the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you a post largely about me, so you can be assured of its total excellence. You may remember me from such about-me posts as “Most Improved”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with, who, if you ask me, was trying to be too bossy, said for me to open my eyes, and un-retract my ears, so I did one of those things. 

I guess that made him happy. Some other things didn’t.

It snowed. And I don’t mean just snowed. We got over a foot of snow. You can imagine the complaining and whining and colorful language when that happened, but I really liked it, and ran around the back yard just to show the guy I live with how much I like snow.
And my walks have been excellently snowy. 

Maybe you can see a few leaves on top of the snow there. The weather forecast called for a high wind warning, with wind gusts up to ninety miles per hour (about a hundred and forty-five kilometers per hour), which sounded like a lot of miles per hour to me, but the guy I live with said that that wasn’t really excessive for here, that it happened quite a bit “back in the old days”, but that this wasn’t the old days, and there would be hardly any wind, and he was right.
In fact, he said that the weather website right now said we were having wind gusts up to eighteen miles per hour, but really the air was dead still, like it almost always is. Creepily so, according to the guy I live with.

Anyway, when it started snowing, we were walking along the canal road, and the owls were there, in the willow tree. The guy I live with posted owl pictures on Facebook but these might be even better. Both owls are in each picture. A couple of days before that, I scared a hawk who was eating something on the ground. When we came back that evening, there was almost nothing left of what the hawk was eating.

The sunsets have been pretty good, when it wasn’t snowing, I mean. These are mostly jet contrails, and the guy I live with said he thought they were sort of cool.The point-and-shoot camera does a fairly good job of moon pictures, though not as good as the other cameras, which he doesn’t take on our walks. He can hold the point-and-shoot, after calibrating it I guess, and just hold it in his right hand, with the leash in his left hand, and, you know, shoot pictures. Eventually maybe I’ll take over picture-taking, but not right now.

So just this morning I decided to walk a different way, which we’ve gone on before but don’t do a lot. That’s the canal on the right; the bank isn’t as high, here.And there was another egg. I was going to get a serious case of the creeps, but the guy I live with said the egg was obviously frozen now, and that probably nothing horrible would hatch out of it. I certainly hope not. I know dragons are green; I’ve seen them on the television.

Well, so, that was the last few days. Not everything is happening outside. This started to happen. I wasn’t sure I like it all that much.

After all of that, then there were these:

It is that time of year again, you know. It comes around pretty regularly now. The guy I live with is often sad, but he said one thing that would cheer him up, and the whole kitchen, in fact, were some packets of turkey gravy. I didn’t really understand this, though I figured it had something to do with eating, which always cheers me up, so I got that part, but he said no, his wife liked to have these packets in the pantry, “just in case”. Like if there was a gravy emergency or something.
It wasn’t about the gravy; it was about just seeing the packets in the pantry. So he went on a turkey-gravy-packet hunting expedition like the day before Thanksgiving. He said if he didn’t return that someone else would take care of me. I knew he was just being funny. But it was a successful hunt; right brand of turkey gravy, now sitting in the pantry the way it always did, when his wife was here. 

He said it actually made pretty good gravy.

And he bought himself a couple of other things. One was this sansevieria. He’s decided he’s going to get into sansevierias and that there will be more in the house, eventually.You can see that someone (no mentioning who) runs to the window all the time, to guard the house and front yard and driveway and sidewalk and street and stuff, has pushed the green marble table top way over; the guy I live with has to push it back all the time.

He also got this, just to be extra-sentimental like with the packets of gravy:

He sat on the couch the other night, looking at the book, while I lay on what I call “my end” of the couch.  This picture makes my rear end look bigger than it is, but that’s okay, because you can tell how cozy things are.

Well, that’s pretty much it for today. No gardening, of course, unless you count watering pots and looking at the sansevieria. It’s supposed to warm up this week but the guy I live with says that probably won’t get rid of all the snow. Some wind would, but it just isn’t windy here any more; not the way it used to be. “Whatever”, he said, which I guess is our motto. Or at least one of them.

Until next time, then.