Queen

It was such a bleak day today, and my mood was so low, that I decided I might as well do gardening (eeurgh). I rapidly filled one barrow with prunings, and half-filled another with dead herbaceous material, then left them both prominently on display in the middle of the lawn as evidence and skipped off to do something more interesting. (Just about the only thing less interesting to me than gardening is housework, but let's step around that.)

Sadly the cold and dark conditions were keeping most of the garden inverts at home, so I was pleased when I heard the low drone of a bumblebee, but I had to follow the noise around the rose bed for a minute or so before this Common Carder revealed herself as the source. She was neither feeding nor foraging, but was spending most of her time rummaging about underneath the ground cover, and the only reason I can think of for this behaviour is that she's one of last year's new queens, just out of hibernation and looking for a suitable site for her own nest. I've written about the life cycle of the Common Carder several times already, so to save me yet more repetition please take a look at this post if you'd like to know more.

This evening I was sitting at my desk processing photos of Bs major and minor, picked up the lubricating glass of red wine that was sitting on a nearby coaster, lost my grip on it (damned joints), and dropped it. It landed on my plastic desk mat, bounced, and went over sideways, sending most of its contents in a graceful arc across the desk surface, my new iMac, keyboard and trackpad, and my R5 and macro lens. While trying to mop the camera with one hand and the computer with the other I heard the sound of dripping, and realised that a small red waterfall was now pouring over the back edge of the desk, down the wall, over a Belkin multi-plug socket, and onto the carpet. Even with R's help the clean-up took about forty minutes, and my language would have shamed a fishwife, but the good news is that camera and computer both seem to have survived unscathed. The Belkin socket may not have been so lucky: it's stopped leaking red wine now, and is currently drying out in the airing cupboard, but after this incident it seems unlikely that I'm going to feel able to rely on it to protect my electrical gear. Whether I can trust myself to look after my gear is obviously also open to question.