Saturday, August 8

Today I am grateful for:

The beekeeper did come today, and was able to move the swarm of bees using a vacuum, and transferred them to a box. He's going to take them home, see if they won't move into a proper hive (he took part of the hive with larvae in it, and some honey for food) and continue to operate as a productive hive of bees. This is the best chance they have at survival, as they could no longer survive winter unprotected.

That we got a pressure washer a while ago. I had to first use a paint scraper to take all the caked-on wax, honey, and squashed bees off of the front steps, then pressure washed it clean.

This is sort of a grim gratefulness, but I'm glad my nephew didn't die in a tornado yesterday (it was only in the news today). There was a tornado in the part of Manitoba where my family lives, and all I saw on the news was that two 18 year-olds from the town where my family lives died instantly because their car got thrown into the air. My nephew is 18, and drives a lot now, and my first thought was that it could be him. I called home right away, to learn that it was two of his class mates (keep in mind there are only about 30 kids in his class, and they've likely gone to school together most of their lives). It seems kind of wrong to be glad it wasn't him, because instead, two other families have to suffer. I vaguely know the parents of these kids, and in such a small town, likely half the town was related to them. I wonder what they'll do for a service, since COVID means that they won't have a funeral for anyone other than immediate family likely. If that. Yet, most of the town knew these kids and likely everyone would like to attend some kind of service for them. Maybe a moment of silence where everyone goes outside on their front yard?

Lots of phone conversation with family today.

My trainwreck sister and I put together an ad for the online buy and sell for a few towns around where she lives. It would seem that now she has decided that it is time to start getting serious about selling things, and her kids want her to get out of that ghost town hellhole. She's left it very late. August means only about six weeks of decent weather. She needs to sell a bunch of vehicles, anything else worth selling, get rid of everything else, and somehow sell her property so she can pay off a bunch of debt that's piling up and move...somewhere. I posted the ads, and already there's interest, so she just needs to get over her embarrassment at the state of her place and let people come and buy things.

I got some cleaning done, and that feels a little better. Sometimes I feel like all I do is walk around our property or our house, and try to make things clean again. To put things away. To organize. To clean. To mend. Always trying to put things right, over and over again.