North Carolina!

Hi, world! We went to Asheville, North Carolina earlier this week to visit my dad's friends, and it was epic. :)
It's hard to sum it all up entirely in one blogpost, but some cool stuff we did includes:

• Seeing a rainbow
• Seeing ANOTHER rainbow
• Going to a reeeeally yummy restaurant
• Going to a garden-place with pretty flowers and lots of bees
• Going to this place called "Biltmore Estate" that is apparently the largest private home in America and was built by some rich guy in the 1800s
• Going to a creek (yay!)
• Renting a pontoon boat and driving around at Lake Lure, where we jumped off the boat and swam around (yay!)
• Me getting stung by a bee for the first time (yay?)
• Climbing up a climbing wall
• Seeing these adorable fluffy little chickens in a friend's backyard which we randomly decided to call Oldy, Goldy, Moldy and Checkers

About the bee sting, if anyone wants to know:
I was in the gift shop of the Biltmore Estate, walking around and looking at random stuff. I set my hand down on a table that had a bunch of clocks on it, and suddenly I felt something weird and prickly on my fingers. I was like, "Is that a bug on my finger? Ha, nooo, that can't be a bug on my finger."
Then suddenly there was a "ZZZZZZZT" and my finger felt like it was going to explode. The end!
It was so weird, though--like, what is the probability of getting stung by the ONLY bee in an over-200-room house? (Well, technically I don't have any way of knowing whether it was the only bee or not. But, you know what I mean.)

Here's a picture of the first rainbow:

And, the second rainbow!

Here are the chickens we gave the weird names.

Here's Lake Lure!

More Lake Lure.

Even more Lake Lure.

Cute little inchywormy inching along.

Nora leaning over the wall and staring at the Biltmore. It looks like a castle.

Koi pond!

Cute little cardinal having a snack. :)

View from some cool fancy hotel-place that's partially built out of rocks.

Well, that's North Carolina. Cool, isn't it? I wish we could go there again.

This morning I tried to make a poached egg:

Well... it's a little deformed. But it actually tasted quite good, surprisingly.
Bye, blog!





Save the Bees!

(Sorry if this post sounds like a random advertisement and really has nothing to do with my life, but I am making a post about bees because I feel like I need to make a post about bees. Thank you.)



A bumblebee in the garden next door

Attention, people of the world! The bees need YOUR help.

Our fuzzy, buzzy, bumbly garden friends are currently in trouble. Their population is decreasing for a variety of reasons, including pesticides, parasites, malnutrition and other stuff that you can read about by clicking the link above.

But if you don't really have time to read an article, then you can skip straight to the rest of this post. And noooo, I am not the world's greatest expert on bees, but I know enough to make a post about it. So, read on:

 

WHY SHOULD PEOPLE HELP THE BEES?

Well, there are several reasons. They include:

• If there were no bees, then us humans would have practically no food at all. They pollinate a LOT of the stuff we eat, and that we feed to our livestock.
• Without bees, there would be no honey! :(
• And not many flowers.
• Bees are fluffy, adorable, innocent creatures that deserve to live!
• They are also really photogenic. :)
• Their population is seriously less than half of what it was back in the 40's, and if it keeps decreasing this rapidly our bees will not be doing well at all in the future.

 

WAYS YOU CAN HELP THE BEES:

• Don't buy foods that have been farmed with pesticides, because pesticides are bad and they hurt bees and if you support farms that use pesticides then they will keep using them and the bees will keep being hurt.
• PLANT FLOWERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Seriously, go do it. Buy a flower and plant it in your garden right now. Please.
• If you see swarms of bees in your yard, that is GOOD! It means that you are doing a great job of helping the bees by planting things they like! Do NOT try to knock down their hives or kill them off!

(Thank you to my grandma Pat, or greengreengreen on Blogger, for giving me this information.)

 

Also, don't be afraid of bees. Not all people, but quite a lot of people in my experience, think of bees as evil things that want to sting any human that comes within a foot of them. (Ahem, Nora.) But bees really aren't as interested in stinging as you might imagine. Seriously, I know that, because there have been times when I have chased bees around for 10 minutes straight shoving a camera into their faces (as you can tell from the picture above--I didn't use zoom) and they just carried on with their merry bee lives without even thinking once of stinging me. They really only sting you as a last resort, like if you're a crazy little child who is stepping on them or touching them or trying to eat them for some weird reason. Please, make sure your child does not run around trying to eat bees or I will seriously start to wonder about your parenting skills.

 

Here are some special flowers bees really like:

 

Alyssum

Anise hyssop

Annual poppies

Asters

Bee balm

Black-eyed Susans

Butterfly weed

Clover

Coneflower

Cranesbill

 

So, I guess that's about all I have to say on the topic of helping the bees. So please, do your best to help them, and share this information with people you know!

Byeeeee!

Thanks for tuning into this bee PSA. The bees appreciate it.

4th of July

Last night I got my hair stuck in a fan. Long story.

Anyway, today is the Fourth of July. YAAAAY AMERICA!!!!!!!!!

At about 11:00 a. m, we went to this random neighborhood fourth-of-July party at the park, where kids ran around screaming and devouring hot dogs, brownies, cookies, watermelons and chips. There were a lot of dogs in wearing interesting patriotic attire, like this one:

More pictures of random stuff other than the dog can be found here.

As part of the fourth-of-July party, the fireman-people (I guess?) brought their fire trucks to the park and let kids play around in them. Nora insisted that I come with her into one, so I did. Then I unintentionally took a picture of myself while trying to take a picture of some random reflective part of the truck.

 

We also walked past this row of fancy old cars that was there for some reason, and my dad was beaming at them like they were the most beautiful things he had ever set eyes upon.

Then Dad, Nora and I rode our bikes to Dad's friend Andy's house, where he and Andy and Andy's wife blabbered on about their lives. While they did that, Nora and I went outside to their backyard where we took turns pushing one another on a homemade swing that hangs from a tree. It started out as just a civilized session of swinging, but eventually turned into a wild rampage of hurling the swing into the air and jumping off it while screaming random names of plants into the air, like, "CACTUS GERANIUM CORN!!!!!!!".

We kept injuring ourselves, and soon it kind of turned into a contest of who could get the most injuries. Nora and I were about tied until she smashed into the tree and shaved the skin off of both of her kneecaps, turning them a bright crimson red. We decided that that made her the winner.

Halfway through the day, I heard my mom having a random conversation on the phone with someone that went something like: "Ahh, gross!" and "Where did you buy it?
Turns out my grandma bought a watermelon that was apparently rotten on the inside.

Then, later, we went to see the fireworks! Yaaaaaaaaaaay! I saw some that were shaped like smiley faces and some that were shaped like fireworks. They were very colorful and firework-ey, and they exploded. Yeah. And I ate a blueberry pie in the shape of the American Flag. It was yummy.