Yesterday morning, it occurred to me that I had not washed my hair in over a week.

A few years ago, I religiously washed my hair every other day.  Sometimes every day, but every other at the least.  Day one, my hair could be worn down.  But day two, it was so greasy, I had to pull it back into some kind of bun.  Gradually, I went to every third day.  For a while, I experimented with not using shampoo, but had mixed results.  Over the past year, I’ve gotten into the habit of washing my hair every five to seven days.

Oh, and two months ago I quit shampoo.

This is my hair on eight days with no washing (and secretly, two days with no brushing…oops!).  While I would not have worn it down to work in this state, it was fine for a day of Home Depot, yardwork, and horseback riding.

When I do get around to washing my hair, I use baking soda and vinegar.  When I experimented with it in the past, I had mixed results, and ended up going back to shampoo.  But two months in, I’ve got the system down.  The trick, as I read somewhere in the blog world, is that I mix the baking soda with a bit of water ahead of time.  A couple of days if I remember, the night before if I don’t.  I think this is the genius. Before, I would make a paste of baking soda in my hand while in the shower, and it would sometimes leave my hair kind of crunchy.

I mix, oh, I don’t know, maybe a tablespoon or two of baking soda with just a little bit of water in a small jar.  When I’m ready to wash my hair, I pour about a quarter of a cup of apple cider vinegar into a my Nalgene bottle, which holds a liter of water.

In the shower, I add a bit more water to the baking soda jar, sprinkle it over my scalp (especially the underneath part towards the back), and give my head a scrub.  Then rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse.

Next step is to fill the Nalgene about half way or two thirds of the way with water (plus the vinegar that is in there already), and pour that over my head.  Once it is down to about two cups or so, I refill it for a more diluted solution, and pour the rest over my hair.  And then another rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse with regular water.

I find that if I rinse enough, there is no residual vinegar smell.

I’ve definitely noticed that the less I wash my hair, the less it needs to be washed.  It probably helps that I don’t use any product in my hair, but I think it is mostly that all of the crazy chemical shampoos strip your scalp of all of its natural stuff, and then it has to work overtime to make up for it, and then you’re in a vicious cycle of oily hair.  Where as when you basically leave it alone, and use much gentler stuff on it, it doesn’t freak out and have to work so hard.

The hair washing thing is probably one of my hippie-est qualities.  Yet while I have some serious hippie streaks, there is a lot that I am perfectly happy to leave in the non-hippie spectrum.

I mean, yes, I use an Amish washer for the bulk of my laundry, but I dry clean all of my work pants, and I have my work shirts laundered and pressed at the dry cleaner as well.  And I have no guilt about that.  Not one drop.  The chemicals and the badness are worth not having to iron a button down shirt.

The hippie side of me will tell you: “I don’t have a TV.”  Which is true.  I don’t.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t watch a ton of absolute garbage on my dependable little laptop.  I have zero desire to have a TV.  Where would I even put it?  And the laptop is plenty fine for watching even the biggest of the “Biggest Loser” contestants.

I also don’t have a microwave.  I don’t miss the microwave at all.  Most things can just be heated up in a pan in nearly the same amount of time the microwave would take.  For everything else, there is the regular oven. It may take a bit longer, but it turns out way better anyway.

I don’t use paper napkins.  For my own every-day use, I have a stack of cheap, white washcloths that I use as napkins.  I use one “napkin” for several days before I retire it to the laundry.  I have fancier cloth napkins for any time that I have guests.  And I do keep a roll of paper towels on hand, but generally those are reserved for dog barf, or anything I really would not want to put in the laundry.

I’m sure there are other hippie quirks I’m forgetting (I forgot about the napkins entirely until mid-post), but you get the idea.  I just try do do what makes the most sense for me and my life.  Sometimes it turns out to be the hippie version (yard full of kale), and sometimes not so much (I sometimes eat a tub of artichoke dip for dinner), but I figure it all evens out in the end.

Oh, hello there.

Before you get too excited about the title, I’m fine.  But the following is my first story of ridiculosity for the new year.  Yay, 2012!  Also, the photo above is an old photo at a different barn with a different horse, but that’s what I’ve got, friends, that’s what I’ve got.

