Corner of Maryland Ave and 3rd St, just south of the Capitol building.

Possible meeting place for any readers who want join forces at the Jon Stewart rally on Saturday. It's hard to predict how efficient the subways will be that day. It seems to me that there could be a huge turnout for this. I'll be at that corner at noon and again at 1 PM. Hope to see some old friends and new friends there that day!

Frozen basil and olive oil cubes. For winter pesto.

Some blogger (I can't track back to find out who it was, dammit, but I'll find out eventually and give her credit) mentioned doing this with any basil that's still hanging around before the first frost. Some people call it pre-pesto. I chopped up basil with olive oil and put dollops in an ice cube tray. Then I froze the tray overnight, popped out the cubes, and froze a bag of them for use later.

Another online person recommends using them this way: finely mince garlic, add the basil/olive oil, and then work in cheese (what kind?), butter, and pine nuts.

We haven't had a frost yet but a low of 38 is predicted for tomorrow night so my remaining three basil plants may be gone soon.

Norah and Dad Kevin. October 15, 2010.

More about this visit soon.

My observant friend Stephanie handed me this little ad a few days ago. "Check out the website for Yaz birth control" she instructed me.

Stephanie and I worked together for a long time and during an excruciating 2-year period -- around 2000 to 2001 -- she listened to me complain constantly about The Choosing of the New Logo Adventure. We had a new Director and he wanted a New Look. I was, unfortunately, a cog in the wheel that had to work with the designers to come up with a New Look and then work with the Director who had very firm ideas about what kind of logo he wanted (ugly, apparently). So Steph knows I'm always interested in logo issues. Bottom picture shows the logo that resulted from The Choosing of the New Logo Adventure of 2001. Hideous then, hideous now. It's supposed to convey neurological research. But to most people it says "look at that guy's pointy little penis."

Socks for George, right off the needles.

Now George is a good friend. Half of the Margaret-George team. Love them both to death. But George hates blogs and it seems to me that he mentions this dislike/hatred quite often. So I'm sure he doesn't look at this blog and that's just fine. But it does make me feel odd to post his picture (well, a picture of my socks with him in the background) knowing how much he hates blogs. Would he be offended? Would he feel that I had invaded his privacy? And then these questions raise the related question of other friends and relatives who are put off by blogs. I worry about them. Should I shut down this operation because it's too intrusive? Too revealing? Too self-centered? Should I (can I?) block access to those who are unsettled by my blog? All rhetorical questions -- obviously -- because here I am blogging. As Anne (of The Complaint Department) says: that is all.

Another book I'll have to read so you don't have to.

Rally to Restore Sanity, Saturday, Oct 30, noon to 3 (??). In my hometown.

The Rally will be centered "at the east end of the National Mall, between 3rd Street and 7th Street, known as East Seaton Park and Henry Park."

I'm going down that way for lunch with friends in a week or so. When I do I'll go by the rally spot and find an easy-to-locate reference point as a meeting place for any bloggers who read this and are coming to town (Peggy). Maybe we could pick a time... 1:30 or so...that we'd gather at that point and say hello face to face.

I plan to go to the Rally (especially if my sister comes to town for the event). If she doesn't, I still plan to go but... I also know myself. I'm capable of staying at home if there's too much local babbling about how Metro will be overwhelmed, or how parking will be awful at Metro stations, or how counter-demonstrators will be around to make things ugly (maybe even my neighbor, whose house is shown here with that g-damn flag*** flying high). And now the guy on the other side of him has one flying. He's in the FBI I know. What does THAT mean? Nothing I guess. I am trying to not be bothered by these (the flags). But every time I see one of them my stomach drops a bit.

***10/13/10 update. I was referring specifically to the "Don't Tread on Me" flag, NOT to the American flag, which I love of course. Someone mentioned that I was not clear.

The "ing"s. In the past I vaguely knew that bee activities included foraging, guarding, nursing, and dancing.

But now that I'm up to my chin in bees I have to be aware of so many more "ing"s.

Drifting
Capping
Robbing
Bearding
Balling
Festooning
Dwindling
Absconding
Fanning
Ripping (I wrote this down but forgot what it means)
Washboarding
Swarming

Even though it's a natural and mostly healthy event, swarming is the "ing" I fear the most.

I don't know what to call the activity shown in this picture. I wondered if there might be a mouse or some other intruder under that pile of bees. I'll never know. I did see workers dragging out drones.

