Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again, but for the first time this year, it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here with yet more boring stuff to talk about, and also to wish you a Happy New Year. You may remember me from such equally possibly tiresome posts as “Caulk And Vernation”, among at least a few others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. 
Even though I intimated that this post would have boring stuff in it, this is really interesting. It’s me, about to have my dinner. That’s pretty excellent.
You can see my eating platform, or dinner tray, if you will, there; it’s an old cardboard box, with an even older dish towel on it. The box and the towel stay the same, though the towel gets washed every so often.
This eating platform was Chess’s, the purebred border collie who lived here before me. There’s another one, which was Slipper’s, another purebred border collie, but that one is never used. It just isn’t, I guess, is why.
So that’s the interesting part of my post. The rest is pretty much stuff you’ve seen before, but different pictures of it.
Well, this is different, but nothing you’ve seen before. I didn’t get to see it, because I was at home on Christmas Day. The guy I live with was coming home from his niece’s and stopped by the library, even though it was of course closed, because he saw this, and had to take pictures of it.
It’s a bald cypress, Taxodium distichum, which you don’t see a lot of around here. You can see it’s growing in a lawn, a soccer field actually, so it gets lots of water.
The other moderately interesting thing is this object, which is nailed to a tree in the sort of forest by the creek, on the other side of the canal.
The guy I live with said it was a nesting or roosting box, for birds, and that he might duplicate this design and make a whole bunch of them. (He can do things like this.)
Then, getting a bit less interesting, are the snowdrops. You can see more are coming up in this big pot. Very exciting. Not necessarily to me. 
And, the guy I live with said he was going to get into sansevierias, which, for me anyway, is about where the interestingness bottoms out, but he says they should do well just sitting around in pots. He might order some from Arid Lands, because they have some other species.
For some reason he likes plants that “just sit around” without him having to do anything. 
That’s really all that’s been going on here. I guess I should show the now-obligatory pictures of sunsets, willows, and owls, since we have some here. The guy I live with posted the sunset pictures, which are also willow pictures, on Facebook, but if you didn’t see those there, here they are here. 
Okay, I admit that these are fairly nice pictures. The guy I live with was happy with them. And they merge into owl pictures pretty effortlessly.
We don’t see the owls every evening, but almost every evening. Sometimes they aren’t where they usually are. (I know they fly, because I’ve seen them do it.)
We think this is the female. 
And this is the male; half asleep, and then completely asleep. Sometimes they sit in the same tree together, but usually they sit in separate trees, quite a distance from each other. The guy I live with and his wife slept in separate bedrooms for most of their marriage, and he said that was the secret, or at least one of them, to success. 
Well, that’s it. Not very much at all. But, I guess, something. Maybe not as much as something, but slightly more than hardly anything.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me on a cozy winter evening. That’s something. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 