Oh, also you should know that I’m writing this Monday night and setting it to publish Tuesday morning, so Tuesday I’ll give you an update.

SO.  Here is the story.

I had a riding lesson tonight.  And it was great.  I was riding a horse I’ve ridden a couple of times before, and she is a super sturdy, reliable-type horse.  As in, she does NOT like to move forward.  So much so that I use spurs while riding her.  And last time I rode her, I couldn’t even make her trot by the end of the lesson, I was so exhausted.

According to my teacher, though, there was just something in the air tonight, as all the horses were acting nutso.

When my lesson started, things were going great.  I felt sturdy, and everything was working, and all was good.  And then it was time to practice jumping.

I haven’t jumped since last time I fell off, so I was just going over poles that were flat on the ground.  Really take a moment to imagine this, as it will make the next part of the story even more laughable. FLAT ON THE GROUND.  In fact, let me give you a visual:

That is totally not me, just a random photo of a kid going over trot poles to illustrate how not a big deal this should have been.

So, the horse, Argyle, and I are headed for the poles at a nice leisurely trot, when she decides: “Oh, eff you.  I’m not walking over that,” and stops.  That is poor, poor horse behavior, so my teacher insists that I make her go over the poles, one way or another.  The horse is not allowed to win this one.  But Argyle resists, and resists, turning her head, and trying to move backwards (because seriously, we are stopped about six inches from the pole, and there is just nowhere else to go).  Finally, my teacher comes over, and smacks the horse on the butt.  Now the horse realizes she’s busted.  The teacher got involved, after all.  And the next time I give her a little kick to move forward over the poles, girlfriend basically says: “Oh, you want me to go over the poles?  I’LL GO OVER THE DANGED POLES!”

And she straight up JUMPED from a standing position.

I was not expecting this and went toppling to the side.  You know, off the horse.

On my way to the ground, I manged to whack my knee into the side of my chin.

Let me repeat that for you, because I don’t think you quite imagined it like you should have.  I mean, I was there, I did it, and I still can’t really picture what happened.

I whacked my own knee into the side of my own chin.

And then I landed on my butt and the horse ran off.

Now, mind you, I did this move in front of my teacher and about six fifteen year old girls who happen to be my classmates.  I didn’t get hurt in the fall, but my chin did hurt, and I did exclaim several times: “I kicked myself in the face!  How did I do that?”  And then I went charging after the horse, occasionally yelling; “YOU PUNK!” Then I got back on and continued my lesson.

My teacher checked that I still had all of my teeth, and around that time I realized that my jaw was just a little bit busted.  Busted as in my teeth didn’t quite close. It didn’t hurt, though, so I figured it would just pop back into place.

I finished my lesson, put the horse away, and came home, and my jaw still wouldn’t shut.  I did some brief googling to figure out what to do, and that was not helpful, so I called the advice nurse at Kaiser, thinking they’d tell me something like: warm compress, Tylenol, jaw stretches.

Instead, after trying to explain what happened, one nurse referred me to the next nurse who brought the doctor on the phone.

“It sounds like you have broken your jaw,” he says.  “You need someone to drive you to the emergency room immediately.”

Now, clearly, my jaw is not broken.  One, I’m not in any pain.  Two, Doctor-Man, I’m talking to you on the phone in a calm and normal voice, OBVIOUSLY my jaw is not broken.

“Well,” he says.  “This is a serious head trauma and you need to go to the emergency room.  Immediately.  And don’t drive yourself.”

I couldn’t make him understand that the only trauma my head had was from my own knee.

But he had me all shook up, so I called my mom, thinking she’d say: “They’re idiots.  Warm compresses and tea and go to bed and your jaw will be fine in the morning.”  Which did not happen, she also said to go to the ER.

So I was angry.  I just knew that now I’d be getting unnecessary CAT scans and spending seven hours in the ER.  But everyone said I had to go, so I called my friend Angelina to tell her what was happening, and ask her to be on-call for dog care, packed two books and a scarf, and drove myself to the ER.

“Head trauma” is a real key word in the ER, and so even though I had only kneed myself in the face (I know, I know), because it was combined with a fall from a horse, I got some speedy treatment.  So speedy that I wondered if the nurse thought that the HORSE had kicked me in the face (which really, would be so much more believable, but isn’t what happened at all.)

