the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, here today to talk about how boring things are. You may remember me from such posts as “Chasing Hawks”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I think you might be able to tell that it was a pretty nice day today. The ice you see on the path has mostly melted.

The indoor plants that are being propagated are doing okay, I guess, because I haven’t heard any loud moaning and groaning.
The cactus are growing very slowly, the way they do.
The sea daffodils (Pancratium maritimum) are doing quite well.
And the manzanitas may have rooted. The guy I live with tugged ultra-gently on them, and only the one on the right came out of the pot.

Those strange patterns you see on the drywall behind are from when there was a lot of misting going on, years ago. (Misting with a plastic spray bottle.)

Oh, this is interesting. To me, anyway. The other day, on one of my walks, the guy I live with noticed some tracks in the snow, which at first he thought were made by a cat, but the tracks went on and on. He said that if we saw the tracks stop, and then appear on the other side of a fence (all of the back yard fences here are chain link, because the field we walk in is a floodplain, and there can’t be wooden fences), that it would almost certainly be a cat, but also that cats usually don’t walk for hundreds of feet in the snow.
But instead, the tracks went all the way down the coyote path, and then into the field, and down to the canal. So the guy I live with said it might have been a fox.
I’ve never seen a fox. And now I’d like to.

So, anyway, probably like a large number of other people on the planet, the guy I live with is really tired of all this isolation.
It isn’t as though he would be going out every day, but a visitor or two would be nice. (After everyone is vaccinated, of course.)
I can tell that it’s becoming a bit much. The isolation, combined with the smell from next door (I get worried when he gets sick from the smell), and the constant snow (it’s supposed to snow again day after tomorrow) are getting to him, but he just keeps going.

He’s become used to his reading glasses now and is doing a lot more reading than he had for years.
Last weekend, we had Opera Day, like Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, used to enjoy so much. (It mostly involves napping, so it’s totally excellent.)

And, you know, there are snowdrops. Like the picture in the “header”. There are a lot of them. Some of the flowers were damaged by the cold, weekend before last, and maybe the display won’t be as good as in previous years, but the snowdrops seem unfazed by the very cold temperatures. (The soil doesn’t freeze in this part of the garden, by the way.)Just today, there was one crocus. Crocus versicolor, if you wanted to know.There was a bee visiting, but it flew away before it could get its picture taken.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even nicer than today was. The guy I live with says he can tell when it’s going to snow, because the days keep getting warmer and warmer, and then it snows. It’s kind of like an endless cycle of disappointment, but the guy I live with says that’s a metaphor.

Well, that’s all I have 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 explain why I’ve been gone for so long. You may remember me from such posts as “At A Standstill”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Or maybe I should say characteristic run, since I was going out to check something. It was really cold.
You can probably see that it snowed here. I forget what day this was; the guy I live with says it’s never going to stop snowing here, and that it’s just more endlessness.

Lots of people who live here go wild every time it snows, talking about “moisture” and stuff like that. He says that’s a holdover from when everyone had bluegrass lawns, and people really wanted the Denver area to look like, say, Virginia, but that since it only snows in the winter here, and doesn’t rain, people pretend it’s the same as rain, even though it isn’t.
Most of the snow here evaporates, in a process called sublimation (I learn stuff, sometimes), and the snow that melts only penetrates the soil maybe half an inch, and then it freezes, and causes more problems for plants.
The way winters were, so I hear, is that they were mostly warm, with occasional cold, or really cold, spells. Winters here lately have been chilly almost every day.

If you look at the post I mentioned, you’ll see that it snowed then, but there were crocuses in flower. There are no crocuses in flower here now. Everything’s been frozen since last November.

Anyway, last week they were predicting super cold for us on the weekend, and the guy I live with was pretty freaked out. We do have super cold here, but I think he was on edge because of the fire earlier, and he started to worry that the furnace would go out. He has a service plan that would take care of that, but he was still nervous.
We got a dusting of snow, and on Saturday we had a high of two degrees (-16.6C), which I thought was perfect weather for a walk, though my evening walk was cut short because the guy I live with thought it might be okay for me not to wear my boots, but it wasn’t. My paws iced up.
Sunday night it got down to -11F (-23.8C), which was cold, believe me. So cold that the guy I live with went outside with me at Tinkle Time, just to make sure, you know. Nothing happened to the plants in the garden. And the furnace worked perfectly well.

A week or so before the cold struck, the guy I live with got a call from his doctor’s office, saying he needed to come in and get vaccinated, but it was for something called “shingles” instead of Covid-19. He was kind of disappointed that he couldn’t get the latter (that will be next month), but it was very important not to get shingles; he knows someone who lost the sight in one eye because of shingles.
And so, naturally, he worried about the car not starting. So he had two worries, all last weekend. I know, because I was there.
The car started up just fine on Monday, and he “took it out for a spin” on the highway, and then went to the doctor’s the next day.
He felt fairly icky the day after the shot, but got better. He also felt “more than stupid” about the worrying, but I know there are what people call “extenuating circumstances”, kind of like when I get nervous and have to hide in one of my forts.

Then it warmed up, sort of, then it snowed again, then it warmed up (again, sort of).
The guy I live with took this picture today.
There are actually two snowdrops in the picture; one by the plastic label, too.

That’s really all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a blurry picture of me, on my evening walk, before it started to snow…again.

Until next time, then.