Tag: parenting

Swarm Season

~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

Staying ahead of your bees is essential to swarm control. This year, I have diligently worked my production hives every week leading up to our main nectar flow, balancing, equalizing, and more or less pestering my bees into staying put. My general strategy is to confuse the bees so much they can’t make adequate preparations to relocate. So far, it has seemed to work, although it has been a lot of work, hence my sore back. 

Last year, I got behind my bees and could never get caught back up. It seemed like a daily mass migration of bees left my bee yard, only stopping long enough in a tree top to say goodbye, before they sailed off into the horizon in search for a new land of nectar and honey. 

So this year, I have redoubled my efforts to stay ahead of my bees and it seems to be paying dividends. Supers are filling up, despite the severe drought we’re currently in. Honestly, so far, I think the drought has actually been good for the honey crop because there has been no rain or storms to wash out and demolish the fragile poplar blooms. But if the drought persists it will no doubt cut the nectar flow short, so I’m still hoping for some rain. 

Here is a picture of Thomas in his bee suit. He got to be my helper on Saturday, and he did a good job working the smoker. Then he contented himself with making wax balls and wax worms out of fresh burr comb. Apparently, beeswax is nature’s Play-Doh. 

Despite the drought, and the craziness of swarm season, these are good times. 

Carburetor Chronicles Part II: A Linkage in Time

~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Last week, I fixed my chainsaw by fixing a carburetor that didn’t need fixing, so this week I decided to level up by fixing a truly broken carburetor on an old push lawnmower. Sounds simple, but add in a five year old orbiting, playing with your tools, while you’re trying to fiddle with tiny screws and delicate linkages, and it is the equivalent of a psychological experiment. 

“Dad, I’m going to hammer some nails.”

“Great.” 

“Dad, can I play with this spark plug?”

“No.” 

“Dad, we need to put some gas in the tank?

“No we don’t.”

“Dad, I’m going to pull this rope” [pulls starter rope] 

“Stop!” 

The good news is I got the new carburetor on and the lawnmower running again. The bad news is I apparently mixed up the two linkages on the throttle, so the lawn mower was surging. I am not sure why I was even trying to fix this old lawn mower–maybe for nostalgia’s sake?–as it had been sitting in the barn unused for ten years or more, in the same place it’s been since it quit running. When Natalie and I first started renting the old farmhouse from her grandparents, I actually pushed our yard because we couldn’t afford a riding lawn mower. Back then, Fitbits and fitness trackers weren’t really a thing yet, but I’d love to know how many steps I took on a weekly basis cutting grass. All I know is I look a lot slimmer in pictures from that time. 

“Dad, why does it sound funny?”

 “I don’t know. I think I did something wrong.”

“Why did you do something wrong?

“That is a good question.” 

“Well, how do you fix it?”

“That’s another good question.”

Of course, I had to take the new carburetor all the way back off, but Thomas came in handy this go round as he was able to find a tiny screw I dropped in the grass. Once we got the carburetor back on with linkages connected correctly, the lawnmower revved and ran like old times. 

“Dad, can I push it?

“Maybe one day,” I said, “maybe one day.”

The Old Lawnmower Runs Again

Boy Rides Again

~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

“I bet you can’t run over Dad,” my wife said, sacrificing me.

Earlier in the day, we had taken Thomas to the park to practice riding his bike. It was a beautiful winter day, warm enough that you didn’t need a coat, and since school was out for Christmas break, the park was full of moral support. 

“You’ve got this!” said a man walking his dog, as we pleaded with Thomas to try riding his bike one more time. I’m not exactly sure to whom the man was directing his comment, but I appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.

“My helmet is too itchy! This is too hard! I don’t like bikes!” Thomas lamented. 

Santa Clause brought Thomas a “big boy” bike with no training wheels, and we thought it would be the centerpiece of his Christmas, but it quickly became the centerpiece of parent-child conflict. Thomas barely showed any interest in the bike, preferring his toy monster trucks and Legos. We had hoped taking him to the park would give him a chance to focus on the bike, but mostly he just wanted to join the other kids on the playground. 

“You have to make one loop around the park on your bike before you can go play on the playground,” we said, not realizing that we had just committed ourselves to a thirty minute journey that felt one second short of eternity. So it is no wonder when we got home that day, when my wife desperately challenged Thomas to run me over in the yard, that he finally straddled the seat with a sense of determination on his face–and grinned. At the very least, this was progress. An hour or so earlier at the park, he was kicking the bike in frustration and we were kicking ourselves as parents. 

