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 a short interlude featuring clouds. You may remember me from such posts as “The Filter (An Interlude)”, among at least a few others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. Checking things that need to be checked.
You can see how kind of disgraceful it looks when cool-season grasses start growing in the warm-season buffalo grass which is the main grass here. The guy I live with says “Whatever”. If it gets super dry this summer, which we hope it doesn’t, the green cool-season grasses will disappear.
It’s much cooler today but of course the overnight rain they promised didn’t happen and everything is still very dry.
On my evening walk a couple of days ago the guy I live with took a bunch of pictures of clouds, and I thought it would be nice to post these pictures.
The first two were taken looking to the west.
The rest were taken looking to the east.
This one was taken late at night. That’s the moon, if you didn’t know.
And that’s all I have for today. Clouds.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, and let you guess what movie is on the TV. A movie the guy I live with says he’s watched about forty-five times now, and is one of the best movies he’s ever seen, though he’s not what you would call a movie buff.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
What luminous photographs. Were they taken with a free-standing camera, or with a phone? Just beautiful.
Please explain more about your garden – what tree are we seeing in bloom in the foreground? And is that a lily in full bloom in the back next to what, I guess, might be a mature desert willow?
Thanks. The pictures, like most of them on the blog, were taken with a Samsung Galaxy Note 9.
The guy I live with does have “real” cameras, but rarely uses them for anything but photographing bulbs, or for macro photography. He doesn’t do much of that, these days.
The lily-looking things are Fritillaria raddeana, finished flowering. The twisty-trunked tree is a Russian hawthorn.
The flowering tree is something special. It’s a hybrid of Prunus andersonii (the “desert peach”) and some purple-leaved cherry that originated at Agua Fria Nursery in Santa Fe. There was one for sale at the rock garden chapter plant sale here, and the guy I live with bought it.
(There are quite a few one-of-a-kind woody plants like that here.)
Someone from Plant Select came and took cuttings, hoping maybe to introduce it to horticulture, but I think it was decided that it was too similar to Prunus x cistena, which people can buy anywhere, though it really isn’t totally similar. The leaves are bluer, and it’s more drought tolerant than the purple-leaved sand cherry.
Thank you! I’m having the most delightful time now going down rabbit holes as I look up all those plants. Prunus x cistena certainly seems nothing like what is in your garden.
You’re welcome. The guy I live with says he was sort of disappointed that it wasn’t picked for introduction, but not because of anything involving him.
There are plants that were propagated, but who knows what will happen to them.
Such beauty! You should submit your favorite cloud photo (hard to choose) to the Cloud Appreciation Society.
Cannot make out the image on the TV. But it is not “High Noon,” of that I am sure. I hope someone else can guess correctly!
I didn’t really notice the clouds, but the guy I live with said they were something else, that evening.
The guy I live with said people probably won’t guess what the movie is, but he will say that it takes place in Tokyo.
Well, it probably is not an Ozu film because it doesn’t match that director’s style, to my eye at least. And it isn’t a Kurosawa film, unless you are a ‘gendai mono’ fan rather than a ‘jidai geki’ fan, and even then, I’m not seeing the cityscapes I would expect of Kurosawa with a ‘modern/realism’ film. Definitely not a Mizuguchi. It’s not from “Perfect Days” because that film hasn’t been released long enough (2023) to watch it ~45 times… Not a Teshigahara film …
Set in Tokyo? I’m stumped!
The guy I live with said lol; it is from “Perfect Days”, the homeless man just standing there.
He says it’s one of the very best movies he’s ever seen and has watched it every day for some time. Not the whole movie every day, but sometimes the whole movie, over and over and over again.
He loves, loves, loves this movie to distraction but is disappointed that he hasn’t learned Japanese after watching it so many times.
We had some visitors a while ago, and the guy I live with said he wished they had asked to use the bathroom, because it’s super extra totally clean now.
He sees the contrast in how content Hirayama seems with his life with how difficult it’s been for him in the almost seventeen years since the guy I live with’s wife died, though both of us are reasonably content with our daily rituals.
Nice cloud photos! I’m a movie buff, but I don’t recognize the film.