The lyf so short

* After our warm and dry April, we've spent the last week firmly in the grip of the Ice Saints. (My neighbour says that it can't be the Ice Saints because this year, everything is four weeks ahead of its time, but the cold spell ended on May 15th - the day of St. Sophia, who is counted as the "final" Ice Saint - so I think it was the Ice Saints nonetheless. He's free to call it Sheep Cold, of course, though I don't know what he'll do if the actual Sheep Cold hits in a month?)

* The mother-in-law gave me money for plants for my birthday so naturally I went wild and invested in a lot of... herbs. Mostly herbs. "Exotic" kitchen herbs (a.k.a. stuff what our ancestors ate and now we forgot about it) and then some actual exotic plants (a.k.a. stuff what grows in the Andes or something) and - woo hoo! - some dyeing plants that I finally found to order. Madder, blue wild indigo and woad. By the time I'll have taught myself to spin presentable yarn, they'll probably have become strong enough to use them. ;)

* I went to London to see the Queen! ... actually I just went "into the bees". On Wednesday, I did a (necessary, to prevent swarming) check-up on my hive. On the previous two check-ups, I'd always found capped brood and fat larvae, so everything was probably all right, but I never saw the queen - or any eggs - so the queen might have been dead for a week, or the workers might already have started to produce drone brood. Well, on Wednesday I not only found capped drone brood and worker brood - so a queen definitely had to exist - but also uncapped brood in various stages of development, and new eggs - and the queen. Yay! They didn't use the drone frame at all yet so I couldn't do any of the non-chemical anti-varroa treatments (a.k.a. "Kill the Men"), but they're spreading and starting to fill the honey super, so I figure they're doing all right.
I also started a new fledgling colony (a BBC documentary recently taught me that once they're queen-right, these are called "nuke" in English, which I find hilarious, I mean, "I've got a nuke in my backyard"? On the other hand, the German term - Jungvolk - isn't exactly unencumbered, either.) with one frame of young brood (& eggs) and a lot of workers. If the bees stick to the manual, these workers will notice that the queen pheromones are suddenly missing, and make a new queen. (BEES ARE WEIRD CREATURES.) Absurdly, I have this urge to check on them every day now even though they can't be queen-right before three weeks are over.
At any rate, I am cautiously optimistic about my bees. I'm also very pleased that the irrational panic I felt while dealing with them is abating - I still don't dare to go among them without my veil and gloves, alas, but at least I no longer want to scream and run away in spite of the veil and gloves. Hormones, people, they mess you up.

* I had to kill a mouse. Mr. Darcy brought it to the door, then apparently went inside to go sleep. Jörg found the mouse with its spine snapped, but still breathing. He said he felt awful about it, but we'd probably be cowards and go grocery shopping and hope that it'd stop breathing by itself. I felt that if I wasn't even capable of taking the life of an already death-bound, and probably suffering, mouse, I would have to turn vegan on the spot. So I took a kitchen knife and cut off the mouse's head. (After apologising profusely.) I have only minimal qualms about killing midges, slugs or drones, but vertebrates are a different matter. >_>

* I didn't do my annual Eurolindalë post, as you indubitably noticed. Maybe I'll comment on the individual contributions later (though it feels sort of pointless after the fact). For now, I'll just say that I felt awfully sorry for the Russian twins. Yes, sure, they agreed to represent Russia, but that doesn't mean they approve of everything that's going on in their country (or at its borders :P). I mean, they're two 17-year-old girls, and everyone booed and cat-whistled whenever they were on the stage or scored some points. And their song wasn't even bad. Happy though I am about the victory of Conchita Wurst (for the non-Europeans on my f-list: bearded drag queen singing what sounded like the next James Bond theme song, all sorts of awesome), I'm really not sure "we" can celebrate ourselves as The Haven of Tolerance (TM) if "we" are at the same time ready to cruelly boo two 17-year-olds just because they're Russian. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
On the plus side, Conchita won! and my second favourite, a country song from the Netherlands, came in second! So that was probably my most succesful Rooting-for-someone-in-Eurovision experience ever. (Actually, there were several pretty enjoyable contributions this year. Also some awful ones, of course, but hey, it's Eurovision. I'm just glad that the bookies' favourites didn't win this year, I found both of them trite and unpleasant.)

* Episiotomy/tear appears to be healing. Instead of a cleft, it now feels like a... a stuffed leather pillow, for lack of a better description. I'm taking that as a good thing. Midwife agrees (with quite some relief, I thought) that it's mending well. So yay. Midwife also says I may want to "correct" the scar later, but unless it hurts when I have sex, I should wait until I'm certain I won't want to have any more kids. Sounds reasonable.

*Cat!Fëanáro also appears to be healing (too) well. By now he's bored to be inside and wants to go outside all the time, but we can't let him yet. (On second thought, maybe Mr. Darcy brought that half-dead mouse to the door so his brother had something to practice on?) He also looks like a weird sort of poodle, as his butt had to be shaved for surgery and the fur is growing back only veeeery slowly. It's sort of hilarious to see how thin cats are, even this overweight cat, underneath that fluffy fur. -- His hip appears to have healed slightly crookedly, but he can walk and climb stairs and chairs again. I just wish we could let him go outside again, because a bored cat is an annoying housemate, but not until he's a) mostly back in shape and b) the people who ran him over have disappeared.

* Speaking of which, our asshole tenants appear to be moving. The past week, we've had the feeling that they've been dismantling stuff (I don't know why, but with previous tenants, we've never been able to hear so clearly what's going on on the other side of the kitchen wall), and all of yesterday and today (so far), two big transporters have been driving to and fro. They're bound to move out at some time between the end of the month and the end of July; if they're really starting now, that would be a blessing. Make no mistake, there'll probably be fights over money and renovations and lawsuits for months to come, but at least we'd no longer have these egocentric bastards on our grounds. (I'm sorry to say it, but there it is! Besides, they're calling us "godless heretics". I'd laugh at the anachronism, untruth and irony if it weren't so depressing.) I'm so sick of renting out, it's not even funny. We're renting out because we can't afford not to, but for three years now, renting out has cost us more money than it's brought in. And thanks to that, now we're so broke that we can't afford not to rent out, but we'll have to invest more money first. It sucks, sucks, sucks.

And that concludes your happy eclectic update from Bergia.