Hello everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to tell you all about my day. You may remember me from such delightfully heuristic posts like “Weeding Day” and “Three Percent Humidity”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Now, even though I decided to title today’s post “Nothing Gets Done”, something really did get done, namely, the guy I live with took our car in for its checkup. You know, oil change and tire rotation and stuff like that. He used to work on cars by himself but he doesn’t any more.
You should have seen how agitated he was. It was like he was leaving and never coming back. I guess he thought it was going to take hours and hours and I’d miss my dinner and eventually realize I was going to be left alone for the rest of my life, because he was still waiting at the car dealer’s for a part that only one tiny factory made by hand, and it was made of bactiolite, a rare metal, which they were out of, and had to order from a small mine somewhere in central Africa, where there was an uprising or something, because no one had heard from the mine owners in a very long time, even though there was this metallurgist in Finland who was working on synthesizing this very rare metal, but didn’t expect delivery until the year 2075, by which time the guy I live with probably wouldn’t be driving much, so he was afraid he would have to wait.
It took about an hour, and then he was back, and I was glad, as usual.
So I don’t have pictures of what today was like. It was a very nice day and the snow is melting fast. Oh, it snowed, since I haven’t posted for a couple of days.
But, ever resourceful, the guy I live with found some of my mommy’s pictures, and I’ll post some right now. Here’s one of my buddy Slipper, looking down, and my grandpa Flurry, and me. I’m the cute one with the red collar. You can see what good front door guards we were.
What an excellent start for a post. I don’t know what my buddy Slipper was looking at, though.
Now, I’ll show some flower pictures, because I have to, if I show lots of pictures of me.
an arctotis
Abronia villosa
abutilon
Angelica gigas, Eupatorium rugosum ‘Chocolate’, Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’
We don’t grow that anemone any more. It gets blister beetles and they devour the whole plant in a day. And besides, it needs way too much water in our garden. But we do have some more anemones, namely, Anemone blanda. They’ve seeded around in the garden here. (You may have noticed I’m going alphabetically, too.)
Now a bunch of campanulas.
Now our native corydalis. It appears it various places from year to year. I think that’s kind of neat.
Corydalis aurea and tulips
Dolichos lablab
Okay, now this is a really weird thing. The guy I live with grew this as a house plant, but it looks like something from a completely different plant. Dorstenia gigas, he thinks. That’s the flower. Really and truly. I think it’s scary. The guy I live with says it reminds him of the scary movies they used to have back in the 1950s when monsters from outer space would come into your neighborhood and smash up stuff and try to grab you. He was sometimes afraid of being grabbed by something that might have looked a little like this.
Here’s the last picture for today, a nice one of Gentiana acaulis. It actually is that color. I know because I can see blue.
Well, that’s all I have for today. I hope you enjoyed these pictures. My mommy took them with her Olympus camera, which ran on AA batteries. “Almost like it ran on coal”, the guy I live with said.
Wait, no, here’s another picture, of me, no less. That’s right, me, when I was really little. This might have been my first day here, back when there was a green lawn, and my tummy is on it, since I’d never seen a green lawn before, and had to make sure my tail was still attached, or something. I was super cute, as you can see.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Beautiful photos, both flowers and dogs. Honorine Jobert is one of my favorites as is corydalis. Thanks for all the beauty.
Thanks. I think the pictures of me were the best. There are dozens of pictures of me, and I thought about posting them all, saying “me, me again, me once more”, but the guy I live with suggests I be more modest. I don’t know why.
Oh, Chess, you were a cute little doggie and have retained your cute on into today. Your first portrait shot might become my new screensaver, we’ll see. I have to decide whether it captures more essence of Chess than the one I have up now.
I thought only old roses have names like “Honorine Jobert.” Evidently not. My favorite rose name is “Baronne Henriette de Snoy.” I may even have the rose. Somewhere.
Your mommy’s camera caught so well the delicate texture of campanula petals.
Anemone blanda is definitely going to find a home in my garden, perhaps by the Baronne. They will look splendidly together.
At a good moment, Chess, you might counsel the guy you live with, “don’t go borrowing trouble.” Works for cars, just about anything.
I was and still am cute, aren’t I? The guy I live with says lilacs have those names too. “Souvenir d’ …” and so forth. Clematis, too. Anemone blanda is from Greece. You can get tubers anywhere, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out which way is up on them. The plants usually figure it out for themselves.
