Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on what’s been happening here, which really isn’t all that much, hence the delay in posting since last time. You may remember me from such posts as “My Walk At Dusk”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Almost nothing has happened here since my last post, except that the guy I live with discovered there were more dead conifers. That made him unhappy for a few minutes, and then he said “Whatever”, which is pretty advanced of him. We are both very advanced, if you didn’t know.
It’s still frightfully dry here.
And then he discovered fungus in one of the pots of cactus seedlings downstairs. He sprinkled some Bordeaux Mixture on the pot, but a lot of the seedlings died anyway. It was the pot I showed last time. It’s in back of this one and you can see that there are fewer seedlings. The guy I live with said he didn’t need all those seedlings anyway; just some. 
The cyclamen are doing okay in the upstairs bedroom. They could be doing better, but the lights aren’t the greatest. I guess it doesn’t really matter that much so long as the cyclamen are alive. They’ll be planted outside next year. 
The news, though, the nose news, is about snowdrop noses. That’s what people call them, though of course they aren’t noses.
There are some snowdrops flowering in the frames, but these are outside, as you can tell. These are Galanthus elwesii ‘Theresa Stone’. It made the guy I live with pretty happy to see these.
There isn’t much of any other real news. The alarm went off on the phone this morning, with a message of severe risk of Covid-19, but the guy I live with said we were staying home anyway, for the foreseeable future (which for us is like a day, at most, anyway), though he might make a whirlwind trip to the store pretty soon.
I still go on my walks. I get three of them a day, which is pretty nice. The late night one is my favorite, I think.
The other night the guy I live with took a picture of something he said was Orion.
The bright star in the upper left is Betelgeuse; the bright one in lower right is Rigel. The guy I live with said we could see Orion’s belt, too, which is really a nebula, which sounded scary. (I think really I was the only one who could see the belt.)
He said the belt points to Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, which is where the Pleiades are, too.
He always tells this funny story (funny to him) of when he and his wife went to buy the car we have now, the Subaru, and how he told the guy who sold them the car that Subaru was the Japanese name for the Pleiades. There wasn’t any response, so he said “The logo. The stars.”
So we drive around in a Pleiades. We don’t drive very often, these days.
I’m not sure how to top that fascinating story, but I can show you some pictures of my evening walk. It’s pretty atmospheric at that time, about an hour after my dinner. The owls are out, too.
This one was taken right at the end of the path. 
So that’s it. I hope you found this post unbelievably entertaining. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Beautiful dusk sky photos.
ps I never knew that about the Suburu logo either. Go figure.
The thing you learn on this blog, huh?
(It’s because the guy I live with never stops talking.)
Exciting snowdrop noses!
Very exciting. There are a lot of them, too. We probably won’t see anything in the shade garden, which is where those are, until next year, though.
Mee-yow wow Mani you know so much ’bout Constellationss an THE nite sky!!
Pleese meow….umm woof to yore Guy his foto of Orion was Furabuluss! LadyMew sorta saw Orion a few nitess ago butt beein close to a street it iss hard to see cleerely!
Bad luck ’bout yore Connyfurss an Cact-eye….At leest Cyclamen are growin guud!
Our Snappy Dragonss are still bloomin even inn snow an cold! Not alot of snow….just enuff to covurr THE ground. No Condo time this week an mee iss piXXed….mee wantss to sit out but a sirtain LadyMew sayss it iss ‘too’ chilley fore mee! CATFISH!
If mee endss up inn lockdown iss goin to bee a furry long Winter….3 walkss purr day soundss grate!
An wee are inn Yellow Zone…LadyMew sayss Stage 2 which meenss wee headin fore Stage 1 an toetal lockdown. Covid needss to bee gone…..if only rite Mani? Bee well both of youss’!
**purrss** BellaDharma an LadyMew sendss Guud Wishess
Thanks; same to you too. We’re in the Red Zone; Purple is the highest. And just when the guy I live with got used to going to the store again.
It’s going to be over 60 here today and then a bunch of snow tonight and tomorrow. This is unexpected, to say the least. That wasn’t the forecast yesterday. As long as it melts, that will be okay.
