Beelandia Mosaic Apiary Sign

I've been working on the Beelandia sign for Abelisto's apiary. The migraine last week slowed everything down for me this past week, and along with a number of the "must-do" things that often get in the way of making art kept me out of the studio most of the week.

Today I escaped from all that and worked on it for a few hours. I got much of the background done. I think a couple more evenings and I'll have this one done.

Beelandia Apiary sign 1 week ago - the bees are done and I started the background.

Beelandia Apiary sign when I started on it today.

Beelandia Apiary sign when I stopped working on it tonight.

Current Mosaic Project

While I'm waiting for the orders of supplies for the other mosaic project I'm working on I decided to make Wes' sign for the apiary, Beelandia. He's been wanting one ever since the apiary became public knowledge last summer (with the infamous article in the Winona Daily News regarding the bee ordinance and the various responses to it ).

The sign is 12" x 24". The letters and the bees are in smalti and the background is stained glass, and the differences in the thickness will make the sign have a little bit of a third dimension. I'm going to put a thin strip of copper around the piece to serve as a frame.

I'm doing the bees in tiny pieces of smalti. I wanted to make their striped bodies with narrow, slightly curved slices of glass so that they would obviously be bees. I then decided to also make the wings out of random tiny slivers and wedges of smalti so that they'd be more interesting and give the bees more character than using just a few larger pieces. This will be a grouted piece and the grout will make the bees -- bodies and wings -- cohesive elements while accenting the green background pieces, making them stand out as distinct blades of grass. There will be enough contrast between the letters and the background that there won't be any problem seeing the letters as letters.

Close-up of bees, letters and grass (background)

Abelisto Dulcimer

I've resisted using Picasa even though uploading photos to a Blogger blog creates Picasa web albums with the images automatically.

Today, as part of my work I did some exploration of Picasa. I downloaded the application and installed it.

That was about 55 minutes ago. It's still indexing all the photos on my computer. I'm not surprised since I have over 500G of photos spread between three harddrives.

While it's still finding and cataloging things I played with it a bit. I found this photo of Abelisto playing the dulcimer on stage. I used Picasa's interface to adjust color, contrast, and fill light, and then applied a sepia filter to the image (hopefully all of this is undoable... I'm fairly certain it is - I actually know it is while you are still working on an image, but I don't know if I leave an image in an altered state and return to it later if it is undoable... we'll see). I then used the Blog This feature in Picasa to upload this photo and write this little bit about it.

I added a caption to the photo in Picasa but it does not seem to have accompanied the photo into this blog post.

Picasa is still indexing photographs... I'm beginning to wonder how many I actually have. Hopefully it hasn't gone out onto the network... I have access permissions to lots and lots of networked folders.

Maybe I should check on it. Now.

Swarm

Abelisto's bees swarmed today. It was amazing. At first I was sad that we did not "catch" them. But then I decided that it was cool that we contributed to the wild bee population!

Abelisto has photos of the swarm in a neighbor's tree.

Bees - NY Times Blog

Great post on bees and the world we live in - even though it's a bumblebee they've got pictured, not a honeybee.

I'm waiting to see what Abelisto thinks about it (the article, not the misidentified pollinator in the photo).

Opinion
Olivia Judson: Guest Column: Let’s Hear It for the Bees
Published: April 28, 2009
You can set your watch by the openings and closings of certain flowers, but for real circadian synchronicity, it's the bees.

Mead Making

Tonight Eli and I bottled the first batch of mead. This mead was made with honey from a local beekeeper that we got at the Farmer's Market in Winona. I do not drink alcohol so I do not really know myself, but others in my household think it tastes good.

This batch was made sort of willy-nilly. I did read the meadmaker book, but I did not have any special equipment for doing it other than the carboy and the fermentation lock. I did not even have a thermometer. I guess I was really lucky that it made at all. It took DAYS for it to start fermenting, and it was not very vigorous when it did start. There was maybe a bubble every 15 seconds. We worried that we were going to end up with honey vinegar, or something like that.

A week or so ago I stopped by the Wine & Beer Making Supply store just north of Rochester on Hwy 52. I bought a polycarbonate carboy, another fermentation lock, a racking tube and hose, a floating thermometer, a hydrometer and testing tube, some stabilizer, and some yeast energizer (or maybe it was nutrient - don't remember and the box is in the other room).

