"Zoom"

Bees are wonderful creatures.  I’ve never really understood the people who scream and swat around wildly when they see one, even though I’ve been stung like anybody else who runs around barefoot.  My mom has a knack of catching them in a hand towel and putting them outside when they find a way into the house.  I love to watch the bees zooming around, dancing from flower to flower.  The fact that they aren’t supposed to be able to fly makes them all the more fun to watch.

There’s a flower garden where I work, and I watch the bees when I take a break.  A very antisocial priest tends the garden, and he’s walled it off so nobody else can enjoy it.  I’m pretty sure he’s unhappy I acquired a key to get in, but I leave him alone, and he leaves me alone, and we both leave the bees alone.  I’m pretty sure they’re going to sleep for the winter now anyway.

Up till this summer’s bee watching, I never really paid attention to how many kinds of bees there are – black bees, yellow bees, striped bees, bumblebees, and lots of other bees too.  I’m pretty sure the variety of bees in the priest’s garden is because of the wide variety of flowers he plants in there.  I’m pretty sure there has to be acres of honey somewhere, but I’ll leave the bees to it.

Completely un-zoom related, I recently fixed a friend’s dresser.  In fact, this was kind of an anti-zoom activity because I had to build up layers of wood putty to mend the broken bric-a-brac.  I’m pretty sure I spent entirely too much time doing this, but I have to admit I enjoyed it.  I conferred with another friend about what kind of paint to use to camouflage the putty (we decided on oils), and she suggested that I take before and after pictures.  Good idea.  Wish she suggested that before I started, but I think you can tell what I was doing from these pictures.

This dresser was put out for the trash a lot of years ago, and my friend’s husband rescued it.  I’m glad he did.  It’s very solid, and now it’s pretty again too.

What is not pretty is the dark brown puddle of oil-based stain I kicked onto my friend’s carpet.  I will take any suggestion if anyone knows how to rectify that mess.  I tried blotting and also tried turpentine, but the main thing I accomplished by that was to make myself rather high and befuddled.  She says not to worry about it, but I feel bad and would like to know how to fix it.

Coincidently, I talked to another friend recently (which is starting to sound like I have an awful lot of friends!) who made the observation that I spend too much time feeling bad about other people’s issues.  I’m not so sure his observation applies in this case since I am very clearly at fault, but it does give me something to think about – which brings me back to bees…

I watched a nature show which talked about how bees communicate, and the host said bees are a lot like how our brains work.  One bee = one brain cell or synapse.  When you put all those synapses together, it’s like a whole hive of bees swarming together as one conscious thought.  I started thinking about that, and wonder if each human = one brain cell of society, and don’t humans swarm the same as bees?  Just something for you to think about, or maybe I’m justifying feeling bad too much when other people feel bad?  On the other hand, if everybody’s happy, then I’m happy too!