“Just coast down the hill, don’t even try to peddle,” my wife said, giving him a hopeful push. But in his desire to flatten his dear ole Dad, he not only coasted but naturally pedaled to pick up speed. Finally, it clicked. Thomas was not only controlling the direction of his bike but providing locomotion for it. He made it to me, I fell over for dramatic flair, and now he wanted to ride, again and again. 

Here is a video of one of his subsequent rides.

A burgeoning bike rider

Blest Be the Bricks that Bind

~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

My first memory of legos dates back to Mrs. Baird. She was an old church lady who used to keep me from time to time. She had white hair and kept a plastic pail of the big legos in her closet. When she died many years ago, the pail of legos was bequeathed to me, and I kept it reverently like an urn, at least until Thomas got old enough to dump out the contents and all reverence was discarded. Her legos were once again in the hands of a child. 

I’ve also kept a big plastic tote of my legos, mostly a jumbled mix of pirate Legos circa the 1990s in storage, waiting for Thomas to get big enough to graduate from the pail of big legos to my tote of little Legos. I gave it to him a few months ago, and have secretly found myself enjoying recreating my lego ships of olden times. We also got Thomas some small sets for Christmas, which, after building, he summarily destroyed with a monster truck and all the blocks made their way into my old plastic tote, young and old blocks intermingling. He rummages through this tote, makes his own creations, smashes them again, so on and so forth.  

My wife finds pleasure not in building or smashing but in sorting. It is the strangest thing, but she is the type of person who doesn’t like peas to mix with corn or butter beans on a plate. I’m lucky because she generally brings order to my disorderly life, but occasionally she can go a little overboard, at which point she commandeers the whole dining room for three days in an effort to bring order to the jumbled mix of legos she has spread out over the table.

She had the look of a person obsessed so I didn’t say much. But she also had the look of a person who was enjoying her task, like she was putting together a puzzle (or deconstructing a puzzle?). In any event, she created a Dewey Decimal system for the lego bricks in our house, based on sets, like Pirates or Jurassic Park, and then miscellaneous bricks based on color. They are now all organized in Ziploc bags, in small plastic containers, and stacked on a shelf.

Personally, I don’t think I would have picked color to classify the bricks by–I think I would have chosen brick type–but let’s be honest, I would have never classified or brought order to anything, hence the jumbled mix of legos to begin with. 

Building, smashing, sorting–it takes all kinds. We’re a family of lego lovers, each in our own way. 

A Fever Dream

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

This week, I’ve been reacquainted with an old friend. A few years have passed since we last interacted but we picked up where we left off–I swabbed my nose, swirled sufficiently in both nostrils, and waited for my old friend, the Covid test, to wick up my drops of nasal juice and render a verdict: Two lines, positive. 

“We’ve got to stay away from dad for a few days–he’s got Covid,” my wife pronounced. Then she banished me to the guest room. It brought back memories from five years ago when she left gatorade and food outside my door while I sequestered myself. She had the baby monitor set up in my room so she could monitor my progress, while she kept Thomas in the bedroom with her. 

This time I didn’t have a pounding headache, but it was the same old fever, then several days where you feel like you’re living in quicksand. I first got Covid on March 4th, 2021. Back then, when you got Covid for the first time, you worried about whether or not you would survive the next five days. Five years later, the Covid era feels almost like a fever dream. 

Did that really happen?

It did. I know because Thomas was born in the hospital in 2020, with no family or visitors present for fear of spreading the virus. While my wife and I were celebrating our new life in the maternity ward and I was learning to change diapers, up above us in the ICU, people were on ventilators. In January 2022, as a county employee, I had to work at the first vaccine drive thru at our local high school. I’ve never seen people so happy and relieved to get a shot before, but that excitement wouldn’t last. By September 2022, when the Delta wave was peaking, our rural hospital was overwhelmed and turning people away. We had one of the lowest vaccination rates and the highest positivity rate of any county in the state. From that peak (or trough), Covid tapered off and slowly faded from the forefront into the background, into memory–at least for some of us. 

“What’s Covid?” Thomas asked.

I’m glad he has no memory. 

close up of a rapid antigen test kit