In a weird haze after wrapping a particularly unruly first draft.  I say first draft because it was after the rough draft but not… clean enough for the polishing stages that begin at draft three.  Many structure issues to work on before I can tweak the language.

I wonder if I write in a different language than I edit in.

Also, my yard is full of drunk bees.  My husband and I picked up a massive amount of alcoholic plums off the ground yesterday.  The tree in the backyard is quite prolific, and no matter how many we eat and give away for jams, there’s always bushels that end up overripe and boozy at the end of August.  While we were picking these up from the ground, we nearly closed our hands over a few bees as they drank from the plums.  All of them buzzed in warning, and tried to dart for us, but they couldn’t get more than an inch off the ground and they wavered around, unable to fly in a single direction.  One bee, a great black and yellow bumble about as big as the last knuckle of my thumb, (maybe a little bigger.  I have really small thumbs), was holding onto a fallen leaf the same way I’ve seen some partiers in a bad way hold on to the toilet.  He wasn’t moving, and I picked up the leaf to inspect him further. 

I could see his eyes and he was adorable.  He only clutched the leaf more tightly and his antennae waved, and I put him back down, away from the rest of the plums.

We got all the plums off the ground, but there’s still a lot of juice on the ground, and the bees are still hovering/staggering around the tree.  Now, like most things in Washington, we just have to wait for the rain.

This morning, my husband said that great big bumble was searching around for some aspirin and plain potato chips.  But really the best hangover cure is a hamburger and silence.  Poor guy can’t manage, though, buzzing everywhere he goes.

In almost unrelated news, while searching through Google to see if possible titles have been used before (on stories that would bring unwanted comparison), I tend to come across some hilarious questions posed by presumably more than a single person.  This one?  “How much does chocolate weigh?”