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 things other than gardening and all the serious stuff. I thought that might come as a relief. I might not be able to resist some slightly serious stuff, though. You may remember me from such posts as “Stuff You Didn’t Know”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I like sleeping this way.

I do this a lot, if you didn’t know. Life here can be quite strenuous, what with all the squirrel chasing, barking at people walking down my street, and, oh, you know, just being me.

The other day, while I was at Day Care, playing, the guy I live with and his friend went out for lunch. They do that quite a bit, too, but I’m so busy having fun that I don’t mind, and, anyway, I like her a lot, and am glad that he has someone in his life who makes him happy.

They saw this thing on a tree near where they went to have lunch. It is pretty darn odd, if you ask me.

If you look at it for a minute you’ll see what it is. The guy I live with thought it was kind of amusing. He is easily amused.

So they went to lunch, and then to a place I’ve never been, called “H Mart”. The guy I live with has a hard time controlling himself there. They have things called “Korean pancakes” and all kind of things he likes. Now the refrigerator doesn’t look so empty.

The most important thing there is my food, of course; I get a little canned on top of the dry. The guy I live with, though, is very happy to have a bunch of kimchi, and I hear that the kimchi from H Mart is really, really good. Hot, too. And then on the left you can see the Korean pickled vegetables.

Sort of funny story here. The guy I live with likes really hot food, but the first batch of pickled vegetables didn’t have pickled jalapenos in them. He didn’t realize that the second batch did, and he offered his friend some, not knowing that the pickled jalapenos were like a zillion times hotter than the regular raw ones. She still likes him anyway.

He got some black tobiko, too. When they were at H Mart there was some uncertainty as to what tobiko is, but owing to the miracle of modern technology, the guy I live with looked it up on his smart phone, and it turns out it’s flying fish roe. He said he knew that.

The guy I live with likes a lot of different food, and when he and his friend first started seeing each other, he knew they would have a good time together from the look on her face when she had the fatty toro at Sushi Den here in Denver. He was thinking about becoming a vegetarian until he met her. They go there for special anniversaries and the waiter comes up and tells them all about fish just flown in from Japan (not flying fish though) and if it’s his turn to pay he says they’ll take all of them.

But anyway, he also got the special Korean chili threads which they were out of last time, to sprinkle on Korean pancakes when he makes them here.

The guy I live with spends a lot of time cooking, which I guess is a good sign. He used to cook for his wife, all the time, but after she died, he stopped, and later took it up again.

The kitchen cabinets are full of stuff.

 

Some of the boxed seasonings are really old; the guy I live with’s wife bought them many years ago, and they’re just here for old times’ sake.

But like when people say they’re into cooking Indian food, for instance on Facebook, and they talk about all the new spices they’re been using, the guy I live with says “Lol”, because this is one highly evolved spice cabinet (you can see the ajwain seed in the picture looking into the cabinet), and then he shows a picture of this, to show just how highly evolved.

After they went to H Mart, on the way back to his friend’s house, he suggested she might like to visit Read and Black, which is a used book and CD store. So they did.

They had a good time there, though it was a bit rough for the guy I live with. He had not been there since his wife died; they used to spend hours in this place, looking, and of course acquiring things.

In fact he could have just stood in the store and cried, if his friend hadn’t been there to make everything better. If you’ve seen the movie High Fidelity, this is a place like that, and the guy I live with would be in pretty much total bliss to be able to work in such a store. Even more so than, say, working in a garden in Ireland. Some people want to be powerful executives, or movie stars, or great artists. The guy I live has always wanted to do something like work in a used book or CD store, and not be any other sort of person.
But things change.

When the first book came out, the one on penstemons, everyone said it would “open a lot of doors” for him, like he would have this magnificent career in horticulture, but other people got to the door before him, and it dawned on him that this was a very competitive field in which he had no desire to compete at all. He was at least reasonably content working for the phone company; his wife didn’t have to work at all. 

Two more books got written; shortly after the third one came out, his wife died, and after that, thirteen of her watercolors were accepted by the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and that was sufficient for the guy I live with.

