• Tag Archives fear

  • “We’re this pack of honeybees just working away.” Ray Garcia

    Posted on by The Thousand Yard Stare Comment

    Gosh what an exhausting day.

    The bees finally showed up. Woo-hoo!

    The brakes of the UPS truck creaked as it glided to a halt. I peeked out the window as the driver walked slowly to the door, holding the box up so he could see the precious cargo. In the middle of a conference call, I answered the door with a headset and laptop in hand.
    “I’ve been delivering packages for about ten years. I’ve delivered live lobsters, but this is the first time I’ve ever delivered bees.”

    Me: “Oh really?”

    This is what he was carrying. As is. Pretty cool, huh? The scary part:  Those bees were mad. Aaaangry. Very irritated.  Hearing about a 1000 angry bees in your home is a little unnerving.

    10177328_10100099028543986_3835724645344448221_n

     

    As soon as I brought them in, I put down some newspaper and sprayed them with some sugar water.  They immediately calmed down. Holy crap! It worked!

    It was go time.

    I suited up with my army surplus mechanic’s coveralls.  Sure they were green, and the bees could mistake me for a bear, or a bear shaped object and sting me to death. I’d take my chances. I put on my pith helmet and the bee veil and gloves.

    Game time.

    I put on my big boy pants, swallowed my nervousness and grabbed the bees.  I ignored the book, went straight from memory. Pulled the queen out, checked to make sure she was good (she was) and then pinned her to the first bar. The first rush of bees when I pulled the queen and feeding can…..uh…..*gulp*. Since there’s a giant mound of bees, the sugar spray really only gets on the outside of the screen. The bees on the inside were pretty excited.

    Gathered my wits, installed the bees….uh….and I left the feeder inside. D’OH!

    Ran inside with no bees trailing and got the feeder. None of the bees were really in attack mode. I didn’t get stung, I think they were more curious than anything. Pretty interesting.
    1010381_10152384697689452_4495841266411516487_n

    So I’m also supposed to start a bee log.

    So here goes:

    Day 1.
    Installation.

    No comb (obviously)
    Refilled feeder once, they had emptied completely after installation while I was at work
    Weather: 80 degrees, up to 90 during the day on the day of install.
    Blooming: Only noticed dewberry bush in the backyard blooming. All front yard quit blooming about a week and a half ago (during one of the cold snaps) Fruit trees in neighbors yard aren’t doing anything yet.
    Combs: None
    What is in the Combs?: N/A
    Swarming?: N/A
    Queen Issues: None, queen healthy, removed cork, they should be eating away.
    Celebratory Beer after massive adrenaline rush from installation of bees: Revolver Blood and Honey

     


    📂This entry was posted in Bee Log 📎and tagged

  • “One little natural disaster, a refinery fire, any type of instability in various parts of the world could push us over that edge.” Mantill Williams

    Posted on by The Thousand Yard Stare Comment

    I have been taking a CERT training class for the past few weeks. This class is helpful in my ongoing “man maintenance” where I become (theoretically) more capable of self support in times of crisis. I got to put out a fire two weeks ago – with a fire extinguisher.  How many times before that had I actually used a fire extinguisher in my life? ZERO.

    When I was a kid, my father thoughtfully installed a small fire extinguisher into my my closet in my bedroom.  I never used it – and rarely thought about it.  My paranoia did not extend so much to fires.  It was fully occupied with fear of monsters under my bed, ghosts/dead things/aliens in my closet, and how I would actually escape a fire from the second floor of my home.  Yes, fire was involved, but my fear wasn’t of the fire – it was of breaking my legs jumping out the window. I recall at some point asking for a fold down ladder, but I was talked out of it. “Just hang on to the ledge and fall, you don’t need to jump”

    Early on, my closet was a refuge from light when anxiously clutching a glow-in-the-dark dinosaur skeleton obtained from a box of Fruity Pebbles.  Later, however, the small door that led from the closet to the attic taunted me with the fear that I might be dragged in there by something unimaginable. Having watched Creepshow, Poltergeist, and Close Encounters of the Third kind – I know it was possible.

