the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to let you know just how little has been going on here lately. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “More Endlessness”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that the snow is still here.

And now it’s snowing again. The guy I live with says this might drive him up the wall, which I might like to see.

“Another endless winter” is what I keep hearing. The guy I live with says this could very well be the first February in memory where there are no snowdrops in the shade garden. A lot of them were up, before they got covered with snow back in January.
There was one snowdrop pathetically trying to flower in an almost snowless part of the garden, just today.
The enthusiasm for snowdrops started years ago, when winters didn’t have so much snow, but now the guy I live with is beginning to wonder if this is all worthwhile.
At this time fifteen years ago, there would have been snowdrops, crocuses, and hellebores in flower, but now there’s just snow. Nothing but snow. The snowdrops would all be finished by the end of March.

Until last night, though, the weather was pretty nice. It was almost sixty degrees yesterday, but that wasn’t enough to melt the ice and snow.
The weather changed by late evening.
The guy I live with did fill the bird feeders, again, today, when it started to snow, which I guess counts as working in the garden. I helped.

These arrived in the mail today. Not all of these seeds are for our garden. He’s going to try Lilium candidum from seeds this year, because the bulbs he ordered last year, to add to the ones already in the garden, never arrived.
Oddly, the letter that was in the mail box wasn’t picked up.

These came in the mail the day before that.
The guy I live with was going to post this picture on Facebook, because, you know, it’s snowing and this is hot sauce, but invariably someone would have made a comment that they couldn’t tolerate hot chili peppers, which the guy I live with would have thought was pretty dumb, because these bottles are staying here. For a while, anyway.

I’ve never had hot sauce, but I hear that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here would lap it up. Maybe I should try it some time. The guy I live with says he’s not going to offer me any, even though he says it’s “not all that hot, compared to other things”. Like the ghost pepper sauce they offer. “Compared to other things” doesn’t mean much to me.

There is plenty to do indoors, anyway, while it’s snowing. I prefer napping. The TV is on a lot, because the guy I live with likes to hear human voices. There are a lot of compact discs in the house, so there’s music from time to time. And even more books, but he doesn’t read much, unless it’s a book on music. He used to read a lot, decades ago, and when his wife was here he read a lot of gardening books, but not any more.

Her memory is kept alive partly by the books she owned. The guy I live with hasn’t read many of them. This is one:
He remembers the day she bought this book, and a couple of other old Everyman’s Library books.

The other day, he found this book, which had fallen behind something. Another old Everyman’s Library book. It was his grandfather’s, and is in pretty bad shape. I guess it was used a lot, maybe a hundred years ago.

He keeps it for sentimental reasons. There isn’t much of anything that’s relevant for this climate, or so I hear.

I guess I’m rambling now. We purebred border collies are supposed to be highly focused, but we do get distracted, like say by squirrels, or in this case, hot sauce and books.
I’ll leave you with a rather atmospheric picture of me.

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 something a little different. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Our Modern Lifestyle”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Rather pensive, and a bit wistful, don’t you think? We purebred border collies can often be lost in thought.

Well. I was beginning to wonder if I hadn’t repeated myself an awful lot in the last year or so. That’s quite possible, considering the large number of posts made on this blog.
So this post, as I said, will be a little different.

There’s so much snow on the ground that there’s no gardening, and all you would hear on that front is a bunch of complaining, so I’ll just skip that part.
Maybe you can see how much snow we got, with this picture of me standing on the canal road looking south down the field.
It’s not very cold out, even though it looks like it might be. It was cold last night, and really cold the night before, but the guy I live with just said, “Whatever”.

Sometimes things around here can be puzzling, to say the least.
Like just the other day, out of nowhere, and I do mean absolutely out of nowhere, the guy I live with said to me, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but rather that it exists.”
I had to look that up. It’s Wittgenstein. Again. This is at least the third time the blog has mentioned Wittgenstein, so maybe that’s overdoing it.
I thought about it for a minute, since that’s the amount of time I’d devote to wondering why the world exists, then took a nap.
In truth, I’m more interested in breakfast and dinner.

Sometimes, strange things happen that make me wonder if the guy I live with is all there, if you know what I mean. Besides quoting Wittgenstein. He was vacuuming behind the door of our bedroom, and looked at this like he’d never seen it before.
He said, “Huh”.  It was pretty dusty, so he washed it off. He said it had something called “potpourri” in it, and that at one time, years ago, it must have had a scent.
The bedroom door is always propped open with this doorstop. The doorstop is heavy so maybe that’s why the door is rarely shut.
I guess he didn’t finish vacuuming entirely.
But still, how can you spend twenty years sleeping in a room and never notice something? We purebred border collies notice almost everything.

The mail came today. The guy I live with was irked that he still hasn’t received some tax documents, because he hates having to put things off, though, on the other hand, he got a box filled with bags of coffee in it, the day before he was going to run out.
He keeps saying he’s going to “transition to tea”, and I know there’s tea in the cabinet, near where my biscuits are. It seemed strange to me that he keeps talking about taking up tea-drinking when there are at least four teapots in the house.
I don’t understand this at all. Maybe there’s something in Wittgenstein about it.

And he hasn’t heard from the ear doctor yet. He said he was going to be very patient, which I thought was a bit heavy-handed when talking about waiting for a doctor.

The ear is much better, by the way, though it still needs to be checked out. He can hear perfectly well now. He said it was something to do with his inner ear, which I didn’t get at all, because my ears are on the outside.
This has happened to him before. But he’d lost quite a bit of hearing in his ear, which completely freaked him out.
This is why.Music is the guy I live with’s main interest, and has been since he was eight.
It wasn’t listening to headphones that caused this; more like a cold, though he said it was because he was allergic to snow and cold weather, and that if I wasn’t such a total wimp about hot weather we’d move to Tucson. (I know that’s not going to happen, for like ten thousand reasons.)

Something really interesting happened yesterday. This was utterly astonishing to me.
I was on my morning walk, and noticed a whole bunch of water running down the gutter, into the storm drain kitty-corner from our house. The sidewalk in front of our neighbors’ house was a sheet of ice.
There were a couple of guys down the street looking at something, so I dragged the guy I live with down there to see what was going on.
This is what we saw:
It was a broken water main. There was water just bubbling up from the street.

Our water wasn’t affected; the water guys said they didn’t know how this happened, because the water pipe is buried pretty deeply, so it couldn’t have frozen.
When we came back home, the guy I live with went back out and talked to the water guys, because he used to do work sort of like that. Things involving backhoes and going into holes in the ground, and sometimes staying out all night, working.
The water main break got fixed by evening. I didn’t like all the big machinery, the noise, and the flashing lights.
This morning, we walked by again, and the guy I live with took a picture of some frozen mud. He said maybe this is the only blog that shows pictures of frozen mud.
I wanted to walk through it but the guy I live with said not to. You can also see what the color of our soil is, deep down in the ground.
The guy I live with, who’s not a geologist, by the way, says it gets its color from the Fountain Formation, which is what Red Rocks Amphitheater, about five miles away, is made of.

Now, I realize this has been kind of a different post. It seemed like a good idea. At least I didn’t have to hear about not seeing snowdrops until July, or tell you about it, either.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me doing something I’m not supposed to do, but I do it anyway. Head cool, hindquarters all toasty. Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, liked to do this, too, until the guy I live with’s wife made him close the back door because the heat was on.

Until next time, then.