Robin McKinley's Blog, page 55

The Week That Was

 

 

In the first place THAAAAAAAANK YOUUUUUUUUUU MOOOOOOOOOOODS!!!!!  You are STARS!  STARRRRRRRRRRRRRS!

* * *

So.  How has my week off from the blog been?

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Next question.

I’ve been to three different vets so far this week.  I’m going to a fourth tomorrow.  Life is so exciting.

Other highlights of the past eight days include that hellhounds were just barely beginning to view food as a friend rather than an enemy again, and essaying the occasional mouthful without rushing across the room immediately after and hiding behind the sofa in case it came after them for this impertinence . . . when the hellterror came into the final, full-standing-fertile stage of heat*, and the hellhounds’ tiny little minds exploded with the rush of hormones to what passes in a dog for the cerebral cortex AND THEY STOPPED EATING COMPLETELY.**

They can’t afford to stop eating.  Again.  More.  Longer.  They already look like toast racks because first they were ill and then they weren’t eating because they had been ill, and this is always the way they behave after they’ve been ill.  Or experienced any other disturbing stimulus.  The sighthound’s first defense is always to STOP EATING.

So I’ve been FORCE FEEDING THEM.  Try to imagine how much fun this is for all of us.***

Monday morning the hellterror went outdoors and produced a gigantic mushy sloppy glob.  Nooooooooo.  Because this is her pattern:  this is how it begins.  By the evening, while she doesn’t geyser with force the way the hellhounds do, it was the same substance even if the delivery system was a little different.

When I took her out yet again at midnight . . . she actually looked like she was having trouble walking.  PANIC.  I rang my new vets’ emergency service and was told to bring her in.  Another nice young vet, this one male, Discussed the Situation and . . . I think poor Pav had just really really had enough and was feeling ghastly and was just coming to the end of the fertile phase of her first heat so while she put up with his fondling her abdomen when he went away and then came back she growled and snapped at him.  I’ve never had a dog that bites.  I was tired and stressed myself, and worried, I was completely nonplussed—and clueless.  We got a muzzle on her, my little Jekyll and Hyde, and if anything could have made me feel even more miserable, that was it.

I brought her home again and she went comatose.  It was TERRIFYING.  I . . . um . . . didn’t go to bed Monday night.  I didn’t understand what was happening, it’s been a bad several months, my hellhounds won’t eat unless I literally poke it down their throats†, I was totally losing my hold on reality and reality was sucking big time anyway, why would I want to have a hold  on it?  So I just stayed up, reading some of my backlog of 1,000,000,000 magazines, sitting on my stool next to the Aga, and glancing at the hellterror crate occasionally.  Got through a lot of magazines by the time it was eight o’clock and the day shift was back on duty at the vet’s.

I took her in again at noon.  She’d stopped being comatose†† by then, but she was still rivering.  Aaaaaaaaand . . . my new young engaged-with-the-problem vet?  Is now talking to me about how it’s IBS.  It’s not something in the environment that we can, you know, find.  It’s IBS.  Just like the hellhounds.

THREE dogs, the third one seven years younger AND entirely unrelated AND a different breed . . . ALL have IBS†††?  I know truth, that ratbag, is often a whole lot stranger than fiction, which has to pretend to mind its manners, but . . . REALLY?

Pav also tried to bite this vet.  I was not in good shape.  I hadn’t had any sleep the night before and I am tired of sick dogs—and being patronised by vets.  I burst into tears.  I don’t think this did me a lot of good in the ‘reliability of owner’ category in the clinic records.  And I feel like I’m being told It’s All My Fault.  I am a nervy, anxious paranoid person with IBS . . . and have created three nervy, anxious paranoid hellcritters with IBS.  WAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Pav has a new appointment with the fancy internal-specialist vet tomorrow morning.  The fancy internal-specialist vet that my old vet wanted to send me off to after one round of basic lab tests came back negative because the only other possibility was ‘stress’.‡  We’ve had one round of slightly more comprehensive lab tests with the new vet . . . and I’m being sent off to the fancy internal-specialist vet again.

I got some sleep last night.  I woke up this morning in a temper.  I rang my old homeopathic vet’s new office and they could fit me in this afternoon.‡‡  Which meant finding his new office.  I took Peter so I would at least be getting lost with somebody.

We got lost.

But we got there.

And I have to go to bed, because I have to get up early tomorrow morning for our next veterinarian adventure.

* * *

* I haven’t had to deal with a bitch in heat in years and I’d forgotten the details, or possibly the details are more prominent on hellterrors.  But for most of the year the exterior genitalia on your average bitch is a tiny little vaguely pointed bulge^, as seen from behind, where their hind legs meet.  I knew it swelled when the bitch goes into heat, and sometimes it changes colour—and, of course, it drips.  What I hadn’t remembered—although it doubtless varies from bitch to bitch and breed to breed^^—is that as it swells it turns outward and up.  To the rather creeped-out human at the other end of the lead it looks like it’s saying F**********CK ME.  Which, of course, it is.

^ They pee out of the same hole.  I assume that the geography within that single external opening is sufficiently clear that a hopeful penis won’t take the wrong fork.

^^ Sighthound bitches are famous for whistling nonchalant little tunes while they go into and come back out of heat without anyone noticing.  People who want to breed their sighthound bitches can be extremely frustrated by this.

