Hello again everyone; yes, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to delight and inform you, as usual. You may remember me from such posts as “The Sun, Finally” and “A Futile Effort”, among so many other wonders of the blogosphere.
I fell out of bed again this morning, really, slid out of bed, and so the guy I live with said it was probably time to get up, which I didn’t think was as funny as he did. Here I am about to say something. I forgot what I was going to say, though.
Oh, well, I could say there’s the new arbor, which was built to look exactly like the one my mommy built at the other end of this little garden, but minus the gate, and so it isn’t really done, because it needs wire stuff on each side, trellis-like, if you will. Trellisy. Better word. You’ll notice a gap in the fence my mommy built, a very uncharacteristic gap, which she claimed she planned to fix, but never did, so the guy I live with will have to do it, and not eventually, either.
“There are too many border-collie created neologisms in these posts”, says the guy I live with, whose opinion here doesn’t count hugely, since I do a better job than he does. Even he admits that. The arbor will look better, and done, too, when it’s all trellisy.
Speaking of new things, the guy I live with insists on trying new approaches to garden photography, and so I’m supposed to show some pictures taken from inside the house, a few of which are through extremely dirty windows.
This is from the upstairs bedroom. It isn’t a bedroom but was built as such. The windows are double storm-type windows and can only be cleaned by being taken completely apart, which the guy I live with has no intention of doing. And don’t look at me; I don’t do windows.
Then, from downstairs, in my mommy’s studio. She wouldn’t even consider cleaning the windows because she said the light, which is very intense at this elevation, was perfectly filtered so she could do her drawing.
She also spent a lot of time writing. The guy I live with would go downstairs to say Hi, the way he did, and she would either put down what she was writing, or tell him to go away because she was writing, and she never let him look at any of the things she wrote because I guess she thought he would be too critical, but he wouldn’t’ve been, of course, and so he never looked at any of her stuff until after she died. And even then, he couldn’t bear to look at much of it, and still hasn’t. There were a bunch of poems, some of which he posted last year, and one published online here, but there was also an unfinished novel, which he read some of, and felt heartsick, or more so than usual, so it just sits there as this pile of notebooks gathering dust.
Here’s what it looks like from downstairs. Mostly cactus, through the window.
And the kitchen window, which is clean. Looking northwest.
And then sort of west. The Wardian case type thing on the table has stuff in it that my mommy put there. She was kind of mysterious.
The wrought iron furniture was the guy I live with’s paternal grandmother’s, and originally it was painted white, then green, then black, which the guy I live with was the color he said it should be. His maternal grandfather, though, who was a gardener, said everything should be painted green, but when the guy I live with read Henry Mitchell and that everything should be painted black, he decided that had to be right, but the black paint sort of flaked off, and in some places the green did too, so you can see the three colors all at one time, and my mommy said she liked it best that way, and the guy I live with almost always agreed with her since she had a better eye for that sort of stuff, but of course secretly he wanted to paint it all black again.
That will probably never happen, because then the furniture would “lose its character”, which I don’t think furniture can really have, but the guy I live with says we tend to assign value to things even though they might not have any to other people, which really annoys people of an older generation when they try to tell the younger generation that a particular colored rock, say, was the treasured possession of an uncle whom everyone in the family liked because of his impression of Woodrow Wilson doing an Irish jig on the White House lawn on a Sunday afternoon in August, but no one really cares about that now, and besides, how would you go about telling that story?
The guy I live with, though, has always liked birdbaths, because his grandparents had one in their garden in Los Angeles, though he doesn’t remember ever seeing any birds bathing in it, though a toad occasionally hopped around under it, so there have always been birdbaths here. The one by the back patio definitely gets bird visitors.
And sometimes other visitors.
And now I can effortlessly segue into our feature presentations. Dumb squirrel movies. The guy I live with filled the bird feeders today and the can that holds the bird seed was open, and so, well, you can see what happened.
In this next one you can see the squirrel doing a funny kind of tap dance. I guess squirrel hind feet aren’t built to balance on trash cans.
I think that’s enough for time. I know I kind of ramble. You would too if so many exciting things happened where you live.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Ah, Chess. The dogs I live with do windows. Boy, do they ever! A finer veneer of nose-slime you will never see.