I walked in, checked in with the triage nurse, and then went directly to X-Ray.  Do not pass Go, etc.  This was a much quicker turn around than the time I had to take myself to the ER for a busted appendix.  Anywho, they took about ten X-Rays of my head, and then brought me back to the doctor.

He checked out my jaw in a variety of ways, and agreed that it was messed up.  “How, again, did you do this?” he asked.

Fortunately or unfortunately, while my jaw is busted, it isn’t busted enough to do anything with it.  He thinks it is just seized up and will eventually relax and go back into place.  In the meantime, he offered me a prescription for Vicodin, which I am not planning to use, as I don’t have pain.  I am currently treating myself with a beer, macaroni and cheese, and a chocolate bar, and hoping that tonight while I sleep my jaw will magically shift back into place.

Wish me luck!

I think it was on Christmas Eve, when someone asked me if I still had this blog, as I originally started it to document the fixing-upping of my house.  They assumed that since there were no major house projects happening, the blog must be done.  My mom was there, too.  And she replied: “Well, now it is just more “Dear Diary…”

Which I suppose is true.

Anywho, in the spirit of the new year, here is a boatload of stuff that still needs to be done on my little casita.  This doesn’t mean that my goal is to finish all of these things in 2012.  I’m a realist, and I know that if I haven’t been able to make myself finish painting trim in the last 18 months, chances of it happening in the next 12 are relatively slim.

However, some of these things will probably happen!

In no particular order:

1. Consider getting new kitchen cabinets.

The cabinet doors above are in the closed position.  You can’t tell?  I enjoy calling my cabinets “custom” cabinets because they are.  They are made out of plywood and were made just for my kitchen.  They plywood was shellacked with glossy orange stuff when I first moved in, and I painted them green, which I heart.  They’d be fine if it wasn’t for the wonky door situation, which is evident to some degree on each of the cabinets.

I don’t plan to live in this little casita forever, just for the next handful of years.  So at this point, when I do house-things, I try to think about what will be most useful if I have renters in the house, or if I sell it.  Normal kitchen cabinets is now on that list.  I figured, crap, if I’m going to replace the cabinets for the people who live here next, I may as well do it sooner rather than later so that I can enjoy them, too!

2.  Seriously, finish painting the trim.

I moved in in June 2010, and painted my nuts off for several weeks.  Then, one day, I just couldn’t take any more painting.  And so there are several parts of my house that look like the photo above.

3.  Do something with this sad room

My second bedroom/office/etc basically belongs to the cat.  It is also where I keep my coats, usually in the closet, but often piled on the desk.  I just don’t know what to do in there, and I really only go in that room to feed the cat or get a jacket.

4.  Caulk and paint the trim on my back door.

At least I finally had the trim put on.  I fired my handyman before he finished this project.  Which reminds me- this door also doesn’t open.  (It is behind the curtain in the room photo above!)  I’ve stopped thinking about it as an actual door and didn’t even remember until now that “get door to open” should probably also be on the project list.

5.  Figure out what to do with this area, and get a step put in

I have no idea what to do with this space.  It does need some kind of step off of that deck, but other than that, I just don’t know.

6. Fix the twice broken, twice patched fence.

Here’s the update since the second time the fence fell down, at the beginning of December.

I came home two days after the fence had fallen, ready to investigate the neighbor’s yard (two sections of the fence were actually flat on the ground, so I had access) and see if the gates were secure enough to let Casey run around the double yard. But INSTEAD! I found some guy installing posts!  Basically, nobody lives in that house.  It was sold in the fall, and the people who bought it are trying to flip it.  They don’t care if this fence stands, they only care if it looks like it stands.  So they hired some guy to install two new posts on their side, and just nail the fence to them.  This is a stupid solution for a variety of reasons, including the fact that if you lightly tap on the end of the fence, the whole thing sways back and forth.

The propping-up boards are from the first time the fence fell down in the spring.

CLEARLY that fence needs to be replaced, but I’m not about to do it until there are some decent neighbors in there.

Also, at this point I’ll just wait until it falls down again.  Third time’s the charm, right?

