8.21.2007

Random shots from a day here

Odds and ends from a day at the lake. You'll have to pardon me - I just got the new version of Adobe Creative Suite. So I'm commitin' some art... click it and it gets bigger.







































Good GOD.
That's enough tongue to feed a Scottish family for a week.
Make a nun blush.














Human meat

Yellow Jackets, or meat bees as they are often known, are a plague at the Lake this year. Kelly's hardware says they can't remember a summer when they sold more traps. Three weeks ago I put up the trap in picture below. Quite a mob.

I have always thought meat bees only bite - they don't sting. Because of this belief, I have always been pretty fearless about swatting them. They're not like honey bees or bumble bees - which will, if you take a shot at them, come at you with the single intention of stinging you. In the act it rips the stinger and venom sack out, and kills the bee.

This morning I have learnt that Yellow Jackets do indeed sting. If you are holding the food they want (in this case bread for the ducklings), they will sting you to get it out of your hands. It worked.

Having held this "bite only" belief since I was a youngster, I found it very hard to believe I'd just been stung. But I googled, and there it is... They sting. And not just that, YJs can sting unlimited times - it doesn't kill them. At least not directly. Indirectly it does. Because I, eventually, will kill every single one of the little bastards.

I can tell you that it doesn't hurt as much as a wasp or a bee, and the sting is mostly gone in about ten minutes. That, however, does not lessen my now sworn blood vengeance. Yellow Jackets are on the shit list.
Like something out of a Stephen King novel.

8.20.2007

August in Seattle

Many people are bitter about the short-sheeting we got on summer this year. Yesterday, today, tomorrow... all more reasons for the bitterness.

It's usually some cheery older person who says, "rain in Seattle - think of it as liquid sunshine!" Which is one of the most inane sayings imaginable. Insult to injury. A slap-able offense - "think of it as a hand kiss!"

I'm going to Chelan.

8.19.2007

Walt Whitman is 90 stories tall

Click to make it big