the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to present a post almost entirely devoted to me, so you’ll know it’ll be completely excellent. You may remember me from such posts as “The Birthday Present”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
As you can tell, I’m not completely crazy, and enjoy lying on the cool concrete at night.

It’s been hot. This is about the most obvious thing in the world that I can say. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be 99 degrees Fahrenheit here (37.2C), and that’s hot, though the hunidity will probably be very low.
We’ve had no measurable rain here for forty-six days.
Both the constant heat and the lack of rain at this time of year are highly unusual for us. It does get hot here, but not every single day.

So, the portable swamp cooler that the guy I live with bought is pretty great. (Oh, by the way, all the stuff on the refrigerator was put there by the guy I live with’s wife.)
The sauce pan on the stove is for making hummingbird nectar, four parts water to one part sugar. You have to do this every day when it’s hot, so the hummingbirds don’t get sick.
I discovered just how great it was by lying in the path of the cool breeze. Maybe you can see the hairs on my hindquarters being blown about by the cool air.In truth, the guy I live with bought the swamp cooler for me, and I do appreciate that.

I guess I don’t need to say that not very much gardening is going on here, right now. I get to go into the canal on my walks, to cool off my paws.

Now I’ll show you some pictures which may just illustrate how dry it really is here, and then I’ll let you go for today.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you the news of the day. You may remember me from such posts as “Naughty Noodle”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m waiting for the right moment to be naughty, I guess.

So today is the guy I live with’s birthday. He’s seventy-one. He doesn’t care much, one way or the other, except that his wife died when she was fifty-one, so he thinks about that, of course, and that’s the perspective.
He’s still here, and so am I.

I was super-naughty today and almost died, according to the guy I live with.
I was chasing squirrels, and barking at them, in the heat, this morning, and the guy I live with got unbelievably angry with me, and made me come in, and when I did, I was panting so hard that the guy I live with thought I was having heatstroke.
Eventually he soaked me down with the hose, and then when I stopped panting so hard, we went for our morning walk, and he told me to go into the canal, which I did. My paws got all cool.

That was the excitement for today.

After things calmed down, the guy I live with transplanted some seedlings. Most of them wilted the minute he transplanted them. The three desert willow seedlings look hopeless (he doesn’t know why this happened, and doesn’t know why they had so few roots, because they seemed so happy in their original pot), but the acacias seem okay.
There were a lot of heavy sighs when the seedlings wilted. “This is gardening”, the guy I live with said, kind of stoically.

And we saw a red-tailed hawk out in the field. It was doing something.
You can see how dry the field is. They forecast a seventy percent chance of thunderstorms today, but almost nothing happened. It sprinkled a little. The guy I live with was pretty disappointed, but that seems to be like the running metaphor, these days.
We’ve had about two millimeters of rain since the first of June.

I guess that’s it. I heard some thunder, and about twenty drops of rain fell, but I had to go to my Upstairs Fort, just in case. I mean you never know.
At least I’m still here, according to the guy I live with.

Until next time, then.