Legalize Beekeeping in NYC

If you're interested, you have the opportunity to help legalize beekeeping in New York City. From now until February 3, 2010 the Board of Health will receive testimony regarding the proposed revision to health code Article 161.02.

Right now Article 161.02 reads:

"A beekeeping nuisance shall mean conditions that include, but not be limited to, aggressive or objectionable bee behaviors, hive placement or bee movement that interferes with pedestrian traffic or persons residing on or adjacent to the hive premises; and overcrowded, deceased or abandoned hives."

There are a few ways to share your words:

1. You can send and email to Rena Bryant: resolutioncomments@health.nyc.gov

2. You can go online: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/notice/notice.shtml

3. You can show up in person and let yourself be heard

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

from 10am-12pm at the 3rd Floor Boardroom (Room 330),

125 Worth Street, New York City (Manhattan)

pre-register by calling (212) 788-5010

Be sure to rehearse oral testimony, keep it brief, and bring 15 copies of your remarks.

The following is the revised text that the Department of Health is proposing, which would lift the ban on honey beekeeping, and which you should be responding to in your oral or written testimony --

"All venomous insects, including, but not limited to, bees other than non-aggressive honey bees (Apis mellifera), hornet and wasp. Persons keeping honey bees shall file a notice with the Department, on a form provided or approved by the Department, containing the beekeeper's name, address, telephone, email and fax numbers, emergency contact information, and location of the hive, and they shall notify the Department within ten business days of any changes to such information. Beekeepers shall adhere to appropriate beekeeping practices including maintaining bee colonies in moveable-frame hives that are kept in sound and usable condition; providing a constant and adequate water source; locating hives so that the movement of bees does not become an animal nuisance, as defined in 161.02 of this Article; and shall be able to respond immediately to control bee swarms and to remediate nuisance conditions."

Feeling a bit rusty

Since I moved back to New York City I've been living in the land of fiction. That is to say I've been working on fiction but I might as well be living a fictitious life, and a boring one at that, since all I can seem to do is: go to work (to pay the bills), move the car on Mondays and Thursdays (to conserve money), and go home and write (to feed the soul). Not bad all-in-all but kind of dull.

I've got a wicked case of cabin fever and if I could jet off to the Caribbean I would. And I just read that people aren't supposed to just hop on a plane and go to Haiti to volunteer to help. So I don't feel so bad about going to the Caribbean and not volunteering, although if they needed my help I'd be willing to head out and help on a day's notice. I've been following (as best as one can) what's been going on in Haiti via the New York Times and I've got to say it's kicked me into a whole nuther level of gratitude.

My dreams have been all kinds of intense lately. I meant to blog a month or so ago about a workshop I took with John J. Oliver. Suffice to say, the dude changed my life. For the better so no regrets. The workshop was called Psychic Self Defense. The reason I took the workshop is that I've been dogged by some nasty spirits for many years and I'd just about had it and needed to find a constructive approach to solving this weird-ass problem. John was a champ. If you ever watch Haunting Evidence he seems kind of serious and aloof. In person, he's quite generous and kind and has an odd sense of humor. While I was in the workshop it occurred to me that John is a vegetarian. I also kind of figured he didn't do any drugs. Aside from the practical skills we were taught, I was impressed by the man himself and felt I ought to model myself after him.

So. Now I'm a vegetarian but I say, "I'm a fucking vegetarian," because right now it's the dead of winter and I don't want to have to figure out how to be a vegetarian. But as I've got to eat then I've got to figure this out. I've been doing that although I'm none to happy with my diet right now and plan to get much smarter around this in the months to come.

Then there was the issue of doing drugs. Well. I decided not to do anymore. I'm a huge fan of opiates, mainly because my head is always traveling at the speed of light and I just want to chill the fuck out. So no more opiates.

Needless to say cutting meat and opiates out of my diet changed my head and my heart. My dreams which appear to be a product of my head and my heart, were soon to follow suit.

I usually have at least one extremely intense dream per night and then 2 or 3 fluffy dreams. By fluffy I mean that they aren't as intense as the master dream.

One night, about 2 weeks ago, I had a dream which featured myself and two of my strongest dream companions, my brother and an ex-lover. I was with these two people and an orb of energy entered the dream and knocked me on my butt and then hit the ex-lover. While I hopped to my feet and went to seek out the source of the orb, I looked out the window and noticed an article about angels lying in a snow bank.

When I woke up I started to research, on-line, about angels. It appears that they've been trying to get my attention for some time and I was just too busy being a lunkhead.

This is one of the better websites out there explaining who (?) or perhaps what angels are and how they function. Angels.

I'm stoked to know that angels are surrounding us at all times and not only that, they're here to help and if I ask the right questions, they'll give me the right answers. This is absolutely brilliant.

I'm off to Anahata next weekend. I'm fairly sure I'll find the place knee deep in snow. Not to worry it'll all melt by April. This Friday I'm meeting a man about buying his used bee keeping equipment. And in a couple months time I'll be planting Paw Paw trees. They're hardy to zone 5. Who knew? I can't wait to take a chomp out of one of these.

