A few things that have me worked up these days:

eggs! They’re wet and just-hunted for in this photo–you may even spy a tiny slug on one or two of them. (Which is what comes of them spending a few pre-dawn hours hidden in the backyard.) We used natural dyes on all of them but those green ones. I do love the pop of that phony green. Looks like it’s egg salad sandwiches for dinner tonight. I’m trying a new recipe, which uses yogurt instead of mayo, and comes from…

super natural every day. I’m loving this cookbook. I have Heidi’s first cookbook, which I’ve enjoyed as well, but this one may be even better. For Easter breakfast we made the Baked Oatmeal with blueberries. Yum. We’ve also prepared and lapped up the Farro Soup and the Harissa Ravioli. I took a big chance on Pan-Fried Mung Beans with Tempeh, knowing that it sounded like something from a 70s commune, but was unexpectedly directed by the resident teenager to please make this again! At Heidi’s signing at my local bookstore, I told her that as a longtime vegetarian, I have my gourmet cookbooks and my hippie cookbooks–and am very grateful to now have her cookbooks, which elegantly combine the two. Heidi knew just what I meant. She was absolutely lovely and gracious.

teenage style. Easter afternoon. Love their independence.

more teenager appreciation. In the form of a note, left on my desk.

ollalieberries and honey in my future. My girls are so busy these days. This one’s working our ollalieberry bushes. I have one strong colony (the swarm I so comically captured last year) and am hoping to catch another.

a simple, tasty recipe for said honey. This one comes from the classic The Cheese Course, by Janet Fletcher. It’s basically honey and walnuts on little Cabecou goat cheeses, but there’s one special, somewhat time-consuming trick, which removes the tannins from the walnuts. You pour boiling water over the walnuts and let them sit for half an hour. Then you put them on a triple-thick paper-towel-lined pan, and bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, and for an additional twenty minutes at 250 degrees, until the nuts are dry throughout. You toss them with the honey and drizzle over the goat cheese. I’ve also done the same over gorgonzola; both got raves at parties. Let me just say that when the cheese was gone, fingers were seen swiping plates.

collaborating brothers. My boys have a long history of working together on H’s film projects. I figured those days had ended for the time being, given that H is at school clear across the country. But never underestimate the power of Skype. Last week, Mr. T did some voice work for an audio story for H’s sound class. We loaded up Skype and H sent the script as a Skype transcript. He gave T direction via headphones and I recorded it on Garage Band. It was sweet to see them working together again–and fun to see how H’s direction class has influenced his abilities to get what he wants from an actor. And he’s always baffled at how T manages to nail what he asks for–yet the two of us can’t convince the kid to try acting for others. Someone’s missing his calling.

an alphabet glue winner! The giveaway issue goes to Wendy, who answered my request for a favorite shared book with, “How could i forget one of my all time favorites – barn dance – by bill martin jr. and john archambault. it is like singing a song!” I’ll send your email address on to Annie, Wendy, and she’ll send along your e-magazine. Congratulations! For those of you who missed out on the giveaway, I hope you’ll still check out Alphabet Glue. You can read more on the website, or in my last post. It’s good, book-loving stuff!

So, what has you all atwitter?

There’s so much to set a person atwitter in December.

rendering my beeswax: For the first time I melted down the bits of wax I’ve collected from my girls. I got a nice golden prism–enough to make into two (count ‘em!) candles. I was hoping to be able to make more for gifts, but I’ve decided to save the wax from my abandoned hive for next year’s bees. Stefaneener told me how to keep it critter-free in the meanwhile with the help of a heavy-duty trash bag and a chunk of dry ice. Such smart friends I have! My remaining hive is still going strong, harvesting nectar from my just-beginning-to-bloom-in-California rosemary…

good books: How could I forget how much I love Lorrie Moore’s writing? Maybe because she hasn’t published a book in ten years? Chris gave me A Gate at the Stairs last Christmas, and somehow I didn’t start reading it until now. Dumb move. The book is fabulous. No one manages to be both snarkily funny and lyrical like Moore does. Just appreciate how she writes about a fortune cookie: “I had one elegantly folded cookie–a short paper nerve baked in an ear.” Lorrie Moore, you kill me.

