Getting Away

It was so great to have the May long weekend in a cabin on the beach. This is getting to be our regular getaway and I'm wishing we could get up there more often. The more we go, the easier it is to just immediately get into relaxation mode once we arrive. It's best to travel on the Friday so you can get your groceries at the farmer's market first thing Saturday morning. The local food scene there is growing--more so in selling local ingredients than in actually getting local food in the restaurant scene, although we missed the chance to go to a restaurant called Locals in Courtenay because they were closed most of the days we were there. Anyway, I have some food adventures to tell of spot prawns and crack pie, so I have to get my photos in order to present them to you. We had some good feasts!

RIP

My computer died. My wee lovely laptop. (Firstborn one.) Yes I am going through the seven stages of grief, thanks for asking.

The report on our holiday up island with photos will have to be postponed. Today I ate bright orange red salmonberries on the way to UBC farm. Saw a robin take a yellow one off the bush in flight and flip it back down into her throat after two tries. A red squirrel attempted to steal my lunch. A bumble bee robbed honey from a frame of honeycomb I was showing to the students. A pair of eagles wittered in the trees. One boy was curious enough to touch the electric fence and learned a lesson he could teach the others. "I'll never do that again."

Courting Chaos

This afternoon I went to the Kits library and searched for books by Diana Beredford-Kroeger. They were supposed to have two that were in but when I went to look for them they were gone. Ditto for a book by E. O. Wilson. It was present in the system but not on the shelf. So I decided to bug the librarian and she was happy to go take a look for me. She'd heard the interview with the botanist/biochemist as well. She was also a fan of E.O. Wilson who by coincidence has written the intro to Bereford-Kroeger's upcoming book. I'm onto something good here. I tell the librarian I have the feeling someone else heard the interview and has the books on a table somewhere in the library. I keep staring at a pile of books by a man reading magazines. After a while he starts to feel my eyes on him. The librarian goes to the trouble of ordering me all the books I'm wanting, then figures I actually made a mistake transcribing the code for the Wilson book. I take another look and it is there. Meanwhile the librarian told me she was harassed for two hours on Sunday after booking an online air ticket that seemed to have disappeared. "It's the same thing," she says. "The computer said it was there but it was not really there." As I was about to leave I looked at the pile of books I was obsessing over. Both the books I wanted were right there just where my spider senses had been tingling. I have them now and I am happy.

Before making dinner I listened to the podcast three times as I cleaned the house with a natural cleanser containing citrus oils which makes me feel bright and happy. "Is it toxic?" my son asks. "No, completely natural," I say. "Toxic," he says. My mom says I've never been a great housekeeper. Well, she said it behind my back to my partner actually, so I am really making an effort to clean the house.

I am also very excited to be courting chaos with A for a performance in the fall. Ideas are percolating.

The other coincidence is that I turned to a page in the E. O. Wilson book written with Bert Hölldobler called The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies that talks about the patterns honey bees use to choose which cells they are going to lay eggs in, which they will put pollen and which honey. He describes a formula that helps create order out of a seemingly random and chaotic process. More on this later, but this is one of the burning questions in my beekeeping mind these days.

My New Hero

My ears perked up this morning when I heard that The Current on CBC Radio was going to feature an interview on the healing properties of hawthorn trees. The woman was Diana Beredford-Kroeger. She's Irish, speaks Gaelic and was brought up learning Druidic knowledge. Now she's a botanist and she writes about the healing potential and power of trees. She's about to publish a new book, but check out the podcast of the interview. It's fantastic!

From the CBC website: (May 18, 2010)
"Pt 3: The Global Forest - The potentially powerful and altogether untapped healing properties of trees. We all know trees give us oxygen, food and fuel. But according to Diana Beresford-Kroeger, some of them -- the Hawthorn for example -- have powerful healing properties."

A Fresh Start

My mood flipped into the sanguine after planting pea sprouts at the garden at city hall with M. Gardening and talking to people who love it is very therapeutic. I especially like gardening in a place outside my back yard for some reason. It takes me out of myself and my petty problems. The world seems more possible now. A possible, even probable world. We gave away some pea sprouts to another gardener and even had a few to chew on. M pronounced them "nutty".

I found some mini burger buns and made sliders for dinner with sliced Campari tomatoes, avocado and cheddar. Then P shared his coconut raspberry Zotter birthday bar with us. What a treat.

