fourth_moon

All the heat of the last month is paying off in our garden: jostaberries, red currants and purple plums are all ripe and mostly harvested, too. (The purple plums in large amounts by neighborhood kids who have no problem climbing up the tree in the front yard because hey, "Allah grows berries for everybody!" My parents are not amused, and I can understand it.) The berry bushes in the backyard have huge nets over them because otherwise we'd hardly get a cup full of berries off them.

Sometimes, a blackbird manages to slip, dig or simply magic itself in there after all and go after the berries.

This one certainly tried hard, but ended up all twisted in the net - my mother had found her (it was probably a female) but didn't have a chance to free the struggling bird out of the net, and when we both went there a few hours later she had stopped moving and just lay there with her dead-eyed stare. Poor thing.

Only when I picked her up to unwrap her and bury her somewhere she started struggling all over.

Well, great news, but that left us with the problem of a struggling bird caught in a net with, on examination:

- both claws and legs thrust through loops

- one claw fisting together a whole swath of the net

- both wings wrapped into swaths of the net

- the head through two individual loops and then the net twisted around and around so the loops had pulled tight around the neck.

( Nice work there, girl friend. )

Keep in mind that there were plenty of sweet, purple plums in the front yard with no net or anything!

When she was finally free I put her right under the plum tree together with a shallow dish of water. She was just sitting there, limp wings and drooping head, and I was sure I had broken at least one of her fragile bones when holding her tight.



( Not looking any more hopeful from a different POV )

So, going after the sugary lure that'd get her into the most trouble, then beating and struggling till she was almost strangling herself and finally trying to fight of help. No wonder she reminds me of myself.

I am (as usually) behind with chores, especially with paperwork. Letters still have to be written, bike still isn't repaired. Consultation hour missed out on, though I've got to say that there was no appointment and no hurry (yet).

But I got three important mails written, two of them very, very important and I kept forgetting about them for months now. So I've got some reason to be satisfied with this day.

Oh, and let's not leave out the really crucial thing: feeds pedicured and nails polished.


On the other side of reality:

I had some very disquieting dreams this night, about three of them bad verging on nightmares. Stuff with sexual harassment, zombies... part of it was definitely whiplash caused by a conversation with a good friend who had plenty of bad stuff to discuss - it comes with her work. It was a bit of a stress at the moment but I didn't realize it effected me so much.

Whoo boy, back at the umbelic cord, thank the gods, trying to check in on three e-mail accounts, two blogs and various other dubitable accounts in 30 minutes.

I'm at my great-aunts since Tuesday evening: the younger one (86!) had an eye-operation and I'm here till Sunday to help, among other things with caring for the 90+ one with the bad hearing, eye-sight and diabetes. (Plus associated difficulties with walking, but that's okay because she hardly does walk.)

Now, since I offered it myself, lamenting about annoyances would be terribly bad style, so excuse me for a few minutes while I stomp down my various little grievances.









Moment, please.

















Right. Whoa.

Let's just say that even the worst music while eating is better than none. I also got an unvolantary education on some northern european royal house.

That aside, I'm deeply impressed at how well the younger of my aunts manages the double household as well as the care of her sister, and at how kind and uncomplaining she is at whatever little or large troubles arise. It is also very difficult for her to allow me to let do the work that's hers since 20 years; actually I pretty much had to shoulder my way in as gently as possible. It pretty much took me ten hours and her getting a head-ache before I worked up the nerve to really take work out of her hands, which I literally had to do. That was really the most difficult bit: the work is no problem at all, but getting her to let me do it is the most difficult thing at all. Anybody who ever tried to help out elderly relatives might know what I talk about.

More later, time's running out.

Ive been fascinated with bees and how to keep them for a while. Now I stumbled onto a group of students who keep bees. This in itself makes them unusual because normally, the average age of a beekeeper is 64. (No, really.)

So I've learned some of the basics beyond what most people know by now: all working bees are female, the drones are mostly around during summer and kicked out in fall, honey&pollen are collected during spring and summer and sustain them in fall and winter.

Today there was a representation with some interesting stuff: old beekeepers equiment like those conic hives made from straw, wooden presses, frozen frames (those are slides put into the modern hive boxes) with drones, centrifuges... I got to put together some of the frames whichi s a good thing because that's a recurring work in the student group, too.

There was a quite interesting lecture on beekeeping from an ethologist who was very, very self-assured - she told a group consisting mostly of male bee-keepers of 60 or older about ten times that most winter deaths of bee colonies aren't due to cell phone radiation, gen crops, climate change or tchernobyl but to mistakes on the side of the bee-keeper, _and_ that old bee-keepers tend to stick with the methods they learned 30 years ago no matter how many colonies they may loose each year.

But she was interesting, too, especially since she has found a way to handle her colonies (she has twenty herself, and that's just "hobby") without protective gear, even when harvesting off the honey.

If I ever have a home with a garden I think it's just a question of time till I start keeping bees. Hopefully before I'm 64.

All in all: intere

Now, this started out with an lj-post of tacit's showing off this image:



accompanied by a vivid description involving tentacle sex, japanese tentacle demons and the like. Great fun to read even for those who aren't utterly twisted.

Then it turns out that other creative minds have gone similar ways, only bigger and wilder:

( cut for size )

And to make it even more lovecraftian, there are documented attempts of artifically inseminating one of those creatures:


Okay, they claim they're trying to clean the thing. Honestly, who falls for that? There are probably hooded man chanting sinister things right below.

I feel like it. Looking around helplessly, clutching my map (would if I had one), no clue as to what to do and how to do it, but very excited to see it all. I'm just one step in and already lost: user icons refuse to be uploaded, even after cutting them down to the traditional 100x100 size. Any moment now someone will abscond with my wallet. (Enjoy, there are old receipts in there.)