cookies, cookies, cookies! We’ve only just begun (sing along)…to bake! Yesterday Mr. T and I made up the dough for our annual gingerbread tiles, which longtime readers may remember from two years ago as contender for the best Christmas cookie ever. Next up will be the other cookie that tries each year to claim the throne: David Lebovitz’s Almond and Chocolate Chunk Biscotti. (This is the first year I’ve found the recipe online and sharable!) I’m still considering a few upstart contenders for the batch after that. Maybe Remedial Eating’s version of Flo Braker’s Drei Augen (also known as linzer cookies or red currant jam sandwiches)? Or perhaps Orangette’s take on Alice Medrich’s Whole Wheat Sablés with Cacao Nibs? Or maybe her now famous rendition of Peppermint Bark? (Not a cookie, I know, but I wouldn’t kick it out of the cookie jar.) Perhaps you have another stellar cookie to recommend?

thrilling text messages: Not that I do much texting. But when you have a kid in college all the way across the country, you pick it up pretty fast. A few weeks back I received this ebullient message from that kid: “Joel Coen is speaking to my film class!” Wow. Guess all that battling with the college application monster of last December was worth it. (I’m not sure whether I was more excited with the content of the message or the fact that he cared to share it with his mama.)

fast knitting projects: The knitting really slogged this fall. Swimming lessons got me deep into my crazy gold Que Sera cardigan–but then the lace combined with decreases made for not-so-good Park Day knitting and it was as if my production button had gotten stuck on slo mo. With Christmas coming and a cold boy in New York, I put that project aside and started up a scarf–and suddenly we’re in fast forward. The stitch pattern is manly and 18-year-old-guy-approved and it lets the scarf lie gloriously flat. And the whole long thing is almost finished!

decking the halls: The advent wreath is aglow with three candles at this point in the season, but our advent box could use some more slips. (Either we all need to work harder at sharing our light, or we need to work harder at remembering to record it when we do.) The tree is wearing the equivalent of an unadorned little black dress: it’s done up in nothing but lights and garlands. Not that we’re minimalists around here–it’s just that Lulu and Mr. T want to wait for their big brother to get home before breaking out the ornaments. Which is rather sweet. There’s nothing like a Christmas tree to get you all sentimental.

turning turntables: Chris got his old turntable hooked up and is revisiting his old record collection. He only plays Rush when I’m not home to tease him about it. (Sometimes I catch him.) The other morning he cranked up Van Halen and said, “I have a song for you.” And proceeded to blast “Hot for Teacher.” Ah, the man knows all the backstreets into my heart.

You knew I’d ask: what has you all atwitter?

There’s nothing like summer to get you all atwitter! A few things that have me worked up:

Santa Rosa plums. We planted our tree as an afterthought, an espaliered affair that hides behind our outdoor fireplace. But it gets lots of southerly sun, and it’s just above our bees so we got an unexpected bonanza this year. I followed a recipe for Santa Rose Plum Jam Conserve from local jam artisan June Taylor in The Pleasures of Slow Food. Divine! From here on out I will always leave the skins on my plum preserves because they add such twangy tart to all the sweet. (The secret: cut the pitted fruit into bite-sized chunks before cooking, so the skins aren’t too over-sized and off-putting.) Then Mr. T and I made plum ice cream. All the foodies have been blogging about David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop, and rightly so. It’s full of flavors that you know will be wonderful like Pear Caramel and Guinness-Milk Chocolate. Plus all sorts of mix-ins like Buttercrunch Toffee and Candied Lemon Slices. When I brought my plum ice cream to a dinner party, someone called it the bomb. I think he liked it. (Next up: Malted Milk Ice Cream with crunched-up malt balls. Yowza!)

knitting projects. This one still needs button loops, so I don’t have modeled shots or a ravelry update yet. I’d hoped to finish it before our trip so I could wear it; instead I was still working on it on planes, trains and automobiles. It’s Ysolda’s Coraline, but I’m calling it my Smocked In Sweden sweater because I started the smocking during the long drive from Stockholm to the south. There will now always be red farm houses and purple lupine looped into that smocking. The smocking was so fun to knit that I had to remind myself to look out the window at all that gorgeousness.

