Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all the thrilling happenings here. Okay, well, not really, but I felt like I had to say something. You may remember me from such posts as “Passing The Time”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I think the photographer missed part of my tail. Maybe because he doesn’t have one and doesn’t think a tail is all that important, but it really is.
Anyway things have been kind of static here, lately. It snowed, like they said it would, but now that’s all melted, and there was a lot of damage to the garden. On top of the considerable damage to plants this past winter.
The guy I live with only partly cares about this, but there were some really irksome things that needed to be attended to, like the Paul’s Himalayan Musk rambler, that died almost completely back to the ground.
You should have heard what he said when he started cutting this down and got jabbed by all the thorns. The guy I live with said they were prickles, and not thorns. Like that made a difference. His hands were all bloody.
At least there was wind, which is no longer as common as it used to be, and it was coming from the west. The guy I live with has been feeling sick, on and off, from the very strong perfumed smell of laundry coming from his neighbors’ house. The smell is often so strong that he has breathing problems, and can’t work out in the garden like he wants to. This has been an ongoing thing for quite a while now. I don’t talk about it much because it isn’t very pleasant. I’m not sure why people do the things that they do.
The guy I live with got the car fixed. That was a big deal. The car sat in the garage for a few weeks. He calls it our “metal friend”, because it can take us places if we need to go there. He had it towed to the dealer’s, and then towed back again. He has a friend whose husband worked for Subaru for thirty years and who told him the fuel pump was going. He trusted that information, so he had the fuel pump replaced as well as the oil changed, and all of that stuff, so I could go to the doctor’s to have my shots and generally be looked at. My doctor said I was totally excellent. I already knew that.
So then the guy I live with was going to go to the urologist’s next week, for a blood test, but they called and said not to come, because of the virus. And that was weird. He doesn’t mind going to the urologist’s because he feels well cared for.
The guy I live with has been looking at stuff about the virus, stuff posted by medical professionals, not politicians or talk show hosts, and even though he’s not squeamish at all, he is pretty creeped out by all of this. He doesn’t talk to me about it, though.
The thing is, he would really like to go out to lunch with his friend, or go with her to the botanic gardens, and right now he can’t. All of the plant sales have been cancelled or postponed. The Mother’s Day plant sale at the botanic gardens was something he looked forward to every year, partly because he likes being in crowds of people, and the “vibe” there (I didn’t know that word until recently) was something he enjoyed a lot.
One maybe ultra-odd thing has happened. The guy I live with went into the crawlspace yesterday and dragged out his old turntable.
It’s about thirty years old, but it’s not just any old turntable. He spent some time assembling the tonearm and attaching it to the mount on the turntable.
He said that, eventually, the downstairs bedroom will possibly get some new furniture and there will be a couch and maybe he’ll sit down there during the winter and listen to music on headphones, or something. A couch big enough for both of us, of course.
He gave away all the LPs that were in the house (a couple thousand, at least) after his wife died, so he might need to get a few. And headphones.
Maybe I should get back to some gardening. The guy I live with spent an hour or so in the front yard, working on things, today, so that the fence which had to be removed when the sewer drain was replaced could be put back. The front garden is still pretty much of a mess.
The juno irises suffered quite a bit from the record low temperatures we had when it snowed the first time. They were covered in snow the second time, but it wasn’t like that helped any. I forget which one this is.
The main thing, though, is still the corydalis. Forms of Corydalis solida. The guy I live with purchased quite a few of these from nurseries overseas, in the Baltic states, but you can also get them from Odyssey Bulbs. Not all of these pictures are the greatest ever.
I think this one is called ‘Going Rouge’; it came from Odyssey. 
I’m under the impression that this is just about all I have for today. The guy I live with says it might snow tomorrow, like this will never, ever end, but that then next week it will be close to eighty degrees. That doesn’t mean it still can’t snow, which I know is hard to believe, but snowing is something it does a lot of here, and often at the most inconvenient times. I keep hearing about how much the guy I live with wishes he lived in a place where it didn’t snow so much, but I know nothing will ever be done about that.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 