the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here on this somewhat snowy day to while away the while by describing Our Modern Lifestyle, which I hope you may find at least moderately entertaining. You may remember me from such highly (not moderately) entertaining posts as “The Sun Was Out”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

This is my bed, if you didn’t know. I share it with the guy I live with. He says that sometimes I’m a bed hog, which I think is slightly rude. But I do like a bit of room.

The upstairs bedroom is pretty small, and, I think, extremely cozy. A mattress and foundation were put up there a long time ago, and eventually the guy I live with started sleeping up there with Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, while his wife slept downstairs with Pooka, the second purebred border collie who lived here. When he got old and irritable, Flurry would get upset by firecrackers or thunder and attack Pooka, sometimes in the middle of the night. So this arrangement was made, and everybody slept much better.

Sometimes, during the day, Flurry would get so terribly frightened and agitated by thunder he would have to spend time in the bathtub, where he felt safe. If things got really bad he would try to scratch his way through the bathroom door, or even turn the handle with his teeth.

Flurry was kind of a nut. The guy I live with said he should be taken to a Border Psycolliegist, but that never happened. And the bathroom stuff has been left as it is, because the guy I live with said this was a house full of ghosts. Friendly ones, I’m happy to say.

In fact, there are several things containing ashes in the upstairs bedroom, which the guy I live with thinks it’s inappropriate to show, but they impart an even cozier feeling up there. Maybe it’s hard to explain.

There are certainly a lot of books in the bookshelf that the guy I live with’s wife built. You can see the shelf, behind me, in the first picture.

This is what he sees when he wakes up in the morning. A print of a painting by Rosa Bonheur, an ancient mah jongg set, a sort of gamelan, and a display of rubber stamps the guy I live with’s wife made from an old typesetting box. 

Most of the books were hers. He says H. Allen Smith was a really funny writer. 

There’s a peculiar chair by the window.

Next to an ancient dresser, which is mostly full of greeting cards. The mirror is a zillion years old, I think.And a thing, I guess you would call it, on the wall, with dried flowers. When the guy I live with took this picture, he burst into tears. He can be like that.

This is the view out of the bedroom window. The window frames are this gross aluminum stuff, but there has never seemed to be any need to replace them.There’s a book on the nightstand, on the lower shelf, which the guy I live with sometimes reads from.

At the entrance to this bedroom, there’s this odd thing hanging on the wall.

On the other wall, kitty corner from it, is an old hand-colored print of a goatsucker. A page from an old book. The guy I live with bought that after his wife died, and had it framed. That was one way he made it through the first few years without her. Painting the house, and buying engravings, having them framed, and hanging them on the walls. Things like this are surprisingly inexpensive. (I think this was sixty dollars. Cheaper than some snowdrops.)

He likes the self-satisfied expression of the goatsucker.

Mozart had been dead for less than a year when this was engraved.

Next door is what was built as the master bedroom but has never been that. Where the snowdrops and cyclamen, and other plants, live.

There’s an engraving of William Blake on the wall, done when he was still alive. The guy I live with said, though, that this was like a “second state”, and not the original first issue. But still, he likes it.

The view from the window in this room.

There are some framed pages from a cactus book by Karl Schumann made in 1900 on the stairs. 

Farther down the stairs are watercolors his grandfather did. He got these from his mom’s house after she died, and likes the paintings there, instead of bare walls. I think this is a fire station, maybe in Newport, Rhode Island, which is where he was from.The house on Prairie Avenue in Newport, which was built by the guy I live with’s great uncle Jim, who was a master carpenter. The guy I live with’s mom said the house was built entirely out of oak. It’s still there. On the other wall, pages from old botanical books.

I know most of the downstairs, especially the studio, has been shown before, but I think not this funny little frog mirror. The guy I live with’s wife got it from her mom.Back upstairs, the rest of the books by Graham Stuart Thomas, and some by Christopher Lloyd, on the partition between the living room and kitchen.

The view from the kitchen window, today.When they moved into the house, the partition was made of this “hideous orange plastic textured thing”, which the guy I live with’s wife removed almost the first week, and made these shelves. That’s her picture there.The Buddha, or Hotei, is real ivory, from the old days. The guy I live with’s mom accidentally broke a couple of the fingers. “Condition issues”, like they would say on The Roadshow. I know the grasshopper has been shown before, but I think it can’t hurt to show it again.

Well, that’s it. I hoped you enjoyed some different pictures showing our modern lifestyle, and especially, maybe, what my life is like in the house, here, on a snowy day with nothing else to do. 

Until next time, then.