Abelisto and I picked up 12 pounds raw honey at the food co-op. I started a second batch of mead with part of it last weekend when I moved the first batch to the secondary fermentation carboy (the rest of the honey went to the roofers in appreciation of taking such good care not to drop old shingles on the bee hives). I really did not need to move the first batch into a secondary fermentation carboy, it was absolutely done with the fermenting, but it did help clarify it. Anyway, the second batch of mead was bubbling away about 4 hours after I mixed it up. The bubbles were rising through the fermentation lock at about 1 bubble every 2.5 to 3 seconds this time. I took specific gravity and temperature measurements and am keeping better records with this batch. 

It will be interesting to see how it comes out.

Successful Party

Saturday night Abelisto & I had a Cinco de Mayo party at our house. 34 Co-workers, spouses and children came to our house between the hours of 6pm and 10pm or so. The guests were invited to bring either a dessert or a beverage if they wanted to do so. We now have so much alcohol (in the form of all sorts of beer, Irish whiskey, Mexican brandy, and tequilla) in our house that it will take years to consume it all - neither Abelisto nor I drink alcohol in any format, although I do taste things just to experience them.

I think the success of our parties (this was our third) is the mix of people that we invite. There are people from all areas of the university - except perhaps, upper administration. Both Ablisto and I have friends across the university - Abelisto has been there for nearly 25 years, and I am fairly gregarious and outgoing.

The party mostly consisted of people enjoying lots of Mexican food and great conversations with people they do not see often. The semester is nearly over (finals last Friday, Saturday, tomorrow and Tuesday - then we are done until August) and it felt really good to celebrate a number of things. I am not off for the summer, of course, not being faculty, but I enjoy most any occasion to get together with these people.

The hit of the party was Abelisto's apiary - Beelandia. People were going in and out all evening to watch the bees doing the bee-thing. It was good to see people listening to Abelisto talk about sustainable beekeeping.

The next party will be in the fall. I think that we could have up to 40 people in the house. We may end up with that many. Our parties are evermore popular.

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Iron Man

Abelisto & I went to see Iron Man today. Abelisto is a comic book fan. We have boxes of his old comic books in the closet. Iron Man was one of his favorites, I think. Him and Dr. Strange.

The movie was a very smart rendition of a genre that has gone a bit stale and predictable in its products following the first Spiderman release. Casting Robert Downy Jr. as a decadent playboy billionaire with a genius for inventing gadgets was a grand experiment that seems to have worked. He flourishes as Tony Stark. It is refreshing to see a studio chose someone with some wrinkles and creases, not a baby-faced male ing'enue for this role. Robert Downey Jr. is sort of a reprobate anyway - perhaps reformed, who knows - and this adds to the subtle flavor of the film. Perhaps the superb casting (not just Downey, but Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts and Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane) can be laid at the feet of Marvel Studios in this debut venture into greater autonomy in movie creation (Marvel Studios totally funded the creation of Iron Man).

This story is understandable and engaging without a personal history of comic book reading. It is a witty, sharp, non-saccharine saga with glimpses of the epic good vs. evil (evil that you sometimes are in bed with) tension that lets you leave the theater with all sorts of promises to do better, to be better, zinging around in your head and heart.

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Beelandia

Abelisto and I welcomed 20,000 honeybees into our lives a few days ago. I took a lat lunch hour from work and came home to photograph the installation. You can see the photos and read more about Abelisto's bees here.

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New site published

I uploaded the new www.854w5th.com website. The home page for the site has not been changed, but the sites for Abelisto (Wes) and myself (Monta) are totally redesigned. These redesigns are totally my work, and are not based on templates. The home page for 854w5th.com is still template based. Wes' pages reflect his current Beekeeping research and project. Mine are primarily an updated portfolio website.

I will be redesigning that page soon. I may need to do the Winona DFL site first.

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New Email Signature

Normally I just use my contact information for my email signatures. I have always thought that adding some pithy signature was either pretentious or preachy or polly-anna-ish.

Last month I actually added one - "Please consider the environmental affect of unnecessary printing." that seemed to be enough to say, to remind people that they do not have to print everything. Yesterday I changed my email signature to:

Inspire rebellion to promote defiance to achieve social justice.

The inspiration for this was a lunchtime webinar that Abelisto and I attended at the university where we work. The webinar was produced by Magna Online Seminars and The Teaching Professor. It was an interview with Michael Newman, author of Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators. On page 10 Newman challenges us with a mission - "Our job is... to teach people how to make up their own minds, and how to take control of their moment. It is to teach choice. It is to help ourselves and others break free from our pasts, plan for the futures we want and resist the futures we do not want. Our job is to teach defiance."