I’ve always wanted to knit a gold cardigan, and after finishing that one up there, all done up in alpaca and too hot to wear anytime soon, I looked for a pattern that would work in cotton. I stumbled on this version of the knitty pattern Que Sera, and I had to flat-out copy it. All that color! All that texture! And it is the most fun pattern ever to knit while watching swimming lessons. I’m not sure the color will flatter this dishwater blonde, but I’m hoping the sweater will be stunning enough that no one will notice.

honey! Speaking of gold, look what we got. Our first honey harvest, after two seasons of keeping bees. We hadn’t planned to harvest so soon. But we don’t use foundation in our frames (you can read about that here), and sometimes without foundation, bees will build wonky comb. In this particular box, the bees built the comb in perfect rows, but diagonal to the frames. If we hadn’t been traveling, I’d have recognized it sooner, and would have cut out the errant comb or two and refastened it properly with rubber-bands. But left on their own, the colony filled the entire box this way. You can’t pull the frames from the box when the comb is attached at angles, so Chris and I had to remove several frames at a time, destroying the comb and watching honey ooze everywhere. We cut them into a big cake pan, did our best to shoo away the bees, and eventually brought it inside and used the crush-and-strain method to extract the honey. You can see a video of the method here. Basically you crush the wax to release the honey from the comb, and then strain it into a big container.

Now we have about a dozen jars of honey with a very delicate floral flavor, and lots of beeswax for crafts. Since we have two hives and a hillside of blooming lavender, there should be more by the end of the summer. Thank you, girls!

farm city. I knew about this book by Novella Carpenter, about her experiences starting a small farm on a vacant lot in a seedy part of Oakland. You might think I’d have wanted to read it, since she’s local, but I’m not so keen on books in the look-at-the-fringe-thing-I’ve-done! genre. I’ve read 168 novels in 168 days! I dressed in clothing made from trash for a year! The writing in that sort of memoir doesn’t tend to do it for me. But one day I picked up a copy at the bookstore, and was drawn in by the first line: “I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto.” By the end of the first page I was won over by the writing; reading on the back flap that Carpenter “attended UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism” gave some insight into that. It’s a fun tale–despite the fact there’s enough meat-animal killing to make a vegetarian like me wince. Carpenter’s mindfulness about the process makes it readable, though, and thought-provoking. (Quirky discovery: half-way through the book I realized that Carpenter is the sister of Riana Lagarde, whose These Days in French Life flickr photos I’ve followed for a few years. Small world!)

a new blog project. I have big plans for something here in September. It’s a secret for now, but my wheels are spinning.

an anniversary. As of today, I have been married to this man for 22 years. Twenty-two years! Either we are very old, or we married very young. Or both. In the photo, it looks like he’s leading me off to a lifetime of fun. We’re still going. (Happy anniversary, Sweets.)

So you know I’m going to ask: What has you all atwitter?

If you’re here via the kind link from heather at Beauty That Moves, welcome! This little blog has never seen such a full house, but there’s plenty of room, so come on in!

Since I left you dangling, or more precisely left myself dangling a few weeks back, on that chain-link fence, I figured that I’d better tell the whole story.

Have you ever immersed yourself in some sort of fringe activity, and met others who partake in the same activity, until over time it seems that what you’re doing is totally normal and mainstream–only to realize later that what your doing is actually still quite fringe-y? (I’m talking about clean and legal activities, mind you.)

