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 to tell you about my scary night, and some other things as well. You may remember me from such posts as “Oaks From Afar”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m inspecting my suddenly-lush Private Lawn, which is Cody buffalo grass. You can see how it responded to the downpour we had last week.
Other lawns I’ve walked by didn’t do this, so I feel privileged.
That area on the left side had plants in it, but they were dug up. That kind of gouge on the right side is where bunnies have been eating the grass, which the guy I live with says is okay. The grass comes back very quickly.

Penstemon richardsonii has been flowering very happily in a sixty-year-old glazed pot. It seeded itself there; the original plants in the rock garden died and the pot was, at the time, right next to the rock garden. The guy I live with moved the pot onto the flagstone by the patio.
Bumblebees like this penstemon a lot.
A scary thing happened this last weekend. The guy I live with went to the store, and when he got home, the power was out. It was about 90 degrees (32C) outside.
Someone came to the back yard to look at the transformer, which is in a corner of the yard.
Then what seemed like a long time passed, and other people came to look at the transformer. The guy I live with had done work like this, but with phone stuff, so he talked to them. There were a bunch of houses without power.
More time passed, and eventually there was digging, about the time I went on my evening walk. There was a lot of digging. With shovels.

It got dark, and the guy I live with lit some candles, but I thought it was creepy, and I was really hot.
I wanted to go to my Upstairs Fort but the guy I live with wouldn’t let me, because he said it was even hotter up there.
So he took me on a third walk, and we went by the creek, where it was much cooler than anywhere else around.
More time passed, so the guy I live with took me on a fourth walk, to cool off again. The power came on about one in the morning; the guy I live with turned on the air conditioner upstairs, and after a while we were able to sleep.

What had happened was that there was an old fault in the buried electrical line, and when all the water from the downpour rushed into the storm drain pipe, the pipe started leaking and shorted or grounded the electrical wires.

I inspected the filled-up pit the next day.
Everything looked fine to me.

But there’s more to the story. After this picture was taken, we kept walking, and the guy I live with saw this.
He instantly knew what this was.
On our way back home, he picked up the tool “so no one would swipe it”, and put it in the wooden box on our driveway. The box has been there for deliveries ever since the pandemic; people who deliver stuff find it convenient.

The next day, the guy I live with was talking to our neighbor, over on his driveway, when someone walked by. The guy I live with struck up a conversation with him, like he does with everybody. They talked about working outside, retirement (the guy I live with told him his retirement story like he does with everyone who says they yearn for retirement). The man worked for the water department, so the guy I live with showed him our front garden, which hasn’t been watered in thirty-nine years.
Then the guy I live with mentioned that he’d found this tool, which is a hook to open utility hole covers.
The water guy said “I’ve been looking all over for that!”
He was very happy to get it back.

To wrap up today’s post, I know that things have been very stressful around here. There are a lot of terrible fires in the state, and elsewhere, too. The guy I live with has been talking about them and they sound scary to me.
He’s also been working a lot in the garden, moving rocks and gravel again. He set three heavy pieces of flagstone today, without dropping them on his feet or fingers.
And the dirt path finally had gravel spread on it, after about forty years of it being dirt, or thick mud in the winter.
The area to the left of me is a “problem area”. It’s been like this for a while. The soil there is not very good, for reasons I don’t understand. I know what dirt is, but that’s about all.

I lay in the problem area while the guy I live with set the flagstones. You can see what a mess it is. The guy I live with hasn’t given much thought to the little area even though he walks by it every day, but he says he’ll be thinking about it fairly soon. The grass on the right of the picture and also to the left of me is bluebunch, Pseudoroegneria spicata, a native.
We’ll see what happens when the guy I live with starts his “serious thinking”.

Until next time, then.