Saturday Edition: Notes From The Hive

 Last weekend it was time to check the bees and make sure Queen Carnie was laying eggs. If she wasn't, I would have had to replace her. Otherwise, when the summer Italians start to die off in a few short weeks (about three, I think), there would be no new bees to replace them and keep the colony alive.

I was nervous going in. Not afraid of the bees, but afraid of hurting them. I was especially afraid of making a clumsy new beekeeper mistake and committing regicide. It seems that I tend to screw up my face just the slightest bit when I'm intent on something? No wonder people always seem afraid of me at Starbucks. But don't worry about me, when Mr. V repeated for the seventh time, "Britt, stop making that FACE," I thought it was cute. I swear to god, isn't that what every woman yearns to hear? Honey, I love you. Just try to look more. . . human.

There's the face. Honestly, I think it's flattering. Bet you thought I'd been photoshopped, haha, suckers! This was their newest comb. In the last week they've drawn it all the way down and started another. They're holding on to each other on the side there, it's called festooning. It's how they build the wax and has something to do with wax glands and their wings? Don't ask me, I know about two things, and those things are Captain Tightpants and cake pops. Also Lady Porn but honestly, people. My blog is neither the time nor the place. Quit asking.

 Here they are on another bar that was almost full. Mr. V had no protective gear on and was unafraid. The bees couldn't have cared less that we arrived uninvited and started snapping pictures of their home. They just went on doing their thing while I composed sonnets and got maudlin over their beauty.

I was too damn amateur to notice it at the time, but this bar here is filled almost entirely with honey. The darker cluster there in the middle is the bee bread.

I don't really want to tell you this, but since it might help other beekeepers, I will. We had a minor emergency. We found Queen Carnie on the last bar I looked at, which was the bar closest to the entrance. When I was holding up the bar something felt off about the balance, like the bees had built this comb differently. We held it up for about a minute, watching Carnie to see if she'd lay an egg for us. Then the comb just dropped off. It fell right off the bar and onto the ground. I said words. I said many words quickly and in a row and basically sounded like I was being arrested on COPS. Quickly Mr. V got a cup--I couldn't pick up bees because I'd picked up the comb, which had crumpled in my hand and left sticky honey all over my gloves--and Carnie walked right in, all imperial and pissed. She scolded us good with that stately walk. We put the cup in the hive and Carnie marched right out and back to the comb. I felt terrible. There was bee bread and some larva and honey in the comb and nothing I could do to save it. I don't know what I could have done differently other than replaced the bar the moment I noticed it was weighted unevenly. It's possible it would have fallen off anyway, into the hive. I don't know. I felt terrible. But the bees moved on.

 Ok Mr.V, here is my best attempt at stop making that face.

Towards the end the bees started doing this weird thing. I don't know, I worry they may be hanging out with some neighborhood riff-raff and are learning unsavory behavior. Several bees landed on the entrance, stuck their butts up in the air (shameless!), and began to beat their wings so rapidly they could only be seen in a blur. It made a loud buzz. I don't know what they were up to and I was too busy trying to get ready for my glamour shots to care.

Today I had sort of a panic. I was giving the girls some syrup when I noticed there were far fewer bees on each comb. I worried that Carnie had swarmed, meaning she and most of the hive decided they'd had enough of this fish-bowl life with the damn paparazzi showing up every weekend and decided to go find some cooler digs, something maybe with hard wood floors or a mountain view. So I went in to look for my queen. I didn't find her the first time I went through all the bars and thought I had a kingdom without a ruler. Then I went through each bar again and found her, laying away. I'm hoping I noticed fewer bees because 1) There are more bars of comb now for them to cover, and 2) more bees are out foraging, since they're getting older. Bees forage in the last 1-3 weeks of their lives and work themselves literally to death. I had a few very old bees on my comb, they look like little old ladies, their yellow turned to white with old age. I also had a few dark bees that I first thought were oldies, but now I wonder if they're my baby Carnies? I'm too new at this to know for sure and also all I really cared about was my lip gloss, which had smudged and how the hell was I going to touch it up through my veil?

