Sometimes, We All Fall Down

If your kid’s five years old and has never had a busted arm, or a cut head, or at least a couple of bruises, then your kid’s probably in trouble.
Now, I know that sounds horrible, as though I’m wishing broken arms upon toddlers.  I’m not.  But if a kid is exploring properly, she’s going to fall down occasionally – and fall down hard.  The cuts are the sign of a kid pushing the envelope properly, finding the edges of their knowledge and skill by occasionally sailing right over them.
Learning is failing.  A child who’s never had a bruise is a child who’s never taken a risk.
Likewise, I think relationships without bruises aren’t really good relationships.  You don’t want a relationship that’s all bruises (just as you don’t want a child falling down the stairs every day), but a relationship that’s all happiness is one that’s often static.
I’ve known happy couples who’ve told me, “We’ve never had an argument!”  And more often than not, those are the same couples who’ve split up after a decade because they quietly grew apart… or the couples who, as it turns out, didn’t have sex for three years because one partner didn’t want to and the other didn’t want to cause trouble.
A lot of the conflict-free relationships are inherently reductive – as in, “My going out on Friday nights with the girls bothers you?  Well, I’ll stop doing that.  Oh, and your playing World of Warcraft bothers me, so you should stop doing that.”  And slowly but surely, in these well-meaning, reductive relationships, you quietly give up everything that would cause the other partner stress.
It’s meant to be kind.  In a way, it is.  But eventually, you’re both bumping up against each other in the Venn intersection of each other’s comfort zones, which is often a very tiny and bland place indeed.
No, for me, relationships involve bruises.  You’re growing, taking risks, learning – and sometimes that’s going to inadvertently put an elbow in your lover’s eye.  You apologize.  You figure out what you could do better.  And then sometimes you discover this new thing you enjoy doing is going to be a little ouchy until both of you adjust, and you acknowledge that “comfort” is something that’s often overrated, and when it’s done you’re both the stronger for it.
If it’s a growing relationship, there are going to be growing pains.  It’s not always pleasant, but that’s often the way of ultimately good things.

Random Thoughts On A Random Day

I’m feeling random today, so have some random.
Today’s 4/20!
I’ve never really liked marijuana, and as such I can never really find a celebration of it all that entertaining.
I dunno.  Maybe it works for other people, but every time I’ve smoked marijuana I have really stupid thoughts that never seem to produce anything interesting in the light of day, then I eat until I’m sick.  Then the next day I feel tired and unmotivated.  It’s better than cigarettes in that at least I feel a radical initial high (as opposed to just coughing a lot), but the fetishization of pot just always makes me wonder what I’m missing out on.  So much of pot culture seems to idolize sitting around the house watching TV, and that’s mystifying.
I mean, hey, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it.  Pot should be legal, and I don’t have to get something to say, “Hey, you go ahead and have fun now.”  But in this case the experience of what other people have with pot deviates so much from my own that it’s actively bizarre to me to see people excited to smoke pot, let alone posting excitedly on Twitter going, “It’s 4/20, man, I can’t wait!”
On The Nebulas
Jim Hines said today that everyone nominated for a major award has the “What if I win?!?!” freakout.  I think it says something about me that I have not once ever thought that I’d win, something confirmed by Sauerkraut Station‘s lack of nomination for the Hugos.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to have been nominated.  It’s a major honor!  But my brain immediately went, “That’s as far as you’re gonna get, you’re going up against Rachel Swirsky and Geoff Ryman and Charlie Jane Anders, and those three alone would bury you.”  And I’ve gone on happily going, “I’m gonna attend the Nebulas!  As a nominee!” and never once attached the word “winner” to my head.
The things my brain chooses not to freak out about are odd indeed.
On Levon Helm
I think everyone who is lamenting the loss of music great Levon Helm should read Bart Calendar’s essay on his death, and feel shamed.
The short version is that Levon, a rich and successful man, was bankrupted by fifteen years of cancer.  And I think that’s the myth that conservatives are peddling to stupid people: that hey, if you’re smart and rich and have good health care, you’ll be okay.
Except, as anyone who’s ever actually fucking met someone who’s been through a large-scale disease knows, this is not actually true.  You can do everything quote-unquote right and still get fucked by our system.
I’ve talked to idiots who’ve said, “Well, if I get sick and I’m getting substandard treatment, I’ll just switch to a better insurance company,” as if the term “pre-existing condition” didn’t fucking exist.  I’ve talked to morons who’ve thought that if you had really good insurance, you’d be completely safe, and that the insurance would never run out or refuse a claim.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you don’t know how good your insurance actually is until you get direly ill.  Every insurance company looks good on paper.  But they can screw you bureaucratically in a thousand ways.  And they’re incentivized to, since a for-profit organization loses money every time they pay for a sick person’s treatments.
And yes, I’m sure you’ve had your insurance claims go well for some major illnesses, conservatives.  That’s fine.  I’m glad yours went well.  But you don’t get to use anecdotes about the horrific failures of the European system as evidence that socialized medicine is evil without acknowledging the fact that some pretty damn well-off people have to work through cancer in order to keep their family afloat.  To acknowledge that the idea that “good insurance and wealth is a catch-all” is not a 100% shield against going bankrupt.
(G’wan.  Talk to my wife, the bankruptcy lawyer, about this.  She knows how many bankruptcies come from medical claims.)
In short, if you’re a fan of Levon Helm and against the socialized medicine and Obamacare, then take a look at the hell that you – yes, you – put him through and decide whether you’re really a fan.  Or whether your policies were fair.

