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 tell you how things have been going. You may remember me from such posts as “Hot, Dry, and Crispy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m “swamp-cooling it”; lying in the cool breeze of the swamp cooler.
This is mostly what I’ve been doing day after day, while the guy I live with works out in the garden, in roasting heat.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which one of us has a better understanding of what to do when it’s so, so hot.

Even though it’s been blistering hot, I mean from my perspective it’s been intolerable, it actually rained today, for quite a while. The guy I live with said that that was the “monsoon” stuff. We’re talking about the North American Monsoon here, which isn’t as reliable as the Indian one, so some people say it isn’t a true monsoon.

The guy I live with has turned his attention to “the enclosure”, which was, and still is, a real mess.
Today he scraped a bunch of mud off the flagstones, which are no longer all level and will have to be redone.
The wheelbarrow is lying on the site of the old firepit. The guy I live with pried out the grate yesterday, and filled the pit with soil.
The guy I live with said this was an extremely melancholy task.

Here are some pictures of how the enclosure looked, twenty-five years ago. The guy I live with’s wife built all of this.
A squirrel chewed that skull to pieces, and the fence gradually fell apart, because the enclosure was watered a lot.

That’s all I have for today. I spent most of the day basking in swamp-cooler air, and then it cooled off outside, and then it rained, and everything is pretty muddy.
I was able to lie outside for a while, too, before it rained. Here’s an atmospheric picture of me doing just that.

Until next time, then.