I’ve had this experience with homeschooling. I’ve met so many homeschoolers over the course of fourteen years, and I spend so much time with them that I sometimes forget that what we’re doing is seen by many people as rather radical.

Same for beekeeping. I have several beekeeping friends: stefaneener, kristin, susan. I even have a blogging, beekeeping uncle. I sometimes forget that posting a photo of myself climbing as chain link fence in a beesuit to capture a swarm may be seen by others as a little, um, crazy.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

You may remember that in February, I posted about my hive. How I’d opened it up, found the queen, and was excited that as a first-year beekeeper, I’d helped them make it through their first winter. How I had high hopes for honey this year.

Well. Two weeks later I checked again and they were gone. All but a couple of ladies who sat at the front entrance worrying together and wringing their tiny bee hands. Where had they all gone? And why?

I have no idea. This is just what bees do. Sometimes they take off and go. I knew that, but it was still a little heartbreaking to have it happen to me, especially because this was my first colony. I cried, I did. My mom said that maybe it was a way of preparing me for my oldest going off to college in the fall.

She was trying to be helpful, really.

So I left my hive out in the yard, somewhat full of honey, hoping that another colony might just happen by, before the ants snarfed down the honey. And hoping that one of my even crazier beekeeping friends might get a swarm call.

Both Stefaneener and Kristin are on swarm lists. That means that if someone finds a swarm of bees, or a wild hive on their property, they can call my friends. The caller gets free bee swarm removal; my friends get free bees.

Swarming is a natural part of bee life. Sometimes a colony decides that it doesn’t like its real estate and it looks for something better. It may be that the current living space is too small, or maybe it’s gotten a little too hot in there, or….who knows? Sometimes they just decide to move on, and it often happens in the spring.

They fly out together in a big–for lack of a better word–swarm. Eventually they gather in a cluster, often on a tree. They gather protectively around the queen and wait while a few scouts search out better digs.

Colonies are generally quite calm when they’ve swarmed. They have no honey or brood to protect. Which makes them fairly easy to collect.

Or at least this is what Stefaneener told me, when she phoned to tell me that she’d received a swarm call, and would I like to help gather it and keep it for my own?

Why, yes I would, so long as she was with me. Stefaneener knows her stuff.  Look at the nutty things she does for bees! This job would be much easier. The most challenging part–it would turn out–would be climbing that chain-link fence. Six times.

The swarm was behind some houses, alongside a creek. The houses ran up against that fence, which was the boundary of an adjoining golf course.

Stefaneener is a good climber. You only need to check out that link of her climbing up that very tall ladder for that swarm, or witness her children owning the monkey bars to understand this. I am not a good climber. I am not terribly athletic in any way. Always the last to get chosen for dodge ball. The only kid I knew who played soccer for eight years and never scored a goal.

I made it up the fence just fine. But once I got to the top, I couldn’t move. My hiking boots wouldn’t fit into the links; I had no toe hold. S., from the far side of the fence, tried to help. “Just swing your leg over.” Easy for you! I finally had her unlace and take off my boot, but then it hurt to put my merely socked foot into the links. I just sat there, forked in the rear by the top of the links, giggling at my ineptitude and feeling helpless.

It’s sort of a blur now, but I think that getting over involved stepping on S.’s back somehow.

I put my boot back on and we trudged through blackberry vines.

Found the swarm.

That’s when I realized that I’d left my gloves in the car.

You know what that meant. Two more trips over the fence.  (Sigh.)

Back again, we saw that the swarm was clustered over a mass of branches and vines. We couldn’t simply cut a branch and gently drop it into a box.

(I wish I had a better photo of the cluster. You can sort of see it in the photo above.)

Instead, we shook the branch until some of the bees fell into the box.

We also used our gloved hands to brush them into the box. They didn’t seem to like that much and buzzed about, though not too angrily.

