Things to Squee about

There seem to be a lot of things percolating in my brain that I'm quite excited about, I hope I remember them all!

Tomorrow I'm going to the chiropractor and renting an alpha-stim machine. It uses electrotherapy for pain management. We've been using it in the office and I have had some good results. I'm hoping by using it daily I get some great results! As a side note, my chiropractors (one while I lived in Hutch, and this one in Mac) are really the only ones that have helped me, all the regular doctors ran all sorts of tests, gave me all sorts of pills, that really never did much.

The LYS hooked me and Theresa up and we've been driving up to knit night together ever since. We, of course, have always talked about starting one up in Mac. A knit night, not a yarn store! She got in touch with the county extension office and they said they would sponsor us! Today I went over and finalized plans with them. It will actually be a fiber arts group, knitters, crocheters, cross stitchers, weavers, who ever. We start on Aug 7th, 7-9, every Tuesday!
They are going to put ads on the radio, newspaper, and some newsletters. We get to keep a key to the building(that's how small the town is), and have access to several different rooms. Hopefully we will grow out of the small one! I'm pretty sure there is a frig and coffee pot too.
Isn't that great?

Oh, and I'm planning on taking another class at Yarns. It is a Christmas stocking to learn color work. Same teacher I had for Nathan's baby sweater. I really enjoyed that class and learned a lot. I have been wanting to try colorwork for awhile now, it opens up so many new possibilities!

The best thing to squee about? Marianne thinks I'm a Rockin' Girl Blogger!


Since I think she's pretty darn cool it works out good! I'm supposed to pass this on to 5 other Rockin' Girl Bloggers, so let's see if I can narrow it down.

• Miranda: SIL extrodinare, she fits in with my family wonderfully, actually her Mom and stepdad are invited to most of the family get togethers! I'm proud to call her a friend as well as my brother's wife and my nephew mom. She has just started her new blog so to get a sense of her humorous writing style also check out her pregnancy blog and the blog before that! Third time's the charm I guess? I'm so glad she started blogging again!
• Karla: Yes, it is on myspace, and no you can't comment unless you have an account, I'm trying to con her into starting a normal blog. We have been friends for about 13 years now, met in the college jewerly class, boy did we have fun. She has a lot of the same interests I do, Harry Potter, any good fantasy book, 80's teen movies(anyone know who Ducky is?). She is a single Mom of a brand new teenager telling tales of her trials and triumphs.
• Laura at Sugar Bunny Boulevard: I haven't met her yet, but I'm planning on it come Sept 15! She is the heart of the Squares for Greensburg project. I love hearing her enthusiasm for this project! She is a sweetheart and her girls are adorable!
• Farm Mom at Children in the Corn: a great homesteading blog. I haven't commented to much, but I always look forward to her posts.
• Prairie Gumbo: I'm fairly new to reading her blog, but she has been very entertaining so far!
  

People I would pick if they hadn't already been rocked! These are some wonderful ladies!

• Ms. K at The Life and Times of Florence Knitingale
• Marianne of Marianne's Knotminding
• Charity of Knitting in the North
• Phelan from A Homesteading Neophyte

And the biggest thing to make me squee with delight?

THE YARN HARLOT IS COMING TO WICHITA!

Do you believe that? I'm not sure I do! See for yourselves, check on her sidebar click on Harlot on Tour. Sept. 16th the day after the seaming party! A whole weekend of being with fellow knitters! I don't think I can stand it! For those of you non-knitters that read my blog, the Yarn Harlot is kinda like the knitting comedian, that is the best way I have to describe her. Her books are very funny, and I hear her shows are amazingly funny.

I really can't wait!

Adventures in Honey

In the spring Techpriest was talking to one of the ladies in the courthouse about their spouses. Her husband is retired, getting a little forgetful and has some other health issues so that he needs to take it easy. He also has a huge yard with lots and lots of trees, bushes, etc. Techpriest has a wife that needs to get out of the house more often, could use a little spending money, but who you can't count on from day to day because of her headaches. Since then, the two seem to fit together fairly well. We are scheduled Mon, Wed, and Fri, but between me not feeling good, him not feeling good, and all the rain, we usually don't work all three days. We have weeded(lord have we weeded!), trimmed bushes and trees, put up the waterwheel, made some flower boxes, but the most interesting thing we have done is extract honey.

You see, he is the honey man around this parts. Most people in McPherson might not know who you are talking about if you say his name, but call him the honey man and they go "yeah, yeah, lives out on such-and-such street, right? Great honey." Yup, that's him. He has been raising bees for quite a long time.

