#34: Jesus, bees-us
You like that one? So proud of myself
Actual updates
A lot has happened since last we spoke! Hap started both school and swimming lessons! School seems fine but he is not wild about the swimming lessons, which is too bad for him because this particular extracurricular activity is not optional: you don’t have to be a good swimmer but you do have to be able to swim, for safety, and this is the beginning of that process. But I’m getting ahead of myself when I say a lot happened this month - let’s go back and see what all it was.
At the beginning of the month, we went camping at a little car-camping site in Western Mass, and it was an absolute comedy of errors. Well, at first it seemed like a tragedy of errors, if that’s a thing, but enough obnoxious stuff happened that it came around to being funny.
So, first of all, we stopped in Northampton on the way, ate some lunch, and had been meaning to enjoy the town a little bit, but I scotched that idea - we had bribed Hap into trying a few more bites of his lunch, and if we didn’t stop at the store and get his bribe (a monster truck toy) right away he would have probably become very annoying about it, and then once he had it, we faced the same problem if he couldn’t go open it and start playing with it e.g. in the car, so I decided not to torment him by making him look at interesting stores and restaurants and the highest proportion of people in overalls I’ve ever seen. This was not just a mistake from a parenting perspective: it also meant that our timing for arriving at the campsite was monumentally poor.
You see, it had started to rain just a bit as we were driving over - and then picked up as I was starting to set up the tent. This is relevant because our tent, which I’d like to go on record as saying is needlessly enormous and heavy and just kind of unserious1, also, crucially, has a totally mesh roof. So if you want to be protected from the elements, you have to put the rainfly on, which means that when you’re first setting up the tent, it necessarily is not protected from rain. You can see where this is headed. I unfolded the tent on the ground and immediately rain started getting into it. We put up our little portable awning thingy, which we had brought to put over the picnic table, so that I can finish putting it up, get the rainfly on, and then I have to dry the inside of the tent with a towel so that it doesn’t have literal puddles in it. In case you were wondering how it can be someone’s fault that it rained, now you see how.
So, the tent being sorted out, we moved the awning to the picnic table as intended, and hang our two LED lanterns on it, one at each end. They’re not the same as each other, which I mention because an absolute shitload of bees soon converged on one of them (but not the other). We’re talking 15-20 bees at any one time, buzzing around it or crawling directly on it, with 6-8 of them on or around the power button. They even stuck around into the night; I’ve never seen Night Bees before. So we couldn’t turn the lantern off and had to leave it on all night. It forced us to stand around out in the middle of the campground (also, campfires were forbidden due to drought conditions, so we couldn’t even just move over to sit by the fire).
Before we abandoned the table, though, a guy came walking down the road and asked us if he could use one of our phones to call the rest of his party, who hadn’t arrived yet. I said yes, of course, because you help out a buddy, and he made his call, made a bit of small talk, and went off on his way. Except it wasn’t over. It’s never over with strangers who decide to talk to us, and specifically to me. Later on I took our dirty dishes to the building the bathrooms were in, since there was a sink outside for washing them, and who should pop out of the woods (his campsite was adjacent) but this same guy! Now he’s talking to me and asking me questions and I’m by myself because of course Matt had to stay back at the campsite with Hap and he’s making me lightly nervous but mostly just annoyed, and I make my excuses and leave and head back… until it’s time for bed and I’m heading back to the bathroom for my evening ablutions and who do I see standing around the bathroom building again but himself. I shut off my light and turned around and walked in the pitch black forest night to the other, farther bathroom and hoped he hadn’t seen me.
Oh but wait, it isn’t over yet. Walking to and from that bathroom, I noticed the call of what I thought was an aggressive-sounding bird - an almost human-like scream that increased in pitch towards the end. This bird kept hollering all night long, and eventually Matt looked it up to see what it might be. It turns out it is not a bird, but in fact the mating call of the female red fox. So: we were kept up all night by horny vixens.
So much for the camping disaster. But guess what: bees weren’t done with us yet. Hap turned 5 this month, and we had a little birthday party for him in a nearby playground. One of his friends was having a tough day and needed to snuggle on her dad’s lap for a bit, so they went and sat under a tree together. Then, suddenly, there were dozens of bees. We assume the kid and her dad must have been sitting near a nest, and indeed the dad got stung 5 or 6 times. Fortunately none of the kids got stung; the only other bee casualty was me, when a bee went into my hair, and I brushed it out with my hand and got stung on the side of my finger. Altogether, not so bad; a sting on the hand is nowhere near as bad as a sting on the head, and while it hurt plenty, we had a cooler full of ice for the juice boxes and water bottles, and the ice helped me and the dad who got stung as well. This was a solid 2.5 weeks ago now, though, and I still have a shiny red patch on my finger; it was still itching after a week. Bees!!
