thorns.

A couple of weekends ago, I saw a honey bee outside our kitchen window. I thought it odd, but not too odd. After all, we do have beekeepers less than two or three miles from us. It briefly crossed my mind that we might have a new hive somewhere in our wooded backyard.

Not quite that far away, it turns out.  It seems some squirrels had eaten their way into our attic and left a little doorway to the outside on the back corner of our roof. That, combined with the Icynene insulation we recently had put in the attic, created a convenient, closed in space for an enterprising swarm to move into.

While I applaud their resourcefulness in finding such a unique dwelling, I’d like to point out that we have several hundred trees in our backyard, many of which probably have equally convenient (if less stylish) spaces for setting up their honey factory.

Tags: bees, house stuff, not living in a tree

Stefanie Posavec “On the Map” via (NOTCOT): Gorgeous maps that embody the possibilities of visualization of information.

Periodic Table Menu at Miracle of Science in Cambridge via Laughing Squid: Does the Hb come with Fr and Ko?

10 Best New Illustrators via Tigerprint: I love some of these. I foresee new books for The Boy.

Asterisk Bookends: And other functional art at Blank Project.

Blank is Like Blank, analogies to live by: Using Helvetica is like owning a Mac: It looks so cool that you never bother to stop and think if you really need to.

Apparently my two weeks of (mostly) vacation from my workout was enough for my muscles to protest A LOT when I got back into it this week. I firmly believe that my arms and thighs would boycott the rest of my body and walk off the job if they were able. Instead, they’re settling for making me miserable. Still, only 5 weeks (from today!) until we fly to Maui, so I must stay vigilant! ::looks sternly at thighs::

In further news of suck, it’s starting to look very much like I’m going to miss Eddie Izzard when he comes in June. We have tickets for one of the shows, but I just had a business trip pop up that I don’t think I can miss. I am pissed. When we bought the tickets, we included Girl v1.0 as a birthday present (she turns 17(!) in May) because Izzard has been the source of untold numbers of inside jokes between me and her for years. Now I’m going to miss it and she’ll have to go with someone else.

Plus, the trip is right after I get back from Seattle, so instead of hanging around in Seattle over the weekend and coming back on Sunday, I’ll be flying back Thursday or Friday so that I can spend some time with the family before having to head off again. Consequently, I’m probably going to take the Saturday before the conference starts to take Amtrak up to Vancouver from Seattle, spend the day, and then take the train back down Saturday night.

On the other hand, work itself is going well overall. There are a couple of new projects I’ve come up with which should be fun, and there’s the ongoing HUGE project as well. I’m one of those people who would rather have too much work than not enough, so this is good.

Tags: girl v1.0, running when not in danger, worklife

I’m trying to figure out how to make time for all the things I want to make time for, without scheduling myself into minutiae. Not sure this is possible.

• Dwiv and I drove up to Nashville and came back with this. It’s a 2007 Lexus RX400h (hybrid), it gets over twice the MPG of my Odyssey, and it’s lovely. (It talks, OMG!)
• While we were gone, The Boy managed to fall face-first into Girl v2.0’s bed and split his lip wide open. It looks pretty big and ugly, but apparently ice cream heals all things.
• Gaming happened yesterday. We’re at a sort of weird in-between place where we don’t really seem to have a goal. Or we have too many of them. Not sure.
• I worked on my website. Laura’s inspired me to go back to getting all my stuff moved over to my domain and crosspost. She pointed out two WP plug-ins, one for LJ and one for IJ, and I found one for Vox so…  I may have gone a little nuts with my tags though. ::look shifty::