Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Getting married.
In case you were wondering, yes. We are still getting married at the end of September though until this last two weeks we have done almost nothing about it. Really, it’s a wedding in two parts, with the most planning needed for the smallest (official) ceremony with the family – so what else do we need to do besides book a place and get an officiator?
Well, of course there’s rings and dresses and wine and food planning and – oh yeah – the marriage license…. which we’ve got on a long list of details we have to check off. Oh, plus we have to choose/write vows that aren’t cheesy or religious or embarassing.
But at least I’ve now got two of my biggest stresses over with – the dress (last weekend), and the rings (ordered yesterday). Because some of you have asked, and because I’m feeling showy – here are pictures of the rings and the dress (thank-you Internet). Now we just have to buy wine, the marriage licence and finish up the vows. Oh, and food for the after ceremony bit. At least it’s a small wedding!
Subscribers. And Amazon.
I’ve noticed recently that notifications haven’t been going out to subscribers which I thought was the result of a wordpress upgrade and my failure to backup some aspect of my old folders. Turns out, it was a database error which only got worse until everything was fully corrupted. Yesterday someone in my collective restored everything, and I noticed last night when I was fooling around with an older post that my post-notifications are working once again!
The post I was fooling around with was an old book review post because I’ve finally decided to take a small step towards monetizing my blogs with the Amazon Associates program. I’m coming clean here so that you know when you purchase a book via one of my Amazon links on this site, I get a credit towards book purchases. That doesn’t mean I’m going to do more book reviews than I already do, or recommend things I normally wouldn’t, but I the links in my reviews and articles will go back to Amazon if you are interested in purchasing the books I talk about. I’m not expecting to get rich by this or anything, but it would be nice to support some of my terrible reading habit through my blogs if at all possible!
Beekeeping 101. (Top-Bar-Hive-Style)
So much going on in the garden and I haven’t had any time to write about it! Things coming out, things going in. I’ve got some new photos coming shortly of the end of July garden so you can check them out in the next day or so. In the meantime, I’ve got beekeeping tales to tell.
Despite my bee swarm disaster earlier this spring, I am still hellbent on having bees in our backyard, but I’ve decided that rather than just taking another swarm on without any preparation or experience (which wasn’t my plan last time, they really were just thrust upon me) I would like to learn a little bit about them first. So I’ve been hunting around for just the right type of course – one that wasn’t full already, and even more difficult, one which incorporated some other methods of beekeeping besides Langstroth. Specifically, I’ve had a bit of a fascination with Top-Bar-Hive beekeeping ever since my friend Kyla introduced me to the The Barefoot Beekeeper
So was I ever tickled to find out that Ward Teulon at City Farm Boy and Brian Campbell at Blessed Bee Farms were offering a Top Bar Hive Course right here in East Vancouver over the weekend! And not only that, my friend Sam and I ended up being the guinea pigs of the workshop and having all Brian’s expertise (and Ward’s top-bar hives) to ourselves for the day.
Brian Campbell runs a Community-Supported-Apiary out in Richmond and is a certified bee-master and master gardener – and without a doubt one of the most knowledgeable people I have ever met on the subject of plants and bees. Additionally, he practices and teaches ethical beekeeping, stressing that while urban hives need management and intervention, it is to assist rather than exploit in the pursuit of healthy urban bees. Which is exactly what I’m looking for in backyard bees – while the honey is nice, I’m more interested in raising the stock of urban pollinators and having a healthy hive.
The course covered bee biology, bee population dynamics, integrated pest management, potential pests and predators (of which we are numero uno) neighbourhood plant survey, and the basics of the top bar hive (plans for these hives are online, so we didn’t talk construction of them much). Plus we had sideline conversations about the politics of commercial beekeeping, the history of beekeeping in North America and a ton of other things. And of course, there was the hands-on part where we donned bee hats and looked into the hive, handled the frames full of wax, honey and bees, did surveys of the brood cells, pollen and honey – and as a “test” – picked up a bee by the wings with our bare hands (drones don’t sting – and they are really easy to tell apart from the workers).
Also, because of a little accident, we ended up eating some honeycomb straight from the hive, though that wasn’t really supposed to be a part of the course. All in all, it was pretty awesome, and I’m pretty sure about two things now:
- I am totally, even more, into having bees in our backyard.
- There is so much to know about beekeeping!