  Hint:  Be suspicious of a whistling bitch.

** On second thought, don’t try.  No need for any more of us to be this wretched.

*** They also moaned a lot.  Mooooooooan.  Moooooooan.  I always knew that having an entire bitch around two entire males was going to be challenging and it’s hard for me to tell, because of everything else that’s been going on, how drastically I need to change my coping mechanisms for next time.

† Then you slam the jaws shut, tip the head back and rub the throat with your other hand, supposing you have a free hand, while intoning, Swallow.  Swallow, you effing argling *(&^%$£”!”!!!!!.  Then you do it again.  And again.  And again.  And . . . Did I tell you about getting liquid wormer^ all over the kitchen?  That may have been this weekend.  I’m not too good with liquids, although if it’s just water, no big, and even if it’s water with electrolytes, so the floor is a little sticky, so?  But wormer . . . the label of which reads DO NOT GET ON YOUR SKIN OR CLOTHING . . . unh.  Well, we had semi-pulverized dog food all over the kitchen too.  Darkness after a brief manifestation of disbelieving shock goes all stoic and resigned and lets you maul him, but Chaos has a quite astonishing talent for squirting food back out the sides of his mouth even when you’re sure you got it into the back of his throat AND you have his mouth clamped shut.  Arrrrgh.  Blasted gappy carnivore teeth.

^ Special extra-strong wormer, in case whatever this is is worms, instead of the usual wormicidal tablets, which are a lot easier to manage.

†† The day vet said that what the night vet had given her was opium-based and it might have caused this effect.  He couldn’t have told me?!  All he said to me was that it was a muscle relaxant, to stop her gut spasming.

††† Or IBD.  They seem to call it IBD over here:  Irritable Bowel Disorder instead of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

‡  See:  It’s all the nervy, anxious paranoid owner’s fault.  Yes, well, paranoids really do have stuff blamed on them, just like they have real enemies.

‡‡ I stopped going when he got so overextended you couldn’t get hold of him when, as happened to Darkness, his prescription had made things worse.  Life is too frelling short.  But I’ve thought about him increasingly often over the last several months and he’s taken on another vet and some support staff which ought to make that end of things better.  The other end of things however is that his new office is over an hour away.^

^ Remind me to tell you the Saga of Wolfgang which is the only thing that has gone right this week.

Magic Flutes by Eva Ibbotson – Guest blog by Ithilien

I promised Robin a guest blog on Eva Ibbotson MONTHS ago. (It feels like all my blog posts should start with that sentence!)

The problem with this one (or at least the excuse du jour) was that it was a book review. Which meant, obviously, that I had to re-read the book. I’ve started this process three times now. The first two times, I didn’t have a firm deadline. So I read the book and fell in love with the writing all over again. And then I just HAD to re-read all her other books. And then I didn’t have time to write the blog!*

Third time’s the charm, right? *grins*

Magic Flutes is one of Eva Ibbotson’s five young adult romances, titled after Mozart’s opera of the same name. It tells the story of a most unlikely pair: Tessa, the Princess Theresa-Maria of Pfaffenstein, and Guy Farne, a foundling child abandoned on a wharf at Newcastle upon Tyne.

Tessa is in Vienna, dedicating her life to the glory of opera in the service of the International Opera Company. She works from dawn to midnight for the privilege of learning her trade as the assistant wardrobe mistress. Struggling under a mountain of inherited debt, she has given the order for her old home, Burg Pfaffenstein, to be sold.

Meanwhile, Guy has been sent by the British Government to assist Austria in seeking a loan from the League of Nations. But his visit also has a personal side. Ten years ago, he was cruelly rejected by the snobbish family of his first love, Nerine Hurlingham, for his lack of family and fortune. But now Guy is on the verge of realising all his dreams. For he has become immensely rich in the intervening years, and Nerine has been widowed by the war.

All Guy needs is the perfect setting for the proposal – Burg Pfaffenstein. There is to be a week-long house party at the castle to introduce his fiancée to the Austrian nobility. There will be a ball, a regatta, a banquet, and to crown it all, a performance of the opera at which he and Nerine first set eyes on each other.

And so Guy has secretly engaged the International Opera Company to perform Magic Flutes at Pfaffenstein.

I won’t tell you the rest of the story, because I’d hate to spoil the book for you. But I will say this. This is a beautiful, touching, inspiring book. It fills me with hope and belief and joy.

Go read it!

Next up: The Secret Countess



—————–

* I also had trouble because I decided that I loved them all so much that I wanted to review them all. And then I had trouble deciding which book to review first…

The Butchart Gardens (Guest post by B-Twin)

A couple of years ago I visited Vancouver Island with friends. I didn’t really need a reason to visit The Butchart Gardens – it is, after all, a National Historic Site of Canada – but when my friend mentioned roses it may have taken wild horses to stop me…

We were visiting in the summer and the day we were there it was quite warm and very sunny. Unfortunately, I discovered a few deficiencies in my camera’s abilities (some of which were my fault due to it being new and unfamiliar) but hopefully you will still enjoy this little selection of photos.

This lovely sculpture was one of the first things I fell in love with in the garden.

Not far along the first walk was a covered area with dozens of fuchsia in hanging baskets. I couldn’t get the photo that truly conveyed how overwhelmingly large the display was. So I had to settle for individual shots.

