***, I saw that he had gotten off the tractor and was motioning at something in the fencerow. As I pulled up I saw a dark blob in a bush and somehow I just knew it had to be more bees. Now he was finally excited. He'd never seen a swarm before and I still tried telling him that this little pile of several hundred bees was nothing at all like the previous *** Cool! We had a swarm just hanging--about the size of a basketball--in an evergreen in the front yard of a farmhouse in Central Iowa. It was fascinating and slightly nauseating, at the same time...if you catch my drift. I had two small children and I was afraid they'd get out of the house and head toward the noise. I believe bees "swarm" either when they find their hive uninhabitable (for whatever reason) or because, as you said, they have an extra Queen and need to separating the fighting aristocracy. :-)

Wow, Jokik, I wasn't aware that personal attacks were allowed on this forum. I'm sure you thought you were being so subtle with your Common Sense for Dummies comment. Aren't you clever! So what are the "more than adequate" precautions are you taking with this dumpter-diving wood furniture retrieval? If you are so well-informed, I guess you know that bedbug eggs take 2 weeks to hatch? I'm shocked that you are being so rude about something that's turning into a public health crisis in every major city, every college campus and many single family homes in the middle of nowhere. I feel sorry for your neighbors. If you were so nice and so smart, then you would give a little tutorial about the details about how "more than adequate"ly you clean your dumpster finds so that other people on this forum will learn how not to get bedbugs if they should choose to continue to dumpster dive. But I suspect you are not so nice and so smart. "Common Sense for Dummies" back at you!

Sometimes the biggest risk in decorating is to go the safe, neutral, 'in-style', paint-color-of-the-year route. Now, there's nothing wrong in painting your living room the same beige as the model home you fell in love with when you bought your house. There's no harm in getting a microfiber couch that will stand up to the 4 kids and clean up well for company. There's no foul (yes, you know how I want to spell it...) in buying a beautiful painted rooster for your kitchen island because it ties in all the colors of the adjoining great room and you also have a set of chicken plates somewhere. There's not even a good reason to pull down your own mullioned, (as the case may or may not be!) ginormous mirror that just fills up that zooming wall in the entry and gives you that satisfied feeling that you found just the right piece for Your house, and looks very real since it's up way too high for your own visitors to suspect that it's anything but the real deal. Why? Because a risk for you may be entirely different than a risk for me. Painting a nerf football and using it as art would not be a risk for me. It would be an act of insanity. I can imagine visitors to the house of MV coming innocently close to the giclee-nerfe' and only thinking... "How cool is that sculpture?"--but in my own far more pedestrian/subdivision/cookie-cutter house setting saying... "What the hey?? What were you smoking when you painted a sponge football, Red?" And BTW, have you seen the football in question? Or the plastered table? Bet you could scroll through the photos fast in the link below and not spot it immediately. I've seen it before in the magazine and had a hard time picking out the makeshift art from the artist-painted. Fabulous. No, taking a decorating risk is not the sensible thing to do for everyone. And my risk might make you snicker. Your risk might make me shudder. Beauty is most assuredly in the eye of the beholder. And sometimes beauty is found more plentifully in areas where the shopping is more limited. I know for sure that my house in a small town in New Mexico, at the edge of the desert, next to a Walmart, had more interesting, 'found' items, than any place since. I had few options for furniture or accessories. Now, with stores surrounding me, and a truck to haul things with, I find myself bringing home a lot more cheese than I ever thought possible. Thankfully, most of mine comes with a return receipt and rarely makes it past the first few hours in my house. And interestingly enough, the things I find in the corner of a barn at an estate sale out in the country, are usually not risky buys at all. I know that old piece of rusted iron will work somewhere. The aging needlepoint with spider webs on the edge will make a great pillow. The chipped cobalt and white clay vase will be wonderful on the dresser. No risks and no regrets. It's the stuff I get the register receipts for that always prove to be the the question marks. Right now, I'm working on my own art project. I'm applying plaster and a coat of pink latex paint to a bottle of Nyquil. Then, when it's dry and perfect, I'm going to send it to a good home in Chicago. Watch for it next year in Expensive Home Magazine. Red Here is a link that might be useful: from Apartment Therapy

Carolyn, I have read a lot of Frank's work and I think she is slipping a bit. Somewhat reminiscent of A.R. Siddon's novels, which get quite repetitive in their vocabulary and plots. (e.g. I think she used "spavined" as an adjective in every book she ever wrote!). I have just finished Ian Caldwell's "The Fifth Gospel." The author claims it took him 10 years to write. In a sense, it is a "tour de force" in terms of scholarship re early Christian church history. The plot has many twists and turns. It is also a study of the separation of the Eastern Orthodox patriarchy from the Western Catholics and the papacy. The novel puts a very human face on the late Polish Pope as well as the Vatican as a small nation unto itself. (Caldwell's previous novel was "The Rule of Four.").