Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Several years ago I took the Boulder County Beekeepers' Association class for how to keep bees. It was in the Boulder County Farming co-op and it was in the dead of winter. They told us all about the thousand ways bee colonies can be killed and how to do your best to slow down the death... So I didn't really seriously think about it for quite some time. Last year, one of the big Denver pollination and honey outfits died, and they were selling their equipment for cheap, and I got six boxes, a feeder, a queen excluder, and a telescoping top for $100... Yes, the class told me everything about why getting used equipment was a bad idea, but... it was so inexpensive, and I just wanted to try.  Succeeding wasn't so much the point, as just actually having the courage to try.

It's weird having both Blogger and G+ and wondering how that works. *laughs* Anyway.... here's a link to the G+ album of the little trek John and I took to get my three pounds of bees and their queen. It was more fun than I thought it would be, especially with hundreds of bees just hanging out with the keepers in the garage. It was a very fine example of how to act around these ladies, and how gentle the bees really are when they're not in their hive, yet. All of these commercial bees were bred for gentleness, so I'm actually very happy to have experienced exactly how not-dangerous these girls are.

I remember being a judge of a fanfiction story contest a while back, the people running it picked me because they liked my fanfiction stories, because I had been published, and they thought I knew something about the art of fanfiction, so that I should be useful as a judge. I couldn't fault them for their judgment on that! I mean, yes, I know how to write. I know how to put together sentences, and I know the general structure and reason and ways in which a story should or shouldn't be. But writing is an art, and like with my painting, my writing is all about what I choose to Make Be. It's ALL about constant judgment calls on what I want or don't want in a story or on a page. And the very same judgment that makes me a good writer is the one that made me feel like an awful judge about the relative merit of people's work. Because when I choose, I choose what I want, what I like, what I have a bias for or against.

Back in high school, a pure white boxed set of paper bound books came out with two-color covers and a lid on the box. I bought them because I'd just moved to a new city for my senior year in high school and the misfit boys that I'd ended up being friends with after school were playing D&D. But my friend Alfred had mixed his own version of it, set in feudal Japan, with samurai swords, daimyo, and oni instead of the more standard fare and monsters in the book.

I had the privilege of going to go see Jason Statham in Parker  yesterday. It was a real treat. I've been reading the Richard Stark Parker novels because of a recommendation from Carl. Richard Stark was a pen name for Donald Westlake, and got through the first three, so was completely unspoiled for the movie, which was based on the fourth book Flashfire . The movie-Parker is softer and more sympathetic than the book one, but I can see why that was so. Smart adapters. The early Stark novels went out of print pretty quickly, but the later ones, after Parker's 1990 Comeback were much more popular. There are no spoilers below, just lots of thoughts I've had along the lines of what I love most about Parker the character.

I'd forgotten that going home is always a blend of getting back to where and whom I came from along with both the comfort and discomfort of being here. That it's that uncomfortable feeling of 'oh, that's where that phrasing came from' or 'that's why I have that attitude' all blended with the comfort of the familiar, the known, and all the memories that go with them.

I slept in until 9 and just skipped breakfast in order to talk with Kelly for a while. I had no desire to pay for breakfast either. A cup of bad coffee and a cup of really excellent tea (Carl lent me his tea kettle, and I had my gaiwan and Flit's tea from Thursday. The Phoenix oolong proved to be astonishingly good) was plenty to get me into my really excellent Atomic Robo game with Morgan Ellis. Carl had recommended that particular game to me, and I was really really happy that I was able to get into it!