Wednesday, August 5

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

A day with a lot less pressure.

I didn't do much, just some dishes and the normal chores, BUT THAT'S OKAY.

I did go see River in the evening, just to graze him because it was too late for riding and no one was around. It's nice just to sit with him while he eats (I take him to a part of the yard to graze, because their corral is chewed to nothing).

I talked to my trainwreck sister for a while. She's starting to recognize that the challenge of keeping up with her falling-down trailer and giant yard and huge amount of stuff with not much money coming in is likely too much for her to sustain. Drum roll: she has no idea how she's going to live there through winter. That's what I've been saying all summer. She's pretty frustrating though, because on some level, she knows that she has to sell the place, but she keeps going on about how she "has to clean it all out first".

So, I tell her that I'm willing to help her post things on the buy and sell in her area, since with the internet it's not like I have to live there or anything to post things. So she's like "oh, maybe. I'm too tired to even think about it." That's her response, is just to shut down, even though every time I've talked to her in the last year she's said "I need someone who can post things for me online".

She wants to sell each thing separately, and get the best price, and to take her time thinking about it. You know what? She has a giant work shop full of stuff. I mean it. It's an old mechanic's quonset, and it's huge, likely three thousand square feet or more, and it's full. Bags and bags of clothes, boxes of magazines, dishes and knick knacks, old lamps, rugs, pictures, pots and pans, wicker baskets, furniture. It's not all garbage, but individually it's mostly stuff that's not really worth anything either. Stuff you'd have a hard time selling at all, much less for more than ten bucks for this, ten bucks for that. Old clothes aren't worth anything. Most old magazines aren't worth anything either. Even dishes aren't worth anything unless they're something special.

Anyone else would have set up makeshift tables in that giant shop, started laying stuff out, and put out a sign that said "make me an offer", and put an ad in the local buy and sell and put signs out at the highway, and just had a permanent sale every day until most of it was gone. People would have kept coming back if they knew she'd have new stuff out every couple of days. Nope. My sister can't muster the focus for such a thing, she just mopes around day after day about how trapped she is by all her shit.

I tell her that she doesn't really need to clean everything out to sell the place. Just take what she needs, and allow the price of the property to reflect the fact that there's junk everywhere. She's not the first person to sell a property full of hoarded stuff. She resists that idea too.

So, instead of selling her property and getting out while she can, she's just going to ride this out until she can't pay any of her bills, gets the power shut off and is forced to leave, and then loses the property to taxes. Instead of having at least SOME money to get her a small house in town or an apartment, she's going to have nothing.

She literally told me "oh, something will come along. Some young mechanic will show up and just buy everything and then I can start clearing it out of what I want and I'll move".

She doesn't say "I'll put together an itemized list of what will come with the property, list it with a real estate company, and start cleaning right now". Nope. She believes in MAGIC. She doesn't seem to understand that most "luck" is actually hard work, and that she has to actually DO SOMETHING.

Tuesday: Not a great start to the day. My sweetie got up at about 7am, and started opening up the closed in overhang over the front door that the bees have nested in. He wore a proper beekeeper's jacket to protect himself, and still got stung a few times.

I didn't get any sleep, because I normally go to bed at around 5 am these days, and he pounded and banged on the wall outside the bedroom window until 11 am. I was so tired, because yesterday I didn't get any sleep either because he and our friend started moving dirt first thing in the morning, also right outside the bedroom window. I was so tired I was delirious, and I had to cancel my riding lesson. The first lesson in weeks, due to the hot weather. Not a good start to the day.

My sweetie did his best to save the bees, and they aren't all dead, so maybe something can be done to save the hive. He brought me several containers of honeycomb, which I spent the rest of the day processing and separating the honey from. It's pretty gross when it's a wild hive, because domestic bees raised in a properly built hive have one half made for the queen to lay eggs, and the other half to store honey. A wild hive intermixes larvae with honey cells, so you're killing larvae when you process the combs. I felt awful, but by tearing down the hive they weren't going to make it anyhow. You have to tear it all down so the swarm doesn't go back in there.

We did get about five liters of raw, natural clover honey! Pretty amazing.

I don't like killing bees, but we had to do something. They were getting into the house, and if you leave them they'll start building hives in the walls, and then you get honey everywhere. No one would come out to move the hive or anything, so we had to do this ourselves as best we could.

Update: I did find someone, (too late to do a nice job of moving the hive, but maybe we can save them) a beekeeper, who is interested in coming out and taking the bees. I think the queen is still up in the overhang, because there is a swarm of bees up there still, and they wouldn't do that if she were in the parts of the hive that we moved to a wooden box (these combs were full of larvae, and we thought that might draw them to move into the box). This beekeeper thinks he can capture her with a special vacuum, and if he can do that he'll take the hive for his business.

Part of me wanted to keep the hive ourselves, but you have to ask yourself if you really have the time or expertise to do this. Also, I got the impression that he wouldn't come help us unless we gave him the hive, and we don't know how to get it down ourselves. We have to do something to get rid of them.