Clinging to Summer

This is what liquid sunshine looks like. I have a feeling I'm going to be looking at this picture a lot going into the grey, cloudy, cold winter months (especially January).
My bees are working hard to prepare for winter, which seems to have come quite early. It snowed for a little while this morning -- big, fluffy tufts of cotton -- and the snow even stuck a little to my yard. I started feeding them a heavy 2:1 sugar syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water) to give them a boost for preparing their own food stores for the winter. The day after I changed out their water feeder for the syrup I glanced out of my kitchen window to see how much they had used and probably a quarter of the quart jar had been eaten. I'll keep feeding them until they don't seem interested in it.

My daughter and son took their assignment to move our pumpkin harvest to the front porch very seriously. They found some straw along the edge of a nearby field and arranged and rearranged the pumpkins on the porch to find the most appealing design. My flower pots struggled a bit through August's heat, but they rebounded with amazing vigor...just in time for autumn freezes. I'm hoping to overwinter the bright geraniums and my herb pot that contains basil, rosemary, and marjoram. Hmmm. At least it used to have marjoram in it. I can't remember seeing it out there recently, now that I think about it.

Since the weather is cold and wet today I turned my attentions to indoor stuff I've been putting off, like dealing with the family tech issues. I'm the resident IT person at my home. Today I thought I would start transferring old video movies shot in the last century onto my computer. Sadly, all I could find on multiple tapes, the old Video8 tapes, was static. Sigh. So there's your lesson for the week: Don't delay on transferring the old home movies into newer formats. They just disappear. Guess that means I'd better get my master's thesis (ugh) transferred from the floppy disk it's on to something much newer. I think this family tech update is going to take me all winter. DEEP sigh.