It was indeed my birthday over the weekend, but I’ll get around to that. First let’s talk about the storm which, as I alluded to on Friday, ended up being much ado about nothing. At least it was for us.

We got some strong winds in the early evening that knocked our power out for an hour or so (which significantly disrupted dinner), but other than that it completely passed us by. Bullet dodged.

So all’s well there.

On Saturday Daphne and Jen headed out to Crystal Lake for a round of swimming while I took advantage of an empty house and worked on our garden for a while before family arrived.

Jen mentioned this on her blog last week, but the weeds had gotten completely out of control in there.

So I got in there with the weed whacker and worked on reclaiming our garden from the overgrowth.

Oh! And while we’re talking about the bees…

I schlepped the empty silver-topped beehive and its stand over to my garage where I intended to store it until next spring. (When I’ll undoubtedly suffer from the misguided notion that I’m actually an apiarist and not a the maître d’ of a bear brasserie.)

Then I went back to empty the carcasses out of the “real” hive, the one that Albeart destroyed time and time again, and store it in the garage as well. After all, I thought, it’d been 8 weeks since since his last attack, which is an entire lifespan for a honeybee in summer. As such, I was absolutely not expecting to pull the blue roof off and see…

Yes, against all odds, there are still somehow a bunch of bees in there. I couldn’t tell you exactly how many since I was trying to quickly, yet ever-so-gently, put the roof back on before I was engulfed in a cloud of angry stinging insects. But I’ll go check on them once the weather gets nicer tomorrow. (It’s cloudy and rainy today which makes for grumpy bees.)

Man, if they somehow survived, though… Then those are some resilient little ladies out there. That’d mean they not only survived FOUR bear attacks, but also an entire week of rain while their hive frames sat in utter disarray across our garden.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about how these girls are doing, or whether the whole thing was a false positive, in a few days.

The garden itself is…improving.

And by “improving” I mean you can actually walk around in there. Also when I walked out to snap these pictures I found a couple ears of corn were ready to be harvested.

Now if I could just convince the tomatoes to ripen and the sunflowers to bloom we could call this a “laughably below average” year instead of an “abject miserable failure” year. Still holding out hope…

Okay, will have to talk more tomorrow about my birthday itself because I’ve run out of time today.

See you then.

j.s.