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 some sunset pictures and other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Horticultural Invective”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. Kind of daydreaming, I guess. 
The guy I live with was not enormously happy that I chose to leap onto the bed with muddy paws, but I wondered how else would I get onto the bed.
It wasn’t my fault that parts of the garden were muddy. You know how we have dirt paths here, well, if it snows and then the snow melts, guess what happens? True, most of the snow does evaporate, but some snow melts in the paths and then there’s mud.
If you were wondering why there was all this talk of melting snow at almost the end of the year, this is why.
Really.
When we woke up this morning it was super windy. But also cloudy, which was weird. Our bedroom faces east, like they say to have it in A Pattern Language, and so that was the whole problem.
looking southeast
looking southwest
The wind was blowing from the west, like it almost always does.
It sometimes blows from the north, bringing very cold air, and a lot of complaining from you-know-who about the failure of the government to build a huge mountain range running east-to-west (or the other way around) somewhere to the north, to keep cold arctic air from blowing into our garden.
It sometimes blows from the east, which is called “upslope”. That’s usually in summer, and sometimes brings us rain.
And then, every so often, the wind comes from the south, in late spring, bringing us very bad weather which I’d just as soon not talk about.
Anyway, it was windy. Most of the snow disappeared during the day.
The snowdrop ‘Daphne’s Scissors’ was flowering in the Snowdrop Frame. It’s probably just as cold in the frame as it is outdoors, but the snowdrops don’t get snowed on. 
In the garden there are quite a few snowdrops either flowering (sort of flowering) or showing color. This bud of Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus appeared yesterday or today. You can maybe see that the outer margins of the leaves are slightly folded inward, which gives the species its epithet, plicatus (“folded”). This becomes more evident as the leaves mature.
The guy I live with says that this flowering now is perfectly normal and for me not to worry. I probably wouldn’t anyway. He said a lot of people around here are worrying because it isn’t snowing much, and he said that was just plain weird. According to him, this is possibly the only place on the planet where people complain when the weather is nice, wishing it were freezing cold with icy roads. He said the weather today was just fine, if a bit windy.
I didn’t really have very much for today. I do have a bunch of sunset pictures, “made possible by the wind”, which I hope you enjoy. (I’m also supposed to say these are “straight off the camera”; the pictures were cropped a bit, and some were taken using the zoom feature, but that’s all.)
zoomed in a bit
sunset over our house
looking north
A little later.
zoomed in
Last one, after the sun had set.
So that’s it for today.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Your sunset pictures look great Mani !
Thanks. The clouds were even better in person.
Wow, you sometimes get good pictures of interesting plants that are not the main topic. I know that the snowdrops are more important, but what is that nice small pine in the picture just prior to the snowdrops?
I had to ask about that one. The guy I live with says he has no idea. It was purchased as Pinus pumila, many years ago, which is a low, multi-stemmed pine, but this has grown to about twelve feet tall. In about twenty-five years. It’s a five-needled pine.
Oh, I should not have asked. I thought that it was something cool. I suppose that if he does not know what it is, it could still be something cool. Your zone is so unfamiliar to me, so funny things like that get my attention. Rhody says that the guy you live with should plant redtwig dogwood. It has nice bark. Is that supposed to be funny by dog standards?
It probably is something cool. If you want to see cool conifers, check out “trip to Jerry’s nursery”. This was written before Chess took over the blog, so isn’t as good as it could have been. I would provide the link but the guy I live with says that WordPress does really weird things when we provide a link. (We get an email from a blog we never use; long story.) Redtwig dogwood, no. There are zillions of them in Denver. The guy I live with said he did grow Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’ for years but eventually removed it because it needed so much water.
Mani, you wear a leash like the one I use on one of my girls, the one who pulls. Does TGYLW ever have to grab that second handle and restrain you? Like maybe on a day when the wind is blowing hard and you can smell 10,000 smells from other neighborhoods?
Yes, occasionally I have to be constrained, like if I meet other dogs on my walk who threaten my friend (the guy I live with). I think he’s just being inconsiderate, since I could have the opportunity to show how fierce and deadly I can really be. The leash is made by Ruff Rider, just like the harness I wear when I ride in the car. (This is a plug.)
But he did read that dogs, which I’m, really like to do a lot of sniffing on walks and get as much pleasure from that as from actual walking.
Like today. There were these circular marks in the ground, all over the place, and the guy I live with said these were made by a creature called a horse. I’ve never seen one (the guy I live with said that if I bothered to look in the pasture next to Day Care I would have seen horses), but the smells were very interesting indeed. Way more interesting than just walking. And this evening I discovered a pile of something extremely interesting which the guy I live with wouldn’t let me look at really closely (partly I guess because it was on the other side of a barricade), which was the result of the horse being on the canal road, earlier.
Mani, you are so kind and considerate, taking TGYLW for a walk every day. I hope he appreciates how lucky he is
Thanks; I think he is. I take him on two walks a day. About twenty miles a week.
I enjoyed getting to go on your windy walk by the canal.
The sunset cloud shapes look otherworldly.
The clouds were pretty amazing, weren’t they? Shaped by winds coming off the mountains. Today was pretty chilly, below freezing this morning. We took a nap in the afternoon and were awakened by a lot of wind. Warm wind; it was almost like summer at four in the afternoon. That hasn’t happened here for years. I’m glad you liked my short film. There was another, but I had to tinkle right at the end, and the guy I live with would have had to change the rating on that one.
Funny!! G rating only or PG? I saw in an earlier post where comments were closed that the clouds reminded you of Independence Day. Alien craft definitely came to mind.
The guy I live with said it would have been rated P. He’s so funny, huh. Yes, the comments get closed after about ten days. Otherwise, for some reason, if all the posts were open to comment, we get a bunch of spam. Which of course is caught. The guy I live with does not make money from this blog, and that’s not the intent, for sure. Nor is he interested in jewelry, expensive tennis shoes, Russian brides, or any of that other stuff. Spamming this blog is like the most pointless exercise in the world, but people still do it.
Uh, Mani, those clouds are weird and scary, like some being will emerge, beckoning you to join him in the spacecraft. Even the color – lovely and innocuous in an ordinary Colorado sunset – looks bruised and ominous in your zoom-in images. Thank heavens there were photos of comfy soft bed linen and folded-leaf snowdrops sans snow. Tonight we’re experiencing weather which Petey Dog would just as soon not talk about, fog accompanied by horns holding long low notes. Weird and scary too. Double thank heavens we were able to accompany you on your walk, your rather brisk walk. “Business-like” is how I would describe your sniffing technique. You also have an interesting gait. Gotta love a dog with a gait like that. On the evidence, you make the guy you live with go for distance with speed.
Thanks; yes, I often insist on walking really fast, especially when I hear scary noises, like things being put in the dumpsters at the apartment complex north of us. Though sometimes I stop and check out almost everything. The horseshoe marks, which we didn’t get a picture of, were really interesting. The clouds were weird and, I would agree, scary. The guy I live with said that one time he missed a picture of a “perfect double helix cloud” stretching all across the sky from north to south, the result of the wind off the mountains, and so has tried to take as many cloud pictures as possible, lately. Fog. The guy I live with says he misses fog a lot. In the same way that he misses rain which won’t turn into hail or snow. He explained to me the sense of enveloping comfort which fog or non-threatening rain brings, something I can’t relate to at all (though enveloping comfort I can) as well as foghorns. I would not like foghorns.