The case of the butch who was reluctant to bake.

I limped back into the city under the cover of darkness one night in early November and retreated to the sanctuary of my apartment. For the first 3 weeks I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I didn’t want to do anything, and I didn’t want to think.

In a city of 9 million people it’s hard to not talk to anyone. I did a pretty good job of not doing anything and not thinking for about a week. Then it was time to head back into the workforce and sadly, thinking became a large part of waking life.

As I emerged from my stupor (brought on by 8 months of organic vegetable farming) it seemed that time was moving faster than it had been in the past and that I wasn’t living a full-enough life. I started to look at my weaknesses and decided to challenge myself. There were 2 areas that needed to be addressed: my heart and my stomach.

To strengthen my heart I started to look at where I was being hard on myself or other people and then I made myself back off.

When it came time to strengthen my stomach I realized that there were skills in the kitchen that I had been purposefully neglecting for decades. As a young butch, way back in junior high school, when faced with the choice between taking Shop or Home Ec – you guessed it -- I took shop. Making spice racks and turning brass on a lathe to make a replica canon was much preferred to sewing and baking.

For me Home Ec was way too girly. What’s odd is that in my household if there was any baking or serious cooking to be done, it was done by my father. He baked everything from whole wheat bread and granola to Christmas cookies and puddings. When we lived in New Mexico he became an amazing cook of Tex Mex dishes. But as I’ve got this lily white palette (more on that later) I refused to eat most of this food, especially his enchiladas which were the equivalent of a three alarm blaze inside my body.

My mother had my brother and I cooking at very early ages. When I was 7 I checked a cookbook for kids out of the Los Alamos Public Library and begged my parents to let me cook Sunday night dinner which consisted of hamburgers and baked potatoes. At the time I wanted to cook because I’ve always been very independent and had a hankering to leave home from as early as I could remember and knew that I had to be able to cook dinner if I left home and planned to survive. Later when cooking dinner meant that I couldn’t stay out until dark and play in the canyons I began to resent cooking.

Fast forward four decades later and I found myself thinking that it was time to start baking. What’s a bit odd is that I’m usually on a wheat-fast and yet I wanted to learn the classics. I don’t want to make gluten free vegan cupcakes. Not that I have anything against them, but I wanted to go in search of some part of yesterday that I’d never bothered to include in my personal development. As with all things Ilsa I didn’t decide to read anything or do any study I just decided to do.

Last Friday I went to the Food Emporium on 60^th and 2^nd Ave, the first neighborhood I moved to when Donzie and I were together way back when. I bought all the necessary ingredients to make a chocolate cake, 2 cake pans, and headed home. When I got home I found a classic rock station (I’m not sure why but I like to cook and bake to classic rock) and set myself to the task of making my first cake.

I don’t now if I’ve got a serious case of beginner’s luck but this cake came out frighteningly good. Carly who never addresses me by full name, after her first bite said in a solemn tone, “Ilsa this is delicious.”

Then on Sunday I ended up making short-bread walnut crescents. This was the first time I baked cookies and I baked them as a trial run for the batch I plan to bring into the office for the Holiday Cookie Exchange. A lot of people liked them but they didn’t rock my world and I’m hoping to improve upon them this weekend.

My next stop on the cookie trail was chocolate chunk cookies.

It was during the mixing and baking of the chocolate chip cookies that I started to learn about myself even more. Baking requires patience. I am usually in very short supply of that substance and so it’s interesting to re-wire my brain. But when I come up with the equation “patience = cookies”, this reward system begins to work. Over the past couple of years I’ve hammered away at myself to acquire more patience and I’ve made small steps in the right direction. But it’s in my nature to rev the throttle and hit mach 2. Mach 2 is not the speed at which cookies are baked.

But what I like about baking is that it’s a process. And it’s a lot like solving a problem. And in the future I will strive for consistency and perhaps one day the first batch will resemble the next. All of this is worth looking forward to. And someday I might actually bake in the presence in someone’s company. Right now it’s all about being by myself in the kitchen and pushing myself to hit a certain mark. I like the physicality of chopping, mixing, blending. I like the precision. In making chocolate chunk cookies I realized that it was better to rely on my nose than the timer to sense, rather than know, when the cookies were done. Baking is a sensual experience and there’s not a lot of pleasure to be derived in rushing sensual experiences.

I’m still not sure if baking cookies is girly and I’m glad that there’s a straight man at work who’s going to contribute cookies to the cookie exchange. In some way all this baking is almost like a course in queer studies at the undergraduate level. My butchness couldn’t handle baking which meant that I’d found a chink in my masculinity which is actually kind of cool because I love to call myself out on my shortcomings even if it is in the privacy of my own mind.

my beginner's luck continues

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The pasture after the improvement cutting

wild oyster mushrooms harvested at Anahata