a necessity for the bees. After all, those critters have been around since before the dinosaurs. We know that because a honeybee, trapped in amber 14 million years ago, recently came to light.

So, they don't really need us, but we sure need them. Think of every fruit or veggie you've eaten in the past twelve months. Not the grains -- wheat and oats and such are pollinated by the wind. The fruit trees and gardens, though, whether huge commercial operations or small back-yard plots, need bees. NO BEES translates to no food for us. I sure don't want to live exclusively on oatmeal and rice and whole wheat bread.

(c) yelloideas photography

The equipment, though. My gosh! I could spend a fortune on this endeavor. Of course, there are ways to cut corners. Instead of spending $63 on a huge white bee suit with built-in elastic straps to seal my pant legs and wrists (so bees won't crawl in there to investigate), I went to Goodwill and spent $8 on some oversized white pants and long-sleeved shirts. I figure two layers of each with something like velcro straps around my wrists and with my socks pulled up over the pant legs will do me just fine. I am NOT going to post a picture of me wearing them, but I figure the bees won't care how silly I look.

Why are beekeeping suits always white? Bees get really curious about dark colors. So if you visit a hive, wear light-colored clothes.

I will invest in a bee veil -- don't want to get stung on my face or neck in case I do something dumb to upset the bees. You see, honeybees are very gentle. Unless they feel threatened, in which case it is their duty to protect the hive. They will literally give their lives to protect the hive and the queen. If a worker bee stings, she dies. So, a $35 bee veil is a good investment. Cheaper ones (that still work well) are half that price. I jsut saved $17!

And a smoker. This is a fat can with a tube-shaped exhaust at the top and a bellows attached on the side. You start some newspaper burning in it, stuff in a bunch of pine needles or other such fuel, close it up, pump on the bellows, and smoke will drift out of the tube. Smoking the bees will calm them. At the meeting we were advised to buy a smoker right away and practice, practice, practice, so that when the time came to calm a suspicious hive, we wouldn't have our smoker go out at the wrong time. $36 for a good basic smoker. Should last for years.

Four dollars will buy me an Italian hive tool and another four for a bee brush. One helps open a hive that's stuck shut with propolis, and the other is for gently brushing bees off a comb when I need to take it away from them.

$22 for a frame holder, a metal doohickey that I can hook over the side of the hive body so that, as I lift out frames to inspect them, I don't have to set them on the ground and risk squashing bees, stepping on the comb, or getting grass or dirt stuck to the foundation.

Gloves are a good idea, and there are styles that range up to $17, but one of the books I read suggested getting some yellow rubber gloves from the household department at the grocery store. They work just fine. Eventually, the goal is to get to where you're comfortable not wearing gloves at all. If you get stung -- refer back to the hive tool. It's good for scraping out the stinger.

I'm up to $143 so far (if I added correctly), and I still don't have the wooden hives or the bees. I'll worry about that later. After all, this is only Day #4.

Beeatitude for Day #4:
Blessed are they who wear light-colored clothes, for we shall not pay any attention to them.