Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden, which at this time of year is not really all that much. You may remember me from such posts as “My Walk At Dusk”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. You might be able to see what happened here last night.The weather has been really nice and so of course it had to get colder and snow. It only snowed about half an inch. The plastic on the Snowdrop Frame is sort of ugly and super-conspicuous, don’t you think? The guy I live with began to talk about getting a green tarp or something like that to cover the frame so that there wasn’t this white plastic thing in the garden. The frame doesn’t really need to be covered but it is anyway.

The snowdrops in there seem marginally happier than the ones out in the garden.

It isn’t really true that nothing happened; something happened, like it always does. The rest of the notebooks, which I mentioned a few posts ago, went up in smoke today. Along with a regular fire in the chiminea because it was so damp and you’re not supposed to just burn stuff. The guy I live with said that was it for the burning, after he was done, and also for the chiminea, which is so rusted now it’s become useless.

You can see it here, though I wasn’t looking at it. I guess it will just become an object now, because getting rid of it wouldn’t be easy at all. The chiminea was painted with anti-rust paint for years but in the last several years has been neglected, like a lot of other things, except for me, of course. The notebooks weren’t just burned, they were gone through before tossed into the fire. He said he was hoping that maybe there was a secret bank account number hidden in the notebooks. There wasn’t.

These fell out. They were posted on Facebook, too. I guess I knew that cats lived here when the guy I live with and his wife moved into the house in December of 1985, but these sketches were proof of that.

This is Mister Pipo (pronounced “peepo”); the guy I live with got him for Christmas in 1976. Imagine getting a cat for Christmas. Almost makes my blood curdle.This is New Kitty; the guy I live with got him a year or so later. He couldn’t think of a name and so decided to be clever. Both of the cats had to stay inside and the dogs got to go out, which the cats thought wasn’t fair at all, but the consequences of being an outside cat here can be unpleasant. We won’t talk about that any more, but if you read the rest of the post you may be able to figure things out.

To get to more pleasant things, if you don’t mind. This is a sketch of Flurry and Pooka, two purebred border collies who lived here, sleeping on the bed downstairs, done on December 13, 1995.I hear they were excellent companions, which doesn’t surprise me in the least.

The guy I live with has been sitting with me on the couch, in the evening, not doing anything else, just sitting with me, and that’s turned out to be so excellent that I hope we do it a lot.

He isn’t going to put up a tree. People keep saying to, and he keeps saying no. He said that sometimes people have good intentions, or that they just aren’t thinking things through, which is okay since it’s typical for people to be that way, but there isn’t going to be a tree in the house. There can be an imaginary tree, and I guess I can imagine that, and it would be okay. There’s a huge scrape mark on the ceiling anyway from the one time when he put up a tree and miscalculated its height. The lady of the house got mad at him for a few minutes.

He said people sometimes think they can relate to another person’s experiences, when they often can’t. One time at work he went to a conference where people talked about job stress, and some people said that everyone else had no idea what stress was, because they had the highest-stress job of all. The guy I live with, who had done that job, had also worked outside, and one day someone pulled a gun on him. Everyone agreed that he won the stress award that day.

He sometimes talks to a guy who walks his dog past our house and who lost his wife after a long illness. I get jealous when I see the guy I live with cuddle the dog, but he says not to worry. I still do. I guess no one can decide which is worse, watching someone go over a long period of time, or in just a few minutes, which is what happened here; the guy I live with was surrounded by paramedics and sheriff’s deputies. He said that both are bad, and that the way you get through these things, these really bad things, is from something inside you, and not from people telling you what to do or think or how to feel. Maybe you make a tiny little change.

I know this bunny has been on the kitchen table ever since his friend gave it to him. I tried to get it once but was told not to. It’s always in the same place. That’s a tiny change. It may seem trivial but it isn’t. The guy I live with said that where the apartment houses are now, there used to be a field, and the canal ran through it, and that one day Pooka jumped into the canal, not knowing that “canal” meant “full of water” and he got really scared, and never wanted to do that again, and no one ever forced him to. Instead they let Pooka do what made him feel safe, and good, and not try to make him do a high-dive into a pond or anything like that.

He also said that the days are getting shorter, which I thought was a bit unnerving and made me feel uncomfortable, until he said that in just a few days the days will start getting longer. So the days are getting shorter, but pretty soon they’ll start getting longer. He might be making this up.

I guess there is also a tendency to freak out about something called “the future”. I’m not sure what that refers to, and maybe I don’t want to know. He bought some pills which he said might help him with this.We’ll see if those help. It’ll be interesting to see if he can control his own mind. I say it’s highly unlikely. In the meantime, I do know that one of my important duties is to keep the guy I live with in the present. Not in the past or future. Like when I’m on my walk and I suddenly decide we need to go a different way.

Well, anyway. I’m sorry to be so serious for so long. We purebred border collies are mostly a lighthearted bunch (though the guy I live with said that Pooka was always super-serious).

It snowed, as I said before (a long time ago). The canal is empty but it has snow in it. (So I guess technically not empty, but maybe you know what I mean.) Some of the willows have an attractive red coloring to their twigs now.On our way back home, the guy I live with said something, and pointed the camera at the cottonwood. He took this picture as we started out on the walk, but I meant to show you which cottonwood. Even though there’s only one. Like to remind you. The one behind our house. (There’s a boxelder tree in front of the cottonwood.)So we walked over to the cottonwood and the guy I live with stared up into it. He said something because I got him all entwined in my leash since, according to him, I wasn’t paying attention, even though paying attention is the epitome of being a purebred border collie, but, you know, whatever.

This is as good a picture as he could get, what with being entangled in the leash and all.The first owl of the season. It just looked at us. I know I’ve heard some hooting lately, and the guy I live with said we’ll hear more as the weeks go on. The guy I live with said they won’t try to grab me, which was a relief. I just hope they don’t keep me awake at night. 

Until next time, then.