The site is Ashland Current and it is up and running after a month of publicly developing and testing site features at http://ashlandcurrent.com.

The Ashland Current received recognition on August 2 in Editor and Publisher, a national newspaper industry magazine and website. The magazine referred online to a report first published in the Ashland Current in July about lenders taking control of American Consolidated Media, a national company with ties to Ashland and the northern Wisconsin and Minnesota region.

Basically, the three of us are ecstatic to be this far along in the process of providing northwestern Wisconsin with quality online news and information, and we are trying our best to provide the community with a much-needed and sought-after resource.

We created the idea for the Ashland Current in the summer of 2009, started an LLC together, drafted an operating agreement, and wrote a business plan. Since then, Tristan built and designed the site, and Andrew and I compiled and posted hundreds of event listings, stories, and multimedia related to the Chequamegon Bay region. In late June the Ashland Current web presence went live for the public.Over the course of the site’s first month, Ashland Current had 2,700 visits, 13,000 page views, and 1,300 unique visitors who each spend six minutes on average perusing the site.

Lots of websites have a lot more hits than we do, but given our fledgling status we are thrilled and see it as a fabulous start to what we believe will be a long and fruitful endeavor.

If you’d like to check out the Ashland Current, please visit http://ashlandcurrent.com, or see http://facebook.com/AshlandCurrent, or http://twitter.com/ashlandcurrent.

It helped that the car we sold had some technical difficulties, but even so, those difficulties were fixable. Spark plug wires, maybe a sensor or two – totally doable – and then the car could again be depended upon. Before we took the fix-it plunge, though, we had a heart-to-heart.

“We don’t need the car,” Andrew said.

At first, I balked.

“What if one of us needs a car but the other one has it?” I asked.

“I walk 10 minutes to work. You walk 5 minutes to work,” he said. “We walk to the store and to the library, we ride our bikes to our friends’ houses. We really don’t need the car.”

“Let me think about this for a while,” I said.

The days came and went and I spent hours thinking about the car situation while planting our gardens. Each seed placed in the ground was a pro or con for keeping the car. I had become so accustomed to the convenience of two cars, even if one of them did seem to just sit in the driveway.

We had made a point of living in town instead of in the country in an effort to minimize our consumption and to support our local economy as much as possible. The post office, the doctor’s office, the pharmacy, the hair salon, the movie theater – what we need is located in walking distance from our house – and so at the time it made perfect sense to consider moving to a one car situation instead of owning two. But it was still hard to decide. Harder than I expected.

Finally, I went to New York for about a week for a conference and left the working car at the airport while the fix-it project car sat at the mechanic’s shop waiting for us to make our decision. As there were no cars at home for Andrew to drive while I was gone, it was a serious test.

I flew back to Wisconsin and drove from Duluth to Ashland.  Then Andrew and I had another sitdown about the car.

“So what was it like without the car?” I asked.

“It was fine,” he said.

“You didn’t need the car?”

“Nope.”

And that was that. We sold our car and we now live a one car life.

For the past six years I’ve lived in a house that has an alley on one side.  Over the years, this alley side has been sorely neglected by yours truly, though I’m trying to give it more attention by putting in a new foundation bed along the length of the house, reaching from north to south.  During the hottest months of the year the alley is extremely dry and dusty, so the current gardening challenges are to remove all weeds along the house foundation, to find location-appropriate perennials, and to prep the soil for incoming plants.

It was during the soil preparation step that I stumbled upon an exciting discovery – miner bees.

At first, when I began digging, a bunch of bees began to buzz around and I started to wonder if there was a bees nest in the tree across the alley from where I was working.  In all honesty, a panic moment set in, as bee stings are absolutely no fun.  After swatting a few in fear, I calmed down and realized that the bees were not aggressive.  They didn’t land on me, they didn’t dive bomb like hornets or wasps are prone to do, and they seemed to be soaking up sunshine by landing on the house foundation.

I watched for a while, continued pulling up weeds, and then realized that the bees were not only buzzing about – they were in the soil itself.  Upon disturbance from the trowel, the bees shook off whatever dirt coating they had and flew up into the air.  It was fascinating!

The first night of garden prep I researched different types of bees to try to figure out what type of bee had decided to colonize the entire west side of the house foundation.  A little reading and it was clear that the bees are from the genus Andrena and probably appreciate the warmth of the foundation and the dry alley.

Miner bees are increasing in importance as they serve as critical pollinators now that the honeybee populations are faltering, potentially as a result of massive agricultural pesticide applications.  While native honeybee populations fall, native miner bees are thought to be stepping up and filling a pollination role for fruit and flower production.

After considering all this information I did end up putting in the garden bed along the foundation while making sure to move the bees with the trowel to ensure that they weren’t harmed.  Miner bees also tend to prefer nesting in or colonizing areas with plenty of nectar-producing plants, so I’ve seeded a good portion of the new garden with bee- and butterfly-attracting perennials.  I hope the bees stay to enjoy the show!