Hello everyone; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to tell you all about our day in the garden, or today, our day doing nothing. You may remember me from such riveting posts as “A Post About Nothing”, and “Another Post About Nothing”, both of which I just did, so it should be easy to remember me just from those. I’m pretty memorable.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. I have a pimple on my nose. I write in poetry, I write in prose. 
I might have gotten something up my nose on one of my important sniffing detours on our walks, and my nose got scratched. That happens. I still can’t remember how I got that light dot on my nose, so that happens too. You get a dot on your nose, and then, later, you forget how it happened.
Anyway, this was really a do-nothing day. The guy I live with said we were going to do this and do that, and this would get finished, and that would get started, but we took a long nap instead. He read some of this book, which is one of several by the same author, and he says it’s “the purebred border collie of plant books”. It must be excellent.
The funny thing is that he thought he already had a copy but couldn’t find it, and so he got another one, and now thinks he’s read the book before, so maybe he has two copies and one mysteriously disappeared. Or he just can’t find it.
On our afternoon walk, which is one thing we did do, besides our morning walk, he tried to take pictures of the hawk in the tree, but every time we got close, the hawk flew off to another tree. Fortunately the other trees were in the direction our walk was taking us, so he got more pictures, but none of them came out the way he hoped they would. Like, in focus. 
Oh well. Hawks are pretty scary if you ask me. We sometimes find evidence that they’ve caught something. I have to check it out, because that’s my job, but sometimes it’s kind of gross even for me.
The guy I live with did actually do something today, besides take me for two walks and drink a lot of coffee and feed the birds. He sowed some agave seeds.
these are agave seeds
The pot gets covered with gravel, though you don’t have to do that. You do have to poke the seeds down into the soil if you don’t cover the seeds with gravel. We’ll see how quickly they come up, now. This is year-old seed, by the way. Seed he forgot to sow last year, for one reason or another. 
That whole process took about five minutes.
And that was our day. Since we have to go on our walks, we’ll never be able to say that we don’t do anything at all, but today came close. The guy I live with says we might do something tomorrow.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
That was better than the nothing much I’ve been getting done!
Well, when you have the flu, you don’t feel like doing much of anything. Especially the things that flu brings.
Even doing nothing you’re a pretty entertaining fellow, Chess. Having seen your nose up close, I shall have to examine the noses of my own dogs.
Wonderful hawk photos. All we’ve got of note are pelicans and ospreys and ibis. Hawks are much more majestic.
My ambition for tomorrow is to do nothing. I shall think of you doing something. Stay away from sniffing the scratchy stuff, Chess.
It’s hard not to sniff stuff. The guy I live with tugs on my leash when I get too close to the burdock plants here, but otherwise lets me sniff away. It’s my walk, really. We have pelicans here, too, believe it or not. Huge birds. One time a flock of them flew right over our heads while we were on our walk. They spend time in the hundreds of reservoirs around here, usually in late summer. Doing nothing requires a considerable amount of effort. The temptation to do stuff is pretty strong in a lot of people.
Pelicans…I used to live in a village on the north shore of the Long Island Sound that had a Pelican in its town seal (the town was founded in 1659 from a land grant from uh, James or Charles…one of those mangey Stuart kings). The marvelous old post office had magnificent brass pelicans atop the lanterns that hung above the entrance. I also had the privilege of dragging an English colleague away from meetings in Orlando (FLA) so we could play hooky and go to the Gulf of Mexico. I sent him off on a river/swamp “cruise” (in a row boat with a Cajun guide) so he could birdwatch and he came back almost in tears from seeing his first pelican in situ. Bird watchers, like purebred boarder collies, are very sensitive to nature.
Pelicans in Colorado have to be escapees from a local zoo or pet shop, much like the Brazilian parakeets that have colonized southern Connecticut, I think, knowing not a thing about the natural habitat of pelicans…but Colorado seems a tad eccentric as a place for those kinds of birds to roost.
I’ve never read a book about trees. Did Mr. Parkenham make the guy you live with laugh out loud?
Yes, says the guy I live with, the pelicans escaped from a pet shop. No, seriously, say I, we have pelicans here. Lots of them. He also says to go to the library and get Meetings With Remarkable Trees, the first book, more or less asap.
I have hawks that perch in the lampposts in the park behind my house.I’ve never seen them eat anything but one raided my brother’s bird feeder and ate a pigeon. I can’t wait to see the agave sprout since all I’ve seen of agave was the syrup in jars. I suspect that the second copy of the tree book either went to the alternative universe that is inhabited mostly by missing socks and spoons, or a squirrel stole it.
You have a very cute nose, Chess, and all your photos are worthy of framing. My ambition tonight was to do absolutely nothing but events interfered with that noble ambition.
I agree, my nose is excellent. Originally it had a lot of pink in it, but that went away. There are pictures of my nose, when I was little, here https://paridevita.com/2012/11/28/dogs/ I bet if the guy I live with put categories and tags on the right hand side of the blog things would be easier to find. We have smaller hawks that fly into the garden, crashing through the underbrush and stuff. The guy I live with read that the smaller hawks often get broken breast bones because of their tendency to fly into bushes. There used to be a compost pile here, and that was definitely an alternate universe. https://paridevita.com/2012/05/27/after-all-these-years/
Lots of indoor sniffing happened here today Chess. A man delivered my mum’s shopping this morning so I got to sniff him, all the shopping bags, which I love to do, and then his smells from his shoes after he left. Then 2 more people came and I got to sniff where they had walked in their shoes before. So not much happened here either. But you had two walks and saw the hawk which is more than I did. We had a small hawk fly into our window one day, really strange as you usually only see them way up in the sky circling prey.
Shopping bags are really fun. My buddy Slipper used to spend so much time checking out everything that he had to be pulled away gently so things could be out away. He was looking for Stilton, of course.