"Politics as a whole has a fairly degrading effect on my fiction drive."

Andrew Sullivan is the best. I don't always agree with his politics but he often leads me to interesting places.
He led me to this guy, Kevin Hartnett, who wrote the following:

All forms of desire have their natural enemies and I find that nothing saps my desire to read fiction like the Internet does. This is partly physiological—too much time at the computer withers my brain—but it’s partly dispositional, too. After the last round of primaries a couple Tuesdays ago, I spent an hour reading articles about the Tea Party. When I came up for air I was in an explicitly present-tense state of mind where anything written more than an hour ago seemed to be based on a world that had already been subsumed. Novels, which require a willingness to attend to more enduring themes, don’t hold up very well by this perspective.

Politics as a whole has a fairly degrading effect on my fiction drive. It’s not just that it’s depressing to watch the way Congress operates—it’s that it’s depressing in such an unredeemable way. Fiction can be depressing too, of course, but there’s something intrinsically optimistic about the process by which tragedy and frailty are turned into art.

Well, I'm not alone at least. Guess I have to get these books.

What?? Bees aren't all that busy?? Shocking news that I should have known.

In "A Book of Bees" Sue Hubbell writes:

"In an 1899 study, one Professor C. F. Hodge marked bees and watched them from daylight to dark. He reported, 'no single bee that I watched ever worked more than three and one-half hours a day.' In one case he saw a worker bee crawl into a cell and he watched her remain lying there quietly for nearly five hours. In the 1950s, Martin Lindauer, an entomologist, followed up on these observations. In a rigorous study, he tagged great numbers of bees and found that they spent a lot of time doing nothing at all, or very little. One typical bee during a hundred and seventy-seven observations hours, did absolutely nothing for seventy of them and "patrolled" the nest, as though looking for something to do, for fifty-six. During roughly two-thirds of her time she was performing no productive work."

And here I thought bees never rested, never slept. My cats work harder than these bees. Well... maybe not. But still.

Found somewhere out there in cyberspace.

This is why I worry. Bees clinging to the screened-in porch, watching me, and bees at night around the lights on the back porch, waiting for me.

I read this so you don't have to.

I learned all these fascinating but quite unsettling things about our rejectamenta (isn't that a great word??). The most significant thing I learned is that while recycling is fine and dandy (it makes us feel good about ourselves), the most meaningful step we can take to reduce our garbage problem is to stop buying and acquiring stuff. (This makes me feel so much better about the slightly worn towels I can't bring myself to toss out.)

Did you ever suspect, as I did, that the carefully separated glass bottles and aluminum cans in your recycling bin ended up in the same place with the Chinese food containers you tossed into your trash? Depending on where you live that may be the case.

Did you ever wonder as you (I'm sorry) flushed the toilet where the contents went? If you lived in Boston up until 1990 the contents ended up being dumped into the Atlantic Ocean.

Did you ever wonder where all the hospitals sent their used bandages and surgical supplies? In most places the answer is "to the landfill," along with your Chinese food containers and your beer and wine bottles.

And of course some of our trash ends up on barges moving around the globe looking for poor countries that will take it off our hands.

One Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui, found a way to recycle some stuff. He made this piece of art called Dusasa II (2007) using found aluminum, copper wire, and plastic disks. It now hangs in the Met in NY. Not exactly a cost-effective plan for the rest of the planet but at least THAT stuff isn't sitting at the bottom of a 500-foot landfill in Ghana.

And the author doesn't address this problem, but if we all stopped acquiring rejectamenta wouldn't the manufacturing structure holding up much of the world's economy collapse?? These things worry me.

More scenes from New York. My body returned from the city on Tuesday night but my head is still there. The Daughter's Apt is the top picture.

A honey bee update.

The bees seem to be fine, but I haven't done a hive inspection in weeks so who knows what's going on in there. It's been good that I haven't checked much as the summer wore on because the less the bees are bothered by the human involved the better they'll be. Possible threats that I could look for include mites, small hive beetles, foulbrood, and wax moths. I'll think about that soon, and then I'll have to decide if I'll take any action if I DO find any pests. I may not.

I started with 5 frames of bees and I now have 40 frames of bees, brood, and honey (well, sugar water honey for the most part). I haven't seen the queen for a long time but she appears to be doing a great job laying those eggs so hats off to The Queen! My goal this year was simply to end up going into the winter with a high population of bees and enough food to get them through till spring.

