Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on our latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “The Project”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. 
Pretty funny, huh? The guy I live with has an especially refined sense of humor. But of course you already knew that.
Today’s title is yet another example. There is a serious side to this, though. When eastern Colorado was having all this violent weather, the guy I live with was ultra-agitated. He tried to seem nonchalant but I knew he was just faking it.
The sky on those days when severe thunderstorms struck looked like this, last Monday morning. This is looking south-southwest, in the direction of, say, Albuquerque. 
In the evening, out east, there was this. A terrific thunderstorm, about seventy miles away. (Not coming toward us.) We were still under a severe thunderstorm watch even though the weather was “way out there”. 
Then on the next day of bad thunderstorms, the morning sky looked like this. 
I guess this is where the phrase “out of the blue” comes from. There were really bad thunderstorms in the afternoon and evening. We were under a severe thunderstorm watch for hours. Naturally, the guy I live with wasn’t the only one who was agitated. I could hear the thunder.
Now the forecast is for nothing but sun, for at least a week. You might be able to imagine how happy that makes the guy I live with. Happy and relieved.
His idea of a nearly perfect life is to be almost totally becalmed. I certainly like an uneventful life, with maybe the occasional squirrel or rabbit to chase, excellent breakfasts and dinners, going on walks and seeing not-too-scary things, playing with my friends once a week, and sleeping in the cozy upstairs bedroom.
He says grasses are supposed to make you calm, which is one reason why there are a lot of them here. I’m only going to show this one, because it’s a little different. Achnatherum scribneri. It used to be called Stipa scribneri. Native to the Rocky Mountain region and I guess “points west”. 
(The trap behind it isn’t set, if you were worried.)
Very little happened today. The guy I live with went shopping, and came back with something that pleased him very much: little spiral-bound notebooks, so he could write down important things. These notebooks, the kind with the spiral at the top, aren’t all that easy to find these days.
We have cicadas. The guy I live with loves hearing them.
He took some bird pictures, with the “big camera”, but he said the lens didn’t have vibration reduction and so the camera should have been on a tripod, which it wasn’t. We have a lot of goldfinches, and there’s a lot of eating. 
He looked up how to increase the shutter speed on the camera, and walked out into the garden with a red bandana tucked into his shirt, but all the hummingbirds disappeared.
Maybe tomorrow he’ll get all decked out in red so he can attract hummingbirds. I guess I need to learn how to operate a camera pretty quickly, don’t I? 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Instead of troubling yourself with learning how to use a camera, you might get the birds to take selfies.
Lol.
The birds must love you guys for supplying so much food. It’s such a kindness and such fun to see them enjoying our offerings. Here different birds come to feast on hanging peanut butter logs and trays of sunflower seeds. A woodpecker (I call him The Addict) visits repeatedly to gorge himself. And there’s a funny little guy who eats then lands in the garden and does a sort of dance. He makes me laugh when I see him hopping around. I’m glad they’re all happy and well nourished. It must be hard to be a bird in a climate with intense summer heat, little water, and periodic wind and hail storms.
I’m glad that you’re both feeling becalmed – love that word! And here’s another great word. Tormentas, which is Spanish for storms. I think it’s a perfect description.
I think the birds do like us. The guy I live with says he might have to get a thistle seed loan if all the eating continues. There isn’t much for the goldfinches to eat, though, outside the garden, but we did see some finches on the thistles along the canal road. The storms here were really awful; maybe you read about the one that struck the zoo down south. The guy I live with wouldn’t tell me much about it.
Did he see the pictures of the golf course at the Broadmoor?
Maybe. We don’t care for such things, really, and prefer to look away.
I think a perfectly host thing to do, Mani, is learn to operate the camera, take a photo of the guy you live with dressed all in red and then post it here in your own personal space.
Even as your garden is onslaught by terrible besiegements and events, it looks great. Maybe a function of all the great grasses the garden’s got going.I hope all stays calm on your patch of earth, filled with all you’ve described makes for a happy life.
Thanks. Things didn’t work out, today, for a couple of reasons. The guy I live with did look at the instructions for the camera, though, and that was I guess you would say enlightening.
What a lovely post. I am somewhat ignorant on many fronts and had to look up the difference between cicadas and crickets. I’ve made a slight improvement to my lack of knowledge. But they both sound wonderful don’t they? A lot of joy to be found if you look at the small things. Like, for example, a hummingbird or perhaps just a hint of a snout at the door.
Thanks. The guy I live with says that little things can be the most important. And that cicadas are really big, but not big enough to carry me away to their lair.