More biking!

As I posted several years ago, we have a small cider press. Well, it's getting to be apple season again, so we needed some apples.

What better excuse for a bike ride? We only got about 5 pounds to add to the existing 3-4 pounds we bought earlier, so it wasn't a huge issue to ride home with the produce. Sometimes when I bike to the store I buy a lot...

21.35 round trip to farm stand in 2:02 for an average of 10.4.

Together with 15.5 yesterday just riding around, and my Friday adventure, I've got 60.6 in three days. So if I average 10 miles/day for four days I'll have another hundred. However, that's often hard to do on a workday; frequently I only have time for a short 5-6 mile loop...

House projects

We've been having HVAC people come. Sounds like we're not going to be doing the heat pump thing but just replacing the type of unit we have now. Though some additional research on the internet found different info than I was told about heat pumps. Two more scheduled this week. We don't have any estimates yet, but it's going to be at least a couple tens of thousands of dollars minimum.

Meanwhile, we had noticed some rotting boards in a few areas outside. So we've had a couple people come by to look at that job. I liked both of them; heard from one on the cost; waiting for the other.

However, today's person also noticed that we have some kind of bees living in our house. I had thought they were just interested in some late-blooming flowers nearby, but he pointed out the place bees were going in and out. Bah. Haven't figured out which kind of bees they are; we took a video and tried to look at the stills but the quality was poor, in part due to the vast amount of underbrush that we've allowed to develop making it hard to see the actual entry so all the bees in good light were still flying.

So, tonight after the bees went to bed, I put on a headlamp and whacked away at some of it. It's supposed to be roses with a little ground-cover below them. But, instead it is volunteer elm trees and god knows what weeds. The elms were really hard to whack off. We've done this before; the stump is pretty big (well, a couple inches, but you can't get that with loppers). I took out everything that was actually leaning up against the house except one rose bush. I whacked a little off the back of a couple of the roses; it's not really rose-pruning time, but this is an emergency.

Thus, the bee entryway will be accessible in the daytime, and maybe we'll get some good photos as they enter and exit. The considered opinion is that they're not honeybees, so probably it'll be poison rather than extraction. They weren't at all aggressive when we were out there with the camera and just peering at them.

Just what we need -- another house project!