I'm feeding them a lot and the girls are sucking down more than a gallon of sugar water a day. I guess I'll just keep feeding them until...until what? It gets too cold to open the hive? So much I don't know.

I love beekeeping but am not sure I'm well-suited to it temperamentally. I worry too much. It's an activity that takes a lot of patience and optimism, neither of which I have in abundance. And I am highly suggestible, so when I read about potential problems I imagine that I have them all. I'll keep them over the winter and if they survive, I may donate them to another beekeeper in the spring.

Man dresses to be in harmony with a Jackson Pollack.

Street performers in front of the Met.

Sun worshipers near the Carl Schurz Park, on the walkway overlooking the East River.

Two days in New York City. I don't care if it's a cliche--for me, there's nothing else like it.

Top: Looking roughly southwest across Central Park from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Avenue at 82nd Street. We walked around and inside an elaborate under-construction bamboo exhibit on the rooftop of the gallery. I could try to describe it but my words wouldn't do it justice. This is a good description.

The trip was to visit with The Daughter, check out her odd little apartment in the east 90s, meet her roommate, and see her very small school, which is housed in an old elegant be-chandeliered building just down the street from the Met, at the corner of 78th and 5th. I didn't get a good picture of the building (The Daughter: "no mom, please don't stop to take a picture there") but at least I got one quick shot from the corner (bottom).

The Great White Heron in the pond next door. Look at that long skinny neck.

I'd like to say that I deliberately made these shots fuzzy. I didn't.

Mr. Fox is happy that the deer fencing is gone. But a new fence is inevitable.

Shannon (full-time job, many family duties) finished this beautiful quilt (top) recently. Can it inspire me to finish my DC Margo quilt before Nov 9?

My reliable old friends the 4 o'clocks. It was not a great growing summer for me, but these perennials have been in bloom for months.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/mind-the-grid/

Honeybees can't be frozen? That's the word on the Bee Street.

Every day I read something else that makes me swoon over the miracle of honeybees. Here's today's fascinating (to me) report from one of the members of the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association:
"Bees don't freeze, as shown by the late Ed Southwick at SUNY Brockport when he put a hive in a freezer at -80 degrees C with temperature probes to record that they keep the brood nest at 92-93 degrees F as long as they can reach the honey stores."

[Another opportunity to post a picture of cute sleeping kittens.]

It remains my biggest mystery plant. (Update 10/10/10: Carolyn says boneset and I agree. This will be its last year in my veggie garden.)

On my other blog I posted earlier this year about this plant in an attempt to find out what it is. I'm almost certain it's not boneset (leaves aren't right) or Joe Pye weed (I've found no evidence of a pure white Joe Pye weed) or rudbekia (flowers all wrong). All I know is that I didn't plant it, it got enormous, pollinators love it, and it blocked the sun from half of my garden. I planted some cardinal creeper seeds that I saved from last year, and I like the look of their red flowers and lacey vine leaves creeping throughout the white blossoms and foliage of the mystery plant. What is it??? My earlier post on mylovelyweeds is here, along with the guesses a few people made. Anyone else have any ideas? There's lots of it in the park next door, bottom picture, so it's not rare, at least around here. Mine is so much bigger than those in the park. Probably my worm castings. Not my castings, the worms' castings.

According to Robin Nagle, Professor of Anthropology at NYU, "Every single thing you see is future trash. EVERYTHING."

Even these sweet clapboard and detached houses in Georgetown, where most houses are brick and attached. The above observation about trash came from this article that I stumbled across this weekend. I'm fascinated by dirt and garbage, and so is this professor. I missed my calling. I now know that I really wanted to be a garbalogist.

Nagle says "we are surrounded by ephemera, but we can’t acknowledge that, because it’s kind of scary, because I think ultimately it points to our own temporariness, to thoughts that we’re all going to die."

She trying to get NYC to create a Museum of Sanitation.

An empty top feeder and (possibly) a drone.

The beekeeping continues, I guess successfully. I have a lot of bees and I think that's my only goal in the first year. It's an odd hobby. It plays mind games with me. Drives me to a certain kind of worry that I don't particularly enjoy.

Adoration of the kitty.

Top, from left to right: Christine (niece), Emese (Christine's older daughter), Lucy (kitty cat), Elaine (sister in law), and Ildiko (Christine's younger daughter). The little girls have Hungarian names because their dad, Viktor, is Hungarian.
Bottom: Ildie and I. Babies and kitties. What could be more delicious?