Super cute. SO cute. What a cute cute puppy. I am gobsmacked.
And the flowers are so lovely, too. That blue gentian is stunning.
My mommy felt the same way the minute she laid eyes on me. I was delightful from the start. (Modest, too.) Though the guy I live with remarked right before our afternoon walk that I’ve become somewhat wider…..Kind of insulting, don’t you think? He’s addicted to gentians. There were more here, ten years ago, but we went through some changes, and now he wants to get back all the gentians. There are a few still here, but, surprise, he wants more.
I look forward then to seeing more gentians!
Tell your guy to knock off the wide remarks!! As long as you still fit on the paths, you’re ok!
He called me the “garden fatty” when I was littler. My mommy didn’t like that. The garden fatty. So I gain weight. And anyway, look who’s talking. Look who’s talking. We had a visitor here week before last, and the guy I live with said for her to feel my rear end (MY rear end), and she did, and said “Wow”. It’s actually mostly muscle, from dragging the guy I live with along the canal road at top speed. Even the vet was impressed.
I do like to call puppies “little fattie”.
Puppies are adorable, but we don’t talk about them much around here. Don’t want to give anyone any ideas. I would be jealous.
What a gorgeous trio of pure-bred border collies! Although you definitely are the cutest of the three. The flower photos are amazing; I hope that the guy you live with does plant more of those intense blue gentians.
My vet told me that it is good for my cats to have a little extra weight since it will give them some extra reserves when they get sick; they drop the weight very quickly when fighting infection and when they refuse to eat. Looking at you Chess, I can see that you have cleverly built up a sufficient reserve.
I thought the weird part problems only applied to heating systems (which appear to become antiquated almost overnight) and not to cars. We are still in a period of deep cold and the heating system of my building has been of great concern to me for the past week.
Sufficient reserves, that must be it. I slipped on the ice the other day, and the guy I live with said I kind of just bounced. About the car. Get this. He was worried it was going to blow up if he drove it much before it got its next oil change and stuff. It’s a 2007 Outback, and it has 24,000 miles on it. Twenty four thousand miles. I keep saying he’s kind of a nut, you know.
He bought the car for my mommy. She only drove it once. He loves his car almost as much as me. When they would drive around, he would point out all the other Outbacks and eventually she got tired of him saying Outback. Then one day they drove up to Boulder, and parked in one of the angled parking areas on the street, and every single car was an Outback. He said “Look how we blend in”.
The campanula with the dark eye is very pretty. Do you remember the species?
Campanula versicolor.
Super cute, indeed.
I agree. My mommy was totally besotted with me the first time she laid eyes on me. (Kind of like the guy I live with was, with her, when he first saw her.) If you want to see extra cute, pushing the boundaries of known cuteness I mean, including pictures of my tummy, well, then, they’re here. https://paridevita.com/2012/11/28/dogs/
Chess, your baby picture is adorable! It reminds me of photos I’ve seen of human babies lying on bearskin rugs. They’re kind of weird, but yours is so much more adorable than a human baby picture, maybe because you have a tail. I bet it used to wag like it had a motor in it. Maybe it still does.
It goes in circles. The guy I live with says that when I was little he was afraid I might take off, like an airplane. He says, now, not so much chance of it. That’s really rude, don’t you think?
I love looking at puppy pictures. Sometimes I get puppy lust, and I get on Breeder’s Club website to look at puppies for a while. We call that position you’re in in your puppy photo “Frog dog” — the dogs I live with stretch out like that sometimes, and I always say, “frog dog!” The other notable position they have is on their backs with all four paws in the air, which we call ‘”airing out the underparts.” The 3 generations photo is precious (in the best possible sense).
I love looking at that blue gentian, too. I am pretty sure the likelihood of getting it to grow here is inversely related to how much I covet it.
My husband slipped on the ice today, but he didn’t bounce. He broke his ankle. And the dogs barking let me know something was amiss. When we got back from the Urgent Care Center, I realized the dogs I live with had never seen anyone on crutches before. Seeing them caused mass hysteria amongst the dogs. I had to use my extra stern face & voice (I MEAN IT!!) to get them to settle down. The next time my husband used his crutches, all 3 dogs sat down nearby but out of the way. It seemed like they were saying, “We don’t know what’s going on, but we understand this isn’t a game.” Things like that just amaze me. And that coupled with puppy cuteness, well. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
Lots of people have been slipping on ice and hurting themselves. The guy I live with says he’s against ice, now, except to put an ice cube in his morning coffee so he can drink it quickly and theoretically wake up faster. He still remembers on their first date my mommy putting ice cubes from the water glass into her coffee. It’s also good for defatting stock, but other than that, he’s against it. There was a lot of talk here about a “third one”, with starry eyes and stuff like that, talk about puppy lust, but it didn’t happen. When we were naughty, which of course wasn’t all that often, the guy I live with used to raise his index finger in a certain way. “The Finger of Instruction in the Attitude of Correction.” He’d even say that. “The Finger of Instruction”, etc. We were really intimidated, believe me.
