Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today after a few days’ absence to bring you up to date on the not-hugely-exciting news from our house and garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Seven Percent Humidity”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. 
The guy I live with said he likes this picture of yours truly quite a bit. It is pretty good, though it doesn’t ooze coziness like this picture of me, taken when he was sitting on the other end of the couch, reading, does:
The couch has a new thing, called a couch protector, which is this fluffy thing that goes over the very old and falling-apart cushions, and which he got from Chewy.com, because it’s for dogs, he said, and it makes things even cozier. The fleece goes over the couch protector.
In fact, the guy I live with said that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, and grew to be very ancient, slept on the very fleece I’m sleeping on in this picture, though the fleece was on the bed upstairs so he could have his own space, and that he had a motto, “Roasty, Toasty, Cuddly, Cozy“, which seems to me to be one of the most excellent of all mottos to have. I mean if you feel the need to have a motto.
I don’t need to have the fleece upstairs because I sleep on the pink afghan on the bed, the afghan that’s been there for like forever. Sometimes there’s a different afghan there but this is the heaviest of the three in the house, so I sleep on it, with sometimes the dark red one, which is slightly lighter in weight, pulled over me. If I lay my head on the pillow provided, I can snuggle right up to the guy I live with, who presents a rather large mass on the bed. I was going to say like a gigantic beached whale, but only if you imagine a toasty whale to cuddle up against.
And of course if I get too hot I can go downstairs and sleep in the rattan chair, or on the couch.
But back to my set-up on the bed. The guy I live with (the one playing the part of toasty whale) turns on the TV around ten at night, and gets into bed, with his clothes on, and signals me to come upstairs, and so we watch TV for a couple of hours, before going to actual bed. I really like this set-up a lot. I discovered that if I do some serious snuggling, I can get cuddles and ear scratches while the TV is on, unless the guy I live with falls asleep, which he usually does (and only wakes up when the TV stops because the thing called “Netflix” does that).
Here I am watching “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. (You might be able to see my ears.) We watch that over and over and over again.
a late parrot
So that’s that part of my post. Not much else has been happening.
Remember the two hundred snowdrops? A few of them are up, in the large pots upstairs. One is even flowering. 
There are six large pots of equal size, and there were two hundred snowdrops (we didn’t count them), minus two that were no good, so six goes into one hundred and ninety-eight, um, well, let’s see….. The guy I live with said there “should” be thirty-three snowdrops in each pot, but probably aren’t, because planting that many snowdrops while you’re kneeling is both painful (if you have arthritis) and incredibly boring. But anyway there are snowdrops up.
And even today there were some crocuses in flower. This picture, taken with the DSLR, was from a few days ago, though.
There was an owl hooting tonight, and we got its picture. It’s not a very sharp picture, but it’s a picture.
And there have been some nice sunsets. 
The guy I live with said he’s always thought sunsets were intensely melancholy, maybe because when he looks at them, he’s looking in the direction of the west coast, where he grew up, partly, and which he never wanted to leave, but did, and never returned, for the usual reasons most people have for things they wanted to do but never did. And now he has a very good reason not to go anywhere. He just went out to lunch with her today.
Oh. I almost wrapped up this post without telling you the Tale of the Lamp. This is, like, classic.
There’s this lamp upstairs. Like a lot of other things in the house, it’s old, part of a set of furniture which we have most of. It used to be in his paternal grandmother’s house in east Denver, after she moved here (his grandfather died on the way out here, in 1962). There were several large blue spruce trees in the yard, and in the summer, miller moths would congregate there, because they do.
And the moths would fly around the house at night. Some would get caught in the bowl of the lamp, which faced up, and cook. The smell, according to the guy I live with, was “memorable”.
(I should mention, as an aside, that it wasn’t until just a few years ago–seriously–that he realized that moths were called millers not because they milled around the house, like he thought, but because they looked like they were covered in flour, like millers were.)
Well, so, anyway, the lamp stopped working. He switched light bulbs, “the way genius electricians do”, and nothing happened. I could hear the clicking, on and off. Click-click, click-click.
He unplugged the lamp and looked into the socket, which he discovered was packed with dead moths. He thought that was half funny and half irritating. The moths were probably over fifty years old.
So he cleaned out the socket, put in another light bulb, plugged in the cord, and turned on the lamp. Click-click, click-click. Nothing happened.
So then he said the lamp would have to be rewired. A few months went by before he got around to getting all the ingredients, but he did, for this “ten-minute job”, then spent several hours trying to get lamp rewired. He finally did, and plugged in the new cord. Click-click, click-click.
Nothing. Click-click, click-click. There was some colorful language. I decided to hide in one of my forts.
The outlet would have to be replaced. All that work, and it was the outlet. Well, at least everything else was new, now. The cord was original with the lamp and so needed to be replaced anyway, because cords and electric stuff gets brittle with all the heat, and so, hmm….
You should have heard what he said when he remembered that that lamp was controlled by a wall switch. The switch was off. 
At least it works now.
And that really is all I have for today.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 