Its a BEEautiful Spring Day

So a couple of weeks ago I went outside to take pictures of our neighbors Olive tree that the bees won't stay away from. They basically have been living in this tree for over two years. I swear that if the tree ever produced olives again that they would taste like honey. The neighbors have tried to smoke them out, had the hole in the trunk plugged up so many times, I've lost count. This past autumn they seemed to have finally gotten rid of them, except about two months ago they showed back up, so I thought I would mess around with the settings on the camera.



So it was a good thing that I took this picture and a few others I'm not boring you with because a few days later they had the bee people come out and plug the hole up. Well that cause a massive bee suicide on my front porch, but that's a whole other story. Well a couple weeks later the bees ate enough of the foam filling (I think it was foam filling) away to get back into the trunk of the tree...smart little creatures. Well today the birds seemed to be making a little too much noise outside so I went to the front door to see what the birds were yelling about and well as I stood on the front porch and looked over at the tree, I swear the noise of the bees humming and flying back and forth, that olive tree could have flown away.







You can sorta see the yellowish looking foam that they plugged the hole up with. But the coolest part is the bees were not just hanging out on the trunk, the front yard looked like something from a Hitchcock movie. I'm glad I wasn't in the way of all of them. You can almost see their little helmets and goggles on. I think I spotted Jerry Seinfeld...oops I almost said Jerry Springer. (I'm referring to the Bee Movie)









So I went inside to figure out what to do, so I of course call Mom and Dad. Dad suggested calling a the city vector (I think that's how you spell it). Well the recording said to call 911 if the bees are swarming. I walked back outside and most of the bees were gone...weird where did they go???

















So after getting stung twice last year, the bees kinda know my smell and leave me alone unless they crash into me accidently, so I don't really have a fear of them but man alive thats a crap load of bees. I stayed out on the porch to tell the mail lady about them and then Michael and I went out a few hours later after I showed him the pictures I taken and the swarm at the top of the tree seems to be shrinking some. I think there must have been some bee family reunion or the queen was getting married or there was a division of bee kingdom in the olive tree. I bet there is some good honey in that tree too. I'm just not going to be the one looking at it!!! Hey so I googled info about bees and birds and yes some birds do eat bees, but the best part of this adventure is going to be to see if the skunks show up!!! Goggle said that skunks are a big hazard to bees outside of bears and well I HOPE we don't have any bears show up in the neighborhood but it wouldn't surprise me if they did. Coyotes, raccoons, skunks...oh oh the bees killers are outside now!!!!

Weird Sounds of Spring

So I was taking some stuff out to the freezer and I kept hearing this weird noise coming from the tree over the garage. I thought it was a woodpecker for a few Min's but that wouldn't be right. I don't think I've ever heard of a woodpecker in this area before but that wouldn't surprise me who'd a thunk that we would have coyotes and raccoon's. So I went and got the camera so I could see what or who was making all the noise and this is what I saw..








Noisy little squirrel yelling at me for no good reason!!!

265 Days till Christmas

Why you ask do I have the countdown going? Because every time I look out the bathroom window this is what I see....







Grams must have planted this Poinsettia flower / plant about 10 years ago. I thought I really had killed it off this past Summer with lack of water and a very helpful lawn groomer who kept trimming the dead branches off till there was hardly anything left of it. I think this poor plant has a inner clock issue. I read a story once that said Poinsettia's actually don't bloom in the winter, that the growers some how force them to bloom so that we can enjoy them in the winter. It said that they actually bloom in July, well its April now and this has been blooming since March. I'm actually thinking about Christmas already and I know that when Christmas does come in 265 days that I'll be so over it..except for Christmas dinner!!! (see previous Christmas's post)



So here is some of my Spring garden...we have so much lettuce I think we are going to need a rabbit to eat it all. I usually wait too long to plant the lettuce and it usually doesn't grow or gets burned, not this year. I still have some more I can plant. I'm trying to grow stuff that we are going to eat a lot of, since food prices are going up so high..too bad I can't grow gas. $4.05 a gallon for the cheap stuff. I'm going to be walking a bit more I think.

Interesting Week

So we had an interesting week. The first part of the week we had a huge wind storm. I hadn't seen the wind blow as hard as it did in a very long time. Poor Desmond was so afraid of the noise of the windows rattling that he had to take comfort and lay on my face for most of the night, but the weird thing that happened was this...



I guess we won't be eating at Captain Kidd's for a few weeks or until the smell is gone. From what they've said on the news the smell isn't very nice, but I think it would still be cool to see in person, maybe not smell in person but can't be much worse than a skunk or a dairy farm and I sorta like those smells. I know weird but still. In case you can't read the article a huge school of sardines ended up in the harbor either blown in because of the wind storm or chased in because of bigger predators and didn't have enough oxygen to breath and then made a bad direction choice and went further into the marina and suffocated. As of the Friday news they said they had pulled out 80 tons of fish.

Then the other was watching the news about the earthquake in Japan and then seeing the tsunami hit and washing everything away. I can't imagine that being real and not just something in the movies.

Bad Blogger

This is what most of my December and half of my January looked like



Michael said that the boot reminded him of the Storm Troopers from Star Wars. It was pretty nice to wear the bottom kinda rocked when I walk so that made it nice, but still it was a major pain to wear but my foot and ankle do feel much better. I'm just glad I could take it off to shower and sleep and scratch if I needed to. My neighbor next door broke her ankle in September and had to wear a cast for 3 months and then this boot, she just got to stop wearing it a little while ago too.



So needless to say I did a lot of this at odd hours. I would be up most nights all night and then get about 3 or 4 hours in the morning. I just don't think I looked as cute as this now.

So I'm going to try and start blogging again, I want to go back and add a few things from last year that I want to remember in case I decide to make a blog book, but other than that I'll try to stay up to date. I'm only 3 months late starting but hey like I said the boot and sleeping occupied a lot of my time.

Christmas

I forgot I had these on my camera so I'm doing a back post of Christmas. Here is the tasty appetizers that we had.



We actually celebrated Christmas on the 23rd because Carl and Francine had to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The 23rd was just as easily as the 25th you would have never known it wasn't the "actual" day. We even SKYPED with Barton and Thalea's family.



I think the best part of the whole day was the meal. I was showing this to Michael after the fact and he said he would probably push somebody out of the way right now to have that meal again....it was soooo good!!!





After Dinner and time to let all that food digest we opened presents. I missed not having Summer around to open her presents but Bailey and Brandi didn't disappoint. I wish I had gotten a picture of the two of them when they came into the house. They had Mr and Mrs Santa suits on.



And last but not least one of my favorite Christmas Decorations. Mom painted this for her parents probably about 25 years ago. When Grandpa died in 2001 I became the legal owner of this. I just think it puts everything into perspective.

Winter in Utah/Wyoming

Jennifer is busy with finals right now, but I couldn't let her recent trip to visit us go "un-blogged" so I'm blogging for her.

She decided to fly up for my birthday and to spend some time with us while Byron was out of town at a conference. We kept her very busy and entertained (I'm sure).

First stop was the Festival of Trees - so many trees, gingerbread houses, wreaths, and more!Then that night we all went to Heber to ride the North Pole Express. It was very fun!

We crafted, we shopped and the boys had her read stories to them every chance they got.Then we headed to Wyoming for our great aunt Mary Isabell's funeral - she was able to extend her trip and stay for it. This is a picture of us at the summit before going down in to the valley.And us with our Cassity cousins at the funeral. We love them!