Wedding Crashers...

While my mother is over staying with me things have slowed down a little and we are taking things easy. In the absence of anything like a backyard to sit in at the house, we have been visiting some of the local parks to sit in and relax. (The back yard renovation at home is perhaps a story for another time, but it has been a project from hell to date - so full of expense, poor workmanship and missed promises that I just don’t want to talk about it). Anyway, our favorite place is, of course, the Rose Garden in McKinley Park which, even this late in the season, is still quite beautiful.

Yesterday we were sitting there and as more and more smartly dressed people arrived we realized we were in the middle of a wedding. We were joined on our seat by a friend of the bride and pretty soon we had got the low down on the couple getting married – apparently another case of a smart young woman marrying a less than stellar young man – “throwing her life away” – at least in the view of our new “friend”.

As more and more people arrived, they would walk past us and greet us as if we were invited guests. It would have been so easy to just mingle in with the crowd and we could have slipped along to the reception (at a nearby house).

Of course witnessing a wedding is not something you can usually do in the UK, and Mum was quite interested to see the bride in all her finery. So we stayed around for the ceremony (discretely positioned away from the main crowd) and critiqued everyone’s dress. We decided to pass on the reception however - we had dinner plans at IKEA anyway.

More Bee Adventures

The last time I wrote about the bees, I had recovered from the loss of my bees by accidentally getting another swarm to take up residence in the hive. Alas, those bees did not last too long, and they succumbed to those pesky wax moths and departed. So I was again left without bees.

After my first loss, I had put my name on a list of beekeepers who are prepared to retrieve bee swarms from around town whenever they were reported. I must admit I did not particularly think through all the issues involved with this and I had pretty much forgotten about it until I got a call on Tuesday from a lady in my neighborhood who had a swarm of bees in her backyard. So, not really knowing what I was up for, I went over to her house with a hive box and all my gear (gloves, veil, smoker - all the stuff that makes me look like a pro).

The bees were all massed on the edge of the roof, in the gutter and under the eaves. Not the nice tidy ball of bees that I had read about in books that hang from a tree and are easily dislodged into an awaiting hive. So there I was precariously perched on the top of a step ladder holding a hive box in one hand and a bee brush in the other trying to sweep the bees off the roof into my box. It could have been quite the disaster but, despite my inexperience, it turned out uneventful. Some of the bees made it into the box while others just flew around haphazardly and then went back on the roof. I had about three attempts to dislodge more bees from the roof into the box, and then decided to leave the box on top of the ladder close enough to the roof so that hopefully they would be enticed into the more salubrious surroundings of my hive.

I left things like that overnight and the next morning returned to find the majority of bees had indeed taken up residence in the hive and over the next day I was able to lure nearly everyone else into the hive.

All in all things went quite well – for the first time I have captured a roaming swarm of bees and I was pretty pleased about that. Now all I have to do is keep them alive until next Spring when the nectar flow starts again.

The lady of the house with the swarm was quite thankful and showed great interest in the whole process (a candidate for her own hive in the future no doubt). Many thanks to my step-brother Howard (another candidate for a beekeeper) who went with me to watch the pending disaster, and to my friend Brian who came to the rescue with his taller step ladder. Howard was the only one who got stung (sorry about that) – it was just bad luck.

Mum returns to the U.S. of A.

It's that time of year again and once more my mum has made the trip from England to visit me here in California. She is now 87 years of age and being game enough to make the trip at that age is pretty impressive, I think.

So here we are on the night of her arrival out on the town dining at Ernesto's one of our local Mexican Restaurants. Note the Margarita - not a particularly small one - which she proceeded to consume and then professed that it was better than her usual orange juice.

I can only hope I got some of her longevity genes.

Chalk It Up

Labour Day Weekend is the annual Chalk It Up Festival in Sacramento where the sidewalks of a downtown square are adorned with pavement drawings. The event is a fund raiser for childrens's art education and the funds being raised by renting a square of pavement for your drawing.

The quality of drawings is all across the board from the most primitive to works of excellent quality.


This one was the most technically accomplished. The skin tones were quite wonderful.


President Allende was being remembered - apparently 9/11 was the date of his death.


Another interesting subject with the pencils jumping out of the pavement.


Many local vendors had works on show like this one from Noah's Bagels. What I couldn't understand was the one from a local tattoo parlour that was just not very good at all. If they can't get the artwork right in chalk on the sidewalk, then why would anyone want to let them dabble in permanent ink on their skin.