There was an explanation of what teaching defiance is made up of, how one teaches it. There was also a good discussion of critical thinking and the fact that the idea of critical thinking has been domesticated.

I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Newman, we must make teaching defiance central to our work. The knowledge and skills we transfer to our students must be used in the name of defiance to create a more just and socially aware world. That is the path to salvation of the world and everyone in it.

Inspire rebellion to promote defiance to achieve social justice.
Amen brothers & sisters.

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American Craft Council Show

Abelisto & I went up to the Saint Paul on Friday to attend the American Craft Council show at the River Center. Another professor was teaching Abelisto's second class of the day so he was finished at 8:353a.m. I have vacation time that needs to be used up before May 31.

So I took the day off. We saw a lot of really interesting work - most of it way out of our price range. There was an ottoman made by Robert Harman that I loved. We spoke with Robert (I think it was Robert). His studio is in my hometown (Bloomington Indiana) and we promised to come by next time we go to visit family. His work is wonderful.

I made contact with a couple artists who are interested in having me do their websites. That might be a good thing, when everything is said and done.

Anarchist

Abelisto & I have been talking about anarchy and anarchists. I believe I am an anarchist, but I have not figured out which type of anarchist I am.

I am not an advocate of chaos. That is not what anarchy really is.

I believe in local decision-making and locally based power. I believe that setting up permanent hierarchies, creating the opportunity for career politicians, leads to abuses of power and a strengthening of the systems that keep those in power in power.

I think that local decisions, local empowerment, local sustainability, is key to the health and well-being of our planet and ourselves. I think that only when issues and situations are too large for local efforts should the decisions be made at a regional or national level. And even then it should be a coalition of the local groups affected.

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Doing another redesign

I must be a bit crazy.
I am right in the middle of a nearly overwhelming web redesign at work - a huge project with the herculean task of condensing and redesigning a website that now has over 3000 pages.

I just redesigned the Sustain Winona website, and I am still playing with that a bit.

I am on the technology committee (chair no less!?!) for the Winona County DFL and have undertaken the redesign of that website.

I have promised to look at the Dakota Homecoming site and see about redesigning it.

And I have decided that I need to redo Abelisto & my website.

Last night I worked on Abelisto's part of our website.

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Making Sustainability Sustainable III: Personal Decisions, part 3

Making Sustainable Sustainable I
Making Sustainable Sustainable II: Issues & Dilemmas
Making Sustainability Sustainable III:Personal Decisions, part 1
Making Sustainability Sustainable III: Personal Decisions, part 2

Okay, I mentioned swapping out all the incandescent lights in the house for CFLs. What I did not mention was that it cost Abelisto & I around $225.00 to do so.

Organic, local butter costs nearly $7 per pound (the regular butter is between 1.85 and 2.05), Organic cotton socks are over $10 per pair, and a friggin' hybrid car is way more than I can spend on a vehicle right now.

A friend of mine said to me recently, "I can afford to buy organic and local, so it is my duty to do so. That is the only way it will ever become affordable for others. We need a critical mass of people buying green in order to make it viable and affordable."

I hope she is right. For now, we buy as much at the co-op as we can afford. I am still having trouble paying over three times more for butter.

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Turning our yard into Beelandia

Beelandia - with Top Bar Hive Metpropolis

Today we did some more fencing. With major help from #2 son, Abelisto & I all but finished the section of the yard we are planning to fully enclose for the bees. It is actually about a third of our yard in all. There is some yard in the front that is not fenced at all, and there will be about the same amount in the back as the fenced portion that will only have a dividing fence between our yard and the next house. We are waiting for people to remove a boat and RV and a dog kennel and a stack of firewood that has encroached into our property over the last couple years. The guy with the boat and RV did ask us, but the dog kennel guy did not and I have no idea whose firewood it is - it just appeared one day while we were at work...

We still have a bit more to do on this enclosure - one section in the front to put up (the post is set in concrete since it was next to the house - and it needs to set for a day or two before we hang a section of fence on it) and the rear gate (which would be immediately to my right as I took this photo). The section of the fence that will be the gate needs trimmed with the skilsaw in order to fit in the space allocated for the gate. We will do these two things one night this week.

Abelisto has already started the digging for the various plantings he has in mind. Once the fence is finished I want to remove the screening from the side porch and build steps from it down to the side walk. Then I want to get some nice chairs for the porch. Not a swing - those things give me motion sickness...

Next - the ROOF!!!