7.  For the love of god, sand the graffiti off the fence.

In addition to the white graffiti, there is also brown graffiti on the panel to the right.  Class, class, class!

8.  Deal with this ‘patio’ situation:

What I call a patio is actually the former foundation of the illegal add-on to the garage.  It works okay as a patio, but the boards from the foundation and their corresponding giant bolts are basically a disaster waiting to happen.  I tried unbolting to see if I could pry the wood off, but that crap is seriously attached.

Also, part of it has carpet:

Yuck.

This is another area that really must be taken care of before someone else could live here, so I’d also like to do this sooner rather than later so that I can enjoy it.  Again, I am clueless as to what to do.  Probably the cheapest and easiest thing would be to get a new patio poured over this thing, otherwise all of that concrete needs to be busted out and hauled away, but I’m still totally undecided and have put zero thought into it so far.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep steering clear of the bolts sticking three inches up out of the “patio.”

9.  Stop being so lazy and fix the front fence.

These are the new panels that I have had since spring.  They just need to be primed and painted (already you know why this isn’t done yet….), then I simply need to take out my front fence (the one that is currently missing several pickets), replace one simple little post, and attach these babies.

10.  A million other things.

We’ll see what actually happens in 2012…. Happy New Year!

My neighborhood is… how do you say…. transitional.  That is my fancy word for “kinda ghetto.”  We have our occasional drive by shooting, car jacking, and assorted gang related graffiti.

But today is a special day, because today I am the most ghetto house in the neighborhood, and keep in mind that my next door neighbor runs an auto shop out of his driveway.

Not because of my picket fence that is missing several pickets (though that does help), but because my discarded Christmas tree is sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house, where it has been since Wednesday evening.

The website for my trash company says that they are picking up trees along with your regular trash.  All you have to do is put it out on regular trash day.  Beginning December 26.  I triple checked the danged website, and even confirmed that it said “December 2011.”

The garbage and recycling trucks came.

The yard waste trucks came.

But the tree remained.

WTF, trash company!?!?  You SAID!

I’m not really sure what to do at this point.  I need to call the trash company anyway, since I’ve had two sets of trash cans for a year and a half, so maybe I’ll just see what they have to say for themselves.

The funniest (okay, saddest) part is the reaction of people that walk by.  There are a lot of double takes, and the occasional shaken head.  Sorry, neighbors!

You know, speaking of neighbors, there is this house down the street that totally smacks of hipster urban farmers:  They have solar panels on the roof, a front yard veggie garden, and they drive a Subaru wagon!  These are clearly my people.  I kind of want to go knock on their door and introduce myself, but I can’t risk it right now…. we could talk about bees and chickens and growing kale, but once they realized that I live in the house with the Christmas tree on the sidewalk, I think they might slam the door in my face.

Oh, also?  You know who has a genius system for storing Christmas tree lights?  I do.

Each strand of lights gets wrapped around something cardboardey.  Ideally, the lid to a shirt-sized box.  Less ideally, but equally workable, a file folder.  The whole deal gets shoved into a plastic bag and stored.  And who has two thumbs and tangle-free lights year after year?  (Imagine me pointing to myself with my thumbs…) This girl.

My persimmon tree has left me with a ton of persimmons.

Now, I hate to tell you this, and I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t like persimmons that much.  However, I also don’t like waste, and so I’m trying to use them up.  Unfortunately, I am not a fan of “spice” flavored things…. anything in the carrot cake genre, really.  Not a fan.  But most persimmon recipes are for some kind of spice thing… cookies, cakes, what have you.

In an effort to use up some persimmons, I decided to make the persimmon pudding that I read about on the Lovely Morning Blog.  Secretly, (and this may be worse than my “eh” feelings for persimmons), I don’t really enjoy baking.  It requires too much precision and creates too many dishes to wash.  I really like cooking, but baking just has too much potential to go wrong.

Anywho, I started off quite positively.

I got my recipe ready.

I started with the dry ingredients.

Look at that lovely cinnamon!  Baking is fun!

BUT.  Before too long, my kitchen looked like this:

Please note that nearly every single thing you can see was brought out (and dirtied) in the pudding making process.

