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 bring you up to date after a long absence. You may remember me from such posts as “Snowdrops And Sentiment”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see how dry it is now.
It wasn’t all that dry, really, at the first of the month, and we did get a dusting of snow a while back, but it’s been very warm here (anywhere from 65 degrees F to 70) and windy, so everything is kind of crispy.
We had a “fire weather” warning last Tuesday or Wednesday, then a high wind warning, and this week alone we had three “fire weather” warnings.
There are forecasts of rain and snow for next week, but the guy I live with says with things like that the rug has usually been pulled out from under them a day or two before they’re predicted to happen.
This is kind of awful, really. Some rain or snow would be very nice. The guy I live with has been watering the garden, something he never does in the winter, but this winter has been very different.

There are still some snowdrops flowering. Almost everything is a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, with the warm weather.
The guy I live with saw this one just today.
The cyclamen are flowering, as well as crocuses and other things, but we’ve shown pictures of those in the past.
I will show a picture of Iris ‘George’, though, since it’s such an attractive one, flowering in Sedum ‘Turquoise Tails’, which he likes a lot, and with some old yucca leaves on the right, as well as leaves blown in by the almost interminable wind.
Most of these reticulata-type irises fade away after a few years, but this one has been here for quite some time.

The other big deal here is this:
This is a directional boring machine.
The guy I live with was familiar with this stuff from when he worked for the phone company, but the technology is much more advanced now.
The machine bores a hole under the street and under front yards and then the new gas pipe is run through the hole.
A hole, or more correctly, a pit, is dug in the street where the large new gas line was bored a couple of weeks ago, the boring machine is placed next to the pit and does its work . It takes a bit of time.
The noise has been considerable here over the last few weeks.

Now we have a new gas line to our house, like most of our other neighbors do. There was a gas leak in our neighborhood a year or so ago which is why all of it is being replaced.
I’ve met most of the people doing the work and they were all super nice.  Maybe because they all know that the guy I live with knows what they’re doing and how they’re doing it so they don’t have to go into long explanations.
After they did the work at our gas meter, they even closed and latched the gate on the east side of the shade garden.

So that’s why we’ve been away. Enduring the wind, and the noise.

Until next time, then.