Trinity -- family, garden, animals

I've mentioned before our penchant for bottom feeder cars. I haven't mentioned the unique perspective to be gained from sitting on top of a behemouth (if 2WD) Suburban. That's where eldest (12 yo) was when the husband drove up. Husband's truck is a piece of sh*t and only locks in park on the third shove. Yesterday it was the sixth shove. When husband emerged from truck, eldest observed, "I thought the truck was going down and you were going to have to 'Abandon truck!'". Husband acknowledged this with a bit of pirate talk. Eldest continued, "Ah, but if you were a good Daddy you would go down with the truck! Har!"

Ok, so maybe that loses some of its humor and charm in its translation to blog-eze. I was amused and charmed by it, and so was the husband/father.

It has frosted here several days, and been down in the high 20s several nights. The pumpkins take on an incredibly bright glow when frosted upon. Some of them, and most of the cushaws, have developed soft spots. This means they won't store for winter food. So husband brought them up and has been cutting them up, peeling them, saving seed, and beginning to cook the meat of the squash down. This we freeze to later be fried up savory (olive oil, butter, sage, often with onions), cooked casserole style sweet, or made into squash (pumpkin) pies.

We also finished looking into (and robbing and medicating) the bees and the news is not so good. The two hives we robbed and treated the other day were the strongest. We knew one was dead but it turns out three are dead and one probably won't survive the winter even with diligent feeding. That's still four though. Since husband will be home this coming year, perhaps we will do better. Bees really need to be worked more often than we've been able to do it.

I've always been really attracted to having lots of bees: they make you think about what is a "being" and what IS "being" in a whole different way. The individual bees are more like cells than beings, and the hive as a whole is AN animal (so maybe we are like cells in the cosmic being-ness).

Individual bees have 16 brain cells. No joke. Really. 16. And you know that thing about bumble bees being too heavy to fly? Well, honeybees don't have enough brain cells to do the things they do, like dance to communicate the location and type of flowers they will next work, but still they do it. One hypothesis is that they think in 6 dimensions whereas we just have three normally, four if you count time (another illusion). It is difficult to even think what it might mean to think in 6 dimensions but I figure it is something like being able to switch to different bases in math although that is probably a pretty poor analogy.

In case you are rusty on base systems, 10 is the one we are most familiar with but so many others are common: 2 for binary, 8 for music, 12 for cases and grosses (a gross is 100 in a base 12), 16 for computers. The Celts, Mayans and many other civilizations used a base of 20 which is why in France today everything is a score although of course we are boycotting everything French so I'm not sure if we can still keep score.