And then, AFTER I had used every dish in my kitchen, only then did the swearing begin.  See, you have to steam the pudding.  You have to set it on top of a bowl in a pot of boiling water.  This sounds easy, but there was a lot of trial and error.  Now that I know what I am doing, it would be a lot easier the second time around, but good lord, was there drama created around that process.

It steams for an hour and a half.

But.  I checked on it periodically, and had big plans to bring the finished product to a friend’s house for dinner.  And, shocker of shockers, when it was finally done, it came perfectly out of its little mold:

TA DA!  Look at that beauty!

I was feeling so impressed with myself that I loaded several of the mushier persimmons into the freezer so that I can make this again later.

Also, I have a cutting board in there because I was freezing Ziplock bags of chicken stock, and I needed them to be flat while the froze.  And, yes!  You may feel free to admire the amazing organization of my freezer!

BUT THEN.

(Yes, it gets worse than that kitchen photo)

Here is some foreshadowing:

My new dog, Rusty, the sweet little innocent darling in the photo above, well, Rusty was homeless, and being a crafty guy, he learned to scavenge food.  Like, all food is fair game.  Christmas Day, he stole a package of brie and dropped it off on his dog bed for safekeeping for later.

But back to the pudding.  I was feeling pleased with myself after more than two hours of pudding making, when suddenly,  I heard the sound of a dish being bumped in the kitchen.

I jumped up, and saw two things.

One, Rusty trying to act super, super nonchalant.

Two, this:

He snarfed that whole piece down in one gulp. That effing beast.

Needless to say, I did not bring persimmon pudding to dinner.

The chickens, however, were happy with the share that they got!

So, in conclusion:  baking is far, far more trouble than it is worth.  The end.

Yesterday before it started raining, I did some minor cleaning up in the yard.  I’m happy it is officially winter now, so I can wear my preferred winter gardening ensemble:  rainboots, leggings, and puffy vest.  As usual, I like to keep it classy in the backyard.

Another reason I like winter gardening (besides the outfit) is that it is slow.  Weeds aren’t really growing very quickly, vegetable plants don’t need a lot of attention, so I can just putter a little bit instead of spending an entire day out there, working like crazy.

I was cleaning out a patch of weeds and dead things, when I discovered some forgotten tomatillos.  The plant was long since dead, and some of the tomatillos had fallen into blackberry brambles and weeds that I was clearing out.  Here is the super cool thing about forgotten tomatillos:

Isn’t that fancy?  It is like a lacy paper lantern of tomatilloness!

Besides raking and weeding, I also did some greenhouse tidying.  I love my little pop-up greenhouse.  My mom suggested it last winter, and at first I thought it was completely ridiculous and excessive (not that that stopped me from buying it…), but it has proven to be incredibly useful for pretty much the entire year.

My two potted citrus trees have been in there for a few weeks now, but I had just dumped them in the center of the floor, so yesterday I did some rearranging to be ready for other plants that may need a greenhouse rescue once temperatures start to freeze.

My bucket-potatoes magically came back to life a while back, and seem to be doing very well.  I also have a bunch of potatoes in the ground that re-sprouted themselves and seem to be doing great.  I moved a few of the potato buckets into the greenhouse.  I was reluctant to move all of them, since they are really thriving right now.  I’m also worried that we’ll get a sudden surprise frost and they’ll all die, but in the meantime, I’ll just keep watching the weather and be ready to move them inside.

One of my citrus trees (the one on the right above) was originally planted in the ground in the middle of my yard.  The location was inconvenient for me, so I just dug it out of the ground and threw it in a pot, certain that it would die.  Now, a year and a half later, that thing has two giant oranges growing away!  It is definitely a survivor.

The persimmons, while beautiful, are still not quite ripe.

Are they supposed to ripen on the tree?  Will they ripen inside?  I can’t remember.

Casey-Dog also had a glorious day in the yard.  Not only was there a giant pile of leaves to roll in, she found this giant branch to make herself the world’s largest chew-toy.

And that pretty much sums it up.

Yesterday and today I did a little bit of work in the garden.  Things are dying down (literally) so I pulled out a few more tomato plants, finally took down the dead corn stalks and sunflowers, and did a lot of general clean up.  Here’s what I have to show for it:

The ornamental corn.  The individual kernels are ridiculously pretty.  The downfall is that not all of them developed very well.  I was not very good about watering this summer (the shame!) and I figure that is why.