Fuchsia. *love love love*

More fuchsias. *dreamy sigh*

The Gardens were started over 100 years ago. The vision required to “see” this result when confronted with a quarry is amazing.

The Sunken Garden. This started out as a quarry.

Those familiar with the Pacific North West will know how easily moss grows…. Take some notes – it can be used to great advantage in the garden!

The Bear Family. In moss.

Animals like these were dotted all over the gardens. My favourite was the squirrel but the photo came out too blurry to use. :(

The rose gardens were lovely. Most of my photos don’t do them justice. (I’ll have to go back again…!) We’d missed the spring flush of blooms but there were still quite a few in bloom.

One of the many climbers.

‘Tamango’, Hybrid Tea from France.

This arbour was very inspiring. Want.

A rose arbour I wanted to lift out and take home!

The rose gardens didn’t just contain roses. This was some heliotrope and geraniums.

Within the gardens there are various theme gardens. So, besides the rose garden and sunken garden there was also the Italian garden and the Japanese garden.

A view through part of the Japanese Garden.

In the Japanese Garden

The summer flowers were in and there were begonias everywhere in the garden beds.  I’ve always been a little ho-hum about begonias. This experience changed my mind!

Some of the MANY begonias on show.

And finally, the Gardens have the only carousel on Vancouver Island:

The Rose Carousel.

If you ever get the opportunity to get to Vancouver Island then visit the Gardens. In summer they have fireworks in the evenings too (check their website for times though). And they have a lovely giftshop… ;)

 

Yarrrrrrn! (Guest post by Jodi)

I’ll be honest: this post is an excuse for us to swoon over pretty fibers. What do you like?

Mulberry silk? The colorway is called Aqua Lava. Perfect, right?

What about some BFL wool on my unicorn spindle?

Or camel and silk on my tiniest of tiny spindles?

Red Velvet! Ahem. I mean more silk.

And more silk.

And more silk . . . this time with cashmere. Yum. Stargazer Lily.

A nice wool blend called Carmallow — with a side of Kippy.

Oooo, Heaven Sent — silk and cashmere. (Noticing a theme in my yarns?)

And some merino/tencel.

Don’t we all feel so nice and calm now? I know I do.

KES, 82

 

EIGHTY TWO

The house looked emptier and less inhabited—or inhabitable—than ever with four hundred and thirty-seven book boxes crowding around the front door and a few random non-book items splotched here and there and looking lost.  The plastic bags of underwear looked like collapsed balloons.  Although the six rose-bushes lined up on the window seat in front of the garden window in the parlour provided a certain avant-garde air.  Even the dirty dishes in the sink failed to give it that homey touch.  I locked the kitchen door and slowly went down the short hall, across the front room, and through the front door, trailed by Sid.  When I locked that door the pin tumblers engaging sounded like the crunch of small bones.

Of course I tripped, going down those stairs.  I had just enough time to have a very vivid hallucination of disappearing down a hitherto-unsuspected-bottomless rut and emerging in the next universe with a lot of dirt and gravel and finding that snow plough the town council had been missing since ’87.  And then I slammed into a hairy body.  Sid squeaked but held her ground, or rather her stair, and I managed to grab the banister before we both plunged into the next universe.

“Steady,” said Mike.  “Gravity works around here pretty much the way it works most places.  Maybe not Manhattan.  You’ll get used to it.”

“Ha ha,” I said, reminding myself that he’d carried most of the four hundred and thirty seven book boxes up these same stairs.  Sid, still in Perfect Dog mode, jumped into the van without fuss.  Tomorrow—never mind four hundred and thirty-seven boxes of books—I would figure out how to use the car harness I’d bought from Susanna.  Tonight I did another cat’s-cradle with the lead and the seat belt.

“Remember,” said Mike through the window.  “You’re driving real slow past your neighbors.”

I glanced toward the hedge between the two houses.  Those might be fireflies, miniature demonic sprites wearing sequins, or the twinkle of house lights through last year’s leaves.  It was already twilight.  While I waited for Mike to climb into Nilesh and jolt out of the driveway first I fumbled for and flicked open my phone.  Keeping my eyes carefully averted from the list of today’s messages I looked to see what the last one in was.  Bus late. 6:45. C u.  JJ  Bless the bus company for incompetence.

My turn.  I backed down the driveway as if the licensing examiner was sitting in the seat next to me (no, that was Sid, and she wasn’t carrying a clipboard) and my pass depended on it.   I glanced up once at Rose Manor.  What—?  No, it was gone again.  And I was imagining it anyway.  If I could get half of what I was imagining out here in the real world down on paper/computer screen I’d have FLOWERHAIR THE DAUNTLESS in on time after all.  But there had been something peeking out from behind the kitchen chimney.  Too small for the madwoman.  Wrong shape for a crow.  Maybe it was the hob.  Better not forget the milk.

I rolled slowly forward.  Mike turned his headlights on.  It’s not that dark yet.  He just wants to give the Lanchesters every opportunity to admire their new neighbor’s moving van.  Thanks Mike.  Was it worth having four hundred and thirty-one of my book boxes carried upstairs at the price of an instant feud with my neighbors?

Yes.  Next question.

