Around the Horn

With lower infection rates and one vaccine on board, we decided to grab some dinner and a beer at Around the Horn Brewery after working all day at the cabin.  We safely sat outside well away from anyone else and enjoyed good food, beer and some cards.  It felt great to be out.

 

Life at the cabin...

This is life at my house....

We are at the cabin and I am working.  Jim is outside doing all kinds of projects.

He comes in and says, "hey, can you take a break?"

And I am thinking, "oh yea" because I think he has found a cool lizard or bug, or he an idea for new trees, or he has some new camping plans....

Nope!

I had to go help bleed the steering on the boat.  I had to hold the bottle of fluid and turn the steering wheel a thousand times.

I wish I would have said I was busy.

Bee Season 2021

Bee season 2021 is our second attempt at keeping bees.  The first year was a disaster with losing our queen.  So this year we decided to do two hives so we have a back up.  We also decided to go pick up our bees instead of mailing them because we had all kinds of shipment issues last year.

So on Saturday morning we left the house at 7 am and drove to Orland for a drive thru bee pick up event.  Normally the company has a big festival but with covid they did it safe and just had everyone drive through.  It was about a 6 hour round trip event.

We got two bee buses each with their own queen.  We waited until it was cool and started to install them. 

It was a huge disappointment to find out the the first queen was DEAD.  We had to quickly regroup and close up the bee bus and abort the installation.  The plan is to have a new queen overnighted to us on Monday and try again.

The bee bus above is the one with the dead queen.  This is us trying to decide what to do.

We moved onto the second bus and began installing in the yellow hive.  We are happy to report that Queen Freddie Mercury is alive and well and it looked like a bunch of healthy worker bees.   

We dumped all the bees in, hung Freddie in her cage and now we wait to see if they release her and accept her.

This is the cage that shows the dead queen.   When you add the queen to the hive, you pull off the pink cap and then the other bees will eat thru the candy that is placed in the opening.  Once the candy is eaten, the queen is freed.  And in the time it takes to eat the candy, they come to accept the queen.

And here she is - dead.  The white dot shows that she is a queen from 2021.  They use a different color each year.

Stay tuned to see what happens with her replacement.  

Dog Day of Spring

Dash (middle front) is staying at our house for a week while his mama has another litter of service dog pups. Dash is Astrid's (middle back) half brother.  While at our house, we invited Jovie (far right) over for a play date.  Jovie is Heather's new breeder that she is caring for for the service dog org that she works with.  Jovie's brother, Perry, who is friends with Hops was not there because he has a torn ACL.  A good time was had by all....except for Perry.

Easter 2021

Easter was weird this year with what we hope is near the end of the pandemic.  The grandparents are all fully vaccinated and the rest of us are partially vaccinated so we took the risk and got together  - but did so separately.

We did Saturday at my folks and Sunday Jim's folks came over.   It felt great to be together even if we had to wear masks.

 After brunch, Grace helped Grandpa Roy look up old friends on the internet.  They went home early to get ready for Roy's procedure the next day to get a port put in for dialysis.

English Muffins

I made sourdough English muffins today.  It was a super interesting process because there is no yeast and you cook them in a frying pan.  I made some that were really thin but others that were thick.  

They were delicious and I will definitely make them again.  I will play around a bit with the thickness and the heat for cooking.