I’ll definitely try these again next year, and be better about watering.  I just remembered that I had a dream about these ears of corn last night- in my dream, someone had cooked them and eaten them and declared them not very good.  I was very sad since those were my hard-earned decorative corns!  Seriously.  That was my dream.

Anywho.

I also grew butternut squash this year.  I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like real butternut squash!  Always nice when something in the garden works.  There is still one more growing out there that I left for now.

I ended up with five moderately sized Cinderella pumpkins, five mini pumpkins (not including my mini-mini-mini pumpkin) with a few more still in the ground:  I have some yellow and white striped pumpkins, and one regular big pumpkin that I’m hoping will turn out.

This was an exciting surprise harvest-  There was a stray volunteer tomato plant way back in a shady spot by my fence, and look what it grew!  It grew two bunches like this, and I ate them all while I was watering. I need to remember to grow cherry tomatoes next year.  Don’t know how I managed to forget that this year!

And the apples.  The apples are from a tree that is in my neighbor’s yard and hangs over my back fence.  They are PERFECT apples.  They are little (which I like, because a big apple makes me tired of eating apple before I finish it) and the perfect, perfect combination of crispy and sweet but not too sweet, and not too tart.  They are really, really good.  I just picked a few, but I’m going to get out there with my pole-picker thing, and raid the heck out of everything I can reach.  I never see or hear people back there, and this tree is the only thing growing in their whole yard, so I don’t think they’ll mind.

Shirt-as-apple-basket is just one part of my autumn gardening look:

Just keepin’ it classy in the back yard.

Saturday I learned  a new phrase:  “through and through.”  Apparently, “through and through” refers to a bullet that goes right in to a person, and then comes right out.

How did I learn this phrase, you might ask?  And why are there police officers on my lawn and yellow tape across my driveway?

Well, my friends, that is because……

wait for it…..

wait for it….

waaaait for it………….

SOMEONE WAS SHOT IN MY MOTHEREFFING DRIVEWAY ON SATURDAY.

Now, I love me some exaggeration, but I shit you not, this literally happened.  Literally, in my front yard.

The conclusion, before you worry too much, is that everyone is fine, including the guy who was shot.

Here’s what happened.

Saturday morning, I went to the Humane Society as usual, for my dog-walking shift.  Tra la la.  When I got home, I went right out to work in the yard.  The backyard, thankfully…  I checked on the bees (New bees died!  That is also a story for another time, as it is also quite strange.)  After checking on my hive, I put out the sprinkler, let out the chickens, and was busying myself picking a ton of tomatoes (currently making my second batch of sauce, which is also another story), when I heard a loud POP.

Hmm. I thought.  That couldn’t have been a gunshot, could it?  I heard a kind of yell, and decided that the chickens and sprinklers were on their own, I was headed into the house to hide and peer out my window.

But when I stood up I saw that my next door neighbor as well as the neighbors across the street were all coming out, so, being neighborly, I went out to join them.

As soon as I got out my front gate, my the lady that lives next door came running out on her cell phone with 911.  The police arrived within sixty seconds, which I have to say was quite comforting.

I still didn’t really know what had happened, but it was clear that there had, in fact, been a shooting, and that the shooters drove off and the shoot-ee ran off to a nearby street.

Literally before two minutes passed, police cars were ZOOMING down the street crazy fast, followed closely by an ambulance and fire truck.

There was quite a lot of commotion with all of the police activity and neighborly freak-outs, but basically, this is what happened: some guy was walking down the street.  When he got right in front of my house, between my driveway and my lawn, another car pulled up, and, well, EFFING SHOT HIM.  The car drove off, and the guy turned around and dashed off the other way.  The police/fire/ambulance found the guy who was shot right away, and took him to the hospital.

The bullet, having been “through and through,” went right through him without hitting anything important.

The police were pretty sure he knew who it was who shot him, as he was being less than cooperative.

This also made me feel better, as it wasn’t just some random shooting or a robbery or something.

The police had to ask all of us a lot of questions.  They also went to the houses of all of the other nearby neighbors.

Eventually, they pieced together more or less where the guy had been standing, and where the car was when he was shot.