I was going slowly enough to be able to look up unhurriedly at the Lanchesters’ house.  As the demon (speaking of demons) of bad luck would have it, two people, presumably Mr and Mrs Lanchester, were standing in the big picture window at one end of their house—my end, in fact.  If they had loud parties in what was presumably their living room I’d probably hear them.  It would make a change from the rustling of deinonychus.  The gay couple two floors down from us in Manhattan were notorious for the noisiness of their parties.  They gave several weeks’ warning and invited everyone in the building as well as two hundred of their closest friends, but if you had to get your heroine out of the Gnargon sorceror’s dungeon by Monday, Saturday night was taken.  I wasn’t ordinarily a fan of noisy parties but it only has to happen once that someone drives you bleeding to the hospital and creates the most amazing fuss at the front desk to have you seen now to earn as many noisy parties as they wanted.  I hoped it was in Mr Diamond-Studded Shoelaces’ contract that Kurt and Dean’s parties were sacrosanct. Occasionally some new tenant had dared object but several of us had driven-to-the-hospital type stories, and we closed ranks.

Sheila didn’t sound like the driving-you-to-the-hospital-bleeding type.  Where was the nearest hospital?  What you probably wanted was a neighbor who was an EMT.  That wouldn’t be Sheila either.

The two figures were too strongly backlit but they might have been standing with glasses in their hands, looking out at the view.  I had to watch the road as I bumped through a pothole, but I looked up again in time to see the female silhouette put out a hand toward the window as if to fend off unspeakable abominations, sway—and collapse.

“You’re a what, now?” Guest Blog by Black Bear

One of the first questions that comes up in any social situation is “so, what do you do?”  When I worked in retail, I said, “I sell stuff!” and the conversation pretty much stopped there.  But now that my answer is “I’m an exhibit developer,” the questioner usually gives me a knowing look and a nod, followed by a frown, followed by a slightly embarrassed, “Er… So what does THAT mean, exactly?”

 

Glad you asked!  As it happens, my real-life job is working on exhibits at a huge children’s museum.  We’re one of the oldest such museums in the US (there are two older than us, I think) and we’re also one of the only large collections-based children’s museums in the states as well.  What that means, essentially, is that while we focus on children and families as our primary audience, we are more than just sand tables and splash areas.

Forearmed is forewarned… so what’s twenty-armed?

 

We have a tremendous collection of over 120,000 objects, ranging from toys to dinosaur bones to 19th century dresses to Maori war clubs to old television sets to birds’ eggs to real samurai armor, and everything in between.  Our challenge is to create exhibits that use these objects in ways that encourage learning and questioning between kids and their adults—and while the objects usually can’t be touched by our visitors, we try to come up with all kinds of ways to promote hands-on learning and engagement for them.  And that’s where I come in!  I work with the curators and designers to develop the messages of our exhibits; then later in the process I write labels and work with our production team to create interactive stations that are more than just “Push a button to hear the cow moo!”

 

My first full on exhibit project with the museum was LEGO Castle Adventure.  In addition to writing labels about real-life castles and how those castles were planned and built, I got to come up with an activity involving a catapult. Because—come on, right?  There HAD to be a catapult.  Since the exhibit was about building strong castles, though, we didn’t want to have an activity about knocking castles down… so the creative media team and I worked to put together a game where kids could build a virtual castle wall, making choices (thick/thin, blocks stacked or interlocked, etc) and then crank and release a giant LEGO catapult to “test” their wall.  It was…. popular.  :)  The exhibit is still travelling around, being rented by other museums, so if you see the catapult, tell it I said hi.

This is one of my co-workers. Trust me, she’s having fun.

 

My most recent project was a kind of pop-up exhibit we put together for Spring Break at the museum.  We combined stuff from our pop culture collection and stuff from our world cultures collection to create an exhibit talking about super powers and characters from around the world.  The figure above is a painted wood statue of a villain from the Ramayana named Ravana; one of his attributes is wisdom, evinced by his ten heads (because he is as wise as 10 ordinary men, of course.)   Below is a more generally familiar character who you may recognize…

 

Don’t sai for me, Argentina…

The costume’s from the nearly unwatchable “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze.”  Cool costume, great character, dreadful film.

 

We didn’t have a lot of time to develop a really elaborate interactive station for this one, so I went with a simple but (I hope!) fun fill-in-the-blank activity that let kids make up their own superheroes and villains while practicing basic reading and creative decision-making.  I thought that little guys would have fun with this, but was surprised how many older kids and adults also seemed to really get a kick out of turning the dials and picking their hero’s “superpowers.”

 

My hero’s weakness is smelly socks. Whose isn’t, really?

So that’s what I do.  I work with an amazing team of people to make some out-of-this-world exhibits for families to learn from and enjoy.  Sometimes it’s stressful, like any job, but overall it’s a blast—I’m never bored, and I love my work.  Come visit our museum sometime and you’ll see why!

Buzzing along (guest post by AJLR)

Since I started learning to keep honeybees, just over two years ago, the learning curve has been extremely steep. Still, at least I know a little more than I did 24 months ago and I have successfully helped my two colonies through this last long and cold winter.

