Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you all about how I got into trouble, and also about some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Selling Insurance”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. 
You may notice a slight addition to the garden. It was constructed a couple of days ago.
Not really a huge amount of stuff has happened since I last posted. I explored the drainage culvert on the other side of the field yesterday evening. It was pretty scary, if you want to know the truth. Water drains from the street above it, down through the culvert, and into the field. Just into it, with no ditch leading to the creek.
“Either that”, said the guy I live with, “or it’s a tunnel of mystery“. Like a portal to another dimension, or something.
The guy I live with made ma po tofu for dinner last night and wouldn’t let me have any. He said it was very hot. 
Back in the old days, the guy I live with’s wife would have baked a cake for Beethoven’s birthday, which was yesterday. There was just tofu here, though. He said the tofu was really good, but the whole thing was another one of those metaphors.
It is super dry here. Some of the garden soil is just dust.
It’s usually dry under the arbor, though of course not when it rains or snows. 
The arbor has things written on it. Another mystery. You can see that the squirrels have been chewing away at the wood. 
There was a big hawk eating something out in the cottonwood. 
I watched, but I didn’t want to know what it was. The guy I live with said it was probably a tuna sandwich, with potato chips on the side. Or better yet, a pastrami sandwich with cream cheese on light rye, with a side of potato salad and maybe some pickled green tomatoes. 
The guy I live with worked in the bulb frames, for a while, today. I kept guard.
A crocus was in flower in the big frame, which is the one you see here. This is Crocus hadriaticus ‘Celia’. I’m not sure why this picture is so small.
There were some snowdrops in flower in the Snowdrop Frame.
And, yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but I got into trouble today. The guy I live with was pretty ticked off. I think you can tell what happened just by looking at the title of today’s post. It could have been that I was paying as much attention as I might.
I didn’t really get yelled at, just lectured in what I thought was an excessively loud voice. Not that there was anyone around to hear. It probably didn’t help that I started to drink the bird bath water after that.
So the bird bath had to be all washed out, and then when new water was poured in, everything was fine again. It’s a very popular spot. 
You can probably imagine what we saw on our walk this evening. But you don’t even have to imagine.
So that was my day. It was pretty good except for that one part.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me guarding the Madonna lilies (Lilium candidum, the green things there), while the guy I live with was fiddling around in the Snowdrop Frame, which is just out of view on the right.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
” pastrami sandwich with cream cheese” OMG. No. Chopped chicken liver and lightly pickled red onion. And here I thought that adding Szechuan peppercorns to the coriander and black peppecorn rub was a heresy. BTW… Peterson for some reason says that the female owl is lower in pitch. I believe Sibley, and Cornell, and my own lying ears.
The guy I live with said “Ha”. It’s not exactly Kosher, but there’s deli here where you can get pastrami and cream cheese. Funny before-my-time chopped liver story. The guy I live with made traditional chopped liver, with onions, hard-boiled eggs, and schmaltz (which he rendered). His wife said she wouldn’t touch it, which was fine with the guy I live with. More for him. He came home from work the next day and most of the chopped liver was gone. It hadn’t been given to the dogs, either.
Freddi would saute an apple with the onions for chopped liver and always let the dogs lick the bowl. She learned that from the Brooklyn grandma and earned all of the dogs undying loyalty. Render schmaltz, must like gribenes.
I bet. For the guy I live with, though, those days of cooking such things are past. (He said with a heavy sigh.)
I can see how you might accidentally tinkle there. Once you get the urge you just kind of turn your head and let fly. I think that my girls (who also lift their legs for some reason) don’t like splashback and usually pick some extra sensitive plant with small absorbent leaves. Which I discover after extensive burning has occurred. I looked up that tofu dish and it sounds searingly hot. I don’t know how people can eat stuff like that. I ordered “medium” food from an Indian place and it was so hot I couldn’t eat it. They had even spiced the rice so I couldn’t use the rice to tone it down. Mani you may have thought you wanted it, but you didn’t, believe me. Even the owl looks puzzled by the human’s desire for peppery food.
