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 all the happenings at our house. You may remember me from such posts as “The New Way”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’d just had a biscuit, and don’t use napkins, as maybe you can tell.
Not much of anything is going on here; certainly no gardening. This is what it looks like outside, right now.
It was pretty windy today, but not cold, so a bit of the snow has evaporated, and some has even melted.
It’s supposed to snow again tonight. The guy I live with is okay with that.
By the end of the week it will be about sixty degrees F (about 15.5C).
There have been nice sunsets, when it isn’t all cloudy, which it has been, a lot.
We saw an owl the other evening, hooting away, but the guy I live with couldn’t take a picture of it because he had accidentally turned off the display on his camera screen and couldn’t find the button to press that would have turned it on, in the dark.
I got all tough with the owl, growling at it, and it flew away.
He’s been debating about whether to sow all the seeds that aren’t bulbs in pots outside, the way he’s done for over thirty years, or stratify them in the refrigerator like he does the bulb seeds.
He talked to his best friend, who owned a nursery and grew tons of stuff from seed, and she said maybe the refrigerator was better, because there was more control over the seeds, and sometimes, as he’s discovered many times, something happens to the seeds sown outside and nothing comes up.
And anyway, he doesn’t have any peat moss or perlite to make a seed mix along with the coarse sand that he does have, so maybe stratification in the refrigerator is the way to go, this time.
Mostly, he does this sort of thing, while I wander around the back yard loudly lecturing squirrels who try to eat all the suet in the feeder, or I take a nap.
He’s been making jao tze, dumplings. A lot of them.
He found chili oil at the Asian market. Superior chili oil, no less. This is what goes in a dipping sauce for the dumplings you see steaming on the stove.
The main thing in the last ten days or so–and I know most of my readers will find this boring–is that the guy I live with found a misprint in an Urtext.
An Urtext, if you didn’t know, is a printed musical score that’s intended to reflect the composer’s intentions, based on the original manuscript. The instruction was for the violin to play on the C string, which violins don’t have (but violas do). He contacted a person who plays violin and she said he was right.
It was kind of startling to him, but humans do make mistakes, as I’ve noticed.
He said he made a terrible mistake proofreading the columbine book and that bothered him so much that he couldn’t even look at the book after that.
But he also realized that this is what he could have done with his life, proofreading Urtexts and things like that. He would have been “better than excellent” at it, partly because that mistake in the book affected him so much, and also because he is kind of an obsessed nut, if I haven’t made that clear in all the posts I’ve done. (If you think we purebred border collies are obsessed then you’ve never met the guy I live with.)
I suppose it’s sad that a person who’s seventy-one suddenly realizes what he could have done with his life, but he just shrugged that off, since he would have never met his wife, and he went back to thinking about music, Chinese dumplings, and sowing seeds.
So that’s what’s been going on. Not really all that interesting to me, and maybe not to anyone else, but the guy I live with said that was the story of his life.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me all lit up on my evening walk.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Oh, blasted misprints! What a nuisance they are. I have been enjoying a book over the past few days but have been terribly annoyed to find the occasional misprint. It does spoil the reading experience.
The guy I live with says it can be distracting, though in this case, where things are supposed to be ultra-perfect, it was startling.
Being in the age range as your owner, I can relate to Urtexts…but alas I have to ‘let them go,’ otherwise I’d never get anything else accomplished. All we can do is try our best. Is your guy by any chance a Virgo? Stay warm, Mani. It’s trying hard to snow in NW Denver now, I rather enjoyed yesterday’s near 60F day but will likely pay for the melt that has now frozen dangerously solid when I go for my neighborhood walk.
Snowed here a little bit this morning, but the guy I live with has Yaktrax on his walking shoes, so our morning walk was okay. (Only problem is he has to walk in the snow rather than the sidewalks that have been shoveled, because it wears out the Yaktrax.)
It’s too bad there isn’t a retractable version of the Yaktrax for intermittent conditions. Up on shoveled sidewalks, down for sidewalks where the inhabitants can’t be bothered with following the rules.
The guy I live with just buys a new pair every year.
It turns out that the county doesn’t have an ordinance about shoveling walks (he looked it up). Most neighbors do shovel (or he shovels walks for them, to get the exercise).
There’s one sidewalk across the street that’s totally hopeless; it’s in shade, and the lowest point in between two back yards rather than at the storm drain, so the sidewalk is always flooded when the snow melts, and becomes a sheet of ice in winter.
Those dumplings look wonderful.
I imagine they are, though I don’t get any.
There are even more after last night. The guy I live with watched what he said was a “daunting” tutorial online on how to make fancy dumpling designs, but decided just to fold them the regular way.
I sometimes wonder why Rhody decided to come live with us here when he could have gone to live in a more comfortable home, perhaps with other canine or feline people to play with. He seems to be very happy here with his crew. Human people may be more complicated than canine people are, but some of us have more discriminating taste.
The guy I live with says I could have been living in a straw-filled lean-to somewhere out on the eastern plains, herding sheep for a living, instead of sleeping on a bed with Pottery Barn sheets and a nice wool blanket.
Well, you are likely much happier there with the guy you live with and his posh lifestyle than you would be working with a bunch of ovine people who wear the sort of wool that your blanket is made with.
I think I agree.
It seems to me that every canine person believes that he or she is the most fortunate canine person in the entire Universe.
No doubt.
Mani with yore snazzy blue collar you are a Beecon inn THE dark nite!
An furry hansum!
Wee been offline w/out Pee C fore a week….so wee stoppin bye to let youss’ know.
An Guy mee BellaSita understood what you felt about missin out on havin THE rite job…now hse knowss shee cuud of been a Purrymedic! Butt shee meowed shee did have 3 guud careerss an no sadss alloud! 😉
***nose rubss*** BellaDharma an 🙂 BellaSita Mum
It doesn’t really matter because he would never have met his wife, and all that squinting at printed stuff would have been hard on his eyes, eventually.
I forget if I said that the guy I live with had to get me a new collar, because the replacement batteries wouldn’t quite line up in the old one. The new one is rechargeable.
Reecharge-abell collar batteries Mani?? Sue-purr Kewl mee Poochie frend!!!
And BellaSita meowed to mee if her life were diffyrent shee may not have met ‘angel’ Paul her 4th an beeloved Husband…or ‘angel’ Kevin her 5th an last Husband….. 😉
It’s kind of strange how things like that work. Maybe the guy I live with would have never met any purebred border collies like he and his wife did, at a nursery long ago, and then after that she wanted one, a lot.
Yes, the collar plugs into this laptop to charge.
Life iss full of miss-tery Mani….mee has leerned that. One deecision has so many pawssibilitess….
Mee iss happy mee ended up at THE Purrfect Pad even tho’ it was a ruff pathway 😉
Mee-yow you charge yore collar on lappytop?? PAWSUM!!!!
Yep, I agree.
The battery on the collar can’t be charged with a phone charger, according to the instructions, so it gets plugged into a USB port on the laptop.