I enjoyed the squirrel videos. Fox squirrels are the best — at making messes & at entertaining. We have gray squirrels now, and they seem like squirrel imposters (or poseurs?). I have never named a gray squirrel.
I’ve seen the dogs I live with drink out of the birdbath clamped to our deck railing. Do you drink out of the bird baths? I suspect you’re too well-behaved to do such a thing.
Oh, windows. Well, there is that. The guy I live with thinks he should put in a plug for Sprayway, best glass cleaner ever. (He says it’s the same as the telephone booth cleaner he used to use when he worked in telephone repair.) Even gets nosey windows clean.
I also drink out of the birdbath, which the guy I live with says is terribly undignified for a purebred border collie.
Chess dog, like your photo. Shows up now as my screen saver.
Like the fence gap, too. Just take out the first rail on t’other end. Arbors are always terrific, and this one certainly qualifies.
We have triple-pane windows where we don’t have stained glass. Needed because a blind resides between two panes, and somehow that needed triple panes to bring off. Blind inside glass needed because asthma. Going on, inner pane is filmy, despite warrant to stay crystalline. (Snort, warranties.) So we see the world at its smeared equivalence. Fortunately, the sliding doors open us to full garden glory.
Oh, exquisite photo of water-sipping squirrel. Thank you.
Thanks. The squirrel was there today, too. We feed them, not intentionally of course, and provide fresh water, and we get something else in return.
Loved the squirrel movies! I laughed so hard when he shot out of the can!
Thanks. You can hear a little laugh from the guy I live with in the third movie. It’s surprising they agreed to be filmed without signing a waiver.
Squirrels can either vex or amuse–the choice is ours.
Or both at the same time.
Here we have bird feeders that are “squirrel proof”, which means that they have wire cages surrounding the feeder tube that supposedly squirrels cannot reach through in order to gorge themselves on the feed. And I suppose it is fair to say that on that level the design is a success. However, squirrels, being an especially tenacious species (as your videos clearly demonstrate), solve this particular dilemma by squeezing their entire body through the wire caging. Subsequently, they gorge themselves on the bird seed, thereby increasing their girth so as not to be able to squeeze back out when I or my grampy, armed with a water hose, arrive. End of story is that my grampy has had to cut the wire caging more than once in order to release a satiated squirrel back into The Wild. File this under vexing amusement. Or amusing vexation. Whatever.
We had a similar problem with a mouse in the suet feeder. It ate so much suet that we thought it wouldn’t be able to get out of the cage that the suet feeder was in, but, suet being quite greasy, the mouse found a way to squeeze out. ..
The second clip was quite the revue. The tail swishing is straight out of the follies.
Complete with tap dancing accompaniment.
I also loved the way the squirrel shot out of the can, must have been something scary down there. You can never have too many birdbaths, I occassionally drink out of the big one I can reach, which my person doesn’t mind as she worries about me because I rarely drink out of my water bowl in the house. I think because I am on a diet of totally fresh pureed vegtables and meat I maybe don’t get as thirsty as other pooches, don’t know really, but I am healthy that’s what counts. There is nothing undignified about sharing with the birds Chess. Nice photos again even the arty ones (through extremely dirty windows), a diferent way of looking at things.
There was year old bird seed at the bottom of the can. The seed was a year old, I mean. Not seed for year old birds.
The guy I live with told me the story of the very first dog he had, back when he was living in Long Beach, California, and the dog was fed fresh horse meat. He still has an image of the meat going out of the butcher paper and plop into the dog’s bowl. That sounds really icky even to me.
My mommy bought me some venison in a can once, and put a little in my bowl, and I spit it out on the kitchen floor. Totally icky. My buddy Slipper vacuumed it up, the way he used to do.
The only vegetable I really care for is the potato chip.
What a beautiful, evocative poem of Cindy’s. I loved the word sounds – by that I mean the sounds of the tinkling ornaments in the horse’s mane. There must be a word for that device in poetry. Gorgeous.
There is a name for it, onomatopoeia. The most famous example being in Vergil, “quadrupedante sonitu quatit ungula campum“, the sound of horses hooves pounding on the field.
Squirrel tap dance is hilarious!
It is. The hind feet didn’t evolve to be able to balance on a trash can, I guess.