Okay, it’s me, the dog, Chess, the purebred border collie, once again. You may remember me from such superior posts as “Pictures of Me” and “Watering Day”, and other such epitomes of pure excellence. Here I am in a characteristic pose.

This is my fort. I spend a lot of time in here, lying on my very comfortable rug from Pottery Barn. Not that I’m spoiled or anything; the guy I live with spilled bleach all over the other side of the rug and so he decided I could have it.

Anyway, the reason I’m doing this post, besides ensuring you of providing the continued excellence which you may have come to expect, is that the guy I live with did something weird to his computer and every time he posted and hit the “save draft” button everything disappeared, which is why the last few posts only had pictures. He’d written a bunch of his usual nonsense and it all vanished just like that. Probably just as well, I say. He claims to have fixed the problem.

Oh, here’s an iris. The rest of the post might make you think there aren’t any plants in the garden, but there are a few. This is Iris iberica subsp. elegantissima from Horasan in eastern Turkey. I looked this up. It’s close to Erzurum, which has a climate similar to Denver’s, but even colder in the winter. I didn’t know there was such a place; I’d probably like it. I know I like turkey and remember that my mommy said there was nothing better than the smell of roasting turkey in the house, but I might be getting confused here. I am intelligent, but, as my mommy used to tell the guy I live with all the time, just a dog. Just a dog, indeed.

Now I’m thinking about food, but I should show the iris, I think. You can see it was sprinkling a little.

Where was I? Oh, right, what I started out talking about. The guy I live with, whom I quite frequently refer to as kind of a nut, has been busy moving big flat rocks around the garden. Many years ago he went to a rock store and ordered a pallet of rocks and didn’t realize they were all flat, and when they were delivered, noticed they were flat, and didn’t know what to do with them, except lay them down flat on the ground. What most people would do, I guess. The only thing is, he didn’t like where they lay, so he moved them around. More than once. Now he’s moving them again. The rocks are really heavy and I’m not exactly sure why he thinks moving them is so important. He might be sad, or maybe he’s looking for “the right place”. I don’t think there is such a thing; I think he’ll just move them around until one day he won’t move them any more and he’ll call the place where they are at that time “the right place”.

I bet one reason why he thinks moving them is so important is because of the lichen on them.

Some of it is still alive. The guy I live with and my mommy used to pronounce the word “lichen” like they do across the Atlantic, sometimes, to rhyme with “kitchen”, and they thought it was really funny. They thought a lot of things were funny and I imagine other people wondered what they were snickering about all the time. I know he misses her a lot, and so do I; this Friday she will have been gone for four years. He’s been moving these big flat rocks around ever since. It isn’t all that he does, but it’s probably the strangest thing he does. Or one of the strangest things.

The guy I live with does say that big flat rocks are good to put over a patch of weeds, or in a place where you can’t think of anything else to put there, but they’re also really, really heavy, like I said, and now the guy I live with says his back hurts, even though he knows to lift with his legs, which I think means something other than how I’m picturing it. I like turkey legs too, but there aren’t any in the fridge, because the guy I live with bought a bunch of microwaveable Indian food which is all vegetarian so he doesn’t have to cook, and now I can see I’m straying from the subject a lot.

Big flat heavy rocks, that was the subject. This is me helping. You can tell by the expression on my face that I’m wondering if the guy I live with hasn’t lost the rest of his mind. I guess we’ll see.

And that’s that, for today.