Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about some things. You may remember me from such posts as “Snow Upon Snow”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s supposed to get hot later this week, which I’m not hugely looking forward to, but the guy I live with says it’s better than constant thunderstorms, which is what we’ve pretty much been having here. Yesterday, though, they said a good chance of severe thunderstorms but nothing happened.
“Nothing happened” is about our favorite phrase, except when you want something to happen.
We did have hail I think on Friday. Very large hail. The guy I live with said stuff as these huge hailstones began to hit the ground (like way bigger than golf balls), but then it stopped almost immediately.
Some things did get damaged by smaller hail.
This squirrel baffle was thrown into the yard a year or so ago and the guy I live with said we would keep it, so this isn’t a huge loss.
Well, I have some serious things to say, so I might as well get to it. You know by now we don’t shirk away from that sort of thing. I’ll post some pictures of our super-jungly garden in between, so as not to exhaust anyone. I’m not sure why these pictures come out a bit blurry here when they aren’t in the originals. But whatever.
We’re not going to move into the downstairs bedroom. The guy I live said we might, as he was thinking about it, because the upstairs bedroom gets so hot and there’s so much perfume from our neighbor’s cleaning products. (I guess some people don’t know that there are products that have no perfume, or that natural-type products contain more surfactants.) The fans were pulling the smell into the house. Even early in the morning, waking him up. We don’t have air conditioning here, because he’s lived in Denver for a long time and everyone said you didn’t need it, and that there was no reason to change now.
The guy I live with likes breathing. So do I.
Just last night, at Tinkle Time, the wind was coming from the foothills and the whole back yard smelled of ponderosa pine. The fresh air was nice.
He felt sick all last week, with the hot flashes and perfume and stuff, and even called the county about this ongoing problem, but when they called back he said he had changed his mind and won’t do anything about this, just feel sick when it happens again, and live his life that way. No doubt someone will tell him he should lead his life differently; people always do.
Like when he says how hot the upstairs bedroom gets when he can’t have the fan on because of perfume or someone burning wood, people will tell him we should have our bedroom downstairs, and so then he tells them that his wife died there, and they usually stop talking. It wouldn’t be a bad place for us, because right now we sleep in the upstairs bedroom, with urns full of ashes, which is very cozy and pleasant, but it should probably be our decision instead of someone else’s.
The waterbed will have to go. I hear you just don’t move a waterbed.
He does go down there to get to the laundry room, and also to ride on the bicycle that never goes anywhere.
This is all leading somewhere, if you couldn’t tell. 
The guy I live with was with a bunch of people a while back, said something about Radiohead, and someone said how much they hated Radiohead. So he said that his wife played “Pyramid Song” over and over again in the car, on the last day she was alive.
He has never understood why people have the impulse to say they don’t like things.
Lately, the guy I live with has been doing things he never thought he could do after his wife died, regardless of whether or not other people like those things. He was afraid to do them, but he did them anyway.
One of them is listening to Radiohead again. 
Back when she was alive and they were happy together, the guy I live with read an article about Radiohead and how OK Computer was the Dark Side of the Moon for people in the nineties, so he got a copy and played it in the car as he drove to and from work every day.
Nothing. 
He told his wife he didn’t get it at all. He had played this CD over and over again, driving to work, driving back to work. When the two of them went out together (they always went together), OK Computer was playing in the CD player.
Then he got it. It took a while, since he can be slow at times. It was a record you played over and over.
So then he started listening closely, to see why this was happening, and one day, when they were in the car together, the guy I live with set the CD player controls to the eleventh track, the song “Lucky”, turned to his wife and said “Listen to how beautiful this is”, and they did, and so then he took the CD out of the player and his wife took it downstairs later and began to play it over and over again.
The CD was back in the car the day he drove home from the phone company for the last time. That was a very traumatic day for him. Not to have a job any more. “Lucky” was playing, and he wondered what his life would be like from now on. To be retired, and spend the rest of his life happily, with his wife. The thing he wanted most in the world. 
It didn’t go like that at all.
So he told himself he would never listen to Radiohead again. 
He also told himself that he would never get another purebred border collie when he knew Chess didn’t have much longer to live, and look how that turned out.
And he was absolutely certain, as certain as certain can be, that he would be alone for the rest of his life, and when he was invited to go somewhere, possibly to meet someone, he was so totally terrified that he thought staying at home, crying, which is what he mostly did, even after he got me, was safer than the possibility of being happy again, because that couldn’t possibly be, and he almost didn’t go.
But he went.
And so that’s how things changed for him. There is of course much more to the story, but this is enough for now. And also of course things are different for other people. Even with the cancer therapy, he says he is a very lucky person to have me in his life, and his friend, and his other friends.
Oh, also, he ordered a copy of Amnesiac by Radiohead, to have it once more, and to listen to “Pyramid Song” over and over again, even though he will see his wife, in the car, pushing the button to replay the song, never suspecting that would be her last day on earth. There will be people who say they don’t like that song, the guy I live with will mark them down as clueless, and things will go on, from there, like they do.
Until next time, then.
We had lots of thunder, as usual, but there have also been a lot of very loud explosions because of the holiday yesterday. Here I am wearing a Thundershirt. It belonged to Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, and I guess I won’t say it’s mine until I’ve worn it a few times. I think it does make me feel a little better. Besides, the guy I live with looked in on me, from time to time. 
After I had my dinner, we were under a severe thunderstorm watch. The storm moved very slowly, but then it started to rain. All of a sudden, huge hailstones began to fall. And then they stopped.
And we have a lily flowering. That’s pretty unusual for here. I mean lots of gardeners here grow them, but they need lots of water which they wouldn’t get here. But there is one lily here. Well, two bulbs. This is Lilium martagon.
And, guess who’s living in the little nesting box in the corner of the patio? Baby wrens. I can hear them chirping.
The guy I live with tried to get a good phone picture of Penstemon cobaea yesterday. It didn’t turn out badly. The flowers are huge. He said he’ll read the instructions for the camera sometime, too. 
Today we’ve been under a severe thunderstorm watch all afternoon, and will be tomorrow and probably the next day. It has been really stormy here. The guy I live with said he couldn’t remember a time when it was so stormy, with tornado watches and severe thunderstorm watches and warnings for so many days in a row. A thunderstorm passes over, then another, and another, and another. Wave after wave. Pretty scary.
The guy I live with said there were places where it rained and nothing scary happened. I found that hard to believe, but he said it was true. Those places sounded kind of magical to me. Places where it just rained.
I really like the bedroom. It’s not very big, but it is super cozy. It wasn’t built as the master bedroom, which is next door, but was like a guest bedroom or something. That’s my internet radio glowing there, which I probably showed before, but I like the combination of the candle and internet radio. He bought the radio especially for me, to listen to when he goes to the store, because I don’t go to the store, and someone has to. The sound is good. I like it a lot. I also have a night light which you can’t see; it glows kind of softly after the candle is blown out.
the miserable gardener 