Snowshoe Blog

Ryan, my cousin, would not stop. "Look, a bear! Over there, deer!" Michael Bolton's "How Can We Be Lovers" played on the tape deck. My sister, Meghann, and our cousin, Michael, talked about whatever it was middle-schoolers talked about; Meg made a quick departure from the topic at hand to call Ryan a liar. My mother and her sister, Jane, were in the front; Jane was driving. My cousin, Jonathan, and I watched a VHS of "The Gospel Bill Show". Ryan continued to announce all the amazing northern Minnesota creatures he was certainly seeing in the thick woods.

A week-and-a-half-ago - a bit later than normal in the evening - and the treatment for Lyme disease was underway (it is now pointing toward something else - lupus or rheumatoid arthritis - both, of which, at the age of 30, I should not have) and the not-sleeping-well and the upset-stomach were on full assault modes. An email came in from a friend; it was a forwarding from a post to the UMD Farmers' Market mailing list. Someone had a friend with a tree full of honey bees. They wanted the bees gone.

For a while, I have been tacitly involved with a loose group of people who are strong supporters of urban farming. So, strong and so passionate about it, they campaigned for and successfully changed a city ordinance allowing for the keeping of chickens within the city limits of Duluth. My involvement revolved around being technical support for their website, duluthcitychickens.org.

After checking the hives on June 6, 2010, it was determined, with much regret, that the Minnesota Hygienic Italian queen...must die. The warrant was signed when I located a supplier of new MHI queens, placed my order, and 5 days later, a small, buzzing package was in the mailbox. The queen arrived last Thursday, and we got home from St. Paul far too late (bad weather postponed our departure from 5:00 PM until 9:00 PM) for me to depose the monarch; it would wait until the next day.

We headed to the lake today; took some photos when I was not fishing.

We were planning on heading to the in-laws' cabin this weekend, but my mother-in-law was not feeling well. The in-laws stayed in St. Paul, and we stayed in town. We headed to Duluth Farmer's Market and then to the Whole Foods Co-op. At DFM, we were gunning for fresh whitefish, but Lake Superior Fish Co only had smoked fish. We settled on the trout. As tempting as it was to buy beta grapes from Deb Shubat or the petunias and herbs from others, I am sticking to my "30 days without buying books, seeds or plants". We could have bought chocolate from Peace, Love & Chocolate, but decided it to head to pick up groceries at WFC.

Our neighbor had been wondering about the poles in the garden and why we were apparently making two small teepees; he asked if we were native.

The long and the short answers to that question are the same: no, we are not native. Both my wife and I heritages that hail from northern and north-central Europe - not native American.

We put a new vegetable garden in this year - eight feet by eight feet. It takes up a small section of the yard that the grass never really grew in and the hounds really were never encouraging to the grass that attempted to grow there. In this new garden, we are mainly growing vine-crops: pole beans, bush beans, and cucumbers; in the non-vine arena, there are red cabbage & parsnips and lavender for a border.

Earlier in the week, I trimmed up one of our large pine trees - it had had some branches that were hanging low and getting in the way when mowing the grass. Given that I have had a penchant for fires since I was a mere toddler, the obvious solution to the problem of getting rid of the cut branches was to burn them.

I decided to give videoing myself while I checked the hives a try. I dug around until I found a video-capable camera. Panasonic DMC-FX07. The video shoot (I think that is what it is called in the biz) went well. The audio is kind of bad and when I stood up completely, my head was cropped out of the shot. In the end, it is roughly ten minutes long; I edited out the part where I got stung on the hand and let loose with a string of expletives.