Greetings and salutations everyone; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest and most up-to-date news from our garden. You may remember me from such up-to-date posts as “Below Normal” and “No Snow Yet”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. “Too close”, again. 
How about me in another characteristic pose? Just to make things interesting. 
Okay, that’s good. Now, before I start talking about what happened today, I should say that it snowed yesterday morning, but the snow is all gone now, and it was a “good day for planting”, and so the guy I live with decided to plant all the saxifrages he got the other day. I should also say that everything here is completely and one hundred percent true, though it might not seem like it could be.
Believe it or not, he sometimes consults “the saxifrage book”, a book which he really likes.
the saxifrage book
So he started planting. Every so often he would come inside to wash his hands and give me a biscuit, and then look in this book. Then he would go back outside.
Within a few minutes of starting to plant, though, he started walking all over the garden, and going into the garage, and looking all over the patio, and going into the bedroom, and the laundry room, and the bathroom, and the kitchen a couple of times, and into the shed, and then back into the garage, then out to the way back garden, then around the garden a few times, then back into the garage.
It occurred to me that he was looking for something. The missing trowel. The blade was black, and it had a wooden handle. He is obsessed with trowels in general, but this one was new, and he was testing it.
He was afraid he was having a “senior moment”, even though technically he isn’t one (a senior, I mean), and fretted about this for quite a while, and then decided to get the “other trowel” (not the missing one), and continue planting.
One of the pleasant things about rock gardening is being able to crawl along the paths and look closely at the little plants growing on either side. My mommy loved to do that, and weed at the same time. The guy I live with was crawling along the path, planting, weeding, and looking for his trowel at the same time, when he came across Crocus malyi blooming. The picture isn’t totally in focus, and he accidentally kicked dirt into the flower, but here it is anyway.
And here’s another picture of Korolkowia sewerzowii, taken when the trowel was still missing.
Then, in the Jardin Exotique, which isn’t so exotique any more, he came across this inhabitant of the garden, which means bad things for the mice. The trowel was still missing. 
Well, it went on like this pretty much all day long. Running around with the “other trowel”, and fuming about the missing one. I couldn’t help much, but if you look very closely at this picture (even embiggen it if necessary), maybe you can see why he was so frustrated. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Hello Chess, straight to the end and I did embiggen and I still couldn’t see the reason for frustration, I must need glasses, do enlighten me Chess. I am sure it must have something to do with the missing trowel. I must say I don’t much like the photo before, well my mum doesn’t because she very much doesn’t like those creatures (how big is it and what type) and now is worried for the mice. By the way love that first shot of you and the second one is pretty good too but we wouldn’t expect anything less when you’re posing. Just how many biscuits did you get with all the inning and outing?
It was the tiny bit of tan wood to the right of the flat; that was the trowel handle. When the guy I live with saw that, he took a picture of it, because he spent at least an hour, maybe more, looking for the trowel in all the wrong places, and felt really stupid. There is reason to be worried for the mice. The guy I live with thinks the mice are really cute but doesn’t want them in the house, or the garage. He also doesn’t want to see anything bad happen, but knows bad things do happen. The snake is a wandering garter (that’s its common name, wandering garter), non-venomous, about 40cm long. I don’t much like snakes; in fact, I don’t like them at all, and I picked one up once, and the guy I live with flipped out. He’s always flipping out about something. (We’ll never show any spider pictures on this blog, that’s for sure. My mommy was crazy about them, but the guy I live with, much less so.) The guy I live with says I probably got “too many biscuits” because I go in for my annual check-up on Monday and need to lose a whole bunch of weight over the weekend.
Now I see it, but I feel pretty much like your guy Chess (the s word). My mum’s with you on the snakes and definitely the spiders, did she ever tell you the tale of the saucer size huntsman sitting on her shoulder, freak out. Well your guy better not starve you over the weekend… doesn’t he know there can never be “too many biscuits”. I got a real laugh about your guy looking for the phone, my mum does things like that too.
