Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to show you how to make a post even though nothing has happened. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “A Post About Nothing” and “Another Post About Nothing”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. Remember how I showed how to look ultra pathetic and sad, in case you needed to be (like if you wanted a biscuit and no one was paying any attention)? Well, I’m showing how to do it again.
Those are the guy I live with’s gardening pants in the lower right hand corner, and of course he was in them, and of course I got my biscuit.
Not much else has happened in the last few days, except for the checking of the iris seeds, which is pretty boring, if you ask me.
This came in the mail. Like he doesn’t have enough of these. He got it at Garden Talk; they cost $39, if you wanted to know. 
We had frost the other morning. We hardly ever have frost here, because there has to be moisture in the air, which there hardly ever is. This is Mahonia repens. It’s seeded all over the garden, as well as crept here and there, which is why they call it repens. This one turns purplish when it gets cold, like some people do. 
They say at this time of year there are more geese (Canada geese, Branta canadensis) than people along the Front Range here, and sometimes the sky is full of honking.
There would have been better geese pictures if someone had been out there waiting, but this is what you get instead.
And some pictures of the garden to show what it looks like at this time of year. It’s been nice enough for me to lie out on the patio rug. The rug is there for me, you know. If you look closely at this picture, you can see the gap in the fence, where it started to lean (because the posts are hardly in the ground at all), and just to the right of that is a shiny spot, that’s the sun hitting Miscanthus sinensis ‘Silberfeder’, that the guy I live with gave to his neighbor. She passed away a few years ago; it was a really pretty garden.
Things look really different with the pinyon and Arizona cypress gone. 
The guy I live with says we should call our place “Garden of the Forking Paths”, like after the story by Borges, but people might think that was weird.
These paths were made by border collies, my grandpa Flurry and my Uncle Pooka, so they could race out to the “way back” and bark at things that needed barking at. There are agaves under the plastic there; they were planted out when they were too small. 
Speaking of the “way back”, here’s part of it. One of the poles, for the owls, is kind of leaning. Mount Lindo in the distance, 7800 feet high.
Looking back toward the manor house, from the shed, more or less. 
Well, that’s it. See, hardly anything, and I can still make a post, and end with a picture of me gazing skyward. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Hello Chess, that is a you’d better give me a biscuit or else look, ears back. Guess you got one.
And so the odd weather continues, we are finally having dry weather after weeks of horrific storms and rain, rain, rain. And you are having warmth then odd bits of snow falling, now frost. I don’t know about your garden but the plants do get confused about what they should be doing when the weather goes from summer to winter back and forth.
You said your guy was still checking the iris seeds but didn’t say what was happening with them.
I must be going blind because sometimes I cannot see what you are talking about in the garden, this time I cannot see the rug which you said is there for you to lie on.
Any post is a good post Chess, you could always put more photos of yourself.
I did get a biscuit, of course. In fact several. You can’t see the rug in these pictures, but you can in some other posts. It gets soaking wet when it rains or snows, and then has to be dried out, and it’s really heavy and the guy I live with wonders why he put it out there, until he remembers that I lie on it. Nothing is really happening with the iris seeds, except they’re being checked. I would say that checking them several times a day doesn’t help make them germinate. Our winters really are up and down, like a roller coaster. Sometimes we have snow on the ground for a long time, and the whole garden is white, but that’s not all that common, except that it has been the last few winters. The guy I live with says this is fine, but snow on top of the seed pots would be excellent. I think I should do posts with pictures of nothing but me, don’t you? Me looking this way, me looking that way, and so forth.
Yes Chess, I agree, a post entirely of pictures of you would be excellent.
Thanks, though the guy I live with says that might go to my head. Here’s a link to my mommy’s pictures of me when I was little, with my buddy Slipper. There are a lot of pictures. (I’m the cute one.) http://s1265.photobucket.com/user/paridevita/library/Cindys%20pictures%20to%2009-01-03?sort=9&page=12
You’re so cute Chess. Instead of a post of you looking this way and that way you could do an entire post of you from puppydom to now.
What a good idea. And if there are pics of you gardening that should keep your guy happy.
Indeed. There aren’t really any pictures of me gardening, just being cute, which, if I do say so myself, is effortless.
Oh, what big eyes you have, Chess, all the better to entice biscuits. As your body diminishes under your new regimen, your eyes have grown all-the-better-to-beg large. Canadian geese use the golf course pond here in my mother-in-law’s gated community. Then the coots arrive to drive them away. Coots leave, geese return. Before gated communities with their golf course ponds, geese probably flew right over the desert on their way to somewhere better. Snow caps the San Gabriel mountains too, and the view across the pond is not too different from your own. Nice post about nothing at all, and without resort to photos of rug or iris seeds sprouting. Lastly, such a happy pink tongue shows just how healthy you are now, dear dog.
Thanks, though the guy I live with says things are not exactly diminishing….My appetite has returned in a big way. I said before that border collies are used to get geese of golf courses, but of course I wouldn’t do that, because I’m retired. (That’s why we don’t really do anything.) Germinating iris seeds are not so interesting, but the guy I live with would point out that what germinated today probably will be, when it gets bigger. http://isachar-photography.photoshelter.com/gallery/Iris-Samariae-in-Samaria/G0000MAenVY3MPV8/C00002eAeN.R0O7M
What a pup! What a handsome dude! I understand how exhausting it must be, being so burdened with pulchritude — the Big Eyes must be a nice change of pace for you.
The only interesting thing about Winter here on the Isle of Long is what’s going on with our Japanese maple, which usually loses all it leaves by Thanksgiving. There’s only been one year in the last ten when we still had brilliant red leaves on display for the holiday, which I remember distinctly because that was the year that I happened to be gazing out of the window waiting for dinner guests to arrive when I saw someone in a white Lexus SUV park in front of our house, mosey over to our tree, and cut a branch off. It was obviously a premeditated act of entitlement. That’s Long Island for you.
But I bring up this Japanese maple because here it is two days past the Winter solstice and the tree still has leaves on it. They are not at all beautiful at this point — they look like withered potato peels flapping in the wind — but I am flummoxed as to why they are still THERE in the first place. This is the biggest botanical mystery since that five foot tall stalk of sorghum we found growing between the bricks on our back patio. (It came from seeds dropping from bird feeder, we reckoned, because cardinals are sloppy eaters.)
P.S. Chess, if you ever gave me that look in pic #1, you’d be in for 50 biscuits and a thousand smooches.
Thanks; well, that is what the looks are for, you know. The guy I live with says that leaf-fall, or if you want to be perfect, abscission, is triggered by various weather factors (cold, or day length, really night length), and sometimes things don’t work out the way the ought to. He would say “Sometimes things are just weird”, which I guess explains a lot. To get a picture of how the leaves of Japanese maples do in this garden, in the summertime, take a piece of cellophane, and hold a match close to it.
Hi Chess, it’s Christmas eve now and I’d like to wish you and your guy a very Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy New Year. Lots of cuddles from me and my mum xxx
Thanks; same to you. The guy I live with said he saw reindeer yesterday and they were pretty cuddly. Not as cuddly as me, of course.