After we’d collected a good part of the swarm into the box, S. decided it might be best to leave them alone until dusk. The rest of the colony would have followed the queen into the box by then.

So, back over the fence we went. (Trip #4, if you’re counting.) I became slightly less inept with each climb.

At 7:00 pm, (after Trip #5) we were back at the swarm. Only to find that every single bee had rejoined the original cluster back in the tree. We must not have moved the queen into the box earlier in the afternoon.

On to Plan B. We had to hack at all the branches and vines with my small pruners (at least I’d remembered them). One branch was quite thick, so S. held the box while I hacked. And hacked.

Finally they were all in. We enclosed the box in a sheet so no strays would nettle me as I drove home on the freeway.

Trip #6 was rather victorious. S. went first, I passed the box over to her and then climbed over myself. I’d like to say I was graceful; at least I can say I was successful.

I dumped the box into my empty hive that night: bees, branches, vines and all. I wanted the bees to have the night to settle in. In the morning, when it was still cold and before they got active, I shook the bees off the branches and that was that. I had a hive again.

I also had a very sore upper body.  The results of beekeeping boot camp. For a few days, that soreness reminded me that I’ve now joined the ranks of the slightly crazy.

The girls and their drones seem happy in their new place. There seem to be far more of them than I ever had with my original colony, which I’d bought as a package.

The purple Pride of Madeira is blooming just outside their front door and they’re all over it.

And they got here just in time, just as our ollalieberry bushes began to bloom.

It’s going to be a good year for berries, I think.

Fruits of living on the fringe.

Another post on writing?  I know, I know, it’s a shame. Especially since so many exciting things are happening around here, like college-choosing, and climbing chain-link fences to capture swarms with intrepid beekeeping friends. But I promised to get back to you each month on my book project, so I’ll try to make this quick.

Writing in March was good. All the cutting and reassembling of last month seems to have worked, and my little Frankenstein of a chapter can breathe. It’s alive! I shared it with some very dear writing friends, and the feedback was positive. It still needs work, but I think I have the format and voice of the book worked out. Which is no small thing.

So much of this book is influenced by my experiences as a perpetual student of writing. My own struggles with learning to write have given me a different perspective on kids’ writing, one that’s very different from the traditional school model. I think that writing educators often don’t have much experience writing themselves, and they forget to use professional writers as models for how to go about the task. I’m not sure I’ve written much about this here, so I thought I’d give you a little excerpt of my work-in-progress that addresses it. This is from a section about advice from writing books and how it seemed at odds with what I was trying to do with H at the time.

“…Almost all of these books offered similar advice to beginners: If you want to get past that first barren page, you must write without considering spelling, or grammar, or the next paragraph, or what your mother might wonder, or what your sophomore English teacher might slaughter via red pen. Nearly every book on my shelf encouraged me to begin with uncensored word-spewing.  In one of my favorites, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing and Life, Anne Lamott writes, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something–anything–down on paper.”

         I drank down this advice like a courage-bequeathing cocktail; it was what I needed to get past the censor that I’d picked up in school, and to finally begin.

         Lamott also writes this: “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.”

         This was the sad paradox that I didn’t recognize outright, but that must have nettled me on some level:  H couldn’t write playful, childish drafts despite the fact that he was a child.  He couldn’t romp on the page because he was burdened with the very tasks that professional writers tell adult would-be writers not to fret about. His words did not pour out; instead they got snagged and stuck as he learned to form letters in conventional shapes, facing conventional directions; as he learned to cluster those letters into words that others could read; as he began to string those words into lines others could comprehend. And he couldn’t take comfort in the fact that no one would see his work; instead he had me hovering over him, watching and worrying over what he was doing, and whether he was keeping up for his age.” 

The plan for April: So now I’m on to the next chapter, another cut-and-reassemble affair, about what I learned from Lulu on the importance of developing one’s voice as a writer.