The guy I live with took the picture of Orion with his phone, if you can believe that. He was going to take a picture of the Pleiades last night but I wanted to keep moving.
Mee-yow RED iss seereuss Mani! Wee went from a ‘Stage’ system to a color system too. LadyMew sayss it iss silly…you have to know what color meenss what…..an wee have NO Purpell fore highest…iss green, yellow, orange, sumthin an then RED for seereuss.
An same with LadyMew inn storess. Shee furinallee gotted used to wearin a mask an beein carefull an diss-tancin an feelin more reelaxed when shoppin an now iss goin to bee all tense an hurry hurry again…
YIKESS on yore furry weered weather! Same here…iss apposta bee inn mid 50’ss bye Fursday?!?!
Maybee yore Guy can get a foto of Pleiadess sum other nite! LadyMew wuud LOVe to see a foto fore sure!
**purrss** BellaDharma
The guy I live with decided not to go to the store, but we’re having things delivered tomorrow. It costs a little more, because the guy I live with says people who have to work during the pandemic deserve an extra amount in their tip, but it’s worth it.
He did drive the car out onto the highway today, because it’s good for the battery to have the car driven.
We’re at “severe risk” here.
Mee-yoh Mani! Mee-yoh Guy!! Wee are purrin an purrayin that both of youss’ well reemain safe an Covid free….
Seevere iss not guud at all….
LadyMew thinkss shee mite have to start gettin deelivery startin inn Deecemburr….
Iss so diffycult as shee goes to 2 storess to get ALL her foodabullss an toiletriess.
Thanxfullee all mee foodabullss an treetss an litter an toyss are inn 1 nice store 😉
No, it’s not good. Things were moderately okay and then everything went downhill.
Delivery is pretty nice and the guy I live with says he saves money because he doesn’t walk down the cake and pie aisle….
Mew mew mew LadyMew iss like tha tinn THE Chocolate Isle!!! 😉
The guy I live with doesn’t even go down the chocolate or candy aisles any more.
I always wondered why, since Subaru is the “seven sisters,” the logo has six stars? There’s something for you to figure out, Mani. I would rather it has seven, not so much for accuracy, but because I don’t like even numbers. I’m not obsessive, just prefer odd numbers. I like the idea of those being snowdrop noses!
Snowdrop noses are excellent to think about. So are purebred border collie noses, too.
The guy I live with found this on the “wayback machine” online (internet archive), from a Japanese website talking about the name Subaru.
“Subaru is the name of a star cluster in the Taurus constellation. Six of its stars are visible to the naked eye, but about 250 bluish stars can be seen if one uses a telescope.
In the West the cluster is called Pleiades, in China, Mao, and in Japan, Subaru (“to govern” or gather together”). In Japan, it also goes by the name Mutsuraboshi (“Six Stars”), under which title it appears frequently in very old Japanese documents such as Kojiki and Manyosyu and literature such as Makura-no-soshi. Clearly, this is one of the clusters much loved by the Japanese from ancient times.”
There’s some stuff on Wikipedia, too.
I think this is all very scary. I like to think about my house, and my forts, the couch, my bedroom, my garden, the field and the places where I walk, but things like star clusters are pretty scary to me. The guy I live with says we are completely safe from the Pleiades, though.
The Farmer’s Almanac has a pretty good explanation about the Pleiades too. Apparently there are quite a few more than 7, but even with clear skies and no competing light most are hard or impossible to see. So, your car must be fairly old, even vintage? I like to keep a car for 20 years if I can! I laughed about the car salesman. You’d think that would be the first thing they learned, but no. I am very sorry about your conifers. I guess you can anoint one tree as well as another, but it’s hard on TGYLW.
We have a lot of light pollution looking to the east and north, because Denver is there, and it’s a pretty big city now. But to the west, where the mountains are, not so much. Orion is in the southeast, on our walk, so we can see it pretty well. The guy I live with told me about Sirius, the Dog Star, in the other direction from Aldebaran, and I thought that was pretty interesting. It’s very bright right now.
It’s a 2008 Outback. The guy I live with bought it for his wife; she drove it once or twice before she died. (He would do the driving when they drove around Denver, like Christmas shopping and stuff, or going to nurseries or bookstores.) It has 45,000 miles on it. But new tires (last year I think).
