it's not the bee's fault

what a hazy, itchy and surreal time the past few days have been!

It's been a lovely early summer here; warm, sunny days, full of gentle breezes and general good cheer. I'd taken Wednesday off to put in some beekeeping time, and as hoped, it turned out to be a beautiful day. After a double shift in the beeyard, I had taken off my gloves and was wrapping up the the last of my notes when a bee decided she needed to make the ultimate sacrifice and stung me on my finger. I flicked the stinger out right away, briefly mourned for the bee, and carried on with my day.

Almost exactly 24 hours later I was sitting in the St. Michael's emergency room, getting a good dose of antibiotics through an IV. During those 24 hours I had observed, first-hand, the development of a vigorous bacterial infection. Fascinating! Also scary. It turns out that out of all of the bacteria that's crawling all over everything and everyone all the time, every once in a while one will be in exactly the right place at the right time,and unleash a very localized perfect shitstorm, featuring swelling! incessant itchiness! painful, violent throbbing and frightening pink steaks forming under the skin!

After a second round of IV antibiotics things are definitely looking better, but I'm still on Benadyl and  antibiotics for a while and this ridiculously puffy cartoon hand could be around for several days still.

gettin' old

It's been a busy week, full of reminders that I'm no Benjamin Button.  After several visits to my doctor, I've learned that my thyroid gland is underperforming these days. My doctor had me tested for a bunch of things, and this discovery seems to explain a number of worrisome issues that I'd been dealing with.

I've now started taking synthetic thyroid hormone tablets; as my doc explained to me, it's the same sort of thing my body makes on its own, but since my body's been slacking off lately, something needed to be done. Low thyroid activity makes people sluggish, among other things, so it's to top up my levels and speed me up a bit. The dosage may take some tweaking, but I'm looking forward to feeling peppier.

In other news, I'm now packing a blackberry for work when I'm on call.  It's probably good for my brain to have to learn to manage a new gadget, but I'm not yet in love with the thing.  I can manage to do what I need to do in a reasonable amount of time, still, it seems like a lot of button pushing to get anything done. Perhaps this'll be enough to help me stave off codgerism for a few more years though...

stung by bees, still lots to learn

The new bee season has started, and I've decided that I need to get serious in my commitment to the bee co-op. There have been some big changes in the off-season, and it feels like a fresh beginning.

 I've started the season off being a busy bee myself, spending a couple of hours in the beeyard both yesterday and today. 

Yesterday's session was a lighthearted affair, a nice reunion with my fellow beekeepers and the bees, with enough of us there that I was able to shadow someone with more experience and still be useful. 

Today's session only had two of us besides our staff beekeeper, and went a little less smoothly. I felt like a complete newbie. My allergies were terrible, a queen flew away (!) while under my watchful eye (luckily she was recovered shortly after), and a frame covered with bees slipped out of my hand, knocking a few dozen bees to the ground and infuriating them and their hivemates. One of them was upset enough that she made the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the hive and stung me through my shoe. I still had to deal with the hive, which turned out to be a very angry hive. I also dropped my hive tool on it, which probably did not soothe the bees. I later learned that one of the hives I'd worked on had an 'unfortunate amount' of excess honeycomb removed, which may have included some valuable queen cups. I fear that this was due to my enthusiasm in cleaning up the hive. And incredibly, to add insult to injury I actually managed to inflict myself with a second bee sting. An angry bee had gotten stuck in my pocket, and must have stung the tissues I'd had stuffed in there. At one point I went to blow my nose, and jabbed my face with the stinger embedded in the tissue.

 On the positive side, it was a wonderful warm, sunny day, my companions are gentle, kind and patient, and, when all is said and done, the whole point of being a member of the co-op is to learn. I'm starting with learning how much I still need to learn! I'm a big fan of learning through immersion, and take some small comfort in knowing that by the end of the season I may actually feel like a competent beekeeper. Looking fowrard to next weekend, when I get to reacquaint myself with the Royal York bees!

