Greetings, everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie. You may remember me from such posts as “Under The Weather” (the one about the agaves) and “Memory And Desire” (the one where I talked about T.S. Eliot on my walk in the snow), as well as a number of other amusing and insightful posts.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been a very trying day around here. The coffee maker broke. This is really bad. The guy I live with has a hard time staying awake. He says it’s because he’s bored, but it could also be that he’s boring, and bores himself. He went out to find another one, but came home without one. I thought that was peculiar. He remembered that he had a nice Melitta drip coffee maker which he and my mommy used for over twenty years, he says, and he was able to make coffee with that, so the day was saved. He had to boil water first, which he knows how to do.
About ten years ago he decided to buy a coffee maker machine, the kind where you just push a button and coffee gets made, and my mommy was against it, since the Melitta did such a nice job of making good coffee, but when she discovered that he could fill the machine the night before, and she could come upstairs with us in the morning and just push a button, she was all for it.
My buddy Slipper liked coffee a lot, but only with cream and sugar. Just like he liked toast, but only with butter and jam on it. He wasn’t spoiled or anything, just a gourmet. The only thing he didn’t like was pretzels, about which he was very dubious.
The guy I live with says he still might get a coffee maker machine because he likes just pushing a button, and boiling water in the morning requires thought.
That was the major thing of the day.
The guy I live with noticed something odd today. He looks in the mirror, so I don’t see why that came as such a surprise, but he said this was not only odd, but extremely odd.
This is Antirrhinum braun-blanquetii. He says that the real plant, like in the wild, has light yellow flowers, and this must have hybridized with the regular snapdragon. He also says it’s funny that they call the first one a “perennial snapdragon” because the regular one is too, just a short-lived perennial. But anyway, it has flowers of three different colors on one stem.
The lobes on the flower in the upper right are pinky-orange, but the ones on the flower below it are more yellow-orange with a tint of pink. The flowers are all wet.
The guy I live with says this is more stupid than attractive.
I have to go now since it’s getting late. Before I go, I have a movie to show you, about our weather. It doesn’t star me so it isn’t riveting, but it gives you an idea of what things have been like around here lately.
the miserable gardener 
So even though you’re getting drenched you’re not floating away or anything I hope? House staying water tight? Some of the images I’ve seen of the Denver area are looking pretty horrific.
Um, the house is relatively water tight….
Most of the heavy rain is out east, in Aurora, and up north, where the flooding is, in Boulder, Longmont, etc.
We’re just very, very damp here.
Oh my gosh, Chess, that video is riveting. Thank your person so much for making and posting it. When our doggies heard the noise, they rushed into the book room — they’d never heard such ruckus. Truly, for us with our annual scant rainfall, never prolonged, never drenching, you have brought into our lives magical sound.
Per your prior post, dear Chess, one word (on cheese): Comte.
In the video view, your garden, from a doggie wander point of view, looks more thickly planted than one would imagine from prior views. Perhaps because it’s closer to the house? Rule in our garden is closer to the house the more water the plant requires. That rule gets broken all the time.
I say it’s thickly planted. Though, the Great Upheaval made it much less thickly planted, and that’s ongoing in some places. He does put other plants where ones were dug out.
There are paths, though. My grampa Flurry stuck to the ones the guy I live with made, but more were made by my uncle Pooka, whom I never knew, and by my buddy Slipper, who was an excellent garden designer. The guy I live with said “that’s not a path” but my buddy Slipper thought it ought to’ve been, so it became one. There was even a path he made through the hedge of lilacs but I stopped using that.
The guy I live with knows about Comte, and just got Saveur’s book on comfort food, where they say it makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches. I like grilled cheese.
Oh my goodness, thank you for posting that rain video. Now I know what you’ve been putting up with for days. I know you like to get wet but I bet you don’t want to go out in that, your guy must be getting frustrated that he cannot work in the garden. Do you usually get rain for so long in your place? We’re on the other side of the world ‘mate’ and we appear to live in a rain shadow, when it does rain it is around us but rarely on us. I do hope it stops soon for you and your garden and maybe you could send it here.
The guy I live with says that back in the old days, before 95, it would rain, mist and drizzle for a week or ten days, any time between April and October. That seemed to have stopped but maybe it’s back again.
The average annual precipitation in our little neighborhood is 10 inches (25cm…see what he made me learn?). Mount Evans is 32 miles (51.5km) almost due west of us. We’re at 5596 feet (1705.6m) and Mt Evans is 14265 feet (4348m), and this has an effect on our precipitation. Most of it sails past us and lands in Denver proper. So we have the same situation as you. Except that I always hear thunder because the storms start in the west. This has been a very stormy summer.
Rain doesn’t really stop him from gardening. There are some parts of the garden that are heavy clay, and digging there isn’t a good idea, but he can dig in the raised beds, and slice through bulbs left and right.
P.S.That is *unrelenting* rain.
It did relent, though.
Guess what it’s doing at 10:57 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time? Only one guess.
Chess dear, do you suppose that the guy you live with could link to earlier posts you reference? As a newbie to your blog, I’d actually like to visit such posts as “Memory And Desire” and “Going to California”, etc. Looking forward to sunnier days. Regards.
We talked about that. The guy I live with said it might seem to pompous or something for me to link back to my own superior posts, because it might make him look bad. Like that’s hard to do.
You can, however, just type in “memory and desire” in the Search field and it’ll appear. That way, he says, I don’t look so entirely self-centered.
Of course I can. How silly of me! I guess I’m getting lazy in my old age…
Yes, well, no one can even come close to equaling the laziness of the guy I live with. Why, he even blames me for getting up at 9:30 this morning, when he could have hopped out of bed at 5.
I noticed the yellow jackets acted very agressively when I went out after this rain. Normally there are a lot of them around, but they are calm and I just ignore them. After all the rain, whenever I went outside (to cry over the garden), the yellow jackets would buzz right up and light on me. Adding insult to injury, I must say. Still…one can’t complain when so many people have lost so much. Lots of work for people ahead, with snow only weeks away.
Too true. I called some friends up north to see how they were doing, and haven’t heard back.
I think the yellow jackets blame humans for getting them wet.
My observation is that yellow jackets blame dogs and humans for EVERYTHING! We had a nest of yellow jackets in one of our outdoor flood lights. We rarely, if ever, use our floodlights, but when we had reason to flip the switch, imagine our surprise to see the fixture go up in smoke, then flames, as the nest ignited from the heat of the lamp. The yellow jackets all seem to have successfully escaped the conflagration and have now nested directly over the back door, just waiting to exact their revenge, like it was our fault, or something, that they chose to build a nest in a light fixture that then burned up when it was used for the purpose for which it was intended.
That’s kind of funny. There is this burst of heat sent to a light bulb that accounts for them burning out when turned on.
I think I told the story of the yellow jacket nest in the crawl space and my mommy telling the guy I live with he could just pull it from the wall it was stuck to, stuff it in a trash bag, and run out of the crawl space (I mean crawl out of the crawl space) and run upstairs with no yellow jackets flying after him.
He vetoed that plan.
Thanks for filming the rain (I missed it in sunny Montana and Wyoming)!
Rain here was far less than up north. We don’t care if we ever seen rain again this year, I think.