In better adventure news, we just now got back from a trip up to the Mt. Washington area, where we stayed in an extremely cozy and hangoutable cabin (one of many in a long string of vacation cabin “motels” along this highway), rode the Cog Railway up to the summit of Mt. Washington itself, took Hap mini-golfing for the first time, and went to this tourist trap place that has a weird combination of antique cars and other old-timey objects on display, a water slide, bumper boats, a “mystical mansion” which is a room that rotates around a row of chairs, a train ride that goes through “Wolfman territory” where a grizzly old prospector comes out and yells at you and sets off cap guns and chases the train in his skull-and-pelt-adorned jeep; and, of all things, trained bears. I was not nuts about the bear situation - the trainers were very low-key and positive with the bears and didn’t push them to do any tricks if the bear wasn’t interested, and the show was preceded by a lengthy spiel about how long the bears there live and how well they’re treated, which seemed very defensive, but who’s to say what happens outside of a show? Besides, if they wanted to run a bear sanctuary and let people view them in their natural habitat from a safe distance, that would still be extremely cool and worth stopping the car for, I’d think!2 Anyway, the whole trip was fun, outside of having Bear Doubts, and I wish we had known about this little cabin spot before, it's the kind of place you could stay with a bunch of your friends and just have an extremely lovely and relaxing time.
I’m almost done, I promise, just two more things that were, incredibly, both good.
First, remember last time I was talking about playing a show? We played it! It went mostly fine, except for the part where I forgot half a verse of one of the songs3 and the part where we absolutely blazed through "No Loot, No Booze, No Fun," which isn't the kind of song it's easy to sing fast. But it was ok that we screwed up a couple times because, and this is true, nobody came. At all! Well, nobody we invited4. Obviously the friends in Matt's real band were there, and our neighbor came outside and listened for a while, and two little old ladies were passing through and watched, much to my dismay as all the songs were distinctly inappropriate for your Nana. They were tapping their canes together in time to the music.
If you, for whatever reason, want to watch the whole show, I do have a video of it:
Roslindale Porchfest 2022 full set - camille
And, finally, further updates in the field of trying to move: I got the notification from Immigrations Canada that they have received Matt’s application! It only took a couple months, as opposed to the 6 months it took to receive the same notification about Hap’s Certificate of Citizenship, so that’s promising! I guess now they’re going through the process of actually reviewing it and making a decision on it, so from this side it’s still time to wait and see, but it’s heartening that it’s in someone’s hands and being looked at officially.
What am I reading
I’m in the middle of two books, which is an improvement over when I started writing this issue, at which point I was in the middle of three. I finished the other one, and now it’s two comics: the last volume of Crowded, which I believe I’ve talked about in here before (it’s only getting gayer and better, though5! although there was one point where I nodded in recognition of a fine and normal idea which would worry anyone who had been reading over my shoulder. I’m fine! Reapr doesn’t exist!! Don’t worry about it!) and the other being another volume of Lumberjanes. If you don’t already know how good and pure Lumberjanes is, give it a try; it’s a rare comic that’s geared towards a younger crowd that isn’t too babyish for adults (plus the exclamations of the names of various important women of history are a great recurring bit), and it is also the source of one of my more successful Halloween costumes. Also, the current big problem the girls are facing is an infestation of kittens that start out looking cute and then start manifesting mystical powers of various kinds. So that ought to pique your interest, and if it doesn’t, don’t tell me about it.
Some links
Have you ever flown on a plane? Are you planning to ever fly on a plane? Then you should read this. The Humiliating History of the TSA
I LOVED Choose Your Own Adventure Books as a kid and I bet you did too. There’s more interesting history in their origins than you might expect, and also, you know that way you read them, that you suspect no one else reads them that way? Someone does! There’s proof in this article! The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books
How about a mysterious death getting one step closer to solved, decades later? This is the kind of story that initially makes you think, wow, solving mysteries, cool, and then you realize the level of abdication of privacy that other people had to give in order for this to happen. And to its credit, the article spends some time exploring that. Pecos Jane Has a Name
Floppy disks!! We Spoke with the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business
Ok, this is niche, I admit - it’s Vancouver-specific and it’s just a big bunch of housing and housing-related data and the conclusions one can draw from that, but I find it very compelling6. Do you, too, want to see that the lowest-average-priced area’s benchmark home prices are still over $1 million? Would you like proof that young families can’t afford to live in the area, as shown by which age demographics are growing and which are shrinking? Wondering whether there are any apartments/houses for rent with more than two bedrooms?7 It's all in here! Metro Vancouver 2022 Housing Data Book
Right, yes, this is horrible in all the ways you would expect, but it’s also shot through with very interesting science - the idea of the boreal forests becoming a carbon source rather than a carbon sink, for instance, is something I hadn’t even thought about. Also the pictures are stunning. The Ancient Subarctic Forests at Risk from Climate Change and War
More in climate change, this time with some fascinating/terrifying history. But also, I found it interesting that society recovered from a killer drought faster than from a killer winter. Obviously we’ve got both coming for us, but we’re just having the one right now. This Summer’s Drought is Europe’s Worst in 500 Years. What Happened Last Time?