It’s okay about the conifers. They were blue spruces, which like a lot of water here. The guy I live with said he might cut down the fastigate blue spruce with you see pictures of on the blog. (It’s in the first picture on my last post, that ratty looking thing on the left.)
Morning and evening… the major planets have also been spectacular this month. Next month, the closest conjuction of Saturn and Jupiter since the later 1200’s.
Just got an email about that, from a friend. The guy I live with says we’re not waking up early to see planets, though. He did show Mars to me.
Thank you for the cactus pictures especially – I am very interested in this project! Here in Virginia we hare been seeing great moon phases and a few planets, but the light pollution is bad enough to make seeing stars less feasible. In August we went to a very isolated cabin in NY where there was basically no light pollution (a “dark sky” area) and the stars and planets were amazing.
Of course the pictures of you are always lovely. Glad to hear you all are being careful to stay healthy – we just did a curbside pick up of library books and groceries and that’s it for us for the week. Lots of community transmission here! Curbside grocery pick up is basically free here, and I’m sure we save a lot of money by avoiding impulse buys!
ceci
Thanks; I work hard at nice pictures of me. Well not really.
The guy I live with is staying home, with me, and he said that except for the “with me” part he is dreadfully bored. There isn’t anything much on tv, I guess.
He has started listening to more music again, and that distracts him from almost everything.
It snowed here. I think tonight it’s supposed to be clear, so maybe on my midnight walk we’ll see stars and planets and stuff. The guy I live with said he saw a shooting star the other night. I wasn’t paying attention.
The cactus seedlings just give him something to do. The last time he did this, he transplanted over 600 cactus seedlings into pots of pure sand, thinking the rooting would be better, and then after he watered them in their flats just one time, they were all dead. The sand wicked the water back up and that was that. So no sand this time.
“sprinkled some Bordeaux Mixture on the pot, but a lot of the seedlings died anyway.” Never found Bordeaux effective for an existing fungal infection, only as a prophylactic. We stopped using it as it becomes cumulatively soil toxic with continued use.
It worked okay. Fungus is gone, for now anwyay.
Hi Mani! Sampson the dobie, here! The snowdrop noses are so cute! Not as cute as dog noses, dog noses being the cutest noses ever dreamt up by the universe. The lady I live with has vowed not to buy any new plants this year (there are lots of seeds and pots of “saved” plants for next year so ‘m not sure why this needs the drama of a vow). Apparently things are very busy here and “there is no time”. I am jealous that you get three walks a day. I will have to talk to my people about that. We have to cross the street a lot to avoid other people on our walks. I hear that’s because of “the covids”. I guess they want to jump in your face and make some trouble. We don’t need any of that. 😊
Hi. I am surprised that people would want to jump in your face. The guy I live with has a doberman story he might tell some time. (His late wife had a doberman when she was little. He always told her that if they got one–they got purebred border collies instead–it would absolutely have to be named Obermann. Like the piano piece by Liszt. She said No, but he thought it would have been a great name.)
Three walks a day is a really excellent plan. There is like no one around late at night, but there are all of the day’s accumulated smells to check out.
I agree about dog noses, though seeing snowdrops up makes the guy I live with happy, even though there’s snow on the ground now.
Anyway. Hardly any new plants were acquired this year, except for the oaks in a post a while back, and some things earlier this year.
The cactus seeds are actually from last year. Some seeds didn’t germinate, which the guy I live with said was weird, but he might order them again this year.
Most cactus are pretty easy from seed; these will all likely be given away. The guy I live with likes to share.
Happy Thanksgiving, you Boon Companions…thankful for each other, I am sure, as we are for you.
Thanks. Same to you.
Yup, happy thanksgiving, dear Mani. How are you celebrating the gratitude holiday? With some extra and special nibblet, I hope. I am grateful you share your words and your fine photos to so enliven my days. Keep on keeping on, Mani. I find that “whatever” attitude sure helps with the trekking.
Thanks. It’s been a pretty good day, so far, though not traditional.
I did pick up something on my evening walk, but the guy I live with sort of shrieked and told me to spit it out, so I did. I guess he has my best interests at heart. He always says he does, anyway.