Doodlie-Doodlie Dooo...

Ah, the rain. It's been pouring the last couple of days and this morning everything frosted over. Between class and work I've been doing things. Like watch a movie here and there, or read a book, or even something crafty if I feel like swathing myself in blankies while I'm downstairs in the meat locker (now, to be fair it's no where near freezing in my basement lair. However, it is at least three degrees colder and I do not do well in arctic climates so I tend to bundle up when I go down into the bat cave). So, here are some of the products (more to come when I get around to it).
Felted nesting bowls. Infinitely useful as long as you don't want to put liquids in them. Like cereal. And even then it is possible to use them for cereal, it would just be a bit messy and soggy. These are going to Twelve Mile this afternoon when I go to work for foodstuffs.
And then here is the horse. A few weeks ago Dad, Lisa and I went to check out this little used bookstore in Sandy called "Some Bookstore in Sandy" (which made me want to check it out so badly! With a name like that, how can it not be wonderful?). I dug up a couple of books, among them "60 Great Horror Stories" (or some such thing), "The Herb Bible" and, best of all, a book of sewing patterns. The patterns were from the 90's but that didn't even matter because they were all plush toy patterns! There were horsies, penguins, foxes, chickens... a really good assortment.

I can do some 2-d things on my own, but when it comes to actual shaping or anything my skills just aren't there so this book was perfect for showing the construction of stuffed animals. Very complicated, I would never have been able to brain storm these things up myself without a TON of wasted fabric and frustration. Anywho, a few weeks later Chachi was born. After I took the pictures and started writing this I realized that he looks eerily like something from Charlie the Unicorn, a happy accident I guess because otherwise he just looks like a retarded clown horse. At least now I can say "Why of course he looks slightly retarded, I meant to do that. Haven't you seen Charlie the Unicorn?" with a bit of a condescending-holier-than-thou tone. Right?

Now that he's done I love him very much because of all the time it took to make him, and how huge he turned out (he's about 14 inches tall, if I could get his back legs to stop collapsing in this mincing sort of crouch). Plus he fits very nicely under my arm, especially since he's about the size of a new baby lamb and those are always adorable.

What Star Missed Today...

1. Rain: it rained today. Not anywhere near epic conditions, but there was rain and I did walk in it for unusually long distances. Also, everything had big, fat, happy rain drops squatting on them.

2. These flowers: who also had happy rain on them.

Gorgeous. They were tucked away behind the Lab buildings on the way to the O-farm. A lovely little surprise in the beginning of what promises to be a very long day.
3. The Walk to the O-Farm: Here is the path, and here are the leaves that line the path (note the happy rain is here as well).
This is what happy rain looks like.

4. My Tea: Oh so pretty in its very own mug.

Ahhh.. blackberry tea.

So tastey.

So I went to beekeeping this morning and learned about...

bee disease!

(if you say this out loud it mostly rhymes).

Anyway, it turns out the bees are dying. Who knew? There are a variety of things causing this: Varroa mites, tracheal mites, American Foul Brood, and of course the Colony Collapse Disorder which is the main source of the bad news. About 32% of bee colonies failed last year, 29% of those were caused by CCD which at this point, remains a mystery. Everyone is panicking about it, including Haagen-Daz (the ice-cream company and also the main contributor of funds towards researching this epidemic. Our ice-cream is IN DANGER! Don't you people realize how frightening that is? Contribute dammit!).

Oh, and we also learned a little bit about the animal predators.

Skunks:Will walk up to a hive, scratch around on the side panels to get the bees nice and angry, and then saunter to the front. Here, they wave their luxuriantly rank tail in front of the hive entrance. The bees then attack the tail, get stuck and then the skunk just turns around and picks them out as if they were little popcorn kernel snackies. Crunch crunch crunch....

Bears: Don't really want your honey mr. bee, all they want are your babies. The bears like the brood (which are apparently quite edible, but a little tangy... I really wouldn't know).

Lizards: And other small critters can sometimes just hang out inside of the hives and pick bees off as they buzz on by. Jake (the bee-instructor) was telling us about a lizard he found in the bottom of a three story hive. He had popped off the first two supers (the boxes bees hang out in) and found a little, fat lizard on the floor of the bottom one. The lizard had been there SO LONG that the bees had covered him in a thick layer of wax with just his head free. He was calmly and quite contentedly snapping up bees the walked past his head and showed no desire to move in anyway. Jake popped him off of the floor, a change that the lizard wasn't too happy about, so he wound up just staying in the hive anyway. His little wax mummy casing was pretty nasty because of the months of dead skin sheddings that had accumulated. Gross.

I think that's all I'm going to tell you for now.

Bleh

I've been slightly productive today. I made myself some rice for lunch (my food supply is getting dangerously boring, about all I have left is half a box of cereal, some rice, a bag of potatoes and pancake mix) played with Monty, finished my homework for The Fifties: Fab and Fraught, worked my way through most of my ASL II homework and now I'm knitting a mitten pattern that I'm making up as I go with some yarn I splurged on yesterday (it's called Lobster Mix, how could I NOT buy it?!). But all of those things involved sitting. And I've been sitting for the majority of the last week. So I decided to go for a short bike ride. I'm talking epically short. But hey, it's better than nothing, right? The clouds started to go away and there was even some blue sky peaking out so I decided to bundle up and head out. The minute I crossed Eastside the rain started. I heroically decide to keep going to the end of Fir which is what I had in mind all along. Once I turn on to Fir it REALLY starts to rain. My pants get soaked and my nose started acting like a drain spout for the rest of my cranium, channeling the water coming in onto the top of my head through the holes in my helmet. I get to the end of Fir and peddle as fast as I can back to the safety of the garage. The minute I pull into the driveway the rain stops and the sun comes back out. I huff and kerfuffle my way around the garage, sulky that the weather decided to mess with me and my brief exercise.

I think this is a sign that I'm just not meant to shift myself from a slouchy-sitting position on the couch. The cookie crumbs on my shirt leftover from the sacrificial cookie I nabbed from the freezer agree with me. Damn.

Rainy Day

It's the first truely rainy day. Everything is sparkly and the grass looks happier than it has since July. And, in true rainy day style, I woke up this morning convinced that I needed to be at work at 9. So I set my alarm for 6:59, slept through it, panicked, enhaled breakfast and rushed down the high way. I got there and discovered (without any sense of humor) that I wasn't scheduled until 2:30. So now I've gained an entire five or so hours to have my way with before work.

And you know what that means...

yes, it means that I spent time taking pictures of rain.

Boy, I know how to live.