What you're seeing here is a lot of capped brood and if you look closely you can see some black bees mixed in with my yellows. I'm gonna miss these Italians when they're gone. I'm hoping to keep an Italian colony next year, when I'm an expert at all this.

That's what's new with the bees. Before we go, I'd like to address those of you who seemed to think having Tina Fey put her hand through my mail slot and wave it around is a funny joke: Tina Fey putting her hand through your mail slot is very real, and those of us dealing with it (me) need your support and not your judgement. Just think how you would feel. You could try and tape the slot shut but Tina's wily. She'll cut through it.

Love from the hive,
B


PS YOU FOOLS:

One more thing: My sister's fun friends, Jan and Kellee, and their husbands came up to Mr. V's brewery and my own Mr. V gave them a tour. Jan takes great pictures and is fit to be a blogger, unlike yours truly. She's funny too, but before you give her too much credit, just remember: she doesn't have to deal with Fey. Here's her fun post about Mr. V's place of employment, where he rides skateboards and drinks beer with all the other hipsters, all the live-long day. I swear. (Mr. V is in the black tee with the green "Old Chub" splooge on it. Is that a dirty word? I didn't mean it that way.

What I Do

Late last week I'd sat down to work, ready to input edits I'd made to my Very Pretentious Work of Fiction, when I plum started crying. I know it seems like I cry a lot, usually into food, and this is why I identify so strongly with Tina Fey and all the other crazy, hairy-legged artists. Thinking about  their glamorous mood disorders and anxiety medication, however, makes me sad, because I suspect deep down I'm not crazy enough to be brilliant. I'd love to be as hilarious as The Bloggess, but it turns out she struggles mightily with mood disorders and here I sit, not on a single anti-depressant whatsoever. That's only because I don't have the health insurance to procure them, but never mind that, never mind. For a creative person I am disturbingly sane. But that's not why I was crying, I cried because Tina Fey has been lurking around my yard again, hiding in the irises and putting her hand through the mail slot. I'm sorry, I just--it's very hard, and I get emotional. I wrote to my friend Nathan Fillion about it, asking if he'd show up in his Captain Tightpants outfit to scare her off, as he does every week for our house mother Rachel Maddow, but he wrote back saying please cease and desist, he didn't want to have to contact the police but he would. Which is how Nathan jokes, but I'm thinking of telling him it's sometimes hurtful.

He should know.

Anyway, there I was, crying this time over white sheets of writing and not over my tuna melt, which wasn't ready yet, and watching Tina Fey pull crab grass from my yard. I am getting the hang of talking myself off ledges. I am learning that I can't save lives other than my own. I have heard the answer to a question which troubled me for years, concerning purposes and plans and does the Divine choose to play my life like a chess board? I heard that it does not, that my essence loathes the idea of purpose and so the Divine is pleased not to bridle me with one. Armed with this knowledge, I have naturally begun to consider writing smutty novels. I have read this Shades of Grey nonsense and while I am glad that the world has offered something to please the female libido, for once, I couldn't believe how poorly it was written, how alienated our erotic heroine was from her own eroticism, and I think our Lady Gardens deserve better. Someone must tend them, and it must not be Brian McKnight. It can't be worse, after all, than writing pretentious fiction, and I rather like this idea of myself: a bottle-dyed redhead sitting in her garden with bees in her hair and amorous stories flowing veins to page (and back again, as you know if you've ever written Lady Porn).

I'm starting to hope you have.