And as much as I’m going to go with top-bar-hive to start (it just seems like good bee practice, and I don’t need 200 pounds of honey), while leafing through a book from Brian Campbell’s library – The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee Culture
In any case, the course was really worthwhile, and I learned enough to get started without being too overwhelmed. Ward was a great host and Brian was such an awesome teacher (he is great at making analogies to explain things, covers the material thoroughly, and doesn’t make you feel stupid when answering your really basic questions – plus he’s really accessible) – that I would highly recommend any of these bee-school courses at Ward’s place. It’s great to be able to get this kind of training only a bike-ride away from my house rather than going all the way out to Langley or Abbotsford as so many of the agri-learning courses are.
I’m going to build my TBH this autumn in preparation for bees next March – and I am more than a little “buzzed” at the prospect!
Around and around.
I’ve been a little off track lately, something about a holiday always knocks the drive right out of me – you know? Hard to get back on the workhorse and all that. Difficult to drag myself to work on such beautiful days when I’d much rather be at the beach or in the woods. Anywhere but the city.
But in another way that off-trackness is good because it’s helping me evaluate what exactly I want to be doing these days. Or at least, what I don’t want to be doing. So we’ll see if it’s just another one of my mercurial knee-jerk moments, or if I really will go ahead and do something different with my life. Only time and opportunity will tell. (Nicely cryptic, eh?)
One thing I do know is that I’ve got talents and skills and I need to be more confident about that rather than talking myself out of every possibility that comes my way. The other thing I know is that I’m feeling a little bit used (or underused) in some quarters these days and I’d rather be putting my energies elsewhere than always waiting for others to make their move.
I’m feeling itchy, I guess. As happy as I am in some areas of my life (home, realtionship, garden, community) my work front just isn’t cutting it at the moment.
Hope and inspiration.
I’m feeling good today. Inspired even. I’ve got a Boulevards Alive meeting tomorrow night, and I’ve been thinking about local community organizing all day. As depressing as Eaarth starts out, I’m just getting to the end and McKibben’s prescription for the future is as hopeful as any I’ve come across: small scale farming, close-knit communities, sane use of technology, an end to energy dependence.
And I’m thinking also about how I broke my writer’s block this morning, after several days of frustration in front of the screen typing the beginnings of various things only to discard them one by one. I decided to come look at my blog and draw something from the past to edit-up… but instead I caught on the 100 things I live for (up above, in the tab) and chose one of those to write a poem about instead (“rescued flowers from a dumpster”). This exercise not only gave me an image and some words to work with, but I felt good recounting where that came from and so nice agitated that now I want to write the other 99 thoughts into verse.
Remarkable isn’t it? The happier, the more hopeful I am, the more productive. Which sortof runs counter to all the subculture I’ve come out of. The outsider culture, the place that said “I’m going to be happy to spite everything!” but never quite made it there, the anger response trained into me. Hard habits to break, but essential to avoiding burnout. Anger and alienation may be a part of where I come from as an activist, but increasingly over the years they have been less and less a motivating factor for me. These days, I gotta admit, I practically leave the room at the first sign of them in political organizing meetings because they feel like such counterproductive states to be making change from.
Many years ago I adopted this Raymond Williams quote as my email signature line: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing” and I still invoke that saying a lot. Perhaps now more than ever because it is so easy to get caught up in the bleakness of a world balanced on an ecological precipice, the landscape burning while world financiers fiddle with our very last chances. I mean, if you want to be depressed and angry – there is certainly a whole lot to be depressed and angry about! But if I stay there too long, I can’t believe there is any possibility of making change so why bother? Why not just indulge myself in tropical holidays and plastic gadgets and forget all the hard work of meetings and organizing and trying to make a little change here and there? Without a little hope, and happiness, and joy and dancing and good giggly neighbours and amazing moments of beauty and cuddling with my sweety…. well there wouldn’t be any point would there? It’s really all that good stuff that makes me excited about extending the health of the planet, that gets me moving on the streets for workers rights….. That I believe not only we *can* make change, but it can be uplifting to do so.
I guess I’m thinking of all this because in the wake of the G/20 we’re back at finger-pointing and name-calling and the notion that if 100 people can’t smash things it’s not a serious demo… and wow is that ever tiring. And not inspiring. 20,000 people in the street? That’s amazing. Several hundred of those people breaking off to challenge the police securifying the G/20 leaders? Yeah, totally go for it! 150 boys smashing store windows and jumping up and down on cop cars?….. Meh. And the infighting afterwards is a total bummer.
The older I get, the more entrenched my belief in the need for change becomes, but the weaker my resolve in making it. Mostly because of my scars, and my aches. My lost comrades and the dark places I’ve been. They wear on you after awhile – and it takes a lot of communal dinners, drinks with friends, gardens, music, art, and love to make that energy to keep going up. So much so, I don’t want to give any of it away to infighting. I don’t want to give it away for someone else’s pain.
Red Cedar 