Showstopper

My parents stopped by and we sat out on the deck overlooking our unfinished stone fence project. I served them warm slices of the tortilla espanola that Peggi had just finished making. I helped peel the potatoes. We made two batches. One was destined for Jeff and Margaret Spevak’s post jazz fest party last night. The Spevaks served Sangria and tapas and our tortilla was a hit. Jeff played cds from the artists who appeared at the festival.

We use Gerry Brinkman’s (from the old Rochester Club and now chef at Hotel Wellesley, on the. St. Lawrence Seaway) tortilla espanola recipe. It’s really a simple recipe but it is sort of tricky to make. Ideally you need a hinged frying pan because it is made on a stove top and you have to turn it over and cook the other side before the potatoes, onions and egg have set up. We have such a frying pan. We bought ours online at La Tienda just before Peggi stopped eating eggs to combat her high cholesterol.

My parents had just been to an Historic Brighton luncheon where a speaker talked about the lost city of Tryon, an old Indian settlement on the mouth of Irondequoit Bay near where we live. Early settlers met the Indians here and traded guns for furs and that sort of thing. We sere sitting right under the wasp nest and I kept a watch on it without making parents aware of the thing. That would have been a showstopper. When they left I brought the hose in the front door, opened the back door to the deck and blew the nest away. Peggi videoed it. It was pretty anticlimactic.

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Into Oblivion

Bee hive on the back of the house
Bee hive on the back of the house

When I first spotted this hive it was much smaller and I checked it a number of times and but never found any bees near it so I let it go. Now when we step out on the deck one usually dive bombs us as a warning shot and then they leave us alone. The hive has grown to about twice the size and there are wasps coming and going all day. They run around this thing in a clockwise direction while others fly inside for a few seconds and then they take off. Who knows what goes on inside this thing. I know I have to deal with it before it gets out of control so I’ve been thinking about mounting the garden hose machine gun style onto something and turning it on from a distance and blasting this thing into oblivion.

We had ground bees last summer in the front and we let them go until someone told us that could die if they got stung so had to deal with it. I pounded there holes with a sledge hammer, hosed the heck out of the whole area and they just kept coming back. They dug new holes and must have hooked up with underground community because they would not be run off. They were there until the ground froze.

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