I went to Maple Ridge this past weekend and stayed with Freddie and Twig, and it was marvellous.  My brother Freddie is absolutely hilarious.  As a bonus, their pool is kept at 90 degrees so it’s a pleasure to hang out in it, gently floating or breast-stroking around.

My friend Beverly came out for the day on Sunday and after a delicious lunch at my niece’s Julie’s, we came home to two hours in the pool.  The weather was divine as well, so all in all it was a great visit.

The goal of the trip, however, was to transport Margaret’s cat, Cole, to Kelowna.  I’d promised her I’d do that as she said her nerves wouldn’t take the yowling for the entire trip.  I asked if she could make it to Maple Ridge, and she could, so we met there and I put Cole and his cage on my back seat.

I was steeling myself for the next four hours, but I only heard a few feeble mews about half an hour after driving off.  After a couple of hours of silence I’d convinced myself Cole had died of the heat or a heart attack, and so I pulled over to check.  There he was, all calm, just staring back at me.

He did the feeble mewing about three different times on the trip, and each time I just said here puss puss puss puss here puss puss puss, and he stopped.  I also played ABBA’s greatest hits, so when I arrived I said to Margaret I think he just likes ABBA or something.

However before even being able to leave for Maple Ridge, I had to drive up Glenmore Road past the dump to pick up a mated queen bee.  Lorraine said it’s likely the safest and surest way to get that second hive going, so I said okay, and contacted the seller.

He said you have to come on Saturday, to which I replied but I have to drive to Maple Ridge on Saturday.  He, being the single-minded type, said if you don’t come Saturday by the time you get here the queen will be dead.  Dramatic people always get what they want, as on Saturday morning I drove there and got the damn queen.

She came in a little plastic cage surrounded by two or three worker bees who would tend to her while she was in there.  There was a tube attached and this was plugged with marshmallow.  I took the cage and bees home, fashioned a paper clip into a hanger, and put the queen into my second hive.

This morning when I went out to check, sure enough the marshmallow was eaten and the bees were gone, so I have a queen in that hive. Surely this is going to work.  But you know how gardening and bee keeping can go around here.

So now Margaret lives in Kelowna, just a nine minute drive from here, and I’m finding this very appealing.  I like to imagine the things we can do, as she plans to make more videos of me and the bees, and hopefully with both our brains involved we might find a way to conquer WordPress and get videos added to this blog.

In the meantime I’ve picked the last of my apricots and red currants and plan to spend a day making jam.  I thank God for air conditioning as it’s 35 degrees C right now.

You may recall a while ago I said I’d watched an interesting autopsy of an obese woman on Netflix.  It helped me visualise the layer of yellow fat that resides immediately beneath my skin and coats my entire carcass.  So imagine my surprise to learn that fat can also form itself into a nice tidy lump called a lipoma.

I went to the doctor and said what is this, and she felt it and said “it’s a lipoma.”  I had already Googled lumps so this word wasn’t new to me.  I had fully discounted it however, going for the more glamorous diagnosis of a colon cancer or something of that nature.

However my old doc said she has them too, and allowed me to feel one on the underside of her forearm.  She indicated it’s just another nasty side effect of ageing and to ignore it.  If I had a lump on my arm I think I would, but as it’s in my abdomen it’s kind of annoying.

We’ll see.  I have to live with the knowledge I have an egg-sized lump of hard yellow fat living quite happily among my organs.  And imagine how incensed they are after all these years to suddenly have to shift over and make room for this interloper.

For my birthday my friend Carol gave me a vintage drink shaker, and it has recipes printed on the outside of it.  I decided to try a whiskey sour the other day and man, are they tasty!  I haven’t had one in years, and made it with Canadian Club so maybe that was the secret.

I rarely ever lose anything, and so when I do I go mental.  The other day I was at the hairdresser, and showed her the price tag on the leather purse I’d bought at the SPCA thrift store last year.  It was from California, and the tag said $315.  I got the bag for $10.

Hence one of my greatest joys when someone said “nice bag” was to pull out the tag and say “look at this, and weep.”  That’s just one of the strange quirks of the thrift store shopper, we love to scream out the price we paid.  It’s some kind of hubris, I know.

Anyway, I got home and discovered I’d lost the price tag and was heart broken, so e mailed the hairdresser.  She replied she hadn’t seen it.  I was crestfallen, and then the next day she e mailed and said can you believe it, but when I left the building and looked down, it was right there on the street.

I said just put me down as a mental case, as who goes this crazy over losing a price tag?  She kindly said she’d keep it for me until our next visit.

But when it’s this hot there’s nothing better than to enter an air conditioned thrift store and browse around.  I thought I’d do that at Value Village the other day, and left with a bra, two pairs of shoes and 3 cookie tins.  However at $18 I felt it was probably okay to do that.

And it’s not the money that’s the problem, it’s the volume of stuff I haul home.  The other day I had to buy a lion and lioness ceramic statuette at the Sally Ann, and then do the usual wandering around the house for an hour trying to place it somewhere.  Enough already.

Lorraine, my beekeeping mentor, came over today with a young woman who recently acquired a hive.  As you may recall, I moved a frame of brood into my empty hive, hoping to start a new one, but no luck.  Then at the end of May when Lorraine came over, she tried with another frame, but today when we inspected, we could see there’s still no queen in there.

Without a queen it just won’t work and sure enough we had a lot of dead bees and ants in the bottom which isn’t a good sign.  So Lorraine thought what the heck, this time let’s move a full box of 10 frames over and stick it on the crummy hive and see what happens.

She said I have a 50-50 chance of starting a new hive, so let’s see if this finally works.  If not, then it’s proving to be an extremely difficult thing to do.  But surely, in nature, bees know how to make a new queen when one is needed.  However so far they’re remaining obstinate and refusing to do it.

Today was one of those ungodly hot Okanagan days, so at several points I had to either stand in the shade, or else walk away and remove my hood to wipe my eyes as I had salty sweat stinging them.  That’s definitely one of the downsides to beekeeping: it’s bloody hot.

But then I thought I should be glad, as I started a low carb diet eleven days ago, and so I figure with all this sweat I should drop a pound or two just from that.  It’s so extremely slow to lose weight at this age it’s almost a physics puzzle.

For example, when my usual fat self, I eat like a horse, and just hold the gargantuan size or else gain a bit.  However when I finally decide that’s it, and cut out all of those things I love to eat, my body goes nah ah.  Nope.  And it takes days and days of very little food, and all of it low carb, and then the needle on the scale moves ever so glacially to the left. Why?

I’m happy to say Margaret’s bought a condo and is moving to Kelowna to work at UBC Okanagan.  She’s very excited to become a homeowner and I’m happy too as now we can fly out of here together on any future jaunts.

The only fly in the ointment for Margaret is her 10 year old cat, who makes that very loud yowling sound when locked in a kennel in a car.  She said she could move to Kelowna if someone moved the cat for her, so I said I can move him.  I’ll therefore have to head down there end of July to pick up kitty, and hope to arrive in Kelowna with my mind intact.

I spent a couple of hours at the Liberal tent on Canada Day as a volunteer to hand out buttons.  We were stationed right near the lagoon at the Grand Hotel, and it was a stormy day.  Suddenly a gale kicked up, blowing all written materials from our tables and scattering other people’s tents.  Luckily ours held.

And so the summer goes, with bees, cat plans, and Liberal events.  And in case I thought I’d ever remain alone, Nicky wants to sell his place and move back home.