Warranting us to begin to start thinking about getting things prepared. Living in the 21st century, life is a doddle. We get cold, we turn on the heating; We get hungry, we go to the store. It's not like we need to prepare for winter in the same way we used to many years ago, but there is something soulfully delightful about preparing for the longer evenings and nights, making sure the pantry and freezer are full with food and that food is to be comforting, starchy pies and warming stews, knowing that all the flowers and plants, even some of the animals are hunkering down preparing to sleep until the spring.
I have always fancied myself as a bit of a bear. In fact, for those of you who have been reading this blog for a longtime will know, I often used to call myself a mama bear. I would feel somewhat of a prannock using that term these days, but my sentiments are there and...well, allow me to hibernate and just come out in the spring, summer and autumn, I'm sure I'd thrive!
My 'hibernation' this year is starting with my needing to purge. I don't spring clean, I'd like to not clean at all, but heck...
The children are growing up so fast.
The outside build is getting ready for the roof trusses this week.
My career has evolved over the years
All these things are meaning that we're needing less of the toys; we can start thinking about moving stuff over to the studio over the garage, I don't need some of the items I used to need for work, clothes are continually being grown out of (at a rate of knots!).
We have decided to do away with our Wii, at least for a while. It sits there and barely gets played. The children have all decided (much to my reluctance - I'm not really very tech-savvy and my fear of technology tends to manifest itself in a dislike, which, for my teens is probably not a great thing and I try hard to understand 2014 through their eyes rather than mine in 1987) that they have outgrown the Wii and want a Playstation instead. We have seen that there is more development with the latter and more games they can get, thus we have decided that sometime next year we will replace the Wii as a family. In the meantime the Wii is going, freeing up a lot of storage space. I also feel a large sense of release, temporarily, even though it rarely got played.
The bees are still out and about, although less frequently at the moment. We have been studying our manual trying to decide what we need to do for them over the winter. Primarily, not a lot I think. It doesn't matter where you look, books, internet or fellow beekeepers, they will all say different things. Some tell you to keep the hives warm by stuffing in some kind of insulation, whilst others say that insulation creates moisture and others tell you that bees don't die of cold they die of wet. Some say feed fondant, others say don't feed! Agghh, it's a minefield of information. I think much of our first winter will be trial and error and a lot of dependency on Mother Nature being kind to us all.
It's a bizarre little area that doesn't make a whole heap of sense. The shed is a 'summer shed' style and is massive. Too big really. It has an overhanging roof that I perpetually bump my head on whilst wearing my bee suit (the bees being behind me in this picture). The roof is growing a lot of moss and starting to fail and one of the windows is also failing. It has been built with a decked area to one side of it which is a death trap when it rains because it becomes very slippery. It also takes up a good 10 x 5 metres of garden.
A project for after hibernation perhaps!
No comments:
Post a Comment