Those were some of the thoughts he had after visiting Read and Black. I know he cried a little after we came home from Day Care, but I think part of that was because he was very tired after a sleepless night the night before that.

Maybe I got carried away here. I often do.

Nothing is going on in the garden, but my walks are still good. They almost always are.

The owl was asleep when I went out this afternoon. It’s there; you just have to look. I couldn’t see the other one but it was there too.

I’ve been detecting the scent of voles out in the “way back”; the guy I live with does encourage me to chase them out of the garden. You can see that they’re out in the field. Lots of the tunnels head toward our garden.

I looked for some but didn’t find any.

Okay, that really is it for the day. I know I tend to wander off topic sometimes, but we purebred border collies are so incredibly alert (as you can see in the first picture) that we get easily distracted.

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 be a bit philosophical, as can be the tendency here. You may remember me from such posts as “At A Standstill”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

Events of the last few days prompted a lecture on disappointment. I kind of paid attention. There have been a couple of times when I wasn’t able to go to Day Care, because they were closed for the holidays. One time I had a cough. So I sort of got it.

And there are times when something happens on my walk, like a hugely loud noise, and I have to turn around and go home. I look forward to my walks every day and having to go home in the middle of one is very disappointing.

According to You Know Who, there has been way too much snow on the ground for way too long. It’s okay by me, but the guy I live with says this is “excessive”.

I admit it has been pretty gloomy here, especially when the sun goes down.It was pretty warm outside, though, and that seemed promising.

Yesterday, for instance, was a pretty nice day. I lay out on the patio for a while. The guy I live with did something; I forget what. He was feeling pretty good because the snow was beginning to melt; pools of water were forming by the back fence, which is the lowest part of the yard. If you look back through my previous January posts you’ll see that most of them don’t feature a huge amount of snow in the garden. And if it does snow, it usually mostly goes away in a few days. The guy I live with has always thought January was an especially pleasant month in Denver. So things were looking sort of up.

There were flowers in the bulb frames. Little Colchicum kesselringii, for instance. I know this could have been a better picture, but I didn’t take it.

And of course snowdrops, in the Snowdrop Frame. Another pretty awful picture, if you ask me. 

The wind came up last night, like it hasn’t in a long, long time. When we woke up there was a bunch of snow everywhere. I heard a loud sigh, a sigh of disappointment, that lasted for about half a minute.

He did begin to wonder, partly out loud, why he had become so interested in snowdrops about twenty years ago, when the winter weather seemed to be getting worse (defined as snow lying on the ground for more than a couple of days), but he couldn’t think of anything else that was more interesting. He does like to stare at the floor a lot, though.

Back in “the old days”, he said, he could count on flowers in the garden in every month of the year. Denver didn’t have winters like they have farther north with snow all the time.

This was before he learned that disappointment was a basic fact of life.

He’s been looking for a book for several days now; one that he held in his hand and put back, but he can’t remember where. This is a bit disturbing for someone who has a perfect memory like he does, but these days he is often distracted.

He went down into the studio to see if the book was there, but it wasn’t. Ambrose the teddy bear was sitting in his chair, like he has for years. It seems to me like he’s waiting for someone. 

It might be a little heavy-pawed to talk about disappointment here, but it’s fairly obvious to me, even though I showed up here a little less than four years ago.

And now there’s this other thing. His doctor said he had to exercise more, because of the treatments, so today he shoveled our driveway and sidewalk, then the neighbors’, then another neighbors’, then another neighbors’, and then yet another neighbors’. He said that was his exercise for the day. I still got to go on my walks, of course. I got ice in my paws, but it was okay.

So now, with all this talk about disappointment and stuff, I’m not sure what’s going on here. I know the guy I live with will have to go to radiation therapy in a few weeks; he’ll be gone for about an hour every day, which is certainly a change in our daily routine.

He said he found something to wear, when he went. It used to be his wife’s. It fits him better than it did her.

I didn’t really get it. It may be possible that I don’t understand him at all.
Maybe I should start paying more attention. I’ll have to sleep on it, first, though.

Until next time, then.