*hack*hack*hack*

Huh? wuzzzat? what day is it? It's Wednesday, a week from the end of February, I'm sick and all hepped up on Buckley's daytime yellow pills. I was going to say I'm sick again, but I don't think I stopped being sick from last time. As far as I can remember, the last time I felt really good was when we were in Jamaica. The sore throat started right after that, and never really went away.

I've done a fair bit of reading about the whole quitting smoking process (or what to expect when you're kicking a habit that's old enough to vote), and I understand that being sick is often part of the initiation into the world of non-smokerhood. My whole body and all of its chemical processes have been under the control of that evil sticky bastard Nicotine for almost half my life now, and it'll take a good while before my poor old body can figure out how to manage itself.

Pardon my moaning about being sick, what I meant to chronicle here is this: the sun was shining today, and I went and coughed my way around the garden. It was while I was wheezing over my tarragon sprouts that I came to the optimistic conclusion that this latest go-round of being sick is some sort of final push--my body's getting rid of the last remnants of cigarette-related badness, and I'm looking forward to sucking in great hearty lungfuls of spring air soon!

damned mystery atheist!

Can an atheist suffer religious persecution at the hands of another atheist? Looks like it.

I've had a little tiny bell at my desk for a long time, pinned to the cubicle wall; it's got a little card attached that reads "hope" and has a blurb on the back about how my contribution has helped the St. Something organization care for the community. The message isn't overly religious, but definitely has some sort of churchy association.

Today was my first day back at my desk since leaving on vacation, and while reorganizing all my desktop stuff I realized that someone had taken down my little bell and added a sticky note that read "c'mon, be reasonable, God doesn't exist!" and left this on the middle of my desk. This instantly made me unhappy, but it took a good 30 minutes or so of back-of-the-mind thinking to find that I was really angry about it. What kind of person does such a thing? Who goes snooping around someone's cube when they're not home, touching and moving their stuff, and then leaving an anonymous note with their unasked-for commentary? The note ended up with my manager, as I ranted in a fairly controlled manner about the inflammatory nature of this cowardly, presumptuous note.

I asked around a bit, thinking that perhaps someone who knows me was just joshing around, but I soon realized that the people who know me well enough to joke would know better than to do such a thing.

I'm not angry with the stealthy note-writing atheist for being an atheist, I'm angry with them for being a passive aggressive loser, for touching my stuff and for getting me to fall for such juvenile attempt to get my goat :P Not sure what else I can do except hang up the bell again.

I never realized this before

but I think smoking helped me get off my bum and do something else once in a while.

Now that I'm back at home (and not yet back to work) I'm finding myself at times just standing around wondering what to do now. A smoke break used to force me out onto the porch to look around and collect my thoughts. I think Byron is quite vehemently opposed to substituting chocolate for smokes, so I'll have to think of some other way of addressing this.

a new year, 7 days in the sun and $30 in my pocket!

hooray, it's a new year! Byron, Frank, Anne and I have just returned from a well-earned week in Montego Bay. Byron and I logged about 40 hours in the water, futzing around with our new snorkels and also managed to get a good amount of vitamin D and some pretty hearty meals as well.

Byron and I had also decided to quit smoking on this trip, and had our last cigarettes over a week ago. We purchased Nicorette inhalers but they're not really a great substitute for smoking, so Byron's going cold turkey, while I'm using the inhaler to hold in my hand and wave around in a cigarette-like fashion every once in a while. The change of scenery and routine certainly was helpful in distracting us from our cravings; I did feel a little unstable and cried a fair bit for the first two days or so, but a steady diet of cakes, watermelon, frequent naps and plenty of paddling around the coral reefs soon had me feeling better :)

During the flight home, I figured that I've already saved about $30 that would normally have gone towards smokes during the week. Over the course of the next year, that could either be a nice bonus chunk to stick on the mortgage, or a nice getaway next winter. I'll keep this in mind when battling the cravings that are bound to plague me over the next while.

While I'm busy patting myself on the back about being smoke free for over a week, I'd also like to brag shamelessly about my tooth flossing: I've flossed before bed for 399 of the past 401 days, hooray for me! This impresses no one but myself and my hygienist, but I just had to get it out there. :D