the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about some stuff. You may remember me from such stuff-related posts as “The New Thing”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

Yes, I know the things on the pantry door could have used a bit of straightening, which they have gotten now, and which kind of ties in with other things I have to say, but notice how cozy I am lying on the bed upstairs on a very cold day.

The guy I live with snuck up the stairs and took a picture of me, like he did in the last post. I got into a cute pose, which is not all that difficult for me.

My life here is very rough, as you can tell. That’s my personal pillow, too.

But let’s go back to that first picture, if you can tear yourself away from pictures of me. I know that’s difficult.

I’m not sure if this picture has been shown before, but next to the wall calendar is a picture of Chess and Slipper sitting on a kitchen chair. (As well as a collection of tags. And a quotation from Jack Kerouac which has been on that little chalk board for ages. He lived not too far away from here in the late 1940s; the house is still there.)

I thought you might want to see this, if you haven’t before. They were first cousins and loved each other a lot.

When Slipper died, on the back patio here, with the guy I live with holding him, Chess stood at attention, guarding his first cousin, and then did the same, in the car, when Slipper was taken to the vet. It’s sometimes hard for the guy I live with to stand and look at this picture.

I live in an interesting house, don’t you think?

It’s been cold here. The guy I live with says it will be cold here until it’s not, which I don’t find very reassuring, but on the other hand I like cold weather, like purebred border collies tend to do. I do wonder if the guy I live with might lose his mind, since almost no gardening has been done since the middle of November, which is not very usual for here. Temperatures are “below seasonal normals”; in other words, cold, cold, and more cold. And then cold again. Followed by–you guessed it–more cold.

For some reason I’ve never shown any pictures of the plants upstairs. It could be that they’re not all that hugely fascinating. Some of them are just waiting for the end of winter, which the guy I live with says might be some time in the next three thousand years, and others stay up here all the time. But at least there are plants here.

The plumeria had a rough time a year or so ago but it recovered. The guy I live with said that it’s about fifteen years old and it might be time for it to think about flowering.

The view from this upstairs bedroom is a bit gloomy. 

It started to snow again today, and the guy I live with stuck his head out the door and yelled “Stop snowing!” But it didn’t. It’s supposed to snow again day after tomorrow and the day after that. “And until the end of time”, the guy I live with said.

On to something a bit more interesting, now. Well, maybe not that interesting. Sort of interesting.

The guy I live with took some pictures of himself to post on Facebook. He’s not like an egomaniac or anything and doesn’t really like looking at pictures of himself, but since he starts radiation tomorrow he thought it might be nice to show a picture.

So he started taking pictures. Pictures, pictures, pictures. Finally he found one that didn’t make him look like “a complete doofus”.

He said this was pretty good, and I agreed, but then, when he was looking at it a little more closely, he said that it looked like his left eye was lower than his right eye. “My left eye is not lower than my right eye”, he said, and went to the mirror to check. It wasn’t.

He thought about this for quite a long time, checking the mirror again and even doing some measuring. I mean, seriously, he’s not vain at all but this looked really weird to him.

An awful lot of thinking went on for a few days after that.

It turns out that his head was slightly tilted to the left. He wondered about that for a little while, but of course he does tend to tilt his head that way after so many years of talking on the phone. And he certainly has been talking on the phone a lot, lately.

You may think that all of this is completely ridiculous, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. He took over three hundred pictures to try to get his head level. Eventually he had a hard time keeping a straight face when looking into the camera. “Level head”, he kept saying. That’s pretty much of a stretch, if you ask me.

So that’s what’s been going on. Seriously. Stuff like this. Worrying if one eye is lower than another. And complaining about the constant cold. Which I like. (The cold, not the complaining.)

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 talk about this and that. You may remember me from such posts as “Into The Wilderness”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically pensive pose. 

I forget what I was thinking about. It might not have been all that important. I do know that the guy I live with saw me lying on the bed upstairs

and decided to sneak up (though I noticed him sneaking) and take a picture of me being all pensive.

It was probably snowing.