Here’s something mildly amusing: the standard treatment for an ankle fracture is I.C.E. , which stands for ice, compression, and elevation. So 4 times a day I fill the ice bag with ice cubes so Bill can put it on the ankle he broke when he slipped on the ice.
I also put ice cubes from my water into my coffee in restaurants, partly because restaurant coffee is usually too hot and too strong for my taste, and partly because I find it oddly soothing to watch the ice melt. I’ve never known of anyone else who did this although I never imagined I was the only one.
A groomer once told us that she could tell that we never hit our dogs because they were so gentle and trusting. Our response was, why would anyone hit a dog? I’m telling you this as context because not only do I point the finger of instruction, in the attitude of correction (I liked that phrase so much I wrote it down in my notebook of stuff I like/want to remember); I sometimes also shake my fist at the dogs I live with and tell them I’m going to “knock you out if you don’t stop it!” I usually do this in response to The Howling. The fist of impotence, in the attitude of absurdity. Something like that. They are totally unphased by it, and look at me as if asking, “Well, are you going to take us for a walk, or what?”
Uh huh. According to my grandpa Flurry, the guy I live with declared Martial Law a couple of times, and nothing happened. My grandpa said the guy I live with just felt like declaring it, since nothing ever happened. My mommy paddled my posterior a couple of times, but the guy I live with doesn’t do that. He yells, sometimes. Watching ice crack in hot coffee is kind of fun.
The flower parts of your post today are beautiful. And the puppy bits are unbearably cute. But the triptych of purebred border collies makes me want to faint. The diagnosis: Stendhal syndrome. the cause: sensory overload caused by all that canine pulchritude. (When making a medical diagnosis one must use the biggest words one knows.)
By the way, Chess, I took the advise of the guy you live with and got a copy of Meetings with Remarkable Trees. I am heartbroken that when I was last in Perth, Scotland I did not detour to see that amazing beech hedge.
The biggest trees I have ever laid my own eyes on were in the Grove of the Patriarchs in Mount Rainier National Park (WA). I did not faint because gigantic trees are not cute and cuteness is my kryptonite, but I was awe struck.
I forgot to add: Meetings With Remarkable Trees is a most excellent book. It makes me happy, for today, to live in a world that makes a place for a book called Meetings With Remarkable Trees.
It is, indeed. One really excellent thing about it is that Remarkable Trees of the World and In Search of Remarkable Trees are equally good. In Search of is mostly, if not entirely, about trees of South Africa, and possibly the better for it. The guy I live with says he would not mind having a tree which smells to high heaven (see In Search of), if he could place it in such a way that it cancels out the smell of scented laundry products and body sprays and other ickiness coming at him from all directions.
Stendhal. The guy I live with remembers reading Le rouge et le noir, and possibly bits of Lucien Leuwen, and possibly La chartreuse de Parme, but it was so long ago, and, like John Donne (he thinks), who after reading 600 pages could only say that he turned 600 pages, he forgets. He and my mommy experienced “le syndrome” when they went to Manhattan, she for the first and only time. I suspect that my grandpa Flurry was not long for this world when the picture was taken. He was 17 at the time. Meetings is quite delightful. There are so few books, he says, that one wants to read from cover to cover at one sitting. Raymond Chandler, Henning Mankell, maybe a few others. The funny thing is that the guy I live with is not overly smitten with trees, qua large vegetative objects which shade out his jardin. For his (to go on, a bit) is a Garden of the Sun; very few shade-loving plants are happy here. He remarked to me just the other day, i.e. yesterday, how strange it was that he could feel the heat of the sun, an object which is very far away indeed, on the back of his neck as he stood surveying his domain. I like to lie out in the hot sun on a summer day but the guy I live with says I might overheat myself.
puppies and flowers…
Don’t get much better.
Nope. Puppies and flowers.