When I first wrote about beekeeping, here on Robin’s blog, I was almost overwhelmed with the amount of information one needed to keep in mind if one was to nurture honeybees effectively. I still feel like that but I’m now at the stage where I’m starting to ‘read’ my colonies a little more – what the proportion of brood in relation to the number of flying bees means, their temper, their health, how they react to certain stimuli – rather than just reading the text books. I’m very fortunate in belonging to an active group of local beekeepers, most of whom are fountains of knowledge (even if, occasionally, conflicting knowledge) and willing to share information. I would hate to have to go it alone – the mistakes I could have made, either through action or inaction, would not have helped the lives in my care. And I do find that caring for the bees is my main concern; getting some honey is good and I’m hopeful of getting a reasonable amount this summer but it’s the bees themselves that I find fascinating and that motivate me to keep learning. (Plus, being on a long-term diet I find it’s not helpful to think about honey too much…)

I started beekeeping, following on from an introductory course in late winter 2011, using a single Commercial hive. There are numerous different configurations of hives and they all have their advocates among beekeepers – here in the UK, the Commercial, British Standard, Langstroth, WBC, and Dadant are among those in use as you can see from this page of a large company selling beekeeping supplies. They are all structured on the same principle, however, that of ‘bee space’ and making sure that the bees have just enough space to move around in to do whatever they need to do but not so much empty space that they build comb or propolise in a way that means one can’t take out individual frames to inspect for health, production, etc. I decided to use the Commercial hives from the start because I wanted the slightly larger brood box (where the queen lives and lays eggs and so where all the young bees are raised) it offers rather than have to use the ‘brood box and a half’ that some of the other hives are configured around. Some beekeepers are less keen on Commercials because the individual frames inside the brood box, or the supers, have slightly smaller lugs (the bits that stick out at each end of a frame and by which one picks them up) and that can make it a bit more difficult to manoeuvre when they are heavy (up to 8 lbs if full of brood or honey) and covered in bees. So far, so good.

The young colony I first started with almost drove me mad in the summer of 2011. They kept doing things that they weren’t ‘supposed’ to do (or at least, not at that particular time of year). My mentor beekeeper kept telling me that bees don’t read books but coming from an academic background I find it makes me really anxious if one can’t rely on the text! Still, after I’d allowed the colony to replace the young queen they came with (I don’t know why they didn’t like her, they just didn’t) we started a period of reasonable stability and I’ve still got the queen from then in my original hive. She’s been very good and calm, which makes all the bees in that colony calm and easy to handle. When we inspected that hive 10 days ago there were a lot of bees and brood in there and they were showing signs of building up to a swarm by building queen cells. So I have now taken out all the queen cells but two and put the frame they’re on and four other frames of worker and drone brood, plus a couple of frames of stores (honey/nectar and pollen) into a ‘nuc’ box next to the original hive. That way, if all goes well and one of the queen cells produces a viable queen, I may soon have three colonies rather than two. My original queen is happily (I hope) filling up the empty replacement frames I put in her hive at that time and is no longer looking ‘swarmy’.

Last year, when one of the other colonies in the apiary where my hive was situated, swarmed while we were up there having a meeting, I was offered the swarm (it’s the old queen that leaves a hive during swarming and she goes with all the ‘flying bees’, ie those more than about three weeks old – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarming_%28honey_bee%29) and later hived them and they have just about come through last winter although not with any great vigour. So last weekend I removed the old queen, having first checked to make sure that she had laid eggs within the previous 24 – 36 hours and so the workers could turn one of those eggs into a replacement queen, and am currently waiting and hoping that I will have a newly hatched virgin queen in about eight days from now. She will then need to go out on a successful mating flight (good weather is helpful so fingers crossed) a few days later and should start to lay a couple of days after that. A young queen at this time of year should really start laying fast if she’s any good, so if everything works as it should the colony will have better vigour to go into the autumn with.

It’s a somewhat nerve-wracking time though, with major interventions in both of my colonies at the same time. I’ve taken several short courses this last year, to learn more about specific aspects of good beekeeping, but learning about it and actually doing it with real live beings is not the same. Please keep your fingers crossed for my bees. :)

So, some of the extra things I’ve learned in the past year:

a)      Whatever piece of equipment you have left behind when you go to inspect your hive will infallibly be the one you need;

b)      Honeybees, and other bees, have a lot of threats facing them and need as many people as possible to keep them actively in mind when gardening, using horrible chemicals, developing houses on greenfield sites, or just generally being around them;

c)       The importing of queens from other countries is not a good idea, generally –  locally-bred bees are better adapted. Also, breeding replacements locally removes the risk of parasites or illnesses being imported along with the queens;

d)      It is impossible to look calm and collected when hopping around on one foot, trying to get one’s other foot out of the thrice accursed leg of a recalcitrant bee-suit;

e)      Pollen colours cover an extraordinarily wide range, from almost white, through yellow, orange, red, to pure black. They, and nectar, all have slightly different chemical breakdowns and the bees need as wide a range of plants as possible to choose from to keep themselves healthy;

f)       The BBKA website and the National Bee Unit are great resources but fellow beekeepers can say ‘there there’ at the same time as passing on info;

g)      Locally produced honey can be quite expensive to buy but at a time when some countries aren’t particularly scrupulous about how they regulate and inspect their commercial honey businesses, it’s likely to be better for you.

Allons à Lafayette* (Guest post by Maren)

Last month, I was strongly urged to attend a two-hour Friday meeting about boring library stuff in Lafayette, a little over three hours from where I live in north Louisiana. Considering that the state (my employer) will only pay for 99 miles’ worth of my gas, that the Lafayette area is home to some of the best food and most interesting history in Louisiana, and that it would have been a hassle to leave my dog Lola at the kennel, I decided to take her along and get my money’s worth with a mini-vacation.

