more midnight striped adventures

Posted on August 11, 2020 by paridevita

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today mostly to talk about me, so, as I need hardly tell you,  this is going to be an excellent post. You may remember me from such posts as “Mostly About Me”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see the difference between the mowed and unmowed smooth brome. There are grasshoppers everywhere. I mean there are like clouds of grasshoppers hopping all over the place, including on me, not only in the garden, but especially on my daytime walks.  As you know, I really hate being landed on. The guy I live with says I’m like a grasshopper landing zone. I’d rather not be.
But there’s stuff to look at in the sea of smooth brome. You know, just things. The way there are.
It’s been unbelievably hot here. Yesterday it was a little cooler, but today we’re back to hot weather. Right now it’s ninety degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-two Celsius), nine percent humidity, totally overcast and dark, with not a breath of air moving.
The guy I live with says all this still air gives him a case of the creeps. I tried to picture what a case of the creeps might be like, and how it would be delivered, but couldn’t.

Our part of Colorado is now under what they say is severe drought. It’s super dry here (as I guess it would be to be described as severe drought.)
Look at the area in the “way back” border that was weeded something like three months ago.Or part of the field where the grass doesn’t grow because it gets mowed so much.The grass is just totally crispy here, but it’s been mowed. You can see the green unmowed part in the sun, by the creek, which is dry.The guy I live with has been watering, a little, but it doesn’t seem to do any good at all. There are plants in the garden that can deal with this, naturally, but quite a few that the guy I live with thought would be okay that aren’t. It’s pretty nice in the mornings, though we wake up later than most people, or so I hear, but that’s because we stay up pretty late.
When the guy I live with was working, he worked the late shift, so he got used to staying up much later than most gardeners do. Then when Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, got older, it was very nice to having the fan blow cool night air into the bedroom. Sometimes we have to wait until all the strong smells from the neighbors go away, and that can be pretty late indeed.
So the guy I live with, as I mentioned on earlier posts, decided I get to go on a third walk, late at night.

Sometimes I stop and stare into the darkness for a long time. The guy I live with isn’t thrilled by this. He says it’s “unsettling”. I have better eyesight in the dark than he does, so I’m not necessarily looking at a nameless horror like he says I could be. Maybe just a bunny.

Guess what we saw late last night? The guy I live with said not to try to walk past the striped kitty, because home is on the street you can see in the background, so we kind of moved back and forth until the striped kitty sauntered off to the right. It’s hard for me not to appear super-toughly threatening, but the guy I live with is the opposite of that, so we didn’t have any smelly encounter.
It was just another nice walk at midnight.
I’ll leave you with another unfocused picture of me looking at a leaky drip irrigation system on the canal road.

Until next time, then.

 

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24 Responses to more midnight striped adventures

  1. tonytomeo says:
    August 12, 2020 at 5:46 pm

    Is the striped kitty playful? There was a similar striped kitty where we used to live. I told Rhody to not play with him or her, but he or she teased Rhody from a distance. He or she seemed to want to play. You might find this article about another striped kitty to be amusing:
    https://tonytomeo.com/2018/03/04/pepe/

  2. BellaDharma an LadyMew says:
    August 13, 2020 at 10:22 am

    Mew mew mew that ‘striped kitty’ seemss to like you Mani! Skunkss ARE cute butt they get spooked easy an then THE sprayin beeginss…UCKY!
    Wee had ‘Pierre’ here THE other nite. Hee was NOT spooked an hee still sprayed rite UNDER OUR BEDROOM WINDOW!! Dubbell UCKY!! So LadyMew had to close windowss an use fan to keep us sorta kewl…
    Wee love to lissen to THE Cricketss chirp an sing till wee fall asleep….but not aftur ‘Pierre’ has been here!
    Bye THE way you look hansum inn yore fotoss Mani!! An inn yore ferst foto yore smilin…..
    **purrss** BellaDharma an ((huggiess)) LadyMew

  3. barbk52 says:
    August 17, 2020 at 10:30 pm

    No skunks here, but when I lived in the hills the dog would get skunked when she was barking. Full on in the mouth. I think she was exhaling skunk for at least a month. You look gorgeous in that first picture Mani. Well, you’re always gorgeous of course, but you are posed to advantage in that one.

    • paridevita says:
      August 17, 2020 at 11:27 pm

      Thanks. I do think I’m gorgeous; the guy I live with says that’s immodest. What does he know?
      I’m just back from my not-quite-midnight walk and we had another Striped Encounter. The guy I live with said to be super-cautious, and so we were. The skunk ran down the sidewalk. It’s funny to see skunks running. Of course we have pictures, not super-focused or anything, for later.
      I have been sprayed before.
      I heard that there was this one time, when Slipper and Chess, the two related purebred border collies who lived here before me, were out in the back yard barking, and then they came in, and there was this smell of skunk, which everyone thought was totally outdoors, until both dogs jumped on the bed downstairs. Then everyone knew it wasn’t. There were baths all around.
      But still, the guy I live with’s coworkers said they could smell him the next day, the minute he walked in the door of the huge office building he worked in.

  4. Mark Mazer says:
    August 18, 2020 at 9:06 am

    If only skunk odor could cancel the neighbor’s laundry emissions, life would be grand.

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