And, just because I hate to post without photos, here’s a little preview of all the promised excitement. Photo by stefaneener.

I never was any good at climbing fences. And the hiking boots didn’t help. Ouch.

(edited to add: Lest you think this photo has nothing to do with the post above, read the comments to see how smart my readers are. Everything is connected.)

Things have been so dang thinky on this blog lately. I really owe you my chapter-a-month challenge post, but I’m ready for some fluff. Photos! Knitting! Sugary stuff to eat!

I haven’t done one of these atwitter posts in a while. Here’s what has me all worked up these days.

Knitting. Looky! Even though I haven’t posted here, I’ve been knitting. Hats!

This one (ravelry link) is my favorite, ’cause I can pretend it’s the 1930′s and it doesn’t smash my (already plenty flat) hair.

(updated the photo: I felted the hat a bit because it was too big. This photo is post-felting.)

This was my first foray into colorwork. Isn’t it a pretty pattern? I’m a continental knitter, and was hell-bent on learning how to hold both yarns in the left hand. I kept fiddling with ways of stranding the yarn across my fingers and finally figured a way that worked for me. Having both yarns on the same hand made my tension even, I think.

I also knit a pair of super-wooly socks for Chris to wear around the house, but he won’t hold still long enough more me to get a photo. Now I’m swatching for Ysolda’s coraline. 

The girls are back in action! Here in northern California, my plum tree is blooming, the rosemary is draped in blue and my bees are busy. I opened up the hive over the weekend and found lots of capped honey, and saw Queen Bee-atrice strutting around some glossy white larval bees.

Can you see her in the photo, the longer one towards the middle? Yippee! I think we’ll get honey this year!

new blogs: Danielsaurus is fascinating. Here’s a description from the sidebar: “Daniel’s been hardwired to the Internet since he was twelve and spends a lot of time on it finding nifty things to share. Mostly he writes about children, play, kids’ cultures, and the ‘bigger picture’ of childhood in society.” It’s a constant flow of thought-provoking links and wonderings.

Making marmalade. Last summer, stefeneener and denise gave a jam workshop that finally got me past my irrational fears of canning, and at Christmas my parents gifted me with some fine equipment. 

Our satsuma mandarin tree went bonkers with fruit this winter, so satsuma-vanilla bean marmalade was my first canning attempt. Fabulous recipe! It turned out so tasty that I have a big bowl of our last satsumas, ready to make a third batch. Favorite snack: this marmalade with almond butter on Swedish crispbread. Snarf.

New books. I’m still meaning to write a post on Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, giddy as I am about the ideas in that book. I also read his newer book, Drive, about motivation. It’s also a fascinating book, all about how intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than external motivators, but this one didn’t knock my hand-knit socks off as much as the other book. Because, of course, as a homeschooling parent, I see the power of internal motivation in action every single day. I’ve learned the hard way, as many homeschooling parents do, that my attempts at motivating my kids have not a fraction of the power that their own internal fires do. So the ideas here weren’t new to me, but if you have any doubts about the potential of internal drive and want scientific back-up, or if you want hints for becoming a more internally-driven person, it’s a good read. And, in the section on kids and education, Pink gives a nod to unschooling! Pink’s TED talk on the topic is compelling–it gives you a sense of what the book is like.

And has anyone read 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)? I haven’t, but am intrigued. Lots of interesting stuff from the author, Gever Tulley, at tinkering school.

So, what has you all atwitter right now?

The bees had a festive time.

And so did we.

Requisite annual monkey pull-apart bread photo.

Chris and I got, finally, our own stockings. Handmade by Lulu.

Daddy got guitar picks.

Mama got yarn.

Some of the best gifts were old ones.

For a long time, Lulu has wanted an old typewriter. Chris found this one in the shed of his grandparents’ home, after his grandmother died. He cleaned it up, although it still needs some repair work.

How she thanked us.