I was worried that it might be too warm for Lola to wait in the car during the meeting, so I arranged for her to stay at a doggy daycare for the morning. As it turned out, the day stayed quite cloudy and cool, but at least she had fun! (I could tell because she was thoroughly exhausted. Her preferred method of playing with other dogs involves her zigzagging around them at 90 miles an hour while they stare in bewilderment.) After the meeting, I picked up a shrimp po’ boy** from Olde Tyme Grocery and headed with Lola to one of TWO replica Cajun villages in Lafayette.

Acadian Village in the rain

I’d already been to the other one, Vermilionville, on a previous trip, plus Acadian Village was listed on a pet travel website as being dog-friendly. As it turned out, only their on-site campground allows dogs, but by then it was raining and Lola was more than happy to sleep off her daycare experience in the car. The village brings together several vintage buildings to give visitors an idea of how Cajuns lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. The French-speaking Cajuns (or Acadians) wound up in south Louisiana starting in the 1760s, after they were expelled from Nova Scotia by the British. (Many had refused to pledge loyalty to the king, which required renouncing Catholicism.) They were dispersed all over North America and Europe, but eventually a few thousand settled in the prairies and bayous of modern-day Louisiana***, which was owned by Spain at the time. It was not easy to make a living in the hot, humid, waterlogged territory, but the Cajuns survived and developed a tight-knit culture characterized by boisterous music and dancing, good hearty food, and good cheer. Today there are over 400,000 people of Cajun descent living in Louisiana.

After Acadian Village, we went to walk around downtown Lafayette. It was still raining, so between holding Lola’s leash, fumbling with my umbrella, and stepping in a puddle that soaked all the way through my shoe…I didn’t get any pictures. Well, not of the city anyway:

The Contortionist

I dried Lola off as well as I could before putting her back in the car, but it was not to her satisfaction and she did her best to rub on the seat. There was also maybe just a hint of resistance to having her seat belt put back on for the nth time that day. I scrapped plans to visit a nature park that was undoubtedly a mass of mud at that point, picked up dinner from Johnson’s Boucanière (the Parrain Special: a boudin ball and pulled pork smashed on a bun with melted cheese and barbecue sauce), and headed to the plantation cabin I’d rented near Arnaudville about 20 miles north of Lafayette.

Are you wondering if it was a slave cabin? So am I, but I was too chicken to ask. Obviously it would not have been done up cute back then. Although slave quarters in other parts of the South had dirt floors, they were raised in Louisiana due to frequent flooding.

For about the same as I would have paid for a lower-mid-range hotel room in Lafayette, I got a blissfully quiet, private cabin with a kitchen, separate bedroom, breakfast ingredients, snacks and beverages, and LOTS OF WINDOWS for Lola to look out of. This is a big deal, as my townhome doesn’t have any windows at her level.

I brought our own blanket to put over the bedspread for just this reason.

And it was just fine that we weren’t staying in Lafayette, since the plan for Saturday was to do a loop of the smaller towns around it…starting with:

Breaux Bridge

Central Breaux Bridge is packed with antique shops, sidewalk cafés, and B&Bs like the one above. One of the cafés hosts a Zydeco breakfast every Saturday morning for people who can eat a full meal and dance starting at 8:30 a.m. I was aware that this is a popular event, but didn’t quite anticipate traffic remaining at a standstill by mid-morning! (This may have been compounded by the fact that it was Mothers’ Day weekend.) But we still had a nice walk through town before heading on to St. Martinville.

Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site

Named for Longfellow’s tragic (and probably purely fictional) poem about Evangeline and Gabriel who were separated by the le Grand Dérangement, this was Louisiana’s first state park. It contains the genuine Creole**** plantation house and outbuildings you see here, as well as a replica Acadian farmstead and extensive grounds full of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. There are regular guided tours of the buildings, but unlike the previous day it was now too warm to leave Lola alone in the car that long. We peeked into the house through the French doors and walked over to the Acadian farmstead, then got back on the road for the short trip downtown.

Evangeline Oak, St. Martinville

Live oaks are serious business. Many of those over 100 years old in south Louisiana have names and are members of the Live Oak Society. But the one that draws the most tourists is undoubtedly the Evangeline Oak on the banks of Bayou Teche in St. Martinville. Despite the name, it almost certainly has nothing at all to do with Evangeline, since she probably didn’t exist. Local tourism officials and businesses are quite happy for you to think it’s where she pined for Gabriel or some such, though! In any case it’s still quite impressive with its coat of resurrection fern.

Next stop was New Iberia, where I picked up a roast beef po’ boy from Bon Creole Lunch Counter and devoured it on a bench facing Bayou Teche. We peered through the fence at Shadows-on-the-Teche and strolled a few blocks to a Catholic grotto right next to the public library. Although it was only in the low 80s, not terribly hot for Louisiana, it was characteristically humid and Lola was wilting. I regretfully decided to skip the towns of Rayne (self-proclaimed Frog Capital of the World) and Church Point, so we took a complicated shortcut along secondary state highways to Sunset and Janise’s Supermarket. As you can see at the link they’re supposed to have great boudin, but if the boudin experts say it’s “[n]ot subtle hot, but Hot Hot” I’m pretty sure it’s about 100 times too hot for me. (Even though I’ve gotten better about this since moving here. I put Tabasco in my scrambled eggs for the first time a few weeks ago!) Instead, I got some red beans and rice and fried okra to have for dinner back at the cabin and headed to one last stop in neighboring Grand Coteau…

St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church

On Sunday we had a leisurely drive back home*****, stopping in Opelousas for one more replica village and at Chicot State Park near Ville Platte:

Chicot State Park

I have a lot more photos but I’m already wondering if I should have split this post in two, so if you want to see them feel free to peruse my Flickr set here. Thanks for reading!

