There are a number of ways one can acquire bees. To paraphrase Twelfth Night:

but be not afraid of bees: some are born to bees, some achieve bees, and some have bees thrust upon them.

Some people catch swarms. My great uncle Ronald had a hive thrust upon him. Although I’m the third generation of bee-keepers in my family, I wasn’t born to them (the previous two generations being predecessors but not ancestors). I went with the safer and easier option and obtained a nucleus from a local bee-keeper.

A couple of boxes arrived for me at work. There was a gorgeous aroma coming from them.

When I visited my parents at Christmas I re-discovered a book. It was given to me by my great-uncle Ronald.

The Golden Throng: A Book About Bees.

I bank with the Co-Operative bank. I know there was some awful mis-management in the past, but their heart is in the right place (I think) and they have ethical policies. I think it’s a good idea that they should exist, so I’m sticking with them.

Recently they changed the user interface on their online banking. I don’t know why. I preferred the old one, but that’s just, like, my opinion.

But the more I used it the more careless the design looks.

Snow today. To work, via a snowy field. Stopped to take some photos using panorama mode on my Blackberry Passport. They came out rather better than expected. Click on them to view full size.

 

I am overwhelmed by all this. On Monday our new home was craned in. Words to follow, but for now pictures will have to do.

People do boat-build blogs. Breathlessly they document the progress of their build, keeping everyone up-to-date with up-to-the-minute information about how it’s all going. I am breathless about my new boat. I want to document the progress of the build and keep everyone up-to-date. I have a blog. It’s a very exciting event in life and I want to share it with my friends and family. But it’s also something I’ve never done before, not remotely, and, whilst I’ve been in good hands, there are so many horror stories out there that I didn’t want to tempt fate.

New year reflection led me to the conclusion that perhaps having email, twitter, facebook and the Internet at large following me round in my pocket all the time wasn’t a great idea, so I thought I’d get a phone that wasn’t afraid to revisit issues of self-identity. The Nokia 105 makes phone calls, sends texts, has an FM radio and not much else. I’m very happy with it.

In an attempt to quickly find almost exact melodic duplicates (give or take a note or two) in the folktunefinder.com algorithm I tried comparing the Euclidean distance between their interval histograms.

Flood water waist deep. Bit of a challenge getting out. Thames towpath below Oxford flooded knee-deep in places, just breaching at Donnington bridge. Someone in the University College boathouse shouted that I should be careful of sharks.