I don’t need to tell you that the FBI was formed as a way to have a reason to surveil and arrest people defined by the state as “undesirables,” although I didn’t know that it was formed specifically in response to the manufactured threat of hordes of anarchists, in the wake of one anarchist assassinating President McKinley. Also, in the No Surprises department, it’s racist! Assassination: Anarchism and the Birth of the FBI
I think I would have said a very yellowish green, before reading this article, but now I don’t know what the truth is anymore!! What Color Is a Tennis Ball?
Tunes I’ve been listening to lately
I got introduced to Ex Hex when I covered them for a music blog I used to write for, and I went to their show, and I can still remember they had some of the best coordinated stage moves I’ve ever seen, and I do love a stage move. The songs are also total bops. Here’s one!
You get a bonus this month, because Mary Timony, whose band Ex Hex is, also made a solo album entitled Ex Hex, and this is a song in it that uses some of the same phrasing and concepts as the one above, albeit somewhat less energetically. But go from one song that ends with someone on the floor to a whole song about someone who is on the floor! Try it, it’s fun!
Here’s the song I dropped half a verse from at Porchfest! Now you can hear the whole thing, unspoiled by me!
The chorus of this song gets stuck in my head every time I hear it, even though it is, and I quote, “aaaaaa, brainwasher!”
This month’s top 5: Wikipedia pages related to Mt. Washington
Because you can’t go somewhere without falling down a Wikipedia hole about it first!
Obviously, the page about Mt. Washington itself, featuring such facts as the height of the mountain (6288’), the date that the coach road, which is the oldest man-made tourist attraction in America, was first built (1861), and, of course, racism: the Abenaki people, who lived in the area at the time of European arrival, did not go to the peak for religious reasons, so of course a white guy decided he would go up there, which would apparently prove that he wasn’t subject to their gods and could therefore take ownership of the mountain. Awful; typical.
The page about the Cog Railway itself, because the train is really cool and interesting and a feat of engineering (hey, get it? because it’s a train?), and where you can find out that the guy who initially built it was from the nearby town of Campton, and then you can start thinking “haha, he's straight outta Campton” and stop paying attention to the page, and maybe miss the fact that the original engine, which is displayed in pride of place as you drive up to the station, actually was in a crash in 19298 and smashed into a million pieces, and that engine you see there is reconstructed.
The Tip Top House, which was once one of two(!) hotels up on the peak but which now looks like a pile of rocks. I didn’t realize it was built rather than dug into the ground, when I was there; it’s giving hobbit house as imagined by marmots. It looks much more like a deliberate building in the olden-times postcards on the linked page.
Because I’m greedy for useless facts, I followed a link and got to this List of the Most Prominent Summits of the US, meaning they are ranked by how high they rise above their surroundings. Mt. Washington is on there, but pretty far down the list; it’s a member of the Presidential Range and while it is notably higher than the rest, it doesn’t stand alone on a plain or anything. Denali basically does! Its prominence is nearly the same as its elevation! Also shoutout to Mt. Baker, coming in 15th, very respectable.
Finally, this one followed after the trip, because right near the summit, the train passes by a memorial for Lizzie Bourne, the first woman, and second person overall, to die on the mountain, but we weren’t told anything about her. She was so close to the top! Was she on her way up? On her way down? Staying at the top and out for a walk and got lost in bad weather? No one is telling me, so I looked up the List of People Who Died on the Presidential Range. It still didn’t tell me, although I know she perished of hypothermia. But this list is a very stark reminder that people die on this mountain all the time, even today! (Update: she was on her way up, had left rather late, and a storm hit which reduced visibility - source)
Wow, you made it all the way to the end! This one might hit the email cutoff, so I hope you clicked through to the actual site instead, otherwise I suppose you’re not actually reading this. So I can say it here: you’re my favorite, you; those other guys are just ok. Don’t tell.
it came from Target instead of from a real outdoor store, and I didn’t get to do the lengthy research and decision process that is my birthright
I still remember the time we stood across a river from a whole adult grizzly in Hyder, AK, at the Fish Creek observation point; no one interacted with the bear in any way, a guide told us facts, and everyone went away extremely satisfied (the bear, on salmon; the people, on having just stood across a small river from a bear the size of a family sedan)
coming up in the Tunes section! no spoilers!
a few more groups of passers-by came through while the Guilloteenagers were playing, and then they played “Come to My Window” and all the Lesbians of a Certain Age in the neighborhood, of which there are many, showed up, and then they extended the song to be like 8 minutes long and everyone drifted away again. That song rips, though, I won’t hear any slander of it.
and, to use a term I used towards my own book, hurtling throuplewards - although I think it’s doing a much better job writing about it than I am, and I should be taking notes
because I am a nerd
spoiler: there aren’t
not that one