the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about the horses, and some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Small Thoughts”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
At least the sun is shining. But it’s really windy and not very pleasant to be outside.
And it’s supposed to get colder next week.

This is driving you-know-who right up the wall. Nothing but cold, cold, cold, when it would normally be pretty warm here, at least from time to time.
So the guy I live with decided to have the furnace checked. I worry about things like whether or not I’m going to get my dinner, even though I get it on time every afternoon, but the guy I live with worries about a lot more things than that. Probably because he has no one else to talk to, here, except me.

The furnace-checking person came today, and he was really nice. The guy I live with traded stories about working outside and going into all these peoples’s houses.
I watched the whole thing from the door to the crawlspace, a place I’d never really seen. The guy I live with went in there, too, and they talked about the awful crawlspaces they’d been in. Ours is pretty nice, actually.

So the upshot is we’re getting a new furnace, later this summer. The guy I live with is a lot less worried about having to pay for a new furnace than he is with the idea of living with a fifty-year-old furnace if it winters are going to be this (and here I have to delete the adjectives used by the guy I live with) cold for so (again deleting adjectives) long.

But when they were down there, the guy I live with saw something he didn’t recognize. He turned it over, and brought it out of the crawlspace.
This is a horse. I know, because I’ve seen one. They’re pretty big and scary.

The guy I live with only vaguely remembered his wife drawing this, because his memory was of “the other” horse drawing. This one:
Now we have two pencil drawings of horses. I’m not sure what the guy I live with is going to do with them; there’s no room to hang them on the walls.
He thought he’d given the second drawing to someone, but obviously not.

Sometimes he offers things to people and they never come to get them, which I think is very weird. Maybe they forget, or maybe they hope the guy I live with will drive all over town making deliveries.

I suppose we could offer them for sale at our roadside dumpling stand.

I guess that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me hiding behind the sansevierias on the Italian green marble table in the living room. The guy I live with is “into” sansevierias. (Even if they’re now in the genus Dracaena.)
Well, I’m not really hiding; I like to sleep under the living room window, just like other purebred border collies who lived here did.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today, well, to make another post. You may remember me from such posts as “Seed Time”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This was on my morning walk, just today. You can see how many dogs have been out in the field.

There are some places with no snow at all.
It’s supposed to snow tomorrow, and then maybe next week, when it’s going to be even colder than it is now. I hear quite a bit of complaining about how cold it is, because we rarely have winters like this, with steady cold, as you can see if you look at posts made in January in past years.

We heard hooting on my evening walk yesterday, but the guy I live with couldn’t find out where it was coming from. Some place about a block east of here.

Today we had Opera Day. Yes, again. I got to listen to Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (the elixir of love), though I could tell it was making the guy I live with both happy and melancholy at the same time (because his wife loved the Metropolitan Opera quiz on the radio, on Saturdays).
He went downstairs into his wife’s studio and took a picture of the view out the window, which makes him very sad. He’s posted pictures of this view many times.
Not only did his retirement not go in any way that was imaginable to him, but about six months after he retired he lost all sense of what day it was, and it’s been like that ever since. He has to look at the calendar on the wall here, or at his phone, or the laptop, to figure out what day it is, because a word like “Monday” no longer has the meaning, or “flavor”, that it did when he was working.

Which is why, suddenly today, he realized that he’d forgotten to stratify the calochortus seeds he got some months ago. It turned out there weren’t as many as he thought, so this didn’t take very long at all. The seeds need at least a couple of months in the refrigerator.
I have some pictures of actual calochortus growing in the garden here.
There are some seedpots of calochortus that were sown last year; the seeds germinated after spending time in the refrigerator, and then they were put in pots. There were leaves, and then they disappeared for the summer.
Hopefully just for the summer, and not forever.

The guy I live with said he was going to be very irked if the calochortus didn’t start appearing soon.
You can see that there are a few pots of them, upstairs.
If nothing happens in a few months, I’m pretty sure there will be more than a furtive tear shed. He went to a lot of work, with these.
(Those pieces of wood are to make it easier to slide the flats out.)

And that’s all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me trudging home on my evening walk.

Until next time, then.