Bees!

Our neighbor, Liam, decided to harvest some honey this weekend so Terry and Sherry came up to watch. We helped cut the caps off of some of the frames and then extracted the honey by spinning it in the extractor. Here are some pictures...

Jamie cutting some caps

Elizabeth doing the same with Terry supervising

The honey pouring out of the extractor into a sieve

The finished product!

We also went out to the hives afterward to see the bees in action...

Liam smoking the bees so they calm down a bit.

One of the combs. The hive they are working on is called a "Top Bar" hive. The bees create the comb hanging down from the top bar that he is holding. It is supposed to be a more natural way to raise them, but it is harder to harvest the honey.

Bees at the entrance to one of the more traditional hives.

Well, no one got stung and he harvested about two gallons of honey, so I think it was a pretty successful day!

Here are a few more pictures of our campsite this past weekend. Hunter is very interested in what Elizabeth was cooking in the picture above. You can see our tent in the background; Darcy and Jamie's was just off to the left. Below is the swimming hole. The black bear that we saw would have been just at the top of this picture.

Pictures!!!

Kicking up our feet after a morning of swimming in the river. A few moments after John took this picture, he saw a brown bear on the other side of the river! Thankfully, Pete did not feel the need to prove his manhood right then.

A not-so-lovely camping shot of us in the tent... but at least you know we're still alive!

John and Pete sharing a book on the way back from Charlottesville.

We had a great time camping last weekend. John worked until 11:30pm Friday night so he didn't get to the campsite until close to 2am. Thankfully, we had a very restful time there with no schedule and great weather during the day. Saturday night, though, there was a HUGE thunderstorm. We braved it in our tents but listened with great attention to each crack of thunder while we fell in and out of sleep through hours of heavy raining. The cars weren't half a mile away, though, so we never felt like we were in much danger during the storm.

Here's a picture from Charlottesville the weekend before. We got to see Abby, but she's not in this photo:


We're staying in State College this weekend, just not at the house since there's another game. I'll be temping all day Saturday at a banquet event, but John has the whole weekend off. My parents are coming up to State College the next weekend to learn from our neighbor, Liam, who will be harvesting all the honey from the many beehives he maintains. My dad is interested in doing that eventually so he wants to watch.

Thanks to everyone who has posted so far! We miss you all.

Temping

Hi everybody! We got a new laptop while we were in Charlottesville because our other one was broken and didn't like our attempts to fix it! We're having some problems, though, getting our digital camera to work with this new computer so there won't be any pictures this time.

As far as work goes, I temped a couple of days last week at a construction office, and John started yesterday at an electronics factory. John's working 3:30pm until 11:30pm, Monday through Friday for two weeks which should be interesting. I start on Tuesday at an insurance office as a receptionist for two weeks. We're both on the job hunt and are grateful for these temp jobs that allow us to wait a little longer for jobs we're interested in. There's a position opening up at the end of September at the Women's Center here in town that I'm hoping to get. John's gotten to meet with a few Penn State professors, too, to talk to them about on-campus job opportunities. Being such a small town, much smaller than Lawrence even, State College doesn't have a ton of job openings so it's going to take us a little while to find a good fit. I've taken a few teaching jobs at the Red Cross while I'm looking, but I don't want to keep doing that so I'll only be taking a few.

Darcy, Jamie, John and I are going camping this weekend about an hour and one half away from State College. The Notre Dame vs. Penn State game is here this weekend so I'll be happy to avoid all the chaos by being up in the mountains! Jamie's a fan, though, so I think we'll be sneaking back into the nearest town to have dinner on Saturday night and watch some of the game.

We love all of you and miss you. Please feel free to post in response to any of this or to tell us what you're up to. We definitely read them (thanks Grandma and Papa for your posts!).