Harvest Day

FIRST HARVEST: If you follow along here, you know that we have a couple of beehives. The bees within the hives seem healthy and prolific. They've produced multiple frames of honey. While we need to leave most of it so they have food stores for winter, we felt like it was OK to extract a little for ourselves at this point. 

To do so, we acquired this manually-operated centrifuge-type extractor. You simply put a couple of honey-laden frames in it and spin away.

But first, you have to carefully scrape the wax caps off of the honeycomb.

Then, the racks go in and they're ready to spin!

It requires cranking as fast as possible, as demonstrated below.

We didn't net much honey from our first harvest. Maybe a couple of cups or so. But boy is it delicious!

HARVEST, TOO: Yesterday was another harvest around the homestead. The kids picked a half dozen spaghetti squash from our enormous vine. 

There are still a couple of green-tinged squash out there. Hopefully we'll get enough sun to help nudge them toward yellow in the next couple of weeks.

TINY HOME: Friday afternoon, I took the kids to the Burien branch of King County Public Libraries so that they could participate in a terrarium building class. 

All of the materials were provided by the library, which was swell. 

The kids assembled them step-by-step, from the bottom up. Annabelle's finished product is in the photo above. CJ's is in the photo below.

HOMEWORK: Naturally, a lot of what we did today, and what we do every day now, is make sure CJ's on track with his college work. 

Annabelle's curriculum now pretty much consists of shadowing CJ's coursework. And if you read this blog, that means you're going to be doing some of that, too. ;)

Today, we all watched a TED Talk today. Titled "My Stroke of Insight," in it, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, gives an audience a remarkably detailed, riveting account of what her stroke-in-progress experience was like. 

The video is worth a watch, IMHO.

Here are a few things Annabelle had to say about the presentation. ...

One thing I learned from Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight” TEDtalk is that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are remarkably separate and only communicate through certain areas of the brain. This can lead to situations such as Taylor’s own stroke, where the loss of communication centers in her left hemisphere left her almost completely unable to speak, read, or write. She even had trouble analyzing her situation. The brain requires information from both halves to operate at full capacity, and losing one hemisphere can be absolutely devastating for the mental processes. In her experience, losing the left brain made her lose ‘contact’ with the outside world and get lost in her own thoughts, or as she describes it, “La La Land.”

The most interesting part of her experience to me is the fact that her grasp on the English language was completely shut down due to the blood clot placing pressure on that area of the brain. She admitted that the only way she was able to use the telephone call for help was by matching the ‘squiggles’ (numbers) on her own business card to the corresponding shapes on the dial pad. When someone finally picked up the phone, she was able to hear them, but did not understand what was being said; it simply sounded like a garbled mess. As she tried to reply, her own words were also slurred beyond comprehension. Having to communicate with other people when you cannot understand them, nor can they understand you, must have been a massive challenge.