*”Let’s go to Lafayette”; title of the first Cajun song recorded and released in 1928.

**I realize some readers may not be intimately familiar with Louisiana cuisine, and I pity them. :) A po’ boy (or poor boy, or po-boy) is somewhat similar to a submarine sandwich, served on a soft French loaf. If you get a seafood one (shrimp, crawfish, clam, or oyster), the filling is usually breaded and fried, making for just a bit of a carb overload. Other key facets of Louisiana cooking: boiled crawfish. Boudin. Red beans and rice. Gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée. Muffulettas. Alcohol.

***At the time, the territory of Louisiana encompassed all of what is now called the Louisiana Purchase, which stretched through the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains all the way up to the Canadian border. But the Louisiana Cajuns mostly settled within “the boot” that we know and love today.

****Creole is not the same as Cajun/Acadian; in Louisiana, Creole referred to people descended from French or Spanish colonists (and often from slaves as well) rather than from the Acadian refugees. On the whole, Creoles tended to be wealthier than Cajuns.

*****Unfortunately it was so leisurely that we arrived at Lea’s Lunchroom in Lecompte after they’d closed and I couldn’t get any PIE.

Allons à Lafayette*

Last month, I was strongly urged to attend a two-hour Friday meeting about boring library stuff in Lafayette, a little over three hours from where I live in north Louisiana. Considering that the state (my employer) will only pay for 99 miles’ worth of my gas, that the Lafayette area is home to some of the best food and most interesting history in Louisiana, and that it would have been a hassle to leave my dog Lola at the kennel, I decided to take her along and get my money’s worth with a mini-vacation.

I was worried that it might be too warm for Lola to wait in the car during the meeting, so I arranged for her to stay at a doggy daycare for the morning. As it turned out, the day stayed quite cloudy and cool, but at least she had fun! (I could tell because she was thoroughly exhausted. Her preferred method of playing with other dogs involves her zigzagging around them at 90 miles an hour while they stare in bewilderment.) After the meeting, I picked up a shrimp po’ boy** from Olde Tyme Grocery and headed with Lola to one of TWO replica Cajun villages in Lafayette.

Acadian Village in the rain

I’d already been to the other one, Vermilionville, on a previous trip, plus Acadian Village was listed on a pet travel website as being dog-friendly. As it turned out, only their on-site campground allows dogs, but by then it was raining and Lola was more than happy to sleep off her daycare experience in the car. The village brings together several vintage buildings to give visitors an idea of how Cajuns lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. The French-speaking Cajuns (or Acadians) wound up in south Louisiana starting in the 1760s, after they were expelled from Nova Scotia by the British. (Many had refused to pledge loyalty to the king, which required renouncing Catholicism.) They were dispersed all over North America and Europe, but eventually a few thousand settled in the prairies and bayous of modern-day Louisiana***, which was owned by Spain at the time. It was not easy to make a living in the hot, humid, waterlogged territory, but the Cajuns survived and developed a tight-knit culture characterized by boisterous music and dancing, good hearty food, and good cheer. Today there are over 400,000 people of Cajun descent living in Louisiana.

After Acadian Village, we went to walk around downtown Lafayette. It was still raining, so between holding Lola’s leash, fumbling with my umbrella, and stepping in a puddle that soaked all the way through my shoe…I didn’t get any pictures. Well, not of the city anyway:

The Contortionist

I dried Lola off as well as I could before putting her back in the car, but it was not to her satisfaction and she did her best to rub on the seat. There was also maybe just a hint of resistance to having her seat belt put back on for the nth time that day. I scrapped plans to visit a nature park that was undoubtedly a mass of mud at that point, picked up dinner from Johnson’s Boucanière (the Parrain Special: a boudin ball and pulled pork smashed on a bun with melted cheese and barbecue sauce), and headed to the plantation cabin I’d rented near Arnaudville about 20 miles north of Lafayette.

Are you wondering if it was a slave cabin? So am I, but I was too chicken to ask. Obviously it would not have been done up cute back then. Although slave quarters in other parts of the South had dirt floors, they were raised in Louisiana due to frequent flooding.

For about the same as I would have paid for a lower-mid-range hotel room in Lafayette, I got a blissfully quiet, private cabin with a kitchen, separate bedroom, breakfast ingredients, snacks and beverages, and LOTS OF WINDOWS for Lola to look out of. This is a big deal, as my townhome doesn’t have any windows at her level.

I brought our own blanket to put over the bedspread for just this reason.

