Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about what happened last night and quite early this morning. You may remember me from such posts as “Next To Nothing”, and so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The area beyond me has been left unplanted so purebred border collies can stand at the back fence and bark at stuff. We’re not allowed to have anything but a chain link fence because that’s a flood plain beyond.
The galvanized tub is an old one and was going to be a planter but it just sits there. It does have holes drilled in the bottom.
There are still some colchicums in flower. People sometimes ask the guy I live with why there are so many colchicums here, in what’s mostly a native-plant garden.
His answer is that they were for sale.
This is Colchicum bivonae ‘Mount Giona’, named for a mountain in Greece. The phone camera does tend to make some of the petals look elongated.
And this is Colchicum speciosum ‘Atrorubens’, which means dark red.
The name probably refers to the stems.
There are cyclamen, too.
This is Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Tile Barn Helena’.
This is a terrible picture of Cyclamen cilicium which he discovered was flowering under a daphne.
And Cyclamen mirabile ‘Tile Barn Anne’. The pinkish leaves are the thing here, as they are with most cyclamen.
So about the ominously philosophical-sounding title of today’s post.
Today is the guy I live with’s wedding anniversary, the seventeenth without his wife.
People sometimes ask how he makes it from day to day (it doesn’t get any easier with time, no matter what some people say).
He has rituals, like pouring water into the coffee maker (it’s a Bunn so hot coffee just pours out right away; he fills the holder with coffee the night before, and the carafe with water, no earlier than 9:01 p.m.), then making my breakfast, and after a while, we go on my morning walk.
We go on my evening walk around sunset, at this time of year.
Around midnight, we go to bed and watch “Q.I.” for a while. Every night. Even though he’s seen all the episodes many times.
But last night, about 10 p.m., everything went dark. Really dark.
This was a bit much for me, having already encountered a Day of the Dead party balloon ealier that day.
The solar lamps in the garden were on, but everything else was engulfed in darkness.
There was a power outage, possibly due to all the rain. The utilities here are all underground, one of the first neighborhoods here with things buried, but a lot of rain can still cause problems.
I wondered how we were going to watch “Q.I.” at bedtime since the modem downstairs was off. This is an important ritual for the guy I live with.
He lit some candles and made sure the flashlights worked.
The guy I live with explained that the phone and the little tablet he bought would automatically switch to the 4G wireless platform when the modem was out, so his phone would work, and so would the tablet. We went to bed and watched “Q.I.” on the tablet.
It felt very high-tech.
At about two this morning there was a loud knock on the door. I didn’t like that at all. The guy I live with is a little apprehensive about noises early in the morning, because his wife died early in the morning, but this time he knew what it was.
He let the power guy in through the garage so he could look at the transformer. The power guy did some work and said the power was “good to here”, and the guy I live with said he knew exactly what that meant since he’d done similar work, often late at night, for the phone company.
The power guy left and drove down the street. The guy I live with told me stories about going into back yards at night.
The lights came on about half an hour after that.
Later, during the day, the guy I live with did a factory reset on my internet radio since it doesn’t like power outages, and we did have arguments about who gets to catch yellowjackets that fly into the kitchen. He caught a couple in the butterly net his wife made, and threw the yellowjackets back outside, and I ate one.
The lack of a sliding screen door is another one of those things that needs to be addressed, some day.
After telling that long story I had to spend some time in my Kitchen Fort, ever wary of yellowjackets though.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
The guy you live with is very fortunate to have you there during these disruptions. You probably should let him handle the yellow jackets though.
He was surprisingly calm, but did want the power to go back on because of the refrigerator.
I’m pretty good at catching yellowjackets and nothing happens to me, but the guy I live with said I might have an allergic reaction some time and it would be a drag to have to drive to the emergency vet, which fortunately isn’t very far away.
He just catches them in one of the “bug jars” his wife made for that purpose, and puts the yellowjackets back outside where they belong.
Oh, night time disruptions can be very upsetting but it’s good that all was sorted out and that Q.I. was not missed. Anniversaries can be troubling and upsetting. It is good to have the colchicums doing so well, a distraction and a comfort. They are in flower here also with more to come along. I find some are inclined to disappear on me which is a nuisance and pity as I like them so very much. Re anniversaries: this is a week of three family birthdays here, three generations and also the 62nd anniversary of my mother’s death.
The guy I live with did pretty well with the anniversary, probably because he was so, so tired. He worked the late shift for the phone company for almost thirty years so staying up late is what we do, but staying up until three in the morning (he had a hard time getting back to sleep) was a bit much.
The guy I live with has a vague sort of theory about why some colchicums disappear (I mean besides the ones he’s accidentally sliced through with a trowel), and it has something to do with the mother corm failing to produce daughter corms for some mysterious reason.
With the wishbone-looking soboliferous ones, it’s trying to figure out which end should be up when planting them. Quite a few of those never did anything, for obvious reasons.
Rituals can get us through a lot. Glad the guy you live with found a way to keep that one ritual, despite the power outage.
I like how you have so many colchicums because they were FOR sale, as opposed to ON sale. I plan to borrow that.
He watches “Q.I.” every night. He even laughs at the same jokes over and over again. He got the little Samsung tablet just in case our internet went out, but he uses it almost every day, to watch TV or play music when he tries to take a nap. (I’m much better at napping than he is.)
The guy I live with says colchicums on sale could be too far gone to plant, since you buy the mother corm and it may not have begin to form daughter corms for the next year, but he employs that principle for other plants too.
Like when he went to the plant sale a couple of weeks ago. There were plants for sale, so he bought some.
This date probably conjures up a whole mish mash of emotions. We all have one or two of these. They can be very trying to get through. For me going through old photos triggering happier memories helps. Sounds like your drought has ended. You can send some of your extra moisture this way please and thanks. Having someone come to your door in the middle of the night could be a bit frightening. Good thing you both have each other to get through the dark and challenges.
It was pretty scary to hear that loud knock on the door, but the guy I live with saw the big truck with lights long before I did. He pretty much expected it.
All the rain this summer has been going to the north and south of Denver so it was nice to have the rain come straight for us, and it fell on Denver, too.
The guy I live with isn’t very optimistic about getting more rain so he says we probably can’t send any to you.
The annoversary was okay but he said it had something to do with the distance in time now. His wife’s birthday would have been week after next, so there’s that, too.
Glad to hear about your rain, and glad to hear that the power outage that followed was soon restored.
The colchicum are lovely. And the Cyclamen hederifolium look like angel wings. Beautiful!
There are a lot of cyclamen in the garden. When he realized he could grow a lot more species than people regularly say are hardy he went kind of crazy with them. And it’s nice to see all the leaves during the winter.
It was startling to see how dark it really is at night. I’m a tough and fearless border collie who runs out to the back fence to bark at something around midnight, but there are solar lamps to light the way. It was super dark inside the house until the guy I live with lit the candles.
As always your flowers are beautiful. I hear you on rituals…when my mom died, the dad has gone on with only rituals and memories to give him comfort. It never gets better. Sending gentle thoughts to the man you live with and hopefully there will be no more power cuts any time soon. Take good care this weekend, Mani.
The guy I live with says thanks.
One time, the year his wife died, maybe around Christmas, he went to one of his “safe places”, the Asian market on Alameda. There was an older woman there looking at the peanut candy, and the guy I live with said his wife often bought that.
The woman had lost her husband and she said “It doesn’t get better, it gets different.”
I suspect he’ll have some issues with the bedroom downstairs now that it’s no longer a bedroom, just a mostly empty room.
The outage was strange because it only affected our side of the street.