A while back I asked my parents about a picnic basket they had when I was a kid, that had belonged to my grandmother. They made like they’d given it away, but look what I got on Christmas Day:

My mom can’t quite believe I’m so excited about such a battered old thing. But it’s an authentic Hawkeye Refrigerator! It’s lined in metal! It has a compartment for ice! (Or, these days, freezer packs.) No more cruddy plastic cooler for Park Day lunches!

The best gifts, I think, are the unconventional ones.

Yes, he got Christmas presents. But not long after the gift-opening, this is what I found him doing. Playing with the typewriter box.

This week I’ve been listening to Vespertine by Björk. I have never listened to Björk, just as I have never used an umlaut on this blog. But the album is perfectly quiet and otherworldly for this out-of-time week, this verging on a new year.

Hope your week is peaceful and thought-provoking.

I haven’t written one of these atwitter posts in a while. Not that I haven’t been all atwitter–ask my husband about my tendency to yammer on about things. I just haven’t written about it. So, making up for lost posts…

our lavender is blooming.

60 plants worth, on our front hillside, right beside our beehive. Can you spot one of our girls in the photo? I wish I could insert smells into my posts, because this Provence lavender is eyes-rolling-back-in-your-head fragrant. I really ought to film the flurry of bees out there so you’d believe how many there are–one morning I counted more than twenty on a single plant. This new little colony is taking its time building up comb, though. I’d assumed that with the abundance of lavender, the comb production would pick up quickly, but that hasn’t been the case so far. A beekeeper on the Beemaster Forum explained that despite popular belief, a new colony won’t build comb to keep up with a nectar flow; it will build comb as needed to keep up with its population, and therefore might not be ready to take advantage of a nearby flow. So I just need to be patient, and let Queen Bee-atrice keep doing her thing. But one of these days, I hope there will be enough honey for me to steal a frame. I know exactly where I’ll put it:

a pot for my honey.

Isn’t it perfectly splendid? Wouldn’t Pooh love it? I found it at, of all places, Anthropologie. (Actually, Anthropologie seems to be a bee-loving company: for Earth Day, they had a neat little online honeybee promo, with some art that inspired my kids. If you click on the arrow near the bees in the promo, you’ll be led through a few pages of honeybee info.)

a new book.

If you’re a plant lover with a dark sense of humor, then you must get your hands on Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart. It’s a compendium of–from the back cover–”plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend.” Fun stuff! It’s also a beautiful little book, with faux-aged pages, old-fashioned etchings and creepy drawings.  I photographed it in my morning glory vine, the seeds of which are, apparently, capable of producing “an LSD-like trip if eaten in large quantity.” (I find the vine to be more violence-inducing, as I am constantly ripping at it whenever it strangles my more tender plants.)

healthy cookies.

No, it’s not an oxymoron. I saw the recipe for Nikki’s Healthy Cookies on 101 Cookbooks a while back, and finally got around to making them. Yum! They’re not so decadent as your typical chocolate chip cookie, but they’re surprisingly tasty given their list of healthy ingredients. We like them frozen, which makes their texture a little nicer. Whole Foods’ Dark Chocolate Chunks work especially well in the recipe. (And you’ll have extras to nibble on and call them antioxidants.)

a new knitting project.

Don’t tell my sweater coat! This is the short, simple number I mentioned in my letter. It’s actually my own bastardization of two patterns that I like: the Jane cardigan from Custom Knits, and the Lacy Skirt with Bows from Greetings from Knit Cafe. Details forthcoming on my Ravelry page for you knitting geeks. (Sorry about those Ravelry links, if you’re not a Raveler.)

Spanish design blogs.

Back in June, I posted this photo of Mr. T with some of our ollalieberries to the Flickr group 100 Things to Love About Summer (’cause if ripe ollallieberries aren’t one of the top 100 things to love about summer, I don’t know what is.) A month or so later, I got an email from Spain, asking for permission to use the photo. Which is how Mr. T ended up on a Spanish design blog, under the heading 100 Razones para Amar el Verano. Which tickles me in an it’s-a-small-world-after-all kind of way.

