Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today mostly to talk about me, so, as I need hardly tell you, this is going to be an excellent post. You may remember me from such posts as “Mostly About Me”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see the difference between the mowed and unmowed smooth brome. There are grasshoppers everywhere. I mean there are like clouds of grasshoppers hopping all over the place, including on me, not only in the garden, but especially on my daytime walks. As you know, I really hate being landed on. The guy I live with says I’m like a grasshopper landing zone. I’d rather not be.
But there’s stuff to look at in the sea of smooth brome. You know, just things. The way there are.
It’s been unbelievably hot here. Yesterday it was a little cooler, but today we’re back to hot weather. Right now it’s ninety degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-two Celsius), nine percent humidity, totally overcast and dark, with not a breath of air moving.
The guy I live with says all this still air gives him a case of the creeps. I tried to picture what a case of the creeps might be like, and how it would be delivered, but couldn’t.
Our part of Colorado is now under what they say is severe drought. It’s super dry here (as I guess it would be to be described as severe drought.)
Look at the area in the “way back” border that was weeded something like three months ago.
Or part of the field where the grass doesn’t grow because it gets mowed so much.
The grass is just totally crispy here, but it’s been mowed. You can see the green unmowed part in the sun, by the creek, which is dry.
The guy I live with has been watering, a little, but it doesn’t seem to do any good at all. There are plants in the garden that can deal with this, naturally, but quite a few that the guy I live with thought would be okay that aren’t. 
It’s pretty nice in the mornings, though we wake up later than most people, or so I hear, but that’s because we stay up pretty late.
When the guy I live with was working, he worked the late shift, so he got used to staying up much later than most gardeners do. Then when Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, got older, it was very nice to having the fan blow cool night air into the bedroom. Sometimes we have to wait until all the strong smells from the neighbors go away, and that can be pretty late indeed.
So the guy I live with, as I mentioned on earlier posts, decided I get to go on a third walk, late at night.
Sometimes I stop and stare into the darkness for a long time. The guy I live with isn’t thrilled by this. He says it’s “unsettling”. I have better eyesight in the dark than he does, so I’m not necessarily looking at a nameless horror like he says I could be. Maybe just a bunny.
Guess what we saw late last night? The guy I live with said not to try to walk past the striped kitty, because home is on the street you can see in the background, so we kind of moved back and forth until the striped kitty sauntered off to the right. 
It’s hard for me not to appear super-toughly threatening, but the guy I live with is the opposite of that, so we didn’t have any smelly encounter.
It was just another nice walk at midnight.
I’ll leave you with another unfocused picture of me looking at a leaky drip irrigation system on the canal road.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 