I'm itching to see the blue whale skeleton at UBC. They're having a preview this weekend but we'll be away. The museum opens this fall and I'm really looking forward to it.

Another Fine Day

Brunch with friends at Trafalgars buzzing with creative ideas. A merry meeting with mead and local beekeepers. Dozing in and out of daydreams with a Cotswolds mystery in my hands. Life is good. I hope you all have days like this.

I had a dream last night about performance art anxiety. The critics did not have a happy ending, so I woke up in a pretty good mood. Sometimes schadenfreude rules!

I'm still feeling like I'm performing under water these days. You probably heard the horror story about the family in Quebec that was swallowed by a giant mud slump as they watched tv in their basement. My brain is having minor slumps these days, collapsing in on itself. One becomes afraid of movement. This is normal. This is annoying. How can an entire family disappear in the space between a commercial and the start of the third period of a hockey game? No one is safe. I can't dwell on this.

The smell of basil from the kitchen is overwhelming. Pungent and alive.

Snap Out of It

Although it's a gorgeous day outside and I have nothing to complain about I am feeling very weary in my bones today. I really need a change from the routine and a holiday. Thank goodness we are heading to the beach next weekend. I feel like right now I'm dragging my butt, but it's my honey's birthday so I gotta make him a nice dinner party. I think I'll make proper deviled eggs for appies, with a beet salad and a kind of salmon salad niçoise. We're going to have Riesling, which I've been craving since the weather turned nice.

We discovered Breyer's Banana Cream Pie ice cream. Have you had it? It's dangerously delicious! It even has swirls of graham cracker crust in it. I'll have to make something to go with it, like a simple white cake.

The lupins are blooming, or just about to bloom. Same with the irises. Our queen right hive is making lots of gorgeous honey, but I'm sad to say our quiet hive seems to be failing. At this point I think we need a diagnostic before we decide to combine the two hives.

I cleaned all the junk off the dining room table which is where all unfiled objects tend to end up in our household. If only I could keep it that way. There should really be a magic machine where all indefinite articles go in one end and come out sorted, completed, fixed out the other end. Somehow our dining room table never seems to be able to perform that operation.

I am moving around a lot in my dreams, summer camp, university, airplane travel. I wake with a vague tug of fear that there are items I have left behind.

Honeysuckle Moms

Happy Mother's Day!!!! On Sunday I was treated to a heart-shaped card with three coupons. One was for a "specially laid breakfast in bed" (kidlet's choice of words), one uninterrupted nap, and one back massage. As you can see, I was given the happy meal right off the bat, which was great and then I read a bit and took my nap. When I woke up I was treated to high tea at Shaktea.



I love the simple egg sandwich made with a smear of hoisin sauce. All the savory items have an Asian touch, which I really like.

Of course there also has to be a scone, a pastry, a square, a chocolate and a macaron. Lovely.

Mmmm, peanutty. After calling my mom, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden, potting up plants I bought recently and ones from last year that need more room. I devoured a samosa for supper and called it a day.

Today I see the honeysuckle have begun to bloom. The lilacs are still wonderfully fragrant and the giant red poppies have started to unfurl.

Also

We are finally getting some truly seasonal weather today with a light breeze and full on sunshine. This is the first day of the year I think I've gone out in a t-shirt. It's been a hard week for the kinder, with his twisted ankle still not better and a loose tooth that is making eating really difficult. Today we found out his best friend is moving, so a pretty sad week all around. Meanwhile we are trying desperately to save the school he is going to from some devastating staff cuts. Sometimes life is just hard work.

I went to a plant sale in the neighborhood and bought a really nice angelica plant, some shallots, and lily of the valley. The K and C and I headed off to do a talk on the two block diet club at the Stone Soup Festival which was a lot of fun. It was perfect weather for the festival, and a local group was selling food to raise money for Ecuador, but the lineup for pupusas was so long we ended up at Sweet Cherabim for samosas instead.

I took my lemon verbena plant outside today and trimmed off a few branches so right now I am drinking iced lemon verbena tea with honey, lemon juice and peach juice mixed in.

