Unplanned Excitement

...



I meant to post the second installment of our glance back at 2010, but a few things got in the way.

For example, this evening our kitty Smog, who is allowed to roam in our back yard, disappeared.

We followed the sounds of pathetic kitty-mewing, and eventually located Smog in a tiny crevice between our fence and our next-door-neighbors' back yard. I staked out our neighbor Manuel's yard, and Robb stayed on our side. The sun had gone down, and I since I was the one looking directly at our obstinate little cat, I had the flashlight.

In the darkness, Robb somehow lost his balance and knocked over one of our beehives.

After seemed like an eternity of making kissy-noises, I caught the cat.

And then I lost him again when Manuel (who speaks only slightly more English than I speak Spanish) was trying to give me a bag of homegrown fruit. The cat freaked out, and ran right back into the crevice. More coaxing, a lot of patience, and I caught our Little Dude, for the second time.

And then we had to deal with the bees.

Robb and I managed to right the hive. We parked it temporarily on a table in the backyard, because the legs of the hive stand are stuck in the mud of the back yard. We reassembled the frames of wax, and annoyed an awful lot of bees.

And, yes, we both got stung, several times. (We're doped up on Benadryl at the moment.)

Given that we were doing this in almost total darkness, I think we should be happy that no humans panicked or lost their tempers. We'll look at the bees tomorrow. Until then, we'll hope for the best, and thank goodness that we knocked over our smaller less-populated beehive instead of the one that's overflowing with bees.