Hello again, everyone. Yes, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to entertain you as only a purebred border collie, whose parents were working dogs, can do, as you shall see. You may remember me from such posts as “Baby Blue Jays” and “Disgrace of the Week”, among many others.
Tonight we have something very special in store for you. A movie featuring me. It is indeed excellent, because, as you may have guessed by now, the world does pretty much revolve around me.
I hope you enjoy tonight’s feature. I’ll be appearing as myself. The sprinkler is a gear-driven one made in Australia, and the guy I live with says it’s a wonderful sprinkler. I have to agree.
I apologize for having to leave right at the end, but I had to go see what was going on in the field behind our house. That’s one of my many responsibilities here.
Wait, there’s more. This next one is what the guy I live with calls “the director’s cut”. Really, he had the camera set for taking pictures under tungsten lighting, which was weird, but it happened, so that explains the strange lighting. It’s still me, though.
the miserable gardener 
Oh, you adorable doggie you! Come play in our garden anytime. Mr. Petey will show you the best place for digging holes and Mr. Shredder knows the warmest spots for napping. Although, really, you look like you already possess every good thing a proper doggie should have.
Yeah, but I don’t dig holes. Border collies are good at napping though.
Talked to my husband, and he said of course your person has a wonderful sprinkler — it’s Australian. We’ve been to visit, and in their world-class and every-day gardens Aussies have mandated cisterns. Fun to sniff around, Chess. My favorite is the one I saw covered in a climbing rose. My husband uses our photo of said cistern as his screen-saver. I lust for a cistern. A doggie such as yourself deserves one too. All sorts of interesting creatures take shelter underneath. Oh, you’d have a fine time.
I was going to say Strine, but then people would wonder what Strine is. Or “sprinkler from Oz”. (The guy I live with has gardening friends there.) It came from Nicke’s Garden Talk and doesn’t make the happy noise that his vintage Rain Bird does, but it’s great. Quiet.
A cistern here would be empty most of the time. We live in a rain shadow created by Mount Evans 30 miles due west of here, and 8,669 feet higher. He says we have a good year if we get ten inches of rain. He doesn’t count snow in the winter, but the snow in April this year was really good for the garden.
I think there’s been, oh, less than an inch of rain here in the last six weeks. The guy I live with likes it really dry, but he has had to water a lot because he claims there are nurseries that have websites where he can just click Buy and the plants appear at our door, and so many new plants have been planted lately. I get to bark at the delivery people, which is fun.
Chess–never forget how hard your parents worked so they could give you a life of ease and relative leisure. A grateful heart will never fail you.
My real parents lived on a sort of farm, with goats and stuff. My buddy Slipper, who was my first cousin, reeked of goat poop when he came home, according to the guy I live with.
The two of us, together, did a very good job of guarding my mommy at home, while the guy I live with went to work every day. My buddy Slipper showed me how it was done. You stuck your head out of the part of the screen door you could stick your head out of, and barked a lot, and people jumped. (The guy I live with met my mommy on a blind date; they both worked for the phone company, but after they got married, which was a few months after they met, he agreed that she could quit her job, and so she stayed at home, and when we showed up, we protected her.)
I have different barks for different things. People at the front door, car pulling into driveway across the street, dog walking by, cat walking two blocks away. And so on.
My family are still figuring out what my barks mean. I, on the other hand, can understand them perfectly. You can only imagine the awesome responsibility that this places on my shoulders!
It does. Different barks for different things are very important.
What a household. Even the DoG is multi-lingual. And he herds water. Awesome.
I, by the way, speak extraordinary Strine after a mere two glasses of Pinot Grigio. All you have to do is remember to pronounce all the vowels exactly the same. But I cannot do a convincing ” no” — real Australians wring more nuance out of that single “O” than can ever be uttered by a podian, if that’s the word for non-antipodean.
Someone has to herd water. I’m a good listener, unlike most humans, and I do enjoy a good pun.
Another good Strine phrase, the effect of which Americans can’t quite duplicate, is “Oh, yeah.” Americans have much to learn.
Oh, and, speaking of things antipodean, the guy I live with saw what he described as an
“adorable red and white Aussie girl puppy, all fuzzy and with huge feet” walking by a couple of years ago, and, apparently intending to acquire this fuzzy puppy as a companion for me, cried out to the woman walking the puppy, “Look over there!”, pointing in an antipuppian direction (logodaedaly being a strong point with both of us), but he said the woman didn’t fall for it. Otherwise I would have had to learn Strine, to talk to my new friend.
The guy I live with says he will stick to border collies from now on.
I drove to the next town library (Port Washington, Long Island) to pick up Buried Treasures. Little did I know that this would NOT be bedtime reading. A person could crush herself in the solar plexus hoisting this tome into position for supine study. It’s, um, a very, um, *focused* narrative…love the photos of hippie Latvians ambling through the Crimea in the 1970s looking for irises and crocuses.
Been reading Jeffrey Toobin’s 2007 book about the Supreme Court — the Nine — and found a hilarious word-processing typo on page 63. Whew. It happens even to Jeffrey Toobin. (He reports on Mario Como: “[Pres] Clinton admired the New Yorker’s way with words”…” but some search-and-destroy WP bot gave “the New Yorker’s” caps and italics, like the magazine. Awe. Some.)
Indeed very focused. And note there is no credit for a translator. A readable book. I can’t think of too many gardening/plant books which make suitable bedtime reading, except as a soporific.
Good bedtime books might be Farrer’s In A Yorkshire Garden, anything by Donald Culross Peattie, Elizabeth Lawrence, Henry Mitchell, Lester Rowntree, Ronald Lanner’s book on the pinyon, and some others.
I am very amused by “Strine”.
The guy I live with’s gardening friends from Australia told him about that.
He also says that there was this theory that the various accents of the colonies, including this one here, reflected the sound of English at the time the places were colonized, so that, like, plays by Shakespeare would have sounded more like the way the guy I live with talks than like Laurence Olivier. Perish the thought, huh.
He also says that Shaksper spelled his name like that when he felt like it. Those must have been the days.
Yours,
Chs
I just could not stop saying “Strine!”
More to come, I guess, eh?
G’day Chess,
Glad your enjoying our Aussie made sprinkler, it must be the only thing still made here I would reckon. Your sure it doesn’t say made in China on it anywhere? We like to shorten words down here, it takes up less time talking, so when I see the word cistern, we go – Ah Yeah! Tank is what it is. We also like to say G’day! its quicker than Good Morning, Good Afternoon, evening or night. It may also be lazy mate! We use that a lot too. We don’t shorten everything though, I live in a town called Tangambalanga, crazy hey!
Anyway mate, tell that bloke you live with that he wrote a really good book on Penstemons, I thought it was a Corker!
G’Day. The guy I live with, me mate, took a couple of pictures of this wonderful sprinkler, and you can see them in his library, here.
http://s1265.photobucket.com/user/paridevita/library
Not a big library as you can see.
Oh, yeah. His ute went for six some time ago, so now he drives a Roo. An Outback, no less.
Thanks for the kind words. My mommy and the guy I live with planned to write a proper corker when they did the penstemon book.
I loved Henry Mitchell’s Earthman columns in the Post, when I lived in Washington. Have a few collections of his works…think I will read them again!
The Essential Earthman is pretty great. My copy fell apart from being read so many times.
The first AKC-registered impact-head sprinkler.
Perish the thought. My parents were working dogs.
I work too. Sort of. I hold down the carpet, and make sure the bed sheets are soft, and keep too much cool air from reaching the guy I live with when he sleeps.