Surfing the Tao.com

Please follow me as I move my blog to my domain at www.surfingthetao.com.

Moving to WordPress.org

More news on the blog front. I am in the midst of changing my domain, www.surfingthetao.com, to a WordPress site/blog. I'm still not sure if I'll keep this Blogspot or not - right now I have a lot of traffic here so I might continue posting here for awhile. If you are linked here or subscribed to this feed, consider switching over to www.surfingthetao.com. It's not pretty yet but I'm working on it!!

A Closer Look at the 2012 Phenomenon

Aloha all, here's a link to my interview with Occult of Personality.

Hawaiian Bees are Missing Too

Regarding my post yesterday on our neighborhood bees, I just spoke with my neighbor and got an update. Although the beehive in their yard is still buzzing away (behaving strangely, though, he said they are circling in unusual ways for some reason), they have 60 other hives up north on the island, and are confused as to why 20 of them are suddenly gone, just in the past couple of months. Nothing’s left, he said, no queen, nothing; just the cockroaches. He didn’t actually realize it was happening all over the world and I think he was a little stunned. He promises to talk to other island beekeepers to see if it’s happening to anyone else.

Scary.

Missing the Bees

I live in Hawaii in a relatively rural place so we are used to seeing things like wild turkeys wandering around our neighborhood. Yesterday a wild goat scampered across the street in front of my car to join its family on the other side. The Big Island has wild pigs, cattle, goats, horses, mongoose, parrots and even donkeys. (Not to digress, but Hawaii even has its own Bigfoot myths – two of my family members have personal stories about that.) In suburban neighborhoods it’s not unusual for people to keep chickens or goats; the best eggs I ever had were from a friend’s backyard. In fact the people across the street from us keep a goat as a lawnmower and have a beehive.

They’ve given us some honey before; it’s wonderful. I used to have a patch of mint that flowered and the bees just took over my garden. One time a few months ago they swarmed, coming right up our driveway next to our porch. We all ran inside, including the dogs, at a loss as to what might have upset them.

In the evenings lately I’ve noticed there is always one lone and angry bee buzzing around our porch light rather frantically, as if it’s bound and determined to go somewhere. With all the talk about the bees disappearing lately, I always hope it will find its way home.

The bee apocalypse is hot news right now – truly a sign of the times. So far no one is sure what’s going on - a virus, genetically modified crops, insecticides or maybe the effect of an increase in UV radiation which bees use to navigate. People are quoting Einstein as having said, "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

Next time I see my neighbor I will ask about the bees. It’s important to know if they are still around, and we would miss them very much indeed if they weren’t.

Blogging

A little off the subject for me today, but my brain is full of RSS feeds and tagging and widgets. Blogging is a rapidly growing and changing world! At least for my generation – hey, I grew up with Pong, I have a lot to learn! As a self-published author I’ve done most of my marketing online so I’m constantly searching for more places to put my stuff. Thanks to my smart and wonderful stepdaughters, I’ve entered the world of blogging and social networking sites. It’s been a great way to keep myself involved in the topics that interest me, and to find other like-minded people. Here’s to all the people that work hard coming up with new gadgets, designs and ideas. I look forward to more.

However this rapid advancement can also mean that you can do something on one site that you can’t do yet on another. Frustration at Blogger led me to Wordpress and I’m happy to find some things are easier there; on the other hand, since I’m not into CSS yet (hey, I can find HTML code now and know where to put it, that’s saying a lot for me!) I went back and decided I liked some of the things about Blogger too. Maybe I’ll just keep them both for awhile and see which one works out to be better. I’m still learning and I like the different options and people on all of them. But between my pages on Blogger, Wordpress, Myspace, Zaadz, Vox, Tribe; even experimented with Freewebs just because I could; and now there’s stuff like tag clouds, del.icio.us, Digg it, Technorati, Open ID, and the various feed readers – as a neophyte it can be difficult to absorb it all. But – also a lot of fun. Here’s to surfing, dudes!