Friday, May 27, 2011

Along came a bumble bee...

So the other morning, I wake up for the day, go downstairs to the basement bathroom and begin my morning preparations for the day. With my glasses off, feeling around trying to find my contacts case, I suddenly see in the mirror this enormous black entity start crawling across the carpet behind me.  The cat was watching it bemusedly.

I lunge for my glasses (scared, of course, that it was some sort of spider on some homicidal mission to take control of my home in a baby-step effort to one day take over the world) and slipping them on stared, puzzled, at one of the largest bumble bees I've seen crawling over the carpet in my basement.

Unhappy bumble bee waiting to be released...
Why was she there? How did she get in? Is there a bumble nest somewhere in my finished basement? Why is my cat so entertained by bugs?

I love bees dearly, bumble bees and squash bees in particular, so I grabbed a notebook and a tupperware container, lifted the lady up, and took her on outside to greet the day.  She wasn't entirely happy with this turn of events, but happily flew off to visit some flowers in the garden.

So, it might be a sign; I picked Bumble* as my trail name for a reason, but I nevertheless proceeded to carve a cute bumble bee series that I hope to plant soon...

Runway clear; ready for take off.
Tomorrow, I'm off to the Remember the Railroads mini meet in St. Thomas, hosted by Big Blue Team.  I'm excited and looking very forward to it - the pasta salad is made and ready to go.

*Actually, it was BumbleAlong until recently.  But that was only because AtlasQuest wouldn't let me register Bumble as my trail name at the time, apparently because it was too close to some existing name.  On a whim, I tried to change it and it let me.  So there you go.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Happy Victoria Day long weekend!

There's nothing quite like a long weekend to get away from work and get back to important things. Like letterboxing.  This weekend, I went with a good friend of mine up to Milton to try our hands at the Ancient Greek Revellers series. We were successful and the carves and locations were fantastic.  We got a beautiful tour of the Mt. Nemo conservation area, as well as feasted upon by hungry black flies.  My ankles are still itching, but it was well worth it!

We were going to try some of the other Ancient Greek series, but it took us a lot longer than expected to ferret out these three boxes.  We had a great time though and were given some beautiful views as compensation for our time ;)

I'm now only two boxes away from having found 100 - the mini-meet scheduled for this coming weekend in St. Thomas should cure that.

However, the rain has started back up once again, so it's back to stamp carving yet again.  This means, however, that I have a whole stack of carves just waiting to be planted, so it's time for making the boxes and logbooks... I've tried my hand at making some log books as I have a terrible time finding any worth buying that are the right size. I'm trying to make the logbook part a little more enjoyable, and it's going well so far.  Luckily, I find a place before I begin to create a new box, so all these guys have homes, I just need some time to get out there.