
Most people selling things only know enough to sell them, no more, and for someone like me, who really has to know a thing, it gets interesting talking to someone who only knows enough to sell that thing, and isn't really all that interested in the thing itself.
One really cool find was a pair of yellow socks with a honeycomb pattern on it and a big bumble bee logo. Fun and thick and warm.

We ended up with five and a half gallons from the one hive, and it's a darker honey than the honey we'd gotten at the beginning of the summer. All the bottles in the photo, other than that one in the front left, were still cloudy from the air bubbles from spinning the honey out of the frames. That one was from rendering all the caps, and was the honey that was underneath the wax. It's a lot of honey.
And our friends and neighbors are cheerfully buying it again from us. I'm grateful. The girls seem to be doing really well, and the mite drops have slowed significantly since I started powder sugaring them. The treatment seems to be helping them out so much that I don't need to use the formic acid treatment on them. I'm grateful for that.
The house seemed quieter after they left.
So I sat down and tried playing with paints and some papers my mother had given me the last time we were in San Diego. One of the things I'd been wanting to paint was this... and octopus... the coloring of the creatures lends itself well to the way colors flow from the brush into the paper... starting darker on the tips and shading toward the center on the lighter wash that's in the body of the brush.
A lady at church dreamed that I was painting octopi before I'd even attempted this one, so I thought I'd fulfil the dream. *laughs* I think it worked out well.


So we're frantically finishing things off from the fridge. It was really funny, because Jet asked, explicitly, for a picture of our refrigerator, because his host family couldn't believe how huge our fridge was, according to his description. So we have a picture of John posed by our refrigerator for reference size, and with the door open to show how deep the thing is. *laughs*
Culture shock comes in different ways. So staying busy and getting ready to be even busier.