I gave the Systems Administrator a lift to the station this morning, since the SA was planning to spend the day at the cricket before going to a retirement dinner for an old broking contact, a charismatic Scot fondly known among some of his friends as the large chairman of a medium sized public company. Driving home from the station after a City retirement dinner didn't seem like a good idea, and anyway, I needed to go out to go to the bank, after last week's failed attempt. It was a nasty crash, last Friday's accident. A nine month old baby was killed, and her mother is in hospital with serious injuries.
It's amazing how all the little jobs add up to a full morning's worth. Going to the bank is not such a big deal, but driving there, and waiting while the cashier counts the money, and popping into the greengrocer's to buy a sweetcorn cob for lunch, and driving home, starts eating into the morning. Then, while I thought I'd mostly finished the honey extracting, the odd tidying up and finishing off mounts up. I had to pot up the honey that dripped off the cappings overnight, about two thirds of a jar, no good for sale or as a gift but certainly fit to cook with. Or pour on yogurt. People pay a premium for cut comb honey, so why be sniffy about honey which has a little bit of broken wax mixed up with it? After bagging up the cappings in case I ever decide to melt them and make a candle, that left the colander, the bowl, the spoon, and the jam funnel to wash.
The two jars of honey I jarred up yesterday when I was extracting, so that I emptied a bucket and could use it again, had begun to crystallise slightly in the bucket, and I'd left them on the edge of the cool side of the Aga to liquefy overnight. They needed labelling, which meant getting out and then putting away the box of labels again. The extractor needed reassembling, a slightly fiddly task getting all the bits to line up, and carrying upstairs. All little jobs, but adding up to a surprising amount of time for something you thought you'd basically finished yesterday.
I need to start feeding the bees so made some sugar syrup, two pounds of cane sugar per pint of water for autumn feeding. You end up needing gallons of the stuff, but in a domestic kitchen you can't make it all at once. Experience has taught me to measure out each two pounds of sugar and pint of water, then tip one after the other into the stock pot, and repeat until the pot is as full as I can manage. Without a system it is only too easy to chuck another pint of water into the mix, then be left trying to remember whether you have already added the sugar for that one. You can't dissolve a sugar solution that strong at room temperature, but have to heat it gently and stir it from time to time. One of the bags of sugar was leaking slightly from a corner, which meant more wiping up.
Then I had to write out cheques for everyone who had sold produce at the wildlife fair, and thought I'd better prepare a Treasurer's report for the committee. The cheque writing and report ran into a minor and ridiculous snag, in the form a problem with reimbursements for raffle prizes. The person who runs the raffle had been religiously, albeit intermittently, giving me extracts from her supermarket receipts, showing what she paid for the bottle of wine (not enough to buy a decent bottle, but it is a fund raising exercise). I had been equally religiously sticking these into my accounts file. I now know that if you sellotape over a printed Sainsbury's receipt, the glue on the tape dissolves the print on the receipt, and all the little slivers of paper were completely illegible.
The bank lets me view the accounts on line, after going through what seems a quite massive amount of security, given that I can't move the money, just look at it. I have to type in my name, and our membership number, and the last four digits on my beekeepers internet banking card, and then generate an eight digit verification code using a PIN number which I am supposed to remember, and type that in. If I don't interact with the on line account for more than ten minutes, it logs me out and I have to go through the whole palaver again. I got logged out twice, so one way and another preparing the Treasurer's report took longer than I was anticipating.
After lunch I managed to get some gardening in. The SA parked the trailer by the dustbin bed, after I'd asked for it to be moved enough times that it might have counted as nagging, if I ever did such a thing, which of course I don't, so it seemed churlish not to at least start filling it up with prunings. I made a good start, attacking the ornamental quince under the kitchen window which has grown so much it is becoming difficult to see out or shut the window without trapping twigs in it, the Viburnum tinus in the dustbin bed which has grown hugely in all directions, including over the path and into a neighbouring holly, and a gigantic bramble which shouldn't be there at all. The more I pulled at this bramble the more of it there seemed to be, sprawling its way through a camellia, a cotoneaster, and back into the wood. I hadn't finished by the time I had to go out again, but I'd done enough to show that moving the trailer was not a waste of time.
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