October 4, 2010

At breakfast Iseline insisted on sitting on a very tall chair without a back rest. At first we did the standard cultural norming reaction of “YOU CANNOT DO THAT!” However it struck me that we had no good reasons for forbidding it, except that it was unusual.  I like different, and I think kids should be allowed to be different. It makes them grow into free and happy human beings. It’s so easy to go with conform, but that makes us behave like the famous monkeys in the banana and water spray experiment. For Iseline the situation was nowhere as complicated as it was for me and Hélène. She just wanted to sit on a very strange chair and was very happy when, to her utter amazement, we let her do it.

Today we went down to Campbell in the morning to meet my old friend and Troll, Hal. Hal is a great guy with a trademarked smile.

He has a great blog called Two Big Cats, two big cats (duh!), 2 dogs and about 100 000 bees. His cats are of the breed Maine Coon, a type of cat closely related to the Norwegian Forest Cat. Here’s one of his beautiful cats.

Hal had been kind enough to wait with harvesting some honey so that we could do it with him. He has 3 hives in his garden and told us a lot about beekeeping. I hadn’t thought much about it before and have been naïve enough to think that you basically put out the hive, wait for a few months, and then harvest the honey. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hal could go on for days about the intricacies of beekeeping. It’s a really interesting subject and Adrian and I have already planned to get a bee hive when we get back home. Hélène is not as enthusiastic as we are.

Hal dressed me up with the appropriate equipment and tried to smoke away my body odor.

Then we gave the bees some smoke

and stole their honey.

Note that some of the honey cells have been sealed off. That’s when the honey is ripe for harvesting according to Hal. We scraped off the sealed honey and let the bees have the rest back. Bees venture about 2 miles (3km) from the hive and it takes nectar from about 5 million flowers to create 1 pint (half litre) of honey. The bees keep a temperature of about 100 degrees (40 celcius) inside the hive at all times and worker bees only live for about 45 days.

Honey is finger licking good.

The honey was heated up to become more fluid and then filtered.

And in the end the kids got to bring a jar of honey with them.

Afterwards Hal and his wife treated us to a great tuna sandwich based lunch.

We then drove over to Cupertino to have a look at Apple’s headquarters, or the mothership as we would find out they call it. We saw a sign with “visitors” and hoped there would be some kind of visitor’s center. It’s after all one of the best known brands on the planet and a lot people must be coming here on pilgrimage? No such thing. We asked an Apple employee we passed and he was a bit surprised by our question. All they had was a retail store which seemed to be for employees only. Well, it was cool to have been there and we got our trophy pictures

We would not let ourselves be demotivated by this lack of hospitality, so we headed over to Google and their Googleplex in Mountain View. There were only small signs to be seen and we couldn’t find anything that looked like a main entrance. We walked into the campus and were quickly and diplomaticly thrown out by Google security! We went back and took a photo by one of the small signs.

Enough was enough, we skipped going to Facebook headquarters and went back home to Menlo Park to cook dinner.

Eirik

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