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Making Sustainability Sustainable – III: Personal Decisions, part 1

Making Sustainable Sustainable I
Making Sustainable Sustainable II - Issues & Dilemmas

We (Abelisto & I) have been trying to pick one or two things at a time to do that will move us in a green direction.

First it was swap out the light bulbs in the house - out with incandescents, in with CFLs. I am not sure how much it helped us with the electric bill, but it felt like we were on our way. I can tell you, buying all CF lights for a 14-room house was expensive. We did it all at once, so the pain would be over quick - like jerking a bandaid off instead of easing it off. Mainly we did it in one-fell-swoop so that it would get done. At this point all the lights on the first and second floor of the house are CFLs, porch lights too. The basement still has four incandescent light bulbs. I keep forgetting to swap them out.

The other day one light broke (I think son #2 was practicing swordsmanship inside the house instead of going outside to do it). It did not shatter, but just cracked at the base. For some reason, as I was giving him the replacement bulb, I happened to read the back of the package and saw that there are special recommended disposal practices for fluorescent bulbs - never knew that, should have. EGAD - my wonderful CFLs, those energy saving beacons of light, contain Mercury. Just a small amount, true, but I do not want to be adding any Mercury to the water table here. Already you cannot safely eat the fish from the lakes and rivers. I stopped eating local fish in 1989.

I wondered how much Mercury my son was exposed to when he cracked that CFL. It is now inside a ziplock bag, waiting for a trip to the hazardous waste center.

NPR Story

EnergyStar (EPA program) Infosheet on CFLs & Mercury (pdf file) - a bit scary when you get to the part about cleaning up broken CFLs...

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Hot chicks - cold night

The person or persons that stole the chicks from the biology lab did a awful thing with them. They left them, on a night where the temperatures were just above freezing (yes we are still having night time temperatures in the low 30s) along side the road, in the rain. I can sort of understand rescuing chicks from experiments (although after asking those who would know, I found out that the experiments did no lasting damage to the chicks and were relatively pain-free). What pisses me off is that someone would take the chicks and then risk their lives by abandoning them aside the road at 10 p.m.

Anyway, someone saw them and called the police. The the police and a couple bystanders rounded them up and took them to the Humane Society. Abelisto & I wondered if the caller was the thief. If so the chicks were not really in a great deal of danger, as long as the caller made sure that the police came to get the chicks. However one chick died of exposure, and several lost toes. We also wondered if the bystanders mentioned in the story were in fact the perpetrators of the deed.

Winona Daily News Story (with video) - written before it was known the chicks were from our lab. Ecosheba - one of the comment posters - is daughter #3. She broke the story that the chicks came from the biology lab.

The Winona Post story

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More Bee Fence

Yesterday Abelisto and I, with help from #2 son, place a few more sections of fence in the side yard. Probably one more weekend and we will have the first section enclosed. There are a few places where the ground is uneven enough that we will have to put some paver bricks around the inside of the fence to fill in the low spots so the cats will not be able to squeeze out from under the fence panels. I expect them to eventually climb the fence (probably sooner than later) but I do not want to make it an easy saunter under the fence. If we get strays coming in I will need to run a charged line around the perimeter, maybe at a foot off of the ground. That will keep anything that might harm the beehives out and will have the added bonus of keeping the neighborhood dogs from peeing on the fence too (at least more than once). If I run a charged line on the outside to keep strays out I may run a couple on the inside to keep ours in.

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Fencing the yard

Yesterday Abelisto and I worked on the fence for the beeyard. I think it will end up being around 20' by 48' when it is finished. Of course the bees will wander afar. This is just to protect their home-ground from noisy neighbors, dogs, skunks, and the stray kid that wanders through. It will also give the cats an outside area to be in that is safe from dogs.

Speaking of the cats, Poppy (the lone female) was spayed this past week. It came down to telling daughter #3 that something HAD to be done. Poppy was marking her territory trying to attract a mate. Unfortunately her territory included places/things like my inkjet photo printer (which I finally threw out) and the rest of the computer desk area (both computer desks actually), the laundry room counter, and any plastic or vinyl bag that she found in the house - which meant that my studio had to be kept tightly closed because my new (and expensive) quilting sewing machine has a dust cover that is made of vinyl. She did pee on it once when I forgot to shut the door all the way. It took the chrome off of the presser foot knee-lift which was laying on the table in front of the machine... damn cat. Anyway, the hope is that once she no longer is constantly in heat she will no longer be advertising the fact by marking her territory. She came home on Friday, a bit groggy and out-of-sorts, and I have found no new pee marks. I am tentatively hopeful.

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