I took two days' leave of absence from all writerly aspirations, and what I learned then was that 1) Malcolm Reynolds is one thing, but Fillion is unreliable at best, and 2) my dreams have begun to feel less like hope and more like a thing that weighs me down, and I'm tired of that. For so long I have focused all my energies into earning money, aplomb, a thing that could accurately be called a career to lack of eye-rolls at parties, and for what purpose? My identity  has become wrapped up in 'should' to a degree that drags my heart. It unmoors me deeply down, because so much trying to be removes me farther and farther from the truest bud of my real self, and my grittiest, most truthful self is the only power I'll ever really have.

I am so weary of having something to prove.

Writing is what I do, and I will always do it. So while I tell you artists to keep making your art, I do mean it so, but here is other half of that story, here is how the flower comes to full bloom: I will love you if you never make art again at all, if you earn not a dime, publish not a page. Go and make your art the way you have sex, because it pleases you, and for nothing more.


And so we must learn to love ourselves. I don't know it yet, but I hear this insistent voice whispering that to turn away from all measures of success and back to the joy of creating for it's own sake is the best thing I can do for myself, and thus the best I can offer the world.

So that's what I'm going to do. Now if you'll excuse me, it's just occurred to me that Tina Fey might be after my honey and I'm going to go take her back to look at the bees and see if that doesn't calm her down. Wish me luck because I think she is escalating.

xoxo
-La V

Dress Your Fantasies In Oprah and Winchester

So you'll recall--or maybe you won't, just don't tell me you don't remember every word I've ever written on this blog or I'll likely uncontrollably sob. My ego, it's unusually fragile--that last week (hello, sentence structure) I went to Wal-mart for fake french crap and sleep meds.

What I didn't tell you is that the first bottle of Melatonin I picked up contained 100 tablets, each containing 1mg of Melatonin.

The second bottle I picked up contained 5mg tablets of Melatonin.

The third bottle? Each tablet packed 10mg of Melatonin. That's 10 times more than the first bottle, the bottle for humans and not for caffeinated elephants. (Isn't it? I don't do math).

I bought the 10mg pills.

I take two of them at 9:20 (twenty minutes before bedtime as instructed).

If I'm lucky, I doze off before midnight.

My name is Vesuvius, and I am impervious to sleep.


We're going to need another bathroom. I never looked into a mirror until I was thirteen (and boy was that a shock, to discover that not only did I bear little resemblance to D.J. Tanner but that HyperColor beige really was not my color), but my daughters are different and every morning, we're all three of us crammed in there with Indy shellacking her hair to her head and Ayla lining up every hairpin she can find in artistic, unexpected patterns in her locks and I'm wielding a curling iron, a cup of coffee, and a serious 6 am haze and this just is not going to work.

This morning I was fussing with concealer and indulging in a silly fantasy. You know, in my head. I won't tell you exactly where I was, in my head, but let's just say it was similar to imagining yourself on Oprah's couch or practicing your Oscar acceptance speech in the mirror.

Please note I am not admitting to having done either of those things. If you have had those fantasies, you are lame and pathetic, exactly like you always feared.

While I was NOT imagining myself on Oprah or kissing a golden-statue-bearing Colin Firth, I realized that not only were the goblins not removing their heads to bounce them on the ground, but they were both singing. To themselves. Ayla was singing in the shower, a rather unlikely and latent rendition of The Wiggles' "Fruit Salad, Yummy Yummy", considering that we haven't listened to the Wiggles in years. And Indy--well, Indy was singing an improvised ballad by Rapunzel of "Tangled", spiced up with threats I will not repeat here because Indy is going to be a real person one day and it would embarrass her. I think.

Look, the main point of this blog is that I wanted to humiliate you for all those times you've imagined yourself telling Oprah, in peaceful and beatific tones, about how you overcame, say, your ant infestation, or your husband's nose whistling, or succeeded in your life long quest to roll the perfect cake ball. Also to shame you for the times you've fallen asleep scripting all the hilarious things you are going to say on Conan or in your guest spot on 30 Rock when your blog--I mean, uh, "spoken word poem or other thing I have never written"--is recognized for the comedic genius it is, which, I firmly repeat, I have also never done.

But in the spirit of O magazine and what I mistakenly imagine a blog is supposed to be, I would also like to have some sort of insight and it is this: I've been thinking a lot about happiness, and trying and failing to write about it, but I managed to remember something about it in the moment and not in retrospect today. If I had stayed in my head--where I was totally NOT saving the world with the Winchester brothers, wearing perky-butt jeans and packing serious sawed-off heat as 'the one who got away' from Dean--if I had stayed in that place that was so happy in my head, I would have missed all the happy that was going on now.

You know. Like, the real happy. Not the imaginary kind.


I have especially never imagined myself into the scene with the lederhosen.


I mean, I know it's been said before, but I've heard Eckhart Tolle, an exceedingly mild-mannered German, and he never said it like this.

He vould say is more like zis: Uff you spend all zee time imagining you are zee Vinchesteh's totally hot gehl-fwend, you vill miss all zee times your daughters sing inappwopwiate sings in zee showeh. Also, beige is really not youh coloh.

I am Vesuvius and I'm totally not still trying to look like D.J Tanner.

Help Me Help Me

So I'm reading this new book by Martha Beck.

It's a self help book really, and I just want to say to all the people in my life: I'm sorry.

I read self-help or spiritual books from time to time, and whenever I do I get all super annoying. Seriously I'm unbearable. I mean, I feel really good inside so I just keep doing it, devouring Martha Beck and Sue Monk Kidd and Pema Chodron and once I even read The Secret. But then I start saying things to Noah like, "Do whatever makes you feel most liberated!". Or I tell my family, you know, the fact that you have that giant oozing growth on your foot isn't really the problem. The problem is that you THINK it's a problem.

You see?

The book isn't about housekeeping really, at all. I mean not even I am lame enough to read books about combining your true self with your lemon Pledge. But towards the end Martha Beck says that you should mentally walk through your living space and note any area of it that you don't like, that makes you uncomfortable.

So I'm like, ha! That's my ENTIRE HOUSE. Gotcha. What now, Martha Beck?

Eat that.

But she was prepared (damn you Martha Beck, you sly lynx). She knew I would say that so she told me to think about the place that makes me feel the most icky. And I thought: the bedroom.

If you are hearing flashing red sirens now, well, so was I.

If there is one thing you need your bedroom to feel after 8 years of marriage, I don't know what that is but I'm sure it isn't 'icky'.

So then Martha Beck told me to visualize getting a million dollar check in the mail that I could use to redecorate--

Just kidding mom.

She said to put one thing I love in my bedroom and take out one thing I hate. So I'm working on that.

Now all I need to do is figure out 1)How to get Nathan Fillion into my bedroom and 2) does anyone know how to wash brain matter out of sateen sheets? What is a spin cycle? I don't get it.

Just kidding.

No seriously though. Do you?

I am Vesuvius and one day I will have the better of that insufferable Martha Beck.

Just kidding, Martha Beck.

(no, seriously.)

Strangers Without Candy

Our landlord is trying to sell our house. This is an absolute nightmare to me. It means I have people coming into my home when I'm not there—the realtors have politely told me to leave during the showings—and it feels like a huge invasion of my privacy.

I don't really like having anyone into my home at all, because I’m ashamed of it. It's a shitty place, guys. I'm just being straight up about that. I have never lived in a nice house since I left my parent's, but this is the worst. It is a shitty falling apart little box, and it's too small to fit all our stuff. Like, no linen or hallway or coat closet small. Which means that we still have boxes under the desk in the living room and hampers filled with sheets and towels and extra hangers littering our bedroom. And usually, the house is in a state of a huge toy and laundry mess. We're pretty good about keeping up with the kitchen, because a dirty kitchen is just gross. But the girls' toys and clothes, boots and shoes, backpacks, videos, books, and all the laundry that I don't have room for, it's strewn all over the house and crammed into corners and closets—stacked willy-nilly on the crooked closet shelve, packed into a corner on N's side of the bed and forgotten. Because when you have a shitty house, you don't really notice it. You don't want to. You might step for seven months around a houseplant in your shower and not notice it until one day you slip and come up clutching fern leaves and dirt.

Ok, maybe not all of you have avoidance issues like me. But when I feel overwhelmed, I tend to ignore it and hope it goes away. For instance, up until about two years ago, I had hanging in my closet two dresses I borrowed from Ashleigh Bryant in approximately 1997. I never returned them because once I hit a certain point—a year, maybe—and I still had them? I was feeling too ashamed. Returning them would be dragging the issue back up to the light of day. I didn't want to face that shame by returning the dresses. Hi, here are two homecoming dresses I borrowed eight years ago, I bet you're really thankful. You'll probably want to wear them tonight for drinks with your husband, maroon crushed velvet and empire waists are so hot right now.

The shame was painful. But I couldn't throw them out, they were Ashleigh's. And so the dresses hung, unreturned and unused, in my closet through college, my wedding and the births of my two children, red and black remnants of the glory of the 90's, until at some point on Birch Street I finally sucked it up and admitted Ashleigh wouldn't want them anymore and took them to Goodwill.

Ashleigh Bryant, please forgive me.

Now: As if the closets weren't enough, there's also the girls room. It's terrible. It's tiny, there are two of them in there with a toy box, no dresser, and two mattresses on the floor. We're waiting 'til we can afford bunk beds—now let's just all have a big fat laugh right here, because I'm telling you true, we are never going to be able to afford bunk beds. But Noah and I are hanging onto this bunk bed delusion, because it allows us to not be overwhelmed by guilt that Ayla sleeps on a twin size mattress on the floor and little Indy sleeps on a crib size mattress on the floor that no longer has any sheets that fit it and we drape it over with blankets or sheets that are too big and pull loose every night. Delusions are a powerful force in life and I urge you not to overlook them. Also, in subjects not at all related to delusions, I would just like to point out that I love my job because I know I'm not going to be doing it for the rest of my life, I have the exact body size and shape as that of Christina Hendricks and therefore can't wait to don my swimsuit, I don't spend that much money at Starbucks, my children are not at all willful or defiant but just incredibly tenacious, Velveeta with Rotel over noodles is an antioxidant-packed meal, and my hair is not thinning it's just still falling out from the hormone changes that took place after the birth of my youngest. Four years ago.

Now if you'll excuse me, Nathan Fillion is coming over to make margaritas and read me Jacqueline Carey novels.

Seriously, I don't know what I'd do without him.

What was I saying? Oh yeah--So they're showing our house today and tomorrow. This means that I have to scramble around cleaning in that terrible hour after dinner is eaten and I need to bathe the kids and brush their teeth and get them to bed, clean up the kitchen, pack school lunches, rotate the laundry, and do whatever else I've been putting off for days like school projects and hocking coupon books (wanna buy one?). The hour when I'm really hoping to get it done fast so I can sit down before I have to get up an hour later to go pick up Noah. So there's the cleaning thing, which you know, sucks. And then we have to leave our house. At bedtime. So that Strangers can inspect my dirty laundry with all the privacy they deserve.

So it's Monday lunch time, and I went to this gorgeous wedding yesterday. And I wanted to write about that, and about some other things that occurred over the weekend. But this hit me—and did I mention I have to pack for a trip this week too?—and I just really needed to vent.

And I don't think I've ever used this blog to vent before—to describe, to relate, to express or articulate, to rant even, yes, but not to vent—and so I'm hoping you'll excuse me for doing it this one time.

And if I've done it before, now is maybe not the time to point it out to me?

Because guys, I am not my house. But this still sucks.

I am Vesuvius, and have I mentioned to you that I am best friends with the entire cast of Firefly?