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 we do in response to hot weather. You may remember me from such posts as “Unbelievably Roasting Hot”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m sensibly in my Kitchen Fort, with the swamp cooler blowing on me.

I’ve been sensibly lying in front of the swamp cooler in the kitchen, or the swamp cooler in the living room. At night, I sensibly lie in front of the air conditioner in the bedroom.
I spend most of the day sleeping, which is sensible.

Not the guy I live with. He says this is a perfect time to move gravel, rocks, and set flagstone.
Maybe the heat is affecting him. Or he’s thinking about all the fires and wants to concentrate on something.
He also said it’s going to be 90 degrees (32C) or hotter for the foreseeable future, and that the “weather cavalry”, the monsoon, may never show up, so why not move rocks?

I can think of plenty of good reasons not to move rocks.

The other day he dug up some flagstone in the front yard that was being hidden by vegetation and set it at the end of the path going to the shed. I talked about this in the last post, but here they are. One still hasn’t been set, as you can see.
The hose turned out not to be necessary on the Fourth of July.

He finally decided to spread gravel on the back path. The path is super muddy in the winter, because melting snow runs down it.
I thought the paths looked pretty good when they were dry, which is most of the time.
So he crawled under the hedge of New Mexican privet (Forestiera pubescens), scooped a bunch of gravel into two plastic buckets, dragged the buckets under the hedge to the path where the wheelbarrow was, and ultra-carefully poured the gravel into the wheelbarrow.

Now the path looks like this. The guy I live with admits it looks pretty awful, but assures me it won’t when he’s done with it. For one thing, it still has the fine whitish dust that “new” pea gravel has, and it will darken eventually, if it rains enough.
The empty area on my right will be left empty; that’s my space for observing comings and goings in the green belt.
He ordered some seeds of galleta, Hilaria jamesii, which can be sown now, and will be, bordering the path, here and there. The seeds sometimes have low viability so he ordered a bunch of seeds.
This is galleta.
Look how happy it is, especially compared to the hens and chicks in the dish. It’s more drought tolerant than blue grama or buffalo grass.

And, apparently, since a 90-degree day wouldn’t be complete without moving some heavy rocks, some heavy rocks were moved. The bunny-chewed part of the lawn doesn’t look as bad in real life, and as I said, the buffalo grass just grows right back.

So that’s all I have for today. It’s hot. I stay inside making sure the swamp cooler works properly, and the guy I live with moves flagstone, gravel, and rocks.

Until next time, then.