Bill's Bee Movie

The past two summers a neighbor has kept 24 of his hives on our property most of the summer. We have come to enjoy the free honey in the late fall, especially the Meadowfoam honey - that stuff is so good and so different tasting from other honeys we get locally. He comes and goes, checking on the bees each week until one day in the late fall when they leave to go live in California with the Almonds. Too bad Filberts don't need bees.


The bees have water at the hives but apparently not enough. Our large plastic dog bowl is always swarming with thirsty bees, looking for something to drink. They can easily drink a couple gallons a day and luckily for them, the faucet above the drinking bowl leaks. The water causes another problem for the bees though - a lot of them are not good swimmers. So Karen and I carefully place large sticks in the water, strategically so the bees can climb up on the stick from most anywhere in the bowl, dry off and fly away. The sticks kept disappearing though or being found a few feet from the bowl. We kept accusing the other of removing the stick until the night I spied the raccoon drinking from the same bowl. Aha! I'm pretty sure he had to use his paws to drink - they seem to do everything with their paws - and the consensus is that she was the one removing the stick almost every night.

I took a video of the bees and posted it to Google.

iPhone 1.1.1 - seems fine to me

Upgraded to 1.1.1 and all went fine for me - not so much for a lot of others apparently, especially those who customized their phone by jailbreaking it or siming it. I had done neither although I was about to go enjoy some of the 50 3rd party software out there, especially a task minder that sounded good and customizing the GUI by moving and replacing the buttons.

My 8gig works better than ever. The itunes button is awesome (like in Cool To Use, not like Beautiful) as I am so out of touch with newer music and this allows me to sample a whole boatload of different music styles whereever I can get wifi. It is so quick, even with out slow DSL at home. I click on a song and it IMMEDIATELY plays the first 30 seconds. So fast and so easy. I never really used an ipod much and find podcasts so enjoyable. The range of content is, well, global and the ease of listening will only get better when I get my headphones [Update: RIVET makes good headphones just for the iphone - jack plugs right in -10/11] for christmas (hint hint).

So I still love my iphone and still expect it to keep changing my life in subtle ways I did not expect. We now have all of our friends names and addresses and emails in one place instead of five which should help. It's not like we have hundreds of friends, but it is nice to know the number is bigger than 10.

What is my iphone? It is my watch, my camera, my phone, the home phone, my alarm clock, my light, my instant messager, my email box, my photo library, my movie library(I've watched Calum the Enchanter 15 times), my weather station, my maps, my friend finder, my radio, my link to music of all kinds, probably more that I can't think about. With all this, I find that I don't really want to show it off, as it's social patina is still too bright for a lot of people and it is still too much of a symbol of coolness.

45th and stable but the sun's in our eyes

If we didn't live on the 45th parallel, I swear these things would never happen. Well, especially in the midwest where the roads run on the compass.

We feel like we live on the 45th parallel even though we know it is at least 10 miles north of us per the sign on I-5. However it is so close that we can be fooled on certain days. Take the Monday morning in mid-September as I headed off to work. On that day, it really seemed like it was the 45th parallel here.

You see, the 4 lane road I sometimes use goes directly East - no, really really directly East. And my day got me to the roadway just as the sun had crossed the horizon, directly in my face.There was only about 2 degrees of difference between the sun and road way.

As I got closer to town and the sun got up a little higher, there really wasn't much to see but Mr. Sol. My assumption was the road had not changed and was still straight, so I watched my review mirror to make sure it was right behind me. Sure enough, it stayed there and I ended up in town.

Had we been on the 4oth or even the 42nd, the sun would have been at an angle and all would have been different. And the same thing happens at sunset on the road - sun directly in your eyes on the equinox, assuming the sky is not covered in clouds, like usual.

Oregon on the equinox - I still love it.

September brings new grandson video

Here's Calum using his feet as well as his hands - kind of monkey-like.

Click here to see Video on Google

That's it for now.