My Own Image Macro

So Bart Calendar posted this image macro an hour after I posted a Twitter status on this topic, so I felt it kismet to create my own:
Oh, Keith.  You're so cute.  Especially when you use poor grammar and misspell Davy Jones' name.

Covered in Bees, 2012: Installing a New Hive

Last year, Gini and I had a very odd argument about which one of us was going to open up a box of 10,000 bees and dump them into a hive. This argument was made odder by the fact that both of us were arguing that we should be the one to do it.
I won the right to install the hive, and the rather quickly taken video can be found here.  But this year, I got to be cameraman as Gini handled the bees, and so we have much more extensive videos.  For example, if you want to see what a box of 10,000 bees looks like, here is Gini holding three pounds of live and flying bees in a wooden box, with my explanations about how the bees survive the trip and the mechanisms of what one has to do to open it.

Now.  What was not captured on video was THE MOST TERRIFYING SOUND OF MY LIFE.
See, when you get a wooden box full of bees, you have to put it in your car to bring back with you.  In our case, we wisely stored it very far away in the trunk.  And I was getting some honey-bee-healthy out of the front seat when Gini opened the trunk and I heard “Oh shit!” followed by the sound of clattering wood.
When you know you have 10,000 bees contained in a small wooden box, this is a sound that encourages pants-filling.
Fortunately, it was just the new hive top falling out of the back, but for a moment all and sundry imagined how we would deal with an angry swarm of emerging from a broken bee-box. (Even if it probably wouldn’t have been overly bad – I mean, if you watch the third video you’ll see what happens when they’re dumped out, and it’s actually rather lackadaisical. Still, the business of scooping up a bunch of bees from our driveway using magazines would have been a hoot.)
Having survived that, I now explain how you prep the bees before opening them so they’re nice and mellow:

This next video is the money shot, as it’s a close-up look as Gini, yes, dumps a bunch of startled bees out of their box and into the hive.  Unfortunately, this video’s about two minutes longer than I wanted, with lots of dead space, as Gini and I debated techniques for a bit (i.e., we bickered) about how to put the queen in and when to remove the can of syrup.  Still, if you want to see a close-up of how you actually transfer bees into a new hive, this is your best bet from La Casa McJuddMetz.

For the record: Gini’s bee-tamping technique is inferior, but her bee-dumping style trumps mine.  So in an ideal world, I’d thump the bees to the bottom of the box and then hand it to Gini for an efficient transfer.
Finally, the hive installed, I took a video of what it looks like when it’s done, explaining the various parts and functions of the hive.  Gini got stung once when a bee crawled up her sleeve and got scared, but there’s also a rather vivid discussion of the dangers (or not) of being stung in beekeeping and bee docility.

Now we have to leave the bees to themselves for a week, and check in. We have not yet opened up the other hive yet because it’s been a series of crappy weather days, but we hope to do that soon – and yes, I’ll document.

The Many Hives Of La Casa McJuddMetz

So!  Tomorrow, I’m doing something I’ll wager most of you won’t be: I’m picking up a box of bees.  That’s right, we’re so bee-crazy here, we’re getting a second hive at La Casa McJuddMetz.
Which brings up a question: up until now, it’s only been one hive.  Now we’ll have two.  I’m notably awful at pet names, having not named a car or a laptop or my iPhone anything in the past decade…. But people seem to like them, and now it’s not just “the hive” but “the old hive and the new hive,” we need to have a differentiation for properly clever blogging.
So.  What names should we give to each of our hives?  Points given for extra cleverness.  Open to all entries.  As always, if Gini is sufficiently clever, she may trump you all.