And it was just fine that we weren’t staying in Lafayette, since the plan for Saturday was to do a loop of the smaller towns around it…starting with:

Breaux Bridge

Central Breaux Bridge is packed with antique shops, sidewalk cafés, and B&Bs like the one above. One of the cafés hosts a Zydeco breakfast every Saturday morning for people who can eat a full meal and dance starting at 8:30 a.m. I was aware that this is a popular event, but didn’t quite anticipate traffic remaining at a standstill by mid-morning! (This may have been compounded by the fact that it was Mothers’ Day weekend.) But we still had a nice walk through town before heading on to St. Martinville.

Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site

Named for Longfellow’s tragic (and probably purely fictional) poem about Evangeline and Gabriel who were separated by the le Grand Dérangement, this was Louisiana’s first state park. It contains the genuine Creole**** plantation house and outbuildings you see here, as well as a replica Acadian farmstead and extensive grounds full of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. There are regular guided tours of the buildings, but unlike the previous day it was now too warm to leave Lola alone in the car that long. We peeked into the house through the French doors and walked over to the Acadian farmstead, then got back on the road for the short trip downtown.

Evangeline Oak, St. Martinville

Live oaks are serious business. Many of those over 100 years old in south Louisiana have names and are members of the Live Oak Society. But the one that draws the most tourists is undoubtedly the Evangeline Oak on the banks of Bayou Teche in St. Martinville. Despite the name, it almost certainly has nothing at all to do with Evangeline, since she probably didn’t exist. Local tourism officials and businesses are quite happy for you to think it’s where she pined for Gabriel or some such, though! In any case it’s still quite impressive with its coat of resurrection fern.

Next stop was New Iberia, where I picked up a roast beef po’ boy from Bon Creole Lunch Counter and devoured it on a bench facing Bayou Teche. We peered through the fence at Shadows-on-the-Teche and strolled a few blocks to a Catholic grotto right next to the public library. Although it was only in the low 80s, not terribly hot for Louisiana, it was characteristically humid and Lola was wilting. I regretfully decided to skip the towns of Rayne (self-proclaimed Frog Capital of the World) and Church Point, so we took a complicated shortcut along secondary state highways to Sunset and Janise’s Supermarket. As you can see at the link they’re supposed to have great boudin, but if the boudin experts say it’s “[n]ot subtle hot, but Hot Hot” I’m pretty sure it’s about 100 times too hot for me. (Even though I’ve gotten better about this since moving here. I put Tabasco in my scrambled eggs for the first time a few weeks ago!) Instead, I got some red beans and rice and fried okra to have for dinner back at the cabin and headed to one last stop in neighboring Grand Coteau…

St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church

On Sunday we had a leisurely drive back home*****, stopping in Opelousas for one more replica village and at Chicot State Park near Ville Platte:

Chicot State Park

I have a lot more photos but I’m already wondering if I should have split this post in two, so if you want to see them feel free to peruse my Flickr set here. Thanks for reading!

*”Let’s go to Lafayette”; title of the first Cajun song recorded and released in 1928.

**I realize some readers may not be intimately familiar with Louisiana cuisine, and I pity them. :) A po’ boy (or poor boy, or po-boy) is somewhat similar to a submarine sandwich, served on a soft French loaf. If you get a seafood one (shrimp, crawfish, clam, or oyster), the filling is usually breaded and fried, making for just a bit of a carb overload. Other key facets of Louisiana cooking: boiled crawfish. Boudin. Red beans and rice. Gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée. Muffulettas. Alcohol.

***At the time, the territory of Louisiana encompassed all of what is now called the Louisiana Purchase, which stretched through the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains all the way up to the Canadian border. But the Louisiana Cajuns mostly settled within “the boot” that we know and love today.

****Creole is not the same as Cajun/Acadian; in Louisiana, Creole referred to people descended from French or Spanish colonists (and often from slaves as well) rather than from the Acadian refugees. On the whole, Creoles tended to be wealthier than Cajuns.

*****Unfortunately it was so leisurely that we arrived at Lea’s Lunchroom in Lecompte after they’d closed and I couldn’t get any PIE.

Welcome to Mod Squad Week! (guest blog by Black Bear)

Hello all; I’m your friendly neighborhood moderator, Black Bear.  As you’re all no doubt well aware, Robin’s a little overwhelmed at the moment with veterinary troubles.  Having a sick animal is no fun.  But having 3 sick animals all at once is… well, fairly dreadful, obviously.  So the forum moderator gang (or as we like to call ourselves, the Mod Squad) has offered to take over the blog for Robin for a week so that she can concentrate fully on work, the dogs, and minor daily tasks like eating and sleeping.

 

So welcome to Mod Squad Week!  (SPX: thunderclap here)  Just to give you a taste of what to expect from us, I can promise you the coming week will contain at least trace amounts of all of the following:

BEES

GARDENS

WOOL

PETS

PHOTOS and MORE PHOTOS

Plus some other goodies as we come up with them, I expect.

 

Please do continue sending Robin your best wishes for the dogs via last night’s forum thread, and if there are any major updates to be shared, they will be.  Shared, that is.  If you are a die-hard Robin fan who would just as soon take a pass on a week of guest-blogging, please be aware that at present, it is still Robin’s plan to post the next chapter of KES this Saturday.  So if you tune out for a few days, our feelings won’t be hurt–just don’t forget to tune back in for KES over the weekend!  Then it’ll be back to guest blogs for a few more days, to give Robin a full week off.

 

Right.  Any questions?  No?  Good.  On with the show!