Earlier in the week I received a slightly plaintive e-mail from my Japanese gardening friend, asking whether I'd received her letter, enclosing some pages from a Japanese English language newspaper giving an update on the situation in Japan two years after the tsunami and nuclear disaster. I had, and had been meaning to reply when I had time to sit down and think about it properly. To my shame, when I dug out the envelope on my desk, I realised that she wrote to me in March. Oh dear. I hadn't noticed how long it had been, but that's no excuse. I never get the year right on Pop Master, even when I know the song and bought the album, so I should probably recognise that I have a poor sense of time, and plan accordingly by making it a rule to reply to people the same week. Being busy is not really an excuse, since if I have time to write a blog entry each day, I have time to write to my friends. Although when you write a blog you set the agenda, and can burble on about anything that occurs to you, which is different to having to read and intelligently comment on Japanese current affairs.
I checked the bees, and the two small colonies I messed up in my failed attempt at swarm control had eggs at last, both the one that seemed contented last time I looked at them, and the colony that I wasn't so sure about. The golden bees are busy making bees, and not swarming, but haven't brought in any surplus of honey in the past nine days. They were buzzier than usual, but it was slightly humid weather with rain in the offing for later, which doesn't generally put bees in the best frame of mind. The little dark bees still hadn't finished filling their mostly-complete super of honey, or sealed it with wax, a sign that the honey is ready for harvest. I found several very early queen cells, but no more advanced ones. Since they already have a young queen and plenty of physical space, there wasn't a lot more I could do at that moment. I scraped the eggs out of the queen cups, and hoped that if it was nice weather over the weekend they'd change their minds and focus on foraging, but I fear I'll have trouble with them before the end of the season.
Bees and apologetic e-mail to Japan safely out of the way, I could spend the rest of the day gardening, at least up until an early finish because there is a beekeeping meeting tonight. I wasted ten minutes searching for my Tilley hat before discovering I'd somehow mixed it up with my bee suit, white on white, not easy to spot. I finally finished moving the pots of dahlias down to the deck in the back garden for the summer, and put the last couple of pots of geraniums and Tulbaghia out in the Italian garden. Moving the pots has been on my list of things to do for ages, and I have noticed before that I appear to have a neurotic tendency to not quite finish tasks, so that the list never gets shorter even though I have done quite a lot. One of the current jobs is to put two defunct conifers on the bonfire heap, which are only sitting in pots so no digging out is required. It would take all of fifteen minutes maximum, and the concrete and the space in the back garden by the conservatory would both look much tidier without large, nine-tenths dead conifers standing there, so goodness knows why I haven't done it.
When I worked in an office, and had to do personality tests of the sort that friends who are academic psychologists sniff at, my scores were consistently low on the dimension called Completer-Finisher. By now I suspect that for whatever reason I don't like completing and finishing. Unfortunately the Systems Administrator's weakest score was also for Completer-Finisher, so while we rub along relatively happily because neither is driven mad by the other's disorganisation, we are the sort of people who go out to buy curtains without having measured the window.
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