It doesn’t really bother him as much as he claims, because he’s done that all his life; looking for tools he was holding in his hand. Wondering if the car has been stolen because it’s not out on the driveway (it hardly ever is), when it’s in the garage. And the situation has been exacerbated in recent years, because of events. The guy I live with says he’s not going to look up huntsman, it just doesn’t sound like something he wants to encounter even on the internet. There was the wood spider last year, here, and he took a picture of her with his phone, but not with the camera, because she jumped at him when he got close. She was not small.
Is that the handle of the missing trowel peaking out from behind the side of the wooden flat? Around here we call that “hiding behind the mayo”, which, roughly translated, means kinda sorta hiding in plain sight, but requiring a minor shift of the searcher’s focal point in order to be seen, which, for one reason or another, the searcher seems incapable of doing. Eventually, everything is illuminated, so to say, but not before precious brain cells have been permanently blown out in frustration. It’s not a very pretty sight and, unfortunately, it happens around here with increasing frequency,,,,
Yes, exactly right. I never do that, but the guy I live with often spends most of the day looking for something. Sometimes it starts snowballing, as they say. Just the other day—and I’m embarrassed to say this is completely true, but my role here is to see the guy I live with with the eyes of a purebred border collie, and not a person’s, since they can be so frightfully judgmental—just the other day, as I say, he was talking on the phone, and suddenly started fretting about not being able to find his phone. Seriously. Yesterday he did look intently at both of his hands to make sure he wasn’t carrying the trowel he couldn’t find, so he has made some progress.
One thing’s for certain—you’ll always find it in the last place you look!
True. It was extremely frustrating. Almost as frustrating as going into a room and completely forgetting why you went in there.
Handsome snake!
One of my cats brought in a deer mouse 2 days ago, but he got away inside the house. When he came out from under the furniture yesterday he escaped through the open back door. The cats were asleep and missed all the fun and nobody got hurt.
in the summer we have lots of skinks. Not handsome at all.
The guy I live with had cats before I showed up (shudder), and one time one of them was put out in the garage to “deal with the mice”, and all it did was cry to come back into the house. Snakes are protected by law here. They do important work. Not that you want to see it being done.
Well, Chess, at least he was’t looking for the reading glasses hanging on a chain around his neck.
So far, anyway, huh. There was the time he almost left the house not wearing any pants, but fortunately he noticed that before it was too late.
I found the cover of the saxifrage book intriguing, Chess, enough so to search it out. As the art looks familiar perhaps the book is somewhere on my shelves already; if not, I go to the library tomorrow.
I am a great advocate of tools marked with orange. I lose far fewer of them since I’ve taken that vow.
Thank you for providing the newest of my screensavers starring yourself, the purebred border collie. What of my own doggies, you might ask. Shredder is too much Maltese and whites-out the screen and Petie refuses to stay still for a portrait. Good thing I discovered this blog of yours, dear doggie, thanks to Ms. Vivian Swift.
As you feel about cats, Chess, I feel about snakes (shudder).
The drawings in the saxifrage book are by Eva Zoulova. Watercolors and a whole bunch of line drawings. My buddy Slipper couldn’t sit still for a portrait either. My mommy tried to get a picture of the two of us posing with the guy I live with for a dust jacket photo, but Slipper just had to run around like a crazy person instead. It’s funny, come to think of it; when the guy I live with lived in Long Beach, California, he never saw a single snake. It wasn’t until he moved out here that he started seeing them. Maybe they didn’t have them in California then. There were red-brown salamanders in the compost pile at his grandpa’s house, and “blue bellies”, the western fence lizard; he remembers seeing them in the drainage ditch just west of Palo Verde Avenue and Conant Street in Long Beach. (It looks pretty much the same on Google street view as it did about 1958, believe it or not.) But snakes in California, never.