I lived with a Greenlander for a while and I was just thinking about an expression he used to say, "also... aslo..." instead of "yeah..." or "uh huh...". It's a strangely comforting expression in English. I wonder what it is in Danish. It's as if it means "I'm adding your thoughts together for you." It's affirmative and gentle. Sometimes I say it to myself as my thoughts crawl up on top of one another. "Also... Also..." It makes room in your brain for reality to enter at a pace you can handle. Maybe it's a way to make worries spread out over time so they don't seem so devastating. More like ripples than waves.

The Kids are in Bed

It occurred to me that the bees are beginning to resent the white suits. So today I took the risk and opened up the frisky hive without one. First, I hammered a bunch of frames together while listening people reminisce about the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980. I popped in the plastic foundations and then I took off the two top boxes of the hive which had no bees and put on a queen excluder before replacing them with boxes of full frames. Now I feel much better about the whole thing and they can get back to work. It was warm and sunny at 1 pm and they were going with gusto. I'm worried about the other hive. We think they might be queenless, but they were going pretty well today too. Now the clouds have come back already.

A bee wants to build a hive, sustain a hive, build a life around a queen. It's just us stupid humans that get in the way!!!! We are part of nature, but we separate ourselves from it and interfere with it, trying to make their life fit into our egotistical view of the way we want our lives to be. This struggle became very personalized and internal with me these two past weeks. It's been a profound experience. I like learning from other people's mistakes better than learning from my own! J joked about beekeeping being like having children--these past two weeks, that's certainly been true, especially when you have a hive with a rebel buzz. Today I sat and thought about our two children--how different they are and wondered what kind of future they will have. Que sera sera.

Parents in the Schools

I've been thinking a lot lately about parents in the schools. How can we make that happen in a productive way that strengthens the school ecosystems? I'm particularly interested in how we can get parents in the schools teaching kids about where their food and water comes from. I do this through art, but there is a bigger question here of actually having a curriculum that includes parent involvement on this level. How do we get more parents to feel they are welcome in the schools? Are they welcome? Would teachers rather be left alone?

As a parent who is also an artist in the schools I think that it's time for some curriculum reform. We've got to make room for more experiential learning in our classrooms.

Soggy Party

The skies have opened on us again and wouldn't your know, it rained on our garden party at city hall. On the one hand, I was relieved it was not swarming weather. I needed a break because the bees in both hives tried to take off yet again yesterday. They are very twitchy. J and I caught them just in time, sprinkling the faces of both hives with sugar water, re-uniting the queen with her hive by unceremoniously tipping her into the middle of it and blocking off most of the hive entrance of the calm hive to help prevent the raiding that was going on. I think the calm hive is not fond of living next to the twitchy hive and they may abandon us too. So... I am on swarm watch and trying to learn every swarm prevention measure there is. It's good to be doing this deep learning, but when I look at the photos of the bees swarming I get all anxious again. The bees were quiet today. I am thankful for that.

Today was tinged with a different kind of anxiety--a bit of performance anxiety with a bit of maquillage malfunction (I tried a new white makeup which was crap) and getting to the venue anxiety (I thought the cab got lost). We had some lovely singing and music at the garden party--good company, good snacks. The garden is really starting to look great. It's so good to have this happening at our city hall. Brian Campbell gave me some anti-swarming tips, the queen bee made some new friends and when it really started to pour at 3:30 pm we packed it up and called it a day.

Bleary Eyed and Droopy Tailed

Well, I had a hell of a time trying to go to sleep last night with the buzz of imaginary bees in my ears and the ghost of them swimming and swarming in front of my eyes. In short, I had an anxiety attack and swarming became a metaphor for madness. It's trying to contain this energy that is really quite wild and ultimately beyond one's control that is disturbing. You begin to carry that feeling in your gut. The thing that really bothers me is that I know that that ball of bees that established itself on the neighbor's plank will not move and sure enough, I checked this morning and they are still there.

I like our small hive because it is calm and docile, though at one point yesterday they became quite disturbed as well and I think they may have been raided for honey by the bigger hive, or as Cal says part of the bigger hive may have tried to move in. This is very frustrating. I think the thing to do would be to requeen the larger hive, but I'm going to have to go to the experts on this one. We could try to re-unite the queen in the swarm with her hive because I think they are without queen now. The irony is that tomorrow I am playing the part of the queen bee at the city hall garden party. Sunday May 2, 1-4 pm behind City Hall. Come and check out the garden beds and join in the fun.