Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again, and at last, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden, or, in this case, news from the past few days. You may remember me from such posts as “Grapevine Down” and “The Littlest Bunny”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. The guy I live with said I was “too close” and that I had touched the lens with my nose. Well, whatever, huh. 
Anyway, our internet’s been down for several days, and though I didn’t care much, the guy I live with had to learn to live without the internet. If you asked him how he made it through those days, he spent it “reading, and in contemplation”, but in fact he kept moaning and groaning and wondering when the internet would return so he wouldn’t feel “so horribly isolated and alone”. He has me, you know.
Even without the internet, things happened.
The guy I live with said that kangaroos had invaded our garden. I didn’t believe it. But maybe it was true. I know what a Roo is because I ride in one when I have to go to the Bad Place, but this, I guess, was a different kind. 
And, well, you remember Earl, the squirrel with the notch in his ear? The guy I live with said that Earl got married, and he’s going to be a daddy. The two squirrels found the nesting box my mommy made (for birds, though), back when it snowed, and then they took a bunch of twigs and shredded burlap and made a very cozy nest.
That’s Mrs. Earl there. 
Yesterday evening she fell asleep while we watched her, and Earl climbed up the grape vine and snuggled into the nest, beside her, though you can’t really see him in this picture.
The guy I live with says there are going to be a bunch of baby squirrels pretty soon.
We also have bats. The guy I live with spent some time trying to take pictures of them, but they fly really fast.
Eventually he was able to make a movie. It isn’t very long, because, as I said, bats fly fast, and besides, the guy I live with says I was pestering him for attention and he got distracted.
That pretty much sums up everything that’s been happening lately. I’ll leave you with another excellent picture of me. The lens was cleaned, by the way. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
You have a lot of wildlife in your yard to keep it interesting.
The bluebird chicks fledged yesterday, right on time (16 days after hatching). I literally have an ’empty nest’ sadness — happy that there are more bluebirds in the world but missing the routine of feeding them & watching them. I waited until they fledged to clean up that quite weedy area, and when I was back there today, I noticed a house wren was putting sticks in the nestbox, so I sealed the opening. Chalk up another use for duct tape! I’ll take it off in 10 days or so because the adult bluebirds should be back for another brood.
And your bats! Last week when they were saying there was supposed to be a big meteor show, I opened the chaise lounge on the deck & lay back to watch. My husband came out & we were enjoying the stars (no meteors) and lightning bugs. I had said, “Well, at least there aren’t any bats like the last time I did this” — you know, the words were lingering in the air like a cartoon balloon, when a squadron of bats swooped by. My husband was agog. He had no idea there were bats around ~~ although I’m pretty sure I told him about my previous bat encounter. The dogs were out with us, but they didn’t seem to notice the bats at all.
I got 2 bulb catalogs in the mail today, and the photo from your previous post has me looking for blue flowered alliums.
Duct tape does have many uses. The guy I live with used it to keep burlapped conifers in place one winter, despite how it looked, but the duct tape came off the burlap a few days later. Not that he noticed it. We have lots of bats. My mommy built a bat house before they became fashionable, but I think it’s on the wrong side of the house, south side instead of some other side. America’s Neighborhood Bats is an excellent small book on the subject. For such blueness as Allium litwinowii you would almost certainly have to order from Odyssey Bulbs, or sources overseas. We don’t know if it would tolerate climates with summer rain. Maybe. I mean, it rains here in the summer, but not very much.
These photos were the ultimate in cuteness. I am daily expecting Bambi to show up in your yard.
Better not. It’s scary enough to have a small herd of elk out in the green belt, though we didn’t see them last year. https://paridevita.com/2012/07/19/of-elk-and-apples/ The back fence is chain link (it has to be, because it borders a flood plain), and the height of the fence is extended upward by “rabbit fence”, which does nothing to keep out rabbits, of course, but deer or elk (or coyotes, or other dogs) can’t really see it very well and so know not to try to jump over it. One rusted part was broken by an overweight raccoon, but that’s another story. We do kind of like cuteness, which of course is why my picture is featured in posts, but I hear baby squirrels are really cute. I guess we’ll see.
Chess. Bats. I think that they are very important creatures. But let me tell you a story. We had a bat in our back yard by the deck. Maggie, the wonder dog, was a 3 month old puppy who had not yet had her rabies vaccination. And, to the surprise of everyone including animal control, the bat who was “found down” tested positive for rabies. This is somewhat similar to being struck by a tornado in City Floral – the odds are slim. I love watching the bats fly overhead. Well after this, I have a new appreciation. The health department said we should put the puppy down. But, the other option was quarantine for 3 months. We did that. And then home quarantine for another 3 months. We did that, too. So now Maggie is 5 years old (and fondly called “the Bat Dog”). Luckily, no rabies – but a cautionary tale on vaccination (even though she was too young to have received it). Bats who fly in the sky at dusk are probably healthy – bats who are out during the day or near the ground and passive are not themselves.
Yeah. My mommy would race me and my buddy Slipper off to the Bad Place if we looked at her wrong, and we always got every shot you could get, which I didn’t care for much, but I understand they’re important. If a bat fell down to the ground here, I would have to go in the house to hide. Not that I’m not incredibly fierce and brave or anything like that, it’s just that hiding is often the easiest thing to do.
“Hiding is often the easiest thing to do,” I agree, but you can — well, maybe I can only carry on with withdrawal for so long. The animals are certainly out and about in your estate, all of them with a high percentage of cuteness. Of course, you reign the cuteness. My husband’s laptop hard drive crashed and it has been with the Computer Dudes down the street since Thursday, and the Dudes have made no promises. My husband handles his loss by using my old Kindle for email, cooking a lot, and taking naps. He is forbidden use of my laptop because in the past he has croaked my laptop and I myself have had to use the services of the Dudes. So I’d say the guy you live with is handling loss of the internet about right, and there exists the distraction of an abundance of cuteness, a deal of it right by his side. Chess, you two do engage in a lot of fun and frolic, and I’m grateful to read all about it.
Thanks; the guy I live with says that getting angry at inanimate objects is not very enlightened, but rarely practices what he preaches in this respect. I’ve heard him say very naughty words when the laptop didn’t do what he wanted it do, and he claims to be fairly “computer-savvy”. There was the time, for instance, when he found some files quarantined by the anti-virus program, and thought “Why not just delete these?”, not even considering a possible answer to this question, and so he deleted the files. The files were rootkit files, and the computer, while it still worked after that, didn’t do important things like talk to the internal modem, and no amount of spell-casting or chanting or pleading would bring back the files. That was pretty funny. (Even funnier was when he decided he’d be able to upgrade said laptop, an XP machine, to Windows 8, and “brilliantly” reloaded XP to the wrong partition on the hard drive and so now it has two operating systems, neither of which can be upgraded. To repair this problem, he bought a new laptop.) I don’t think I get angry at much of anything, except when people try to clip my toenails, or tickle my nose with a feather.
Ooh ooh, neglected to say, Chess, those are some great photographs, great framing and closeups and color.
Thanks. Oh, one thing, while the internet was down, the guy I live with read the instructions for the point-and-shoot camera. I wondered if there might be something wrong with him.