“Well,” said one of them, “let’s mark the crime scene.”

At that point, I could only laugh, because they parked a police car right in front of my house, and roped the whole thing off with yellow tape.

And then, AND THEN, they started looking for the bullet.  By this time they knew from the hospital, I guess, that the bullet had gone straight through the guy, so they started looking for it.

They looked on the walkway in front of my yard.

They looked in my lawn.

They looked in the driveway.

They came up on my porch and looked in my lawn again.

This went on for a long, long time.

One of them said to me:  “You know, you can never find things when you’re looking for them.  If you see it later, just give us a call.”

Seriously?

The CSI-type van pulled up, and the police photographer started taking pictures.  My neighbors and I were standing in my driveway, when the photographer said: “Um, can all of the non-police people move out of the photo?” At that point, I went back inside.  Well, first I had to turn off my still-running sprinklers, but after I did that, I went inside.

Once I got back in the house, the ever-protective Casey-Dog started a bark-a-thon.  She’d been quiet while I was outside, but she was very barky with the numerous police officers on the lawn and on the porch.  She eventually stopped barking, but she did not stop watching:

(no, she isn’t allowed on furniture, but apparently we make exceptions for police-watching)

Gussie was not impressed by any of it.

Although, later, he did get a new toy from a bit of leftover yellow-tape:

We like to keep it classy around here.

So, that’s it.  Eventually the police left.  I’ve been searching the news, and there is nothing about it.  I guess since the guy was (thankfully) fine, it isn’t a newsworthy story?

And, since you’ll ask:

No, I don’t feel afraid.  This was not a random event, and it is just pure bad luck and the nature of a busy street that it happened here.  I also don’t feel afraid because I live in the kind of neighborhood where if something sketchy happens, people are outside to deal with it right away.

Plus, like Westerman says, if there was a drive-by this weekend, then the odds of there being another one on my block any time soon must go way, way down.

Of course, I was totally horrified at the time, and had an adrenaline hangover after the whole thing was done, but crazy things happen, so what can you do.

I know what you can do.  You can look at pictures of Gus:

That should fix just about anything.

This has been a somewhat shiteous work week.  Yesterday, at the peak of crapdom, one of my coworkers came by and said:  “Hey, let me show you something outside.”  I thought he was just humoring me and dragging me out of the office before I committed a violent act, but no!  (well, maybe that, too)  There was a little swarm of bees in one of the trees!

Right away, I told him I could catch it.  That we just needed a box.  And a ladder.  And something to cut the branch with.  And some tape.  And a lid for the box.  We have boxes, right?  Let’s go get a box!

He is a sensible person, so he told me NO.  But he did agree that if I came back the next day with bee gear, he’d hold the ladder.

Today, I came back with bee gear.  around 3:45, we decided it was bee time.  My boss and a couple of other coworkers came out.

I suited up and we surveyed the situation.  The swarm was really small, and on an easily accessible branch.  My queen is a dud, and I was hoping that this swarm might have a good queen to replace mine.

I wasn’t afraid of the bees, but I was a bit afraid of the ladder, which my boss was holding.  Every now and then I would yell out: “Don’t let me fall!”  Which I’m sure was helpful to him.

Also, because of the way my bee-veil is, I couldn’t see above my head (where, um, the swarm was) while I was on the ladder.  So I also had to call out a couple of times:  “Am I going to hit the bees with my head?”  “Is my head too close to the bees?” Classy.

After a few tries, we figured out the best plan was for my boss to pull down the branch with a rake so that I could better reach the branch the swarm was on.  It worked perfectly.  After trimming off the ends of the branches, We set the box on top of the ladder, and I chopped it off, so that it fell (swarm and all) right into the box. At this point, the bees started flying around a bit, and all of my coworkers ran.

My hot pink ballet flats (not exactly beekeeping shoes) and I climbed down the ladder and waited for the bees to settle a bit.

When they did, I went back up the ladder and put the lid on the box.  Easy as that!  We taped them up so that none would escape while I drove them home.

TA DA!

I done caught a swarm!

I have now installed it in the back of my hive, and am hoping that they will join forces and possibly become strong enough to survive winter.  We shall see.

But in the meantime, I think I am officially a beekeeper!