Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, your popular host, here to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden and environs, and to wish you a happy solstice. You may remember me from such posts as “The Missing Grass”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristically alert pose.
The guy I live with said to make some humorous and highly sophisticated comment about me shadowed by a jalousie but really I am outside and not a character in some film noir. He’s been watching a lot of these lately. He says Saturday night is the best time to watch a good “noir” but he doesn’t always know when it’s Saturday. (Really.)
It was kind of hot today, as you can see by my lack of activity; the humidity was a bit much. Almost twenty-five percent in the early afternoon. He was perspiring, let me tell you.
Things here have been pretty exciting, to say the least. The other day, the weather forecast called for severe thunderstorms–again–and so he went to the store before the storms were predicted to hit, and came back just in time for huge raindrops to fall. He got out of the car, raced inside to let me out of my kitchen fort, so I could run upstairs to my bedroom fort (it’s safer), put the car in the garage (which involves actually opening the garage door, since the garage-door opener broke a few weeks after it was installed, which was also a few weeks after the guy I live with and his wife moved into the house), and then this happened.
If you think this looks scary, it was. He was talking on the phone with a friend, when the hail began to fall. But it just fell. It wasn’t driven by high winds; it just fell. So nothing really happened other than the guy I live with’s calm was severely damaged.
In order for this to do a lot of damage, which I think you can guess it could do very easily, the hail has to be driven by wind. Imagine something just being dropped versus being thrown at high speed. So, whew. But his friend, who lives on the other side of town, was hit by the same storm and by then the storm had built up in intensity and there was a lot of damage to her garden.
The guy I live with says this is easily the worst feature of the climate here, and that this sort of thing never, or rarely, happened until the last decade of the last century. It is certainly a source of anxiety. He doesn’t like being separated from me when storms approach, and I feel the same way.
But anyway that was that.
He tried to get a moon picture the same evening, using the special night-time feature on the point-and-shoot, but the feature isn’t all that special.
And maybe you remember the quandary surrounding the Caragana microphylla plants. The guy I live with said that the phylla (leaves) seemed excessively micro, and so he moved these plants into a place where they might get a little more water to hydrate those tiny leaves, and planted a couple of C. microphylla ‘Mongolian Silver Spires’, if that’s the right name. The leaves on this one are certainly micro, but not nearly as much so as the ones on ‘Tidy’ which he planted earlier.
The guy I live with and his friend (not the same person that I mentioned above) went to Harlequin’s Gardens in Boulder and there was a large specimen of that plant, with seed pods, too.
It will probably take forever for the plants he bought there to get big. There is another one here in the garden which is fairly large but branches on it die every year so maybe it will never get large.
The only other thing I have, and it’s kind of a big deal, though not as big a deal to me as the baby raccoons sleeping in the New Mexican locust just now, which the guy I live with couldn’t get a picture of, even though I was barking like crazy, is the happy, happy muskrat we saw a few days ago. You can see it here, leaving its happy home, to paddle happily down the canal.
It just went down and down the canal. The guy I live with said it, or he, was probably going to visit his girlfriend, and maybe watch TV.
That’s all for today. I hope you had a happy solstice, be it summer or winter. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Your life is getting quite exciting with giant hailstones, baby raccoons, and a muskrat.
It is. The hail part is scary, but the rest is pretty interesting.
The guy you live with has to acclimate, I mean really. Last part of the last century? Get over it or get out. Although you have to admit, Mani, you live an exciting life, constantly exciting. In a very beautiful manor with different forts for escalating reasons, and raccoons and muskrats and bugs and snakes and what-all. Love that night moon sky. And I’m really a fan of tiny leaves as they’re useful in floral arrangements. And your guy is happily numerous in friends and obviously ensconced in friendship, so all good. You, dear Mani, are the portrait of innervated dog in your characteristic portrait, and who can blame you. Happy Solstice!
Thanks; the guy I live with is still irked that his camera has no baby-raccoon setting. It would have made a very cute picture to see these two raccoons holding each other and trying to sleep in the top of the locust bush. They couldn’t sleep because someone was using the flash on his camera. He doesn’t want to acclimate to awful storms and would rather have summer be sunny, dry, a little hot, with the smell of water on crispy lawns after they got watered.
Dear Mani,
I don’t often comment but I want you to know how much I enjoy your dispatches from The Guy You Live With’s garden. Here’s to hailstones and happy muskrats and obscure (to me) plants!
Thanks. We purebred border collies are not exactly enamored of gigantic hail. The guy I live with says I’m lucky to have a fort to ensconce myself in, instead of a lean-to out in the middle of nowhere. (I think it was Slipper’s and Chess’s father who ran a herd of sheep out in the middle of nowhere, in eastern Colorado, where there were no trees in sight anywhere.)
That hail really looks scary. It could do some serious damage. I have never experienced hail like that. We only get the tiny gravely type. Years ago, there was serious hail storm that parked right over Beverly Hills and left a deep accumulation of hail. The hail was not big or damaging or even very scary, but was so abundant that it just piled up in a very unreal way. It looked like snow. The guy you live with can probably tell you how it happens there sometimes.
It can be really scary. Maybe even beyond scary.
There is something ‘beyond’ scary?!
There is. Like “super scary” or “semi apocalyptic”.
you mean, like the moth?
https://paridevita.com/2014/05/24/the-deluge/
OH! I see, that would be worse than a moth! That really would be a wee bit more than semi-apocalyptic!
Sampson, the doberman, here. If I were there, I would help you upset the muscrat. My most important job is to upset the crows that land on my fountain, so I have practice. The lady I live with oohed over your moon photo. She also oohed over the martigan lily from your last post. She’s got a thing for lilies. I heard her remark that she could never have a nice pair of shears like the ones you just purchased. She bought a $50 bulb spade and left it outside in the rain a week later. She’s a little dingy that way. Which is good when she can’t remember if she’s fed you yet… 🙂
Thanks; the guy I live with says there’s a Chinese proverb that goes, “There’s nothing you can own that can’t be left out in the rain”, but here that doesn’t happen very often, even though things do get left outside. I mean like on the patio table. But there’s camellia oil just in case.