It followed me home

Possibly the most interesting fringe benefit of cafe ownership is the strange offerings that come from customers.

There is the predictable smattering of baked goods and so forth, and the freebie stickers, pens, and t-shirts from other local business owners. There is the extensive collection of Preserved Things in Jars (ketchup, mango chutney, habanero peach jam, lemon ginger marmalade, nondescript unlabeled reddish stuff, pickled green tomatoes). There are the green bean sets in the spring and tomatoes in the fall (because here in the mountains, tomatoes ripen by Labor Day if you're very lucky or very dedicated. This year we have unfortunately been neither).
And then you get into the fashion accessories. That thing up there is a hat (thank you, Darryl, you stylish man).
We have been the recipients of a load of manure (many metaphorical and one actual) and a sack of worms (Vanda, bring more worms! Ours did not survive winter on the porch!). We have a manvine nerve tonic (spellcheck doesn't know what 'manvine' is, and neither do I), a tincture of valerian, a dropper bottle of Yin Chao Junior, and a box of Chinese Fish Poop Tea.

Most recent, and most impressive, was the following accessory.

Apparently someone has a very high opinion of my husband.

my week

One mother-in-law
One mom
Five dogs
A 14-foot moving van
1400 miles
And my first day of full-time employment in six years.

In Which I Reveal Too Much

     I am a crappy housekeeper. This is in no way my mom's fault - she has a lovely home which she dusts regularly, and she passed on the rites of such to me. I just failed miserably at internalizing them, along with things like how to change the oil in my car and how to calculate annual compound interest. My brain, lucky for me, retains like a steel trap wildly useful tidbits like what year Oliver Cromwell died and the words to every song we learned in fourth grade music class.
      We have lived in this house for seven (!) years, and there are parts of it that have not been cleaned since we moved in - under the stove, behind the fridge, that kind of thing. I dust more or less bianually. Most of the time it's the usual clutter of toys and papers and goldfish crackers and socks (I have silently gone on strike against picking up my husband's socks, so there are, as of this writing, eleven of them on the floor. I vacuum around them.)(If you don't think you're that petty, you just haven't been married long enough. But I digress...) I have actually considered posting a series of pictures of my day-to-day messy house just to make other women feel better about themselves, because it's something I have spent a lot of time being insecure about, and something useful might as well come of it.
     All this is to preface that Alec got it into his head today to drag the couch out from the wall, and we discovered that a colony of adolescent male gnomes had been living under it for quite some time, stealing and hoarding all manner of small toys, bits of food, and candy wrappers, and supporting an entire dust bunny ranch. There was even a spot in which something orange and thready was growing in my carpet. That has now been steam-cleaned at great length, but still, I had something growing in my carpet. This is horrifying, and funny, and it leads me to wonder if I have a special talent (what's the opposite of talent?) for this kind of thing, or if some seriously crazy shit is just the inevitable byproduct of a busy household.
      I'm going to contemplate that while I go eradicate the spiders from my laundry pile.

um...

Granted, it was a Match.com commercial, but my TV just informed me that one in five relationships begin online. Is this possible? Is it totally weird?

respectably looney

Ryan agreed that he might be fair game for a blog post.


I can hear what my sisters are thinking all the way from here, but it's his first time, so I feel I should be gentle.
I'll start out with the beehive. Way back last summer he was wistfully bemoaning the fact that I wouldn't consent to a beehive in my backyard (and by that I mean an actual beehive in my actual backyard, no euphemisms). In one of those moments of marital clarity, I shot back that when he quit smoking he could have his damn beehive, and sure enough, January 24 was the quit date and he never looked back. Actually he smoked a cigarette about a month ago, after which I explained to him using very small words what I would do to him and which parts of his anatomy would be involved should that happen again because I am not raising my beautiful children to be smokers so help me, but that is neither here nor there, unless it happens again and the bees have to find a new home. I don't think it will. He loves these bees.
The beehive arrived by mail about a month before the bees, which was fortunate, as it took Ryan about a month to decide where to place the beehive, construct a platform at the proper height, use his smartphone's GPS to make sure the beehive entrance was facing Southeast, and get out the old-fashioned green-bubble level to make sure it was flat (what the hell, Ryan's smart device? You can surf the web but you can't level a beehive? I guess there are limits to what Droid does, after all), and then change his mind about the location and go through the whole procedure in a different spot (atop the chicken coop! On the roof! Three inches to the left of the first location!). This is also how he rearranges furniture, but that is a whole 'nother blog post.
So at last the bees arrived, which was an unbelievable production (I found out later from my sister the bee expert that most people who have bees mail-order them from a bee factory, but ours are wild-caught, organic, free-range mountain bees, snatched out of their pristine home by some lady in Boulder and put in a cardboard box, then passed on to another lady who happened to be driving our way that night, and left on our porch at about midnight, since she passed through later than she planned) and our up-the-street beekeeping neighbors came over first thing in the morning to assist (Inga) and/or videotape and laugh from a safe distance (Nathan). I was in charge of herding the boys out of harm's way (five boys five-and-under including theirs - I don't see anything that could possibly go wrong there)
So Ryan and Inga suited up in bee armor and prepared to transfer the swarm from the box to the hive. The bees were all sort of bunched up on a couple of wooden rails, which should have lifted out of the box and into the hive before the bees even knew anything had changed, but of course the rails were too wide to fit into our hive. Some swearing ensued, the kids and I moved back about ten yards, then the intrepid Inga proceeded to whack the bunched-up bees off of the rail in the general direction of the open hive. Suddenly there were about three thousand disturbed bees humming around in a disturbed-bee-cloud by our back door. The kids and I moved back about half a block. I missed most of what happened next, but there were only a handful of stings and it only took the bees about six hours to find their way into the hive, where they are busily building combs and pollinating local flowering shrubbery (saving the world, really) as we speak.

questionable vegetables

Dude, we totally had weed for dinner!


Not that kind of weed. Lambsquarter. It's all over the yard, and my experience with it so far had been mostly to yank it out from between the green beans, but you can saute it like spinach and it's  pretty tasty. Excellent, actually, considering how much work I put into growing spinach compared to this stuff. I'm sold.