World Bee Day

Today marked World Bee Day according to Positive News Magazine.   Is there a day to celebrate everything now?  Mind you the bees need celebrating.   

Our neighbour John keeps bees so our garden is full of them at the minute.   The cotoneaster is starting to bloom and they're all over it and we left a lot of dandelions until their blooms had disappeared.  The bluebells though don't seem to attract them in the same way.  I've also seen quite a few bumble bees around - they're really fun to watch, just getting on with their business and burrowing into the ground. 

And then I've become addicted to the Spelling Bee - another NYTimes puzzle alongside Wordle - are you on the Wordle fad yet?  Apart from the really annoying American spelling of words it's a good brain challenge.   I've reach Queen Bee status a couple of times on the Spelling Bee and they have absolutely beautiful bee pictures - a couple of which I have appropriated here.  

In other news we are progressing well with recording on the new album which we now have a working title for - Shoreline.   Our fundraiser on Kickstarter got off to a good start and we're on schedule to have all the guide tracks finished in another 10 days or so, barring more hospital appointments for mum.   We're down with her every weekend now so the week and our brains are split - I keep trying to walk through a window to get to the loo in the middle of the night - it's very disorientating moving between two beds on a regular basis.  It's around now that I wish that I'd got a 'proper job' with a pension and paid sick leave when I had the chance and when petrol didn't administer heart failure every time you went to fill up the car.   A bit late now.  But all will work out.  

So once the guide tracks, or the skeleton tracks as I like to call them, are done, then it's time to add the little bits of other instruments.   Nowadays that's mostly done remotely - we send tracks to a keyboard player or guitarist or fiddle player and they add their bits and send it back for finishing.   So then when all the songs are completed to our satisfaction we put final vocals and harmonies on the tracks and start mixing - that's when the fun really begins.  

We hope to have a sample of one of the songs in a basic form shortly. 

Images removed due to copyright infringement ...