Miriam!

Finally, here's a picture from Miriam's dancing at the school Russian Night.

Safely Home

This is James, putting the new queen cage into one of his top bar hives. After spending most of a year (because he got taken with the idea too late to start last year) learning about bees and building the top bar hives, James spent Thursday-Saturday on a driving trip down to Georgia to buy his small-cell, and very docile!, bees. While there he learned how to make queen cups and cages, and all sorts of other useful tips. We wore the bee veils while loading the boxes into the hives, but haven't worn them since.
Now I get to tease him about the "exciting Sunday afternoons sitting there watching the bees buzz" (I'll get a picture one of these days!), and the eco-logic of driving twenty hours to buy four pounds of bees, and "interstate trafficking in captive females" (since they didn't get many drones into those cages). But I'm fascinated also, and looking forward to having our own pollinators and honey.
James has really upped the food production in the yard this year, or at least the food planting! We'll see what produces throughout the year. The kale from last fall is still producing, but is going to flower at this point. We're enjoying making smoothies with our fresh chocolate mint and berries foraged and frozen last year- really yummy!
I'm wrapping up my first year as a PhD student. My big paper for this semester is the proposal for my "thesis" due next April, but which I hope to complete over the summer or early next fall. I sent the first "complete" draft off to both professors who'll be grading it and my advisor, as well as the group of colleagues who'll be discussing it in our seminar this Thursday. I'll be expanding and reshaping it all week as I receive feedback, but my stress level has gone way down with that step completed. Beyond that, all I have left is creating a poster with my preliminary statistical analysis for Thursday's class, and grading students' papers before Friday.
We're looking forward to a visit with James's folks, and while there will be planning another trip to help move his grandmother to an apartment close to where they live until she can get into a senior living facility. Granny's having some health issues and is finding her big house too much to take care of and too isolating. At the same time, it's really hard to leave the house Grandpa built for her almost 50 years ago!
The kids are pretty much just keeping on. I do finally have the picture of Samuel's testing at Jing Ying. That's Samuel at the top, standing on Jose's shoulders- something they've been planning since they tested for , I think.