I should probably take a minute to talk about the bed, though I may have talked about it before (it is kind of a main thing in my life), I mean the new mattress and foundation, which as you can see is not sitting on a bed frame like it would be in most houses. This is so I can get up on the bed. The guy I live with said when I get older it’ll be easier for me to get up there, and that’s what’s important to him.

I’ve totally adjusted to sleeping on the bed at night and it’s really about the best thing ever. I have my own pillow, and can snuggle up next to the guy I live with, have my toys right there, and look out of the window to see stuff, if I need to do that.

And of course my upstairs fort is right there, too, in case things get ultra scary, like if there was thunder at night. Thunder at night used to be extremely rare here, but now it happens almost every night in the summer. So my fort comes in handy. I have some toys in there, too.

Oh, before I talk about what’s not happening, because almost nothing is, I should show you the picture I promised to show. Remember that funny thing in the tree? The one a while back? Here’s a close up.

Still pretty odd, I guess. I’m not sure I’d want something like that in a tree here.

As I said, almost nothing is happening here. I know I say that a lot, but really, this time, it is almost nothing. Well, okay, when it comes to gardening, there’s nothing. A whole bunch of stuff is happening that I’m not part of, except that I get to watch the guy I live with be on the phone for a very long time. Watching someone be on the phone is not exactly thrilling. They’re on the phone, and you aren’t. That’s pretty much it.

You know how you watch a caterpillar–the ones that aren’t scary–and how the back sort of moves right up to the front before the front moves again? That’s how things are here. The guy I live with has to start getting radiation next week, but also find time to get his mom’s taxes done. Her personal taxes and the estate taxes. And at the same time go back to the dentist because he has a cavity under a gold crown. The dentist said he could keep the gold and melt it down or something.

So this is like happening all at once. Well, not precisely all at once, but like a caterpillar, only the front isn’t moving as fast as the back is.

Just yesterday the guy I live with went downtown to visit something called the Internal Revenue Service. He had an appointment but they were “backed up”, I guess like the caterpillar again, and even though he had to go through this metal detection thing where they made him take off his belt and he began to wonder why he’d worn pants that were really a bit too big and carry all this stuff and sort of will his pants to stay up, he got frustrated and came home. It wasn’t all that important, he said; he just wanted to find out some things.

On the way home he stopped and got two French pastries, which he shouldn’t have, but he did. They disappeared rapidly.

Today he went downstairs and looked through some of the toys and stuff, things his wife had acquired, to bring to his friend, so she could give them to her grandsons. Including some fake caterpillars.

There was this little box, too.

This is a katydid, if you didn’t know. A rubber stamp.The German, Heupferd, means “hay horse”. The guy I live with and his wife used to go on walks at night, in the summer, and look for katydids when they made their katydid noises, but they were often very difficult to see. So when he thinks of katydids he sometimes shed a tear or two.

Well, so, anyway, that’s what he’s been doing.

I’ve mostly been enjoying the weather, which doesn’t change much here, and listening to the complaining, which also doesn’t change. Some of this snow is the same snow from last year.

You can see that the guy I live with was peeking into the Snowdrop Frame by the way the plastic is all rumpled. There are snowdrops in flower there; lots of them.

Some things growing in the large bulb frame too. This picture isn’t very good, but you can see some leaves.

It gets so hot in this frame that the plastic has to be lifted off almost every day, even when it’s cold. You can see some of the crocus leaves in the pot in the upper right hand corner got burned by the hot sun.

It is nice to see blue sky.

You can see that where we walk, along the coyote path behind the house, is still pretty snowy. I think most of those footprints you see are from us. This isn’t the only way we go, but I like going this way a lot. 

There are voles under the snow. I like to hunt for voles at almost any time of the year, but maybe it’s the most fun when there’s snow on the ground. The guy I live with sometimes gets a little annoyed that we have to stop walking while I hunt for voles, but that’s because he’s never tried it. 

I never find any, but I still like looking. I sometimes get snow on my nose. 

 

Until next time, then.