life in the key of B

Oh mercy, how did life get so busy?!  I like to say that I am ‘well occupied’ rather than ‘busy’ because I really don’t want to be part of the cult of busyness, where people wear their frantic pace of life like a badge of honour.  I relish slow times, even if my brain is always whirring away at a million miles an hour, but I also love a day that is filled with meaningful work.
This month, things are BUSY for me.  Busy as a bee, that’s me.  And it occurs to me that all the projects that I have on the go start with the letter ‘B’ which is just bizarre.  Here is a list of the ongoing passions I am currently pursuing, some which are long-term projects and others which represent a season of busyness just right now.

• Baby Boy tops my list because Henry is the reason I am staying at home right now.  He is my number one priority, but sometimes he needs to remind me of that.  He mostly does that loudly and messily but sometimes he reminds me with little whispers of “I need some hugs” or a chubby hand that grabs mine so he can drag me outside to play in the sandbox.  People in the shops and post office downtown often comment on his lovely personality.  I freely admit that were he not so absolutely delightful, I might be fine with putting him in daycare and going back to work.  But I truly love spending my days with this kid.  He is a hoot.

• Bishop Family Bees is expanding in a big way.  We are adding twenty new hives to our enterprise.  Our two existing hives will remain on our porch, while the other twenty will be housed by kind and curious folks in various spots around Brant County.  So exciting!  The parts of our new hives have been arriving from various suppliers and our basement has turned into a workshop.  Dad and Henry and I have been busy.  The other afternoon, while we were putting boxes together, I heard Henry whisper to my dad, "This is so much fun, Baba."  I love that he can find the fun in hard work because he is a part of Bishop Family Bees too!  He'd better get used to hard work.  Twenty hives means that I have one hundred boxes, plus twenty hive lids and twenty hive bottoms to assemble and paint in the next two weeks.  No problem.  I’ve got this.  I think.

• B-school is the business course I am taking online.  I can’t even believe how many huge aha moments I have had while completing this coursework.  It is completely changing the way I think and pursue our online business.  Which leads me to….
• Business.  We are expanding our online chocolate delivery service (sweetencouragement.com) to include other amazing fair-trade gifts.  It’s a lot of work right now, while I source new products and rework the website, but it is really exciting.  It would be a full-time job in itself, this endeavour, but it is only getting part-time attention from me right now.  Brick by brick, it will happen.

• B and B.  Wow, are we ever meeting some fascinating people through our Airbnb setup!  There sure are a lot of people checking out Paris on the weekends, in hopes of moving here.  Last night we hosted a fantastic couple from Toronto.  He does improv, professionally, and he thoroughly captivated Henry with his ukulele and spontaneous ditties about dinosaurs.  She is a documentary producer with all kinds of interesting projects on the go.  I could sit and talk with them forever.  They will probably rate me as too chatty on their Airbnb review but I just really enjoyed meeting them.  I hope they do end up moving to Paris and we then can have campfires and talk about how they used to pay me to cook for them and now I have to do it for free….
• Bathroom.  We have the best attic ever and we rarely ever use it.  And it could sleep five people, as it stands right now.  But it doesn’t have a bathroom.  So I am on the hunt for a contractor who can build me a bathroom in the attic so that I can rent the entire space out on Airbnb as a family suite.  Because I just figured since I have nothing else going on, why not do some renovations?
• Blogging is time-consuming.  But I love it.  I haven’t had the opportunity write like this since that time I backpacked around the world by myself and had all kinds of time to sit in parks and write.  These days it’s more like a mad scramble to complete other tasks so that I can still have a few minutes at the keyboard before naptime comes to an end.  But it still feels wonderful to be able to indulge this side of me.  I am grateful to those who read what I share here.  Thank you for joining me on this journey. 

• Baking bread is my other new passion.  I will write about it one of these days but that blog entry is still germinating in my mind.  Sourdough bread is, apparently, the ultimate accomplishment in the world of homemade bread and I am still perfecting it.  Who am I kidding?  Perfection is a long way off.  We are in the experimental stage and the results are sketchy at best.  But I love the mindfulness that is required to make this bread.  I have plan out the sequence of events that will take me from starter to sourdough to bread, which turns out to be a two or three day process sometimes.  Even when I am not baking or planning to bake, I have to nurture the starter to ensure that it will be there and ready when it is time to bake more bread.  There is no such thing as ‘whipping up a quick batch’ of sourdough bread.  Talk about slow food!

There you have it!  Eight B’s that consume my time these days.  And now that the weather is warming up, I will soon be desperate to get into my garden.  I am thankful for the sandbox and a child who loves to play on his own in the dirt.  That means that I will get to have my fun in the dirt as well.  The garden is still pretty dormant, but there are signs of life slowly popping up.  And there are more bees back there this week than I have ever seen in our yard.  I keep finding Henry squatting in amongst those early flowers, intrigued by the honey bees who are gathering whatever nectar and pollen they can find right now.  By mid-May, our own bees will be hard at work doing the same things.  But for now, we focus on all the other things that need to happen before then.   It's go-time!!!