Feeling dull, little things

Today is one of those days were everything seems to be an exasperation. My mind is still dull from the illness I have been struggling with over the past few days and every thought and action requires more effort than normal. This too shall pass, and I will endeavor to muddle through with grace, but right now, it is a struggle. Poor pitiful me. Do not waste any sympathy on me. I do not deserve it. There are many far less fortunate than I who need your emotional investment, but sometimes speaking the truth has a way of providing the remedy needed to move on in a positive manner. Perhaps that will be forthcoming and while I sit here this morning feeling sorry for myself, life continues to move on around me. I can either engage or get left behind. I do not like being left behind, so I will engage.

For some reason, Mama’s new MacBook required her to enter her password for her to restart touch ID. She could not remember her password and so the next hours were spent trying to find out how to either recover her password or reset her password. Neither proved an easy path forward but fortunately, Apple built a backdoor for just such an eventuality and between Cori and myself we found a way to reset the password. The issue when following an online tutorial is that they do not generally match up to what is being seen on the device I have in front of me. Such was the case today and I was forced to make a guess on how to satisfy the requirement of the steps I was being asked to accomplish versus what the tutorial was showing me needed to be done, but we made it and Mama is now able to use her computer. It is not a problem I wanted to deal with today, but it is over and done for now.

The weather today is comfortable. The night temperatures stayed above freezing so feeding this morning was far easier to accomplish than the previous several mornings. However, temperatures for the next several nights will be below freezing so fresh water will have to be provided for the animals by carting containers from the sunroom or wellhouse to fill their water pans. It is not a big deal; it just adds a bit of work and time to the preparations each evening and the delivery of water in the mornings. When I am not available to help, it is a strain on Mama to transport the water out to the feeding areas. This month and next will be much the same, but by late February or very early March, we should be past the worst of our freezes. Time will tell.

It is forecast to be warm enough this Saturday for me to peek into the hives. I am anxious to see how the bees are faring through the cold snaps we have been experiencing. I need to make a couple minor changes to the hives that I overlooked previously, but the look into the hives should not take long. I certainly do not want to cool down the hives too much as I service them so I will not dally in what I need to be changed and/or checked in the inspections. My hope for next year is to grow my apiary back to four hives by doing splits of my healthy hives, but that depends entirely on how the hives do through the winter. Having done all I can, I pray and wait.

Tomorrow I will be teaching a class. It is only a half day class, so Mama and Victoria want me to go with them to start a bank account at a bank common to Cori and Victoria. That will facilitate the moving of moneys between the three of us, which seems to be happening a lot lately. The catch is that Mama and I have to be at the bank in person with Victoria to be allowed to open the account. That being the case we will try to get that done while Victoria and I share an afternoon off.

Lately Mama sold six hens to a friend, and we have noticed the loss of production of those chickens. We still get an average of fifteen eggs per day but that is down from averaging twenty per day. I can only hope the family that purchased the hens is seeing the immediate benefit of getting laying hens from Mama. She has enough mouths to feed in her home and a close extended family so I can be sure the eggs are not going to waste, but we sure miss the additional production as Mama seeks to keep er regular customers supplied.

In the little things of life, things seem to be looking up for Trace, but he is still feeling the loss and deep regret of his current situation. Please keep him in your prayers.