Once again I am happy to not be shoveling out from a massive winter storm, in this case one called Jonas. The latest named storm passed mostly east of us, leaving Happy Acres with a little snow on the ground but nothing too out of the ordinary for January. I will need to shovel out in front of the greenhouse so I can get in there, but that’s about all the shoveling I plan on doing.
snow from Jonas
The weather is supposed to warm up in a few days, and most of the snow should melt quickly. I’ll wait until then to open up the cold frames. Even the beehive doesn’t have much snow on it, and hopefully the bees are staying warm inside. They form a cluster this time of year, with the queen in the center so she stays warm. The temps are predicted to be up around 55°F by Saturday, so they may even be out flying then. They probably need to take what is delicately called a cleansing flight, since they do not poop in the hive! The Russian strain of bees we have should handle the cold weather just fine. Even though we didn’t get any honey from the new hive this year, they had plenty of honey stored for themselves for winter. The whole top box was full of honey when I did my last inspection back in October. We never take any honey from the bottom two boxes (deep supers).
bee hive
Inside our house, my six year old computer is in need of replacement. I powered it off the other day and the hard drive did NOT want to spin back up. I finally got it going, but that is never a good sign. Before I retired I served as Disaster Recovery Coordinator for many years, so you can rest assured that I have good (and current) backups of all my files! I even have ‘offsite’ backups, in this case residing in my workshop. When I was still working (at an aluminum plant) the auditors required us to have backups in multiple locations, so nearly every day I schlepped mag tapes out to a process control computer room for safekeeping. I usually walked, so it was good exercise, and occasionally the backups came in handy. These days I can fit much of my important stuff on a thumb drive, which is encrypted in case it gets lost or stolen. So I will be shopping for a new PC, which is not a bad thing to do on a cold snowy January day. Considering my years of dealing with various computer problems, you could say it is deja vu all over again!
I’m like you and am paranoid about losing my data especially photos and have a couple of external hard drives with backups. It is a pain transferring software and passwords to a new machine though or do you cleverly have a cloned hard drive to copy across?
No cloned hard drive. And I use external drives too in addition to the thumb drive. I’ve got all my photos on them for backup. I’m not looking forward to installing software, but it will be better to do it in January than say later when seed starting and gardening activities take off!
We’ve had a few snow storms, but nothing out of the ordinary so far. There’s a good bit of snow on the ground, which I hope sticks around for my plants sake.
Good luck with your computer – I always hated switching computers as it seemed to take forever for me to get the new one set up “just so”. Things seem to be improving on that front, though, as the last time it didn’t seem as painful.
We typically do not get a long lasting snow cover. This one will almost surely be gone in a matter of days.
I’m happy to say that I’ve never had to shovel snow! But I am “ms. tech” around here so I have had the onerous task of setting up a new computer. Winter would be the least burdensome time to have to do it. Good luck, I hope your switch goes smoothly.
I know everything’s relative, but I should be ok as long as I don’t have to call for technical support. That is truly one of my least favorite things to do in life, mostly because it is often difficult to find someone who can actually answer your question (or solve your problem).
Thanks for sharing what’s happening in your garden. How interesting, Russian bees. Probably a good choice for your wintry location. I’m missing Harvest Monday but understand the need for a break when harvests are scarce or non-existent in some regions. Wish you well with a new computer!
Thanks for posting a snow photo. This former Hoosier misses snow in southern California. Well, I miss ooking at it. Dont miss shoveling it or driving in it.
I had a harvest this week–lemons, avocados, lettuce and arugula. I really need to get back to my blog., but I am too busy processing travel photos. Just got back from France.
After my own struggles with 2 computers crashing in the past few months and the loss of Soooo many pictures and even my garden tracking spreadsheet, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that in a past job I was one of those IT auditors making sure everyone had backups. 🙂 Ah well, “do what I say, not what I do”. Geez.
A friend of mine recently lost his queen bee, and therefore the entire hive. Not sure what happened, but normally they last through winter – I wonder what they do for “cleansing” in our temperatures?
Sometimes queens just die, though they normally live for several years. As for the bee poop – I think they hold it until temps are warm enough to fly (above 55°F). I do know not to stand too close to the bee hive during a warm spell!