Tag: Funny

Breakfast with Bees

~ sanebishop ~ 11 Comments

Once in a moment of inspiration, I decided to buy 32 apple trees. Talk about making work for yourself. Now, every winter, the trees need pruning to ensure a bountiful apple harvest for the gluttonous woodland creatures. Between the racoons, opossums, and deer, we probably salvage half a peck of apples for ourselves, enough for Natalie to make a delicious homemade apple crisp each year to remind me of the foolishness of my moment of inspiration.

“This better taste good,” she says, “how much did you spend on those apple trees again?”

I will be glad when the apple orchard turns seven years old; according to the IRS, I can then discard the receipts and all physical evidence of that moment of inspiration. Thereafter, I can plead amnesia when my wife asks me silly questions about costs. 

The problem with apple trees is that they grow, which means the chore of pruning becomes substantially more labor and time-consuming each year, yet the actual return on investment usually remains the same–nothing. Some years it’s woodland creatures. Other years it’s late freezes or early springs. Unfortunately, some of our apple trees had already started blooming this year when winter finally decided to return this week. Not a pretty site. What was a beautiful apple tree white with blooms now looks like it decided to paint its petals black in goth attire. Thus, the woodland creatures might have to go on a diet this year. 

And the weather is not only rough on blooms but the creatures that pollinate them. I got a call on Tuesday from a local farmer who said he had a big swarm of bees on a post in his shed. “Are you sure they’re honeybees,” I said, “cause it’s too cold for bees to be swarming?”  Turns out he wasn’t kidding. Sure enough, there was a big swarm of bees on a post in his shed. Only problem was they swarmed on the Monday before the cold front blew through, then spent all night huddled and shivering on the post as temps got below freezing. By the time he called me on Tuesday, they seemed half dead and the ones that were alive were just barely moving. 

Sometimes with cold bees, dead is “not quite dead yet.” They may look dead, but if you can get them back in a warm area they will miraculously buzz back to life. I brushed the bees off the post into a closed-up nuc box, took them home and put the box over a vent in our dining room. The next morning, I was eating breakfast with the sound of bees roaring. They were up and at ‘em early, ready to escape their nuc box and forage because it was 72 degrees in our house. Because the weather was calling for another night of below freezing temps, I kept them inside on Wednesday night and then put them in the bee yard today since it has warmed back up.  I put a frame of eggs in there just in case the queen wasn’t among one of the resurrected bees.  

So far, they seem to be flying and doing good–just no thanks to the weather!

The New Trash Kingpin?

~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

In a momentous occasion, Natalie and I cleaned out the barn. This was the first barn clean out since Thomas was born, which meant the barn had accumulated two years worth of detritus. Alas, if only I could accumulate wealth as fast as I could accumulate junk, then I could afford to keep my junk by building another barn to store it in. But the dream of another barn is silly daydreaming. In fact, I was given an ultimatum to either channel my inner Marie Kondo, or else my wife was going to spark her own joy by banishing me to our barn until it was cleaned out. 

We took four pickup truck loads of trash to the dump. To be honest, I’m not sure my nerves could have taken any more trips to the dump that day. Usually, there is only one old man guarding access to the compactor, but on the one day we decide to clean out the barn, they just happened to have two old men trash inspectors on duty, each sitting in a lawn chair, each poking at stuff in the compactor with long poles, and each hitting the big red compactor button every so often–yep, definitely a two man job. 

I have learned from experience that old men trash inspectors don’t play. They can make your life a living hell, mainly by declaring your load to be demolition materials, which means you then have to journey thirty minutes to landfill and pay five dollars to dispose of your trash. And whatever you do, don’t dare try to sneak a paint can into the extractor by hiding it in a trash bag. Old men trash inspectors can smell a paint can from a mile away. 

Our county recently imposed a new ordinance that requires everybody who lives in the county to put a green sticker on the upper left corner of their windshield. In my opinion, this green sticker is more important than my social security number. The green sticker signifies that I’m a genuine county resident, and thus I have the right to dispose of my junk in the county’s trash facilities. Apparently, outsiders from South Carolina had been smuggling their trash across the state line and thus clogging up our compactors with their rubbish. 

If I ever decide to turn to a life of crime, I think I will start by counterfeiting green stickers to sell to South Carolinians. From what I can surmise, there is too much competition already in drugs and guns, but I bet the cartels haven’t thought about all the money they could make from interstate rubbish smuggling. I would say that farming could be my front for laundering all my green sticker proceeds, but I doubt that would work given my track record. In fact, nobody in their right mind would ever believe that I could run a highly profitable farm.

So You Want to Be an Emu Farmer…

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

Last week I talked about cryptozoological species, and this week I might as well talk about cryptocurrency, which is what cryptozoological species use to pay for stuff, like when the Loch Ness Monster needs to pay for dry cleaning. Just kidding, I suspect Nessie wouldn’t conduct commerce with cryptocurrency; even a pea-brained dinosaur would have more sense than to use a currency that only gives you ten guesses at your password before it locks away your fortune permanently (really, millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin have been lost forever because people can’t remember their password.)

