Hum-diddly-dum...

Just staring out my window at the fall foliage impatiently waiting for the mother figure to fly her way up here and see me....*9994 bottles of beer on the wall, 9994 bottles of beer.  Take one down, pass it around, 9993 bottles of beer on the wall...*
xoxoxo

Sweetland

So, here are the elementary tools of the honey-robbing trade: white jacket and veil (bees are less threatened by the color white than darker colors), gloves, a bee brush (in yellow) for brushing the insects off the frames you will see later, the smoker (bees are somewhat sedated by the presence of smoke), and other odd gadgets.

Not a terribly bad idea to suit-up first.  You can't see them here, but I'm wearing some pretty thick gloves, too.  When I got to messing with the bees a few minutes later, one of them crawled up the inside of the suit and spent a few panicked minutes buzzing around the inside of the veil.  It never stung my face, but I think it was scared, nonetheless.  Where did it think it had been imprisoned?

You can barely see it in this picture, but the hive is composed of two large boxes on bottom and one small box on top.  Today we will be robbing honey from the top small box.  The lower two will be left alone.  They contain new bees and honey they are storing up for the winter.

Here we've pulled out one frame full of honey from the top small box.  The bees are in the process of capping with a white skin of wax all the cells full of honey.  The uncapped cells contain honey, too.

We are simply cutting out comb with a knife.  The comb will be placed into a sieve and squeezed, letting honey drip through and into a jar.

It's unfiltered and specked with waxy comb.  Pretty good stuff, this simple harvest of a sweetland.

When Life Gives You Lemon...

 

Making bread and sitting with faux-Whitman

Hello All,
I finally got a full day off so I decided to make bread and it was an astounding success!  After about an hour and a half of trying to find a good bread recipe for high altitude that did not require anything too special (ie. anything that I didn't already have), I finally settled on one and went to work.  The first hurdle was trying to get the yeast to rise.  Some websites said to use cold water for the yeast at high altitude and some said it didn't matter and some said to add sugar and some said not to and some said to use a 1/4 cup water and some said to use 1 cup water, so...I ended up with three different batches of yeast to see which worked best.

  The bowl in the middle is cold water, 1 cup, no sugar, the bowl on the bottom is room temperature water, 1/2 cup, some sugar, and the small measuring cup is warm water, 1/4 cup, and sugar.  In the end bowl #1 did nothing, bowl #2 was somewhat active, and bowl #3 exploded beautifully as the directions said it would.

The rest was pretty easy after that and I succeeded in covering myself in flour while trying to knead the dough with one hand and measure flour with the other.  However, not too long after I had three beautiful mounds of dough ready to go on the pan.

But, as with all cooking adventures, there was the mess left behind.



Once the dishes were done and I couldn't wait any longer, I pulled three beautiful loafs of french bread out of the oven.  A little butter rubbed on top and this fledgling baker was very proud.

I am now sitting on my bed with faux-Whitman writing yall and getting caught up with the news in the world.  It is such a beautiful day I think I will go take a walk in order to keep myself from pacing back and forth in the kitchen waiting to cut into my masterpiece. 

Love yall!!!

-Kate



A Few Days' Fun

Here is our kitchen after I decided to put dish washing liquid (the sort that is supposed to go on a piece of cloth or foam with the aim of being directly applied to individual pots and dishes in a sink) into the machine.  I spent the next hour with the shop-vac sucking suds.  It just wouldn't stop.

Then yesterday, after our 6:30 a.m. appointment at MD Anderson, Hope and I drove down to Galveston for a few hours on the beach.  If you are ever wondering when the best time to go to a Texas beach might be, the answer is October (assuming a hurricane isn't twisting the Gulf to pieces).

This shot below was taken at the cemetery where I conducted a small and informal memorial service for our friend Ellen.  You'll see Vance standing in the back right, Joanie seated in black on the grass, half of Hope's head to the right behind a white-haired Nancy Pressler, and (yes) the Honorable Judge Herman Paul Pressler the Umpteenth (if you ever wanted to spell "loser" in gold letters, I just did it for you).  But the ceremony was beautiful, and everybody seemed to enjoy sitting on the grass in the cool evening.  We had good things to say about dear Ellen.

And so the grasshopper didn't eat them all . . . .