MrsDoyle @ MrsDoyle @sh.itjust.works

Go on go on go on go on go on

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2 yr. ago

Lol, I was the computer genius in my office job because I knew how to change the paper size on the printer from Letter to A4. Soak up the praise!

That's a swarm - get in touch with your local beekeepers group/organisation and someone will probably come and collect it.

Otherwise don't fret, the bees will do their thing. Scout bees will leave the swarm and look for a new home for the colony (the queen plus a third to a half of the original hive). They report back with details, and a collective decision is made on the best choice. The swarm will then leave. (Honeybee Democracy https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147215/honeybee-democracy is a good read on this.)

Back home the rest of the colony have a new queen pupating. She'll eventually hatch out, go on a mating flight, and come back to start laying eggs.

People praise me up for "saving the bees". Honey bees don't need saving. It's the other bees that do, the hundreds of species of bumblebees, mining bees, solitary bees etc etc. Bees that are outcompeted in some areas due to the number of hobbyist beekeepers and commercial bee farms. I'm one of the baddies.

Same. I was very much in the wrong.

Scots is full of wonderful words - glaiket, baffies, birl, coorie - it's hard to pick a favourite. But I'll go for "thrawn" - it's a kind of perverse stubbornness, a grim grip on a point of view.

I stayed out later than normal one time and missed one of my dog's walks. He tore up a newspaper while staring at me. Rip, rip, rip. He knew I spent time looking at newspapers so he chose to destroy one, while heavily implying that if I fucked up his schedule again he would rip ME up.

My mouth is actually watering. That looks delicious!

North Korea has just built a beach resort. https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2025/jul/07/kim-jong-un-opens-beach-resort-north-korea-in-pictures

Me too -- oh no! 🫢😬😭

No, I'm a beekeeper, and did a course in microscopy earlier this year. I make slides of pollen and bits of bee. I have another microscope for dissecting bees. It is beyond thrilling to have my own wee lab, with bottles of chemicals and petrie dishes and dissecting tools.

The first one was wild for me. I knew it was happening, but it happened that it happened at the very moment I was on holiday in Welsh Wales, busy navigating my way around a small town. My phone is bluetoothed to my hearing aids, so very abruptly I had a voice shouting inside my head in Welsh. The message was repeated in English, but by that time I'd died of my heart attack, lol.

I bought a new fridge freezer recently. It was tricky because of limited width, but I'm happy with the Bosch I chose (it was on special). Freezer's at the bottom, with drawers, which I've grown to appreciate. I was also dubious about the bigger veggie drawer, but actually it's great.

I use a usb mug warmer to heat microscope slides.

Cheap cat food. She turned her back on it, made scratching motions as if burying shit, gave me a "look" and stalked away.

Meanwhile in Scotland, I stepped into my garden for five minutes this evening and now have at least five midge bites on my face.

I'm still eating blackcurrant jam I made in 2013. I use jars whose lids have the pop-up seals. Pour hot jam into hot jars, screw on the lid and the little thingie in the middle should pop down as it cools, showing it's sealed. When you open the jar it pops up again, to show the seal is broken. Just about all my jars come from a particular brand of pitted kalamata olives I'm partial to. Perfect size for jam.

When I was a child mum sealed the jars of jam with a disc of cellophane that had been dampened in vinegar, fastened with a rubber band. Pretty good seal actually, it tightened as the jam cooled. But if the jam went mouldy we'd just scrape the mould off - no big deal.

Best was my sister's - her new in-laws' gift was the use of their sauna business as the venue (they were nudists, it wasn't a sleaze thing). The caterers had to turn the sauna on to heat the food, so after we'd all eaten, most of the guests stripped off and had a sauna - including bride and groom and me, chief bridesmaid. Really nice, fun atmosphere.

Worst ... nah, I enjoy weddings. Never been to a bad one.

Raspberry jam is insanely easy to make. Equal weights of fruit and sugar, heat slowly to dissolve the sugar, then boil rapidly for five minutes. Bung in jars and screw the lids on while still hot.

The only sterile part is the jars - I put them in a lowish oven for ten minutes or so after washing them. Lids are washed, dried and swabbed with vinegar.

And if they're still alive come autumn, their sisters kick them out of the hive. No freeloaders! (I've seen this happen, it's quite brutal. The drone is struggling to get back inside into the warm, but the workers just shove him out.)

I've never learned about servers - never worked in IT, just a simple old hobbyist. Also never used a Raspberry Pi. But thank you! I might get around to reading up on the topic of servers over the winter. My computer has two drives, the original "spinning rust" and an SSD I installed (so quick! so quiet!). My thought is to keep Windows on a partition until I'm sure I like the distro I've chosen.

I have multiple backup drives, from a wee 4Tb Toshiba to a SparQ drive with 1Gb cartridges (a whole gigabyte, how will I ever fill it?). I'm pretty sure I've got everything saved, but I'm equally sure there'll be something I've missed.