There has been an awful lot of talk about tinkling here, lately, on the phone mostly, for reasons you may be able to imagine, so it seemed to me that a post about tinkling would be in order. I maintain it was an accident, but the guy I live with said it’s happened more than once. The guy I live with likes really hot food. He’s obsessed with food in general. A couple of weeks ago he went out to lunch with his friend and they were going to go to the sushi place where he has always felt very comfortable, like grounded, even after his wife died. But a block away there was one of those sidewalk billboards that said “xiao long bao” on it, so he talked his friend into going there. They’d been there before. Tiny little real Chinese restaurant. So they ordered the xiao long bao, and when they arrived in the steamers, he told her to be careful because the inside was really hot. She looked worried; she doesn’t like hot food. He said “Temperature hot”, because these are dumplings filled with soup. What a relief.
I’ve been eating xlb for years and years, just learned this weekend to pierce through to let the steam escape. Yes, I feel dumb. On the other hand, I haven’t tinkled in the birdbath lately.
Lol. The guy I live with saw a thing about how hot the soup inside could be, and figured that jabbing them with a chopstick would be advisable. He makes dumplings here, siu mai and won ton and jao tze, pretty often. And char siu bao, too. Before they get steamed, or boiled, depending, he would line them up and salute them, like Mussolini. That always annoyed his wife, because she thought if it was funny once it couldn’t be again, so of course, knowing the secrets of a happy marriage, he did that every time. And he still does it, because of that.
Big fan of soup dumplings ever since Joe’s Shanghai opened in Flushing Queens NY in 1995. Now there must be over a dozen better places in downtown Flushing that offer them. Joe’s is a hole in the wall, cash only, communal seating, long lines. There was a comic published in the New York Times dining section by a guy named Zimmerman that gave instructions for eating them. Probably can be found via search.
Several, or at least a few, real Chinese restaurants here, now.
The guy you live with, Mani, is hereby advised he should ask his doctor about eating soy.
Oh, that owl face! Lovely, but the bird doesn’t look to be a heavy consumer of sandwiches. But maybe, I guess, especially with potato chips. Lovely flowers, too, the crocus and the snowdrops. I am wondering if this is really the first time you ill-used the birdbath in such fashion. I’m thinking it’s the first time the guy you live with was paying attention to the usage. Remind him what an excellent guarder you are, and cuddler, of course, and I bet his ire will disappear.
The guy I live with has already talked to doctors. Soy has been shown to have a beneficial effect in reducing the risk of prostate cancer, and also has been shown to have no link to non-advanced cancer. The doctors told him he has low-risk which still needs to be treated. There’s this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5793268/ We did actually see what the hawk was eating, but prefer to pretend it was a sandwich. I’m not sure why the bird bath incident took place; it just did. And has happened before. I would hasten to add that Pooka, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, “accidentally” tinkled on the guy I live with’s wife while she was weeding. He was very sorry.
My little dog’s favorite tinkle spots tend to be running water, either along a gutter, or a small stream she can get close to. Sometimes she topples in. HOWEVER I’m sure that if the birdbath was low enough it would be at risk. Of course the birds go in it all the time…..especially the heated one which is set up when the nights start to freeze hard. Ma po tofu was my favorite thing in a now departed restaurant, it never occurred to me to make it. Hmmmmm.
ceci
The bird bath here is pretty low, as you can see. Heated, too. (The guy I live with said the heater was pretty expensive for the day, but has lasted a quarter century.) The water does get changed pretty often. The guy I live with had some tofu which was about to expire. (He buys it and it sits in the refrigerator, unopened, for months.) Tonight, though, kimchi fried rice with turkey bacon. I’m not going to get any.
You’re not going to get any? On your birthday?!!? Some bacon at least c’mon.
The guy I live with said that the combination of purebred border collie eating kimchi and sleeping on the bed at night would almost certainly not be a happy one. And anyway I got some Newman’s Own beef jerky.
That is rad! It sounds like fun. I must find a bird bath and try it myself.
The guy I live with says not to.
That is why you were not supposed to tell him about it.
Too late.