And I just figured out tonight that it is called Blue Curls or Phacelia Congesta:

I see it on the side of the road by some railroad tracks on my walk home, and bees are always on it, so I want to plant it in our yard. 

My beloved wife is very involved with the pro-life movement, an grassroots effort that brings together people from all walks of life to support the sanctity of human life in Texas.

I have learned so much about the workings of our Texas state government through Katie, who tells me about the successes and failures that she and the other lobbyists have while working at the state capitol.

You can make a huge difference in your state government! I didn’t think that that was really possible before, having become cynical about one person being able to affect any change for the good in government, but I was wrong.

Katie shares stories with me on a weekly basis about how she gets to speak with legislators and their staff and educate them about cloning and embryonic versus adult stem cells. Most don’t realize that proposed legislation to “ban cloning” is actually legalizing cloning by support of somatic cell nuclear transfer.

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Thanks be to God for holy archbishops like Archbishop Burke in St. Louis!

Sadly, Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital invited Sheryl Crow to perform a concert for the benefit of the hospital. Ms. Crow believes that cloning human beings and then destroying them is good to do and actively lobbied in the recent Missouri elections that saw the passage of legislation enabling scientists to clone and kill human beings.

So while it is a good goal for the hospital to raise money, having Ms. Crow as the performer is not good at all.

Archbishop Burke, as he explains in this video, asked Cardinal Glennon to withdraw their invitation to Ms. Crow, and they refused.

So Archbishop Burke resigned from the hospital’s board in protest. How awesome to see a courageous man in Christ stand up against the evil of cloning, abortion, and embryonic stem-cell research, and to do so in a valiant, gentle way.

This man is the successor of the Apostles: Peter, John, James, and the other first followers of our Lord, and he has shown in today.  May God strengthen him and his brother bishops!

I filled up the 2 gallon feeder pail with sugar water after me and Katie’s bee inspection, but some of it spilled on their front entrance.

The bees all lined up and started drinking it together:

Robert has now moved to Long Island, New York! We miss him already, though fortunately he will be coming back to Texas for a few weeks in June for Gerardo and Roxanna’s wedding.

Roxanna, Gerardo’s fiancee, took a picture of me and Robert and Gerardo (aka “the G”) when we went out to dinner together a few nights ago, the last dinner with him before he left on the jet plane. We had our fill of Wings ‘n More, an old Aggie favorite, and topped it off with some Shiner Bock.

I know that he will have many blessed adventures in New York, and now I get to sing the small bits of Sinatra songs that I know whenever I call him: “…I want to be a part of it…”

Devin is trying to make me fall more in love with him this week. And, my goodness, it’s working!

First, I arrived home on Saturday afternoon, after a long and luxurious day of relaxing at my Theology conference, to find that Devin had:

*Installed a new shower pipe and head in our guest restroom
*Installed a new doorknob on the pantry
*Installed a new doorknob on the guest restroom
*Dismantled our defunct master bedroom suite

Knowing that these tasks took Devin much of the afternoon made me feel simply smothered in love.

And, then, tonight he did it again. Making me fall in love with him, that is. I was feeling quite tired and needed some good food to cheer me up, so Devin took charge. He saw to it that I had a good meal and then helped me unload the laundry from the dryer, as well as wash and rinse our evening dishes.

Sweet love, thank you so much! I’ve never known such a man like you. YKC!

Katie and I geared up in our bee suits and inspected our bees today–it was really cool.

Here are the notes from my bee journal (every beekeeper has to have one, you know):

• Bees drank 2 gallons of sugar syrup in the last week!
• Bees quit building burr comb all over the place like last time and have built straight up and down the frames.
• Bees have drawn comb on 6 of the 8 frames, leaving 1 undrawn, and 1 partially drawn (on the outsides)
• We saw bee larva in the comb, so our queen is laying eggs!
• We also saw “capped brood”, meaning larva that have been capped over so they can metamorphose
• We probably have 4 frames that were mostly capped brood–that’s a lot of bees getting ready to emerge
• Bees are storing lots of pollen in the comb
• We saw Queen Ambrose with her distinctive green dot!
• We added another super (or hive box) with frames in it for the bees to expand
• But, dum dum dum, we saw what looked like it could be a queen supersedure cell

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I tackled the hot water valve on the master bathroom sink today–now that I understand how the compression pipe works it only took a few minutes–and then I installed the connector conduit pipe and the new faucet.

The old sink:

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Here is a video where you can see some of Ambrose’s bees bringing in sacs of pollen on their legs. The neighborhood dogs provide the background music.

Since Katie was at her theology seminar all day, I thought I would surprise her by fixing things around the house that have been on my “Big Fix-It Man” list for months.

What I naively thought would be a simple venture in home repair, as usual, grew to be a near-emergency and took the entire day.

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