And even though the kid doesn’t look Spanish, he’s a full one-quarter. ¡Viva la familia Zaballos de Macotera, España!

fun in the sidebar.

I’m adding a place in the sidebar that links to exciting stuff I wander across on my internet ramblings. Mosey on over to the tab that says ever-changing list of wondrous links. I’ve posted a link to the Healthy Cookies recipe there, to keep it up for a while, and also links to some fantastic writing by Michael Chabon and Pico Iyer. That spot in the sidebar will give me a place to share little bits of wonder–even if I’m not keeping up with these atwitter posts.

So I’ll ask yet again, what has you all atwitter?

A few more things that have me all atwitter these days.

the girls have arrived! We picked up our package of bees on Saturday, and introduced them to their hive that afternoon.

There are so many of them–approximately 10,000 at this point! I love to sit near the hive, on the terrace wall that Chris built, watching them come and go. I’m dying to get in there to see if they’re making comb, to see if the queen is laying, but we’re giving them their privacy for a week or so.

Surely bees don’t care if their hive is cute, but since this one sits in our front yard, I care. So it’s painted to match the house, with a totally unnecessary-but-adorable-anyway pitched copper roof. (Please disregard that temporarily unpainted stripe of a shim. You know I’m detail-crazed enough to be bothered by such a thing.)

bee art. Lulu, Mr. T and I sketched bees last week.

Then the kids became inspired to make a collage of bee art, which they later abandoned, but we did carve some rubber stamps.

Now Lulu’s thinking about making bee-themed greeting cards to sell at our Homeschool Fair in a few weeks. She spent all morning searching out bee poetry online–for lines for the cards–and I showed her some of Sylvia Plath’s bee poems. Plath wrote those poems upon keeping bees of her own for the first time, and when I read them a few years ago, I knew I’d have bees of my own someday.

learning about japan. We went to the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco’s Japantown on Monday, to see a San Francisco International Film Festival showing of Battle for Terra. (A perfect film for Mr. T as it tells the story of life on another planet which is invaded by earthlings. The planet, Terra, and its creatures are beautifully animated. The film’s director spoke afterwards, and it was fascinating to hear about his original ideas for the film, and how they developed over time.) Anyway, in addition to the film being wonderful, the location was ideal, as we’re just beginning a study of Japan.

We had a Japanese bento lunch.

We visited the Peace Pagoda.

We went to the Kinokuniya bookstore. I’d never been to one of these Japanese bookstores before–so big, so fab! There are books in Japanese, of course, but also many in English. They also have lots of those great little items that only the Japanese design, like Piperoid robot kits made up of paper rolls which are cut apart and assembled.

Mr. T put together both Goriborg and Dr. Penk with a fair amount of help from me.

The trouble is, of course, that he wants to play with them, which only makes their feet fall off.

I always hear knitters rave about Japanese knitting books. (I just listened to the Knitting Japanese episode on Stash and Burn.) Looking through that section in the store, I came across a few books by a young Japanese woman named Ayano Uchida. Despite the English titles and a few giggle-inducing, roughly translated English headings here and there, the books are otherwise written in Japanese, so I have no idea what they say. But they’re filled with photos of the author’s quirky, layered style, and I couldn’t resist buying one called Favorite Style for Four Seasons.

“Why would you buy that?” Lulu asked, offended at my foolishness. “You can’t even read it!”  I’m not quite sure why I bought it, except that I find the photographs charming. I think I find them even more charming for the fact that I don’t know what the writing says, which means I get to use my imagination. (I’m linking to Amazon’s Japanese page, in case you want to “Look Inside” the book. I haven’t been linking to Amazon these days, which you may have noticed–the reason for which is a blog post for another day. Go indie bookstores!)

Oh goodie–now it’s time for you to tell me what has you all atwitter…