If you follow Cliff’s personal page you would know there’s a new batch of critters around our house. Not to be confused with the normal parade of animals that pass our window. There are the hummingbirds that flock to the feeders on the front porch in the morning. They create such a stir you would think it was Black Friday at Wal~Mart. There are our dogs…. they don’t exactly pass by the window that often. Mostly they sleep…. and eat…. then they wander out into the fields to do what dogs do after they eat. Then more sleeping, more eating, more wandering. Rinse and repeat….
Cows…. lots of cows…. we see them more in the winter when they come up to be fed but we see them a lot….
Coyotes….. well, we don’t actually see the coyotes. We hear them… A LOT…. especially just before dark. Apparently we live at the crossroads of the coyote party line. When one of them howls they ALL howl…..
and cats…. we’ve got a bumper crop of farm cats too…… all I know is there must be upwards of a thousand of them based on how much food we put out…
sorry, got lost in all that just now….
We have BEES. A whole hive of them and they’re not just interesting, they are busy. I know this because I’ve stood next to the entrance to the hive and watched them come and go. A Bee is a very busy critter. Twice a week I open the hive up and feed them. (2 cups water, one cup sugar) This is when I really notice how busy they are. The feeders go into the holes that are shown in the picture and the bees all seem to be really fond of these holes. They certainly get busy when I pull the jars out to refill them. It was during a recent feeding while I was watching all the milling around that it struck me. The comparison between those bees and our musical family, The Captain Ledge Band.
School has just started and mornings are once again busy. Jeana, Tristan and Baylee all leave at the same time. Me, I’m the lucky one. I get to sit in the quiet and finish my coffee. Recently I’ve been condemened to decalf so it’s not as fun as regular coffee but this is MY morning routine and I’m sticking to it no matter what.
At least I will until the Admiral tells me otherwise. (I may be Captain Ledge but Jeana is the Admiral and has the final say on all things important.) I only am allowed to make decisions when the possibility of something bad happening is involved. I could be wrong but I have some suspicions about this whole authority thing.
I know….. my mind is wandering and there’s a point to all of this somewhere.
So, I’m watching these bees all crawling around and flying and doing all the normal stuff bees do when it occurred to me. Our life is not so different than the bees. I’m not going to get in trouble by stating that the whole purpose to my life is to keep the queen happy… or Admiral or….. yeah, that.
The youngest member of the crew, she’s 7, will get home and do homework, go outside and play, come back inside, go back outside, come back inside, eat, eat some more, take a bath and go to bed exhausted. I’m pretty sure there’s the same sort of pattern at school.
Tristan, percussionist extradornaire and full time teenager, wallers out of bed, groans about school, primps for …. well, as long as it takes, goes back in his room to lay down taking the time to breathe between bites of what ever (seriously, he’s reached the age where he doesn’t really seem to care what food is aimed at his mouth as long as it’s food. I don’t even think he takes time to chew it long enough to taste it and I’ve often wondred why we don’t just put everything in a blender and feed him with a funnel. LOT more efficient that way and less dishes)…. yeah, off topic again. He then is aimed at school where I’m pretty sure he goes “off” all day, probably into the preverbial lala land, comes home, complains about school between shoveling bites of food into his mouth, does homework. Rest before bedtime cause he’s worn out from all that eating. Eats dinner, then more resting then a bedtime snack. In the midst of all this there’s constant texting and complaining about how dull and boring school is. THEN we somehow manage to interrupt his busy schedule with a nightly practice with The Captain Ledge Band. Yeah, it’s that busy…
Jeana, aka MOM, aka The Admiral, gets up an hour before everyone else so she can have some quiet time. Some mornings I think she just sits there waiting for the coyotes to howl. She has coffee, does some reading then simultaneously is able to get both her self and the 7 year old ready for school. Drives into work, tolerates all sorts of “stuff” in her office, comes home, cooks, laundry (which is a NEVER ending thing in our house), overseas the completion of all the aforementioned homework then does the band practice thing followed by a few minutes of time with the Captain in which we both set there and stare off into space like brain damaged zombies. Sleep and repeat.
As the Captain of this zoo I manage to observe this whole circus of the brain dead, go to work, get home, take care of all the assigments from the Admiral, PRACTICE followed by the aforementioned “Zombie” period then off to bed and repeat.
As I was feeding the bees today I began to wonder what the bees would think of our routine? I know there are normal families out there that don’t have a band practice every night. I’m betting there’s some other sort of “activity” they participate in and I’m betting they might just be as tired as we are when they finally crawl into their repective overnight hibernation zones. At least I really hope that someone else has as hectic a schedule as we do.
This week us bees are even busier! Yeah, hard to believe…..
On top of everything else we did a show on Saturday and now have two more days of practice before we pack mule it off to New Orleans. I’m not sure just what we’re thinking though. If we have a successful trip we’re going to become even busier and we’ll start looking more and more like those bees.
Yeah, didn’t think that one through before we “jumped” at the opportunity did we? Lol……
But, being busy as bees is a good thing. The alternative is to sit around and do nothing and I’m just not a big fan of that. In fact, if I were to sit around doing nothing I would end up feeling rested and we can’t have that happen can we.
So, I’ll keep feeding those bees. Practicing music with The Captain Ledge Band on a nightly basis and coming soon, we’ll begin recording the next album. It’s kind of our form of the honey those bees work so hard at. Only, our honey is music and just like the bees, it’s pretty sweet stuff when shared with friends!
By the time you read this we may be back from New Orleans at which point one of two things will be happening. Our lives will be different or they will be the same. Unlike the bees though we’ll have all that experience to share on our website.
We’ll be taking lots of pics in New Orleans and posting them online. There’s a feed from Flikr at the bottom of the main page of the site where you can catch glimpses as we run past the camera doing our very best bee imitation.