the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, