some of my favourite books - 2

here is another old, favourite - "Cook's Manual of the Apiary", by Albert J. Cook, Late Professor of Entomology in the Michigan State Agricultural College, Professor of Zoology, Pomona College, Claremont, California.

i have read this book a million times and will re-read it a million more, i am sure. here is a look at the side-binding:




and the front:



i love it when old books have names or dates or whatnot written on the inside. this one says "Thomas W Hutchison Smiths Falls Ont" - no commas or periods but written in old cursive. Smith's Falls is a little town in Ontario.



here is a pic of Professor Cook - you can learn more about his Arthropod Research Collection at Michigan State University here.



the cover page:



publishing information:



this is the dedication page. Professor Cook dedicated the book to Reverend L. L. Langstroth. Pioneer Preppy will know who this is - if anyone else is interested you can learn more about Langstroth here. it is a beautiful dedication to a man that Cook obviously admired very much!



the drawings of various things are simply beautiful!







amazingly beautiful, eh?

the glossary contains all the terms that you will ever encounter in bee-keeping!



the index is busted up into all kinds of categories to help you search out a particular topic or idea.



i love this book - a lot! i hope that you have enjoyed it as well!

mason bees

most of us know that honey bees collect pollen, make honey and pollinate flowers. and if you are my dear friend, Pioneer Preppy, you have been raising honey bees for quite some time and have been sharing your vast knowledge with the rest of us - thank you Pioneer Preppy! some of us with a large set of cajones, like Mamma Bear, are interested enough to take the dare from Pioneer Preppy and start raising honey bees, too. check out her cool new bee outfit here.

some of us have loved bees and anything bee-related since we were kids. i have always loved bees and wasps and anything that remotely resembles a bee! i can get bees and wasps to land on my hand, head, ear, lip - you name it! i have physically moved 2 wasps nests in my life! and have only been stung once by anything! and that was my own stupid fault - we had ground wasps nesting in our cedar mulch back at our house in the city. i used to sit in front of the little hole in the ground and watch those little guys go in and out quite regularly. but this one time, a little guy came flying out a little drunkenly and smacked me right in the tip of my nose. i got stung. he didn't mean it and i never blamed him. but man, did it sting.

but like i said - i can get a bee to walk on my arm or face for hours. and whenever i have been indoors at a public place and a bee is noticed - i just walk over, get him to walk on my hand and then i walk him outside to safety - even after a 13 floor elevator ride!

i have more bee paraphernalia then you can shake a stick at - i have been collecting bee cups, saucers, tea kettles, table cloths, earings, shoes, purses, etc. since i was born - here's a few examples:













AND i have about 40 boxes full of bee stuff up in the attic!!! i love bees! and my second favourite book of all-time is "Cook's Manual of the Apiary"! but am i as crazy as Pioneer Preppy or Mamma Bear????? um - that's a big giant NO!

so for this year i am going to start out small. i am going to start with mason bees. mason bees do not produce honey nor beeswax. but that doesn't mean that they aren't awesome little pollinators - they really are! you can learn more about mason bees here. so all of this to say that i have just ordered my mason bees, a mason bee home and a book about mason bees from these guys, BeeDiverse. my foray into the bee-keeping world will start with mason bees, while i continue to learn from my heroe, Pioneer Preppy, and from Mamma Bear.

bring on the mason bees!

thank goodness for tempered glass!!!

jambaloney weed whacked our front yard yesterday - it looks awesome now! we didn't weed whack in the fall in order to leave the seeds of various growing things for the myriad of different birds that visit our yard in the winter. anyway - have a look - doesn't it look awesome?



and don't ya just love that beautiful stream, called Strachans Brook, that we look at all the time out of our front windows? we have a stream to the northwest, our river to the northeast and the beach is southeast - we feel like we live on a little peninsula! in fact, our island is actually a bunch of little islands. check out Cape Breton Island on Google maps if you are bored one day. you will see what i mean!

anyway, after doing a bunch of yard chores together yesterday, i came in and made some delicious pasta for our supper. i make the sauce from fresh, cut-up tomatoes, a ton of garlic, honey, vinegar with the mother in it, olive oil, parsley, basil, spinach, fresh-cracked black pepper and sea salt. it is yummeh! so there i am making the pasta while jambaloney is weed whacking and then - BLAMMO! i thought someone had shot a cannon at the house! but wait a minute - there are no working cannons in the area - bahahahah! and then i heard this faint crackling sound - it was like - crackling, crackling, crack, crackling, crack, crack, crackling - what the eff?

jambaloney is still out weed whacking and i am trying to find the source of the crackling sound. and then found it. our front door, which is blocked by a big home-made shelf thingy (i know - not up to code - you are supposed to have two exits in every house! but we consider our large windows to be exits!) is made with tempered glass and lets a ton of light in the house. we taped it in place last year for seed starting. anyway, more crackly cracks as the darn thing has shattered on one side - thank goodness it has double tempered glass!

i run outside and yell to jambaloney. he was 40 feet away from the door when the darn thing got smashed by a little rock probably doing close to 100km an hour! yep - sure 'nuff - it was a flying rock that broke the door! have a look:



and here's a close-up of the actual hole:



jambaloney quickly got some clear tape to tape it all together on the door. he will be going in to town on monday to get some plexiglass/recycled glass - it depends on which is cheaper.

but dang - it scared the living bejeezuz out of me when it happened. oh - and thank goodness for tempered glass!

yesterday will forever be known around the Manor as...

..."The first, most-awesome Naked Gardening Day of 2012"!!!!

woohoo! our temps went up to 24-25C (80F) and it was so warm and gorgeous outside! we started the morning in tank tops and shorts but after doing some yard work, we threw our shirts to the wind. and then asked each other - "why are we still wearing shorts?" so those were tossed, too. it was wicked awesome and what a nice treat on March 22!

we got a bunch of work done in the yard. we also went out and picked a pile of radish seeds from last year's radishes that we let go to seed. we are going to start sprouting those for salads - we love sprouts! and radish sprouts are so spicey!!!

jambaloney lugged 10 loads of big rocks in our garden cart from down our road to the river. big, giant, beautiful, multi-coloured rocks that i am landscaping an area of the front yard with. i lugged about 7 or 8 wheelbarrows of rocks that jambaloney has been digging up while digging the trench. the reason: we are making a rock garden!

we have one area of our front yard, that has 2 apple trees, and has a mish mash of everything growing in it! here's a pic of it when we first bought the place:



here's a pic of it after jambaloney's Mom spent several days painstakingly trying to clear out all of the grass:



she did an awesome job clearing it out - but man did it take some work!

and here is a pic of what we are planning to do with it:



because we just don't want to have to deal with all of the grass around the trees, and because there is now a year's worth of birdseed around the trees - it is going to be difficult to keep cleared. so i thought that a nice rock garden around the trees would make a nice landscape feature and once the lawn grass starts growing it will still be beautiful and green, but much easier to keep the tree area cleared.

we spent the majority of the day hauling rocks. we will finish the job in a few days and i will take pics when it is done. we are sore from hauling rocks but it feels really good to get those muscles all stretched after the winter! and we also both got a little bit of a suntan - woohoo!

this week we are back to normal temps, highs around 2C (37F). and in the next few weeks we will get in to the teens. nice and normal. but yesterday was a real treat and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!

today, we are priming the upper kitchen cupboards in order to paint them white. i think it will make the kitchen feel lighter, brighter and less tiny, at least i hope it will! i will take pics of those when they are finished.

from the sounds of the blogs that i have been checking - lots of you, all over North America, had wonderful weather yesterday! i hope that you all got a chance to get out and enjoy your day!

some of my favourite books - part 1

my favourite book in the entire world is "The World's Cyclopedia and Library of Universal Knowledge", compiled by Prof. H.L. Williams of Churcher's College. it is the most beautiful book that i own. here are a few pics:

the side binding:



the front (some of the pics have come up sideways and i don't know why. arghghghggh! please try to enjoy anyway):



the inside cover - yes it is falling apart and moldy as can be. that just makes it more precious!



the inside cover page:



the copyright information - "Copyright, 1889, by S.C. Thompson."



various world maps - it is interesting to see countries that no longer exist, and new countries that do exist today but are not to be found here:



the first page. there are lots of words that start with "a" missing from here.



an index to the Holy Bible:



other contents of interest : a guide to business, odd questions and my personal favourite: receipts and dispersements of the government. it includes a table called " Population of United States by Races". the populations listed in columns are: "Total Population 1880, White 1880, Colored 1880, Chinese 1880", and last but not least, "Ind'ns civ. or taxed 1880".

i think that the reason why i like this book so much is that it so demonstrates that what we consider to be fact/learning or common knowledge, or any other kind of knowledge changes with time. for example, medical knowledge from 200 years ago has changed greatly to present day and will continue to change in the next 200 years.

i treasure this book, but in speaking about medical knowledge, check out the handwritten recipe for laudanum written in beautiful cursive (something many do not know how to write today. especially texting-types - also known as our children!):



sorry the pic came out sideways. here is the recipe:

"1 Table spoon Terpentine
3/4 of Laudanum
1 Table spoon of Ginger
1 " " Baking Soda

use Laudanum only if Pain is Sever"

i love old books. i have several and consider them treasures. and will share a few with you. over time.

gonna get all "Biblical" on ya...and might lose a few friends!

(who knew that a post about a mouse in the house would set off such emotions?!?!?! see the 2 previous entries, and comments, to understand why i am posting this.)

jambaloney and i have very strong beliefs. in a bunch of different things. some are religious, some are spiritual and some are karmic. some we believe are just common sense. oh i am opening up a can of worms - i just know it.

jambaloney's beliefs are a combination of beliefs that were developed by himself, his family, his environment, his culture, his religion and his own personal instinct until the age of 35. my beliefs were developed by me, my family, my environment, my culture, my religion and my own personal instinct until the age of 30. and then we met, fell in love, shared our beliefs...and have been developing our own belief system together for the past 11 years.

we read the Bible. we are both intelligent, educated and trained in using logic, rationale, common sense and intuition. we both understand creationism and the big bang. there are some things that we both instinctively feel that neither of us can describe using human language. we felt this so many times in our years before we met, but after we met - oh wow! and then back in our old house in the city, laying together in our beautiful yard, holding hands, feeling the sun, staring for hours together at grass growing - well, whoa! and here at the Manor, there are days down at the river, after having a dip and laying on our blanket with the sun beating down on us to dry us off...and we look at each other and we know. we both believe very much in Our Father, His Son Jesus Christ - Our Lord and Saviour...and we both truly believe that we have been touched by, and felt, the presence of The Holy Spirit in our lives.

we subscribe to no one religion and only like the good parts in all of them. we have discussed and studied many. we are not new-age - although some new-age belief systems could be applied to our way of thinking. we try our best to practice our beliefs every day. i am a trained linguist and can truly understand the beauty in the words "be" and "live". beliefs are "be-lives", and beliefs are only truly yours if you "be what you live", or "live what you be".

i might be scaring off many of you right now whose beliefs may not exactly correspond to ours. that is not the point of this post. i don't ever want to mislead any of you into wrongly believing that we believe the way that you believe. i don't want to misrepresent us in a way that makes you think that we believe a certain way - and then shock you when you find out that we don't. i want for you to be comfortable here and know that we always try to tell the truth and be honest - those are two things that we strongly believe in.

we strongly believe that The Ten Commandments, regardless of your professed religion, are not bad words to live by. and we try very hard to "be" and "live" them. we feel that The Ten Commandments are good words to try and live by on a daily basis. we feel this very strongly...both of us...and jambaloney was a professed agnostic until i met him. i struggled with my beliefs all through my teen years and it wasn't until my mid-twenties that i was able to fully understand and marry what my heart and soul felt to what my mind constantly re-examined.

back to The Ten Commandments. good words to live by, we believe. you can believe what you want - that is your choice and i am really not trying to get Biblical on anyone. all i want to point out is that we take The Ten Commandments very seriously.

"Thou shalt not kill"

oh crap - here we go. i honestly look forward to everyone's opinion. after having read our Bible, using our logic and ration, discussing together in depth about what this means - we came to a conclusion together. it means we shouldn't kill. anything. period. unless after the Noachite Dispensation - oh scaring off a ton of you here, eh? - except to eat (and please note that we are not Fundamentalist Christians, either. i just studied with a glorious FC for over a year and loved every minute of it. i have studied with Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, the LDS and was baptized in the Salvation Army. i'm just trying to give you some background here!). we believe that you don't kill anything unless it is for your sustenance, your survival. things eat things. all things eat things to survive. jambaloney fishes - but no longer uses live bait. jambaloney hunts. and we pray that he brings down a deer next year in the most humane manner possible - by knowing how to use his weapon and using it humanely. we know that the tomatoes we grow are living things created by Our Lord...and we know that by pulling them off of the vine and eating them - that we are killing them. sometimes you cut open a pepper and inside are millions of seeds...all babies. we kill them to sustain ourselves.

we don't kill anything unless we plan to eat it. that is how we interpret "Thou shalt not kill".

in a SHTF situation, or Armageddon if you will, i guess we will be in a full-out survival situation and what we kill to eat may change. we accept that. but for right now, we save every creature that we can - flies, gnats, mosquitoes, rodents, etc., who end up trapped in our house. yep - we are very new-agey. ya, we are. but no, we are not.

if a fly is in the house, jambaloney and i go to great pains to catch it and release it. same thing goes for a grasshopper, an ant or a mouse.

our beliefs are very strong and very intricate and very detailed. i welcome all of your comments, both positive or negative, but i just wanted to share some of our belief system, especially the part that pertains to saving creatures. so that we wouldn't ever misrepresent ourselves to any of you...we always want to be honest.

i hope that you now understand why we, because of our beliefs, never pull grass out of the ground for fun, never swat mosquitoes, never use traps or live bait, and always try to save every living creature that comes into our house, not by their own volition, but maybe because barrel caught them, traumatized them and brought them home for our approval. mice and rodents and insects find themselves in our home accidentally...and this is just one way that we try to live up to our belief in The Ten Commandments.

if i have offended any of you, our friends, please send me an email at kymberzmail@gmail.com

we are not trying to convert anyone, nor are we trying to press our beliefs on to any of you. we just ask that you respect what we believe after reading why we believe the way that we do. we believe in respecting all life, as we believe that all life was created by Our Father.

and after all of this hulla-balloo, there seems only one thing that would be appropriate to say -

Peace Out, Yo!

the mouse is out - woohoo!

(see my previous post about a mouse in our bed before reading this or it won't make sense)

so much for blocking the bedroom door, opening the window and hoping the little intruder would make a break for it. we were sitting at the kitchen table talking when he came pealing around the hall and under the table. jambaloney almost managed to catch him but he climbed up inside our baseboard heater!!! we quarantined the cats and moved all the chairs and got everything up off the floor and opened the kitchen door. and waited. jambaloney hunched over on his hands and knees on the floor and me sitting up the stairs to the living room. we waited some more. and some more. jambaloney noticed he snatched a crumb of something off of the floor (i am terribly embarrassed to admit that!), so we went and got him a little bowl of water and some bird seed. we put it near the baseboard heater so he could smell the food and hoped that he would duck out to get some food. he probably hadn't eaten or had any water for most of the night and all day - i hoped we could tease him out so that jambaloney could grab him and run him outside.

so we waited and waited. and then we decided to go upstairs to the living room and read. we hoped that he would come out, get food, and then run out the kitchen door. so we waited. all in all we waited about an hour upstairs and then we went searching for him. no sign of him anywhere. he wasn't in the baseboard heater nor anywhere else in the kitchen. we knew that once we let the cats out of the bedroom that they would let us know if he was still here. they have been lolly-gagging around all afternoon so we are quite comfortable that the little mouse, though probably traumatized, is at least free.

and after we strip the bed and re-make it - i will be able to sleep in it again. big sigh of relief there! whewwww!