But people are gullible, especially smart people. Think about all the really smart people who thought Sam Bankman-fried was the second-coming of Warren Buffet, when really he was just the second-coming of Bernie Madoff. 

And think about all the normally sensible folks who bought emus several decades ago. Emus, yes, emus were supposed to compete with cows as the other red meat. At one point during the emu craze, breeding emus cost $25,000 a piece. I’m not an expert in math, but if a bird costs $25,000, then the drumstick is going to be price-prohibitive at the grocery store. I guess that explains why a feral emu once roamed the woods in the upper end of my county; some say it escaped but most likely it was set loose when the emu market went bust. Apparently, Americans didn’t like paying $1,000 per pound for poultry, even if it was red meat.

Recently, over in India, some major breakthroughs in the art of swindling occurred when enterprising con men combined a Ponzi scheme with old-fashioned emu hype. Two men were sentenced to twenty years in jail for scamming aspiring emu farmers out of six million dollars. For a mere $500,000 they would give farmers twenty emu chicks for breeding purposes, in exchange for the promise of buying back future chicks at astronomical prices. Of course, the only way that scam works is by finding more gullible people to invest in chicks, meaning it’s a tried-and-true Ponzi scheme dressed up in emu feathers. I give them points for creativity.

Anyway, I’m not sure what the point of this post is, but if any you where thinking about investing your life savings in an Emu farm, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. In fact, consider this a public service announcement.

The Winter of My Discarded Stomach Contents

~ sanebishop ~ 11 Comments

Just in case any of you might have been wondering if I finally attempted a farming feat so stupid that it ended in my untimely demise, I’m happy to report I’m still alive; I just haven’t had the chance to write much lately since my intestines have unionized and gone on strike, bringing to a retching halt the normal function of my digestive system. 

First, it was Flu B, then it was a pre-Christmas stomach bug, followed by a repeat stomach bug last week. I have upchucked more in three months than I have in thirty years. I blame my son for all this projectile vomiting: we shower him with big Tonka trucks, and all he gives us are microscopic germs. He seems mostly impervious to the weekly germs de vogue that circulate at daycare, barely slowing down from hyperactive to active for a tummy ache, meanwhile his mom and dad are taking turns jettisoning the contents of their stomachs for days on end. 

I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. I thought adults were supposed to have more fortifications against microscopic invaders than children, but alas my white blood cells have apparently fallen asleep on duty; meanwhile, I can’t sleep at all because I’m too busy guarding a porcelain throne. 

Anyway, I hope everyone had a good holiday season and here is hoping for a good 2023–full of new farming feats, fewer daycare germs, and a return to normality, at least for my digestive system. 

A Boy and the Beekeeping Bug

~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

Men, if your wife is trying to tell you she’s pregnant, whatever you do, don’t turn to her and say, “But I don’t need one, I’ve already got three.”

Not that I had three children already, I had three bee jackets. The fact is I didn’t have any children–my wife and I had been trying for years. Once you’ve been married for eight years, you start to resign yourself to the possibility that the only offspring you’ll hear in your house will be when you rediscover your long lost burnt CD collection in a storage box1 (sorry, if you didn’t get that joke, it was really very clever–you just weren’t a teenager in the 1990s. Please refer to footnote #1 for historical context). 

So I certainly wasn’t expecting to be greeted with life changing news when I walked through the door one Friday after a long day’s work. Still, I should have known something was up because on the kitchen counter was an envelope with my name written in my wife’s handwriting. That should have been a red flag because it wasn’t my birthday and, after a quick mental panic, I realized it wasn’t our anniversary either. My wife then handed me the envelope and told me to open it. 

“What’s this for?” I asked. 

“Just open it, and you’ll see,” I said. 

Well, I didn’t see. The greeting card had two little cartoony bees on the inside, and it said, “I’m so happy to bee with you.” Underneath that, my wife had written, “It looks like you’re going to need a new bee suit.” And underneath that, she had drawn a tiny little bee, about the size of a popcorn kernel. Likely, because I’m a man and was too busy wondering where the gift card was to pay for said bee suit, I overlooked that baby bee and blurted out, “But I don’t need one, I’ve already got three.”

And my life has never been the same since. Thomas is now two years old, and I’m actually starting to shop for his first beekeeping apparel. Now that he is old enough to run, I figure he’s old enough to run from bees with me. Secretly, I do hope that Thomas will one day enjoy beekeeping. Growing up, my dad always took me fishing and metal detecting, his two favorite hobbies, and some of my best memories are from spending time with him doing those two things. That said, beekeeping is a lot more like work than fishing or metal detecting, so I’m not terribly optimistic. Right now, he does have some semi bee-related interests, namely rolly-pollies and caterpillars. Mostly, though he just like trains, firetrucks, tractors, and monster trucks.

Even if the beekeeping bug doesn’t bite Thomas, a boy has got to develop a good work ethic, and there is no harder work than lugging honey supers around on a hot July day. We will see.

1In the 1990s, there was a popular band called The Offspring and this thing called Napster where teenagers downloaded music for free to record, a.k.a. to burn, onto CDs. This was more or less illegal, but everybody did it.