    The last time I checked the fire extinguisher, it was dead (never used). Just writing this brings back a memory of an “educational” film that they made us watch in elementary school (Parker if I recall). They were illustrating fire’s effect on blood. They heated up a hotplate and when it got nice and toasty dripped some blood on it. It spattered and boiled nicely (as expected). Shock therapy for budding pyromaniacs. It scared me, but never stopped me from burning matches endlessly.

    I bought two fire extinguishers today. Home safety – yeah!


    📂This entry was posted in Main 📎and tagged

  • “Up to now, the worst fears have not been realized. He has found another style.” Hans Kung

    Posted on by The Thousand Yard Stare Comment

    I spent a little time yesterday figuring out the theme song to “I Dream of Jeannie” on my guitar –

    From there, I moved on to “The Munsters” –

    All in all, it wasn’t a long exercise – it took me about 10 minutes each song to figure and match the horn and guitar parts. Of course, the horn parts were actually a lot more fun to play.

    It was nice to be laying hands on a guitar. I haven’t done that in a while.

    Playing TV theme songs took me back quite a ways – I used to have a small collection of TV Theme tapes. As a child, I wasn’t interested in “guitar” music per se – as the 80’s lollygagged around with synthesizers and electronic drums, the guitar was relegated to 70’s fuzz rock. Speaking of which, back in the 90’s,  my mother told me that she was “scared” of the Stray Cats. Seriously? Scared? The upshot of this is that I was not exposed to very many guitar based kinds of music in my youth. As I have previously blogged, my first record albums (you know, the large black plastic disks) were Meet The Beatles and Beach Boys.

    As I’ve been unemployed a while, and I always said, “If I had more time, I’d be practicing guitar a meeelion hours a day!”.  Of course, that didn’t happen. Neither did working out, but I digress.  So in following flickr and several Facebook accounts, I find myself relatively irritated when I see pictures of teenagers in bands.

    I think to myself, “Why didn’t I ever do that?”.  As I meditated on writing this entry, I think I stumbled onto the reason….well, kind of.

    When I started playing guitar, I lived in New Zealand. As many teen bands have in common, “not much else” was going on in the area. This left them plenty of time to practice their craft.  As such, I spent many hours playing along with the radio there (80’s – true), E-A-D, etc, etc. BUT, shortly after I started those lessons, I moved back to the US.

    As my guitar teacher would say (ask him! I’m still friends with him after 20 years….) I never applied myself. BUT, I still had a great ear.  And I also had a multitude of things to distract me from practicing my guitar. Because of my good ear, in one of my early lessons, I tabbed out a Jimi Hendrix solo (Wind Cries Mary?) by ear, but couldn’t play it.  My guitar teacher was like, “Whaaaa?”.  What a waste of my talent.

    Here’s a picture of a guitar that I somehow convinced my mother to purchase early in my playing career ($599?) – an Ovation Celebrity. With a locking nut, floyd rose, and reverse tuners, I was WAYYYY out of my league in terms of even knowing what to do with it.  I barely touched it.

    So my later teen years I spent countless hours in poolhalls. Not so much that I won any money hustling pool, but it was a good distraction.  I beat myself up for a few years, wondering ‘what if I had spent less time in the poolhalls, and more practicing guitar?’.  Having all this time off recently told me all I needed to know – that I’m too distracted for my own good. Even if I hadn’t been playing pool, I wouldn’t have been hustling on the guitar.

    While I can regret not having ever really put myself out there (beyond a few open mics), I can rest easy that had I the chance as a teen, I still wouldn’t have done it right.  Seclusion (New Zealand) would have been the answer.

    To my relief though, I can still write, I can record, and I can somewhat play.

    And I’ve still got a good ear.


    📂This entry was posted in Main 📎and tagged