Last year the bees didn't produce enough honey to last the whole year, HM(honey man) has been out for a couple of months now. Don't worry, I should have enough to last me! This year, he had several hives that died off. I guess he is having the same problem everyone else is having. He is not a big commercial producer though, his hives are about as natural as you can get without being hung up out in the woods.

Well, these hives did make some honeycombs before they died, so I got the fun of helping extract the honey! I thought it was quite interesting, and well worth blogging about. Now, being a brand new blogger, the first day I forgot to bring the camera. So, bear with me.



This is...well, I don't what they call it, but it has a sort of screen on it(see it on the bottom left?) that the bees build the honey combs on. Now, the first day we took these screens full of honey combs and opened them up with a scratcher(looks kinda like a pet comb, but very sharp, we cut ourselves a few times). Quite often honey would just run down once you opened them up, sometimes even popping out like they were under pressure and hitting you. As you can guess this was a very messy process. I had drops of honey all over me, my hands were coated with it, it was hot enough that I was dripping sweat, pouring in my eyes, but couldn't do anything about it since my hands were all sticky! HM said it could be worse, in the fall(aug-oct) it is usually much hotter, and the bees are flying around all over the place, but because they still have flowers to munch on they left us alone.

So after we did that we placed them in the extractor, where they would drip out all the honey. At least, that was the plan. Normally, this takes place in Aug. Normally, July is much hotter than it has been this year. Between last Monday when we put them in the extractor and Friday when we got back to them it had cooled off, rained, gotten hot again and cooled off again. Not good for the honey. One, not much of the honey was in the bottom of the extractor like it was supposed to be. The picture up above was taken on Friday and you can see there is still a lot of honey left and it has crystallized. Second, it has started fermenting. So no good for honey, HM said it would make some good mead though! I didn't know mead was made from honey, did you?




This is the top of the extractor where you load the screens.



Full view of the extractor. Emptying it out into the bucket. We only filled one bucket, that tells ya how much was left in the honey combs. There is a motor on top used to spin all the honey out.



A glimpse in the bucket. If you embiggen you should be able to see all the bits of honeycomb and dead bees floating in there. And yes, we did scrape off all the dead bees we could, but there were some tucked up in the honeycomb too. Don't worry, the strainer comes next.



Look at all the stuff the strainer caught. It actually gets strained a couple more times, but we were done for the day.



See? Much better. HM says that all the foam is from the fermenting. He really doesn't know what he is going to do with it all.

Well, I think that is it for now, talk to you all later!

More Greensburg stuff

It seems like I have so much to talk about, mainly because I have waited to long to post. I wait until I have enough material for a good long post, then I feel like I have to have a good chunk of time to be able to post it all! So I think from now on I will try to post more often.

Just to make sure I don't forget about it, I'll start with Rebuilding Greensburg. Laura only needs 193 more squares to meet her second goal! Isn't that fantastic? I think that a lot of people are waiting to send all their squares in at once (like me), so there will probably be a deluge of squares come Aug. 1st. That second goal is gonna fly right by. Remember you can crochet squares too, in fact she has a very pretty pattern up. And no, Miranda, don't feel guilty about being to busy to crochet one, I just wanted to post it so everyone knows about it.

Laura's post today was a very good read about the project and how she feels about it. It was reaffirming why this project is important. If nothing else, it will let the people of Greensburg know that people from all over the world feel their pain and sympathize with them and are thinking about them. Just that can help a lot. There are also two links in her post to stories from the Wichita Eagle about mental health issues that are cropping up, and how the rebuilding is going.

I also wanted to let you know that Prairie Gumbo is having a contest for the Greensburg project. You do have to post pictures of your squares to your blog before Aug 16th. She is giving away a random prize and two prizes for the top two people with the most squares. The yarn looks yummy!

Laura is also needing yarn and yarn needles for the seaming party. Check her blog for more details. The seaming party is Sept 15, mark your calendars! I'm hoping to get a group together from here in Mac to ride down together, Theresa said she would go, and hopefully some friends of hers. Laura is planning on feeding us too! Doesn't it sound like fun? If you can please come! We are going to have to seam together 2240 squares! We need all the help we can get!

I knit this square today, my 8th one. My goal is to knit 10, so I'm in good shape. You know blogging does help me finish things. I wanted a picture of this square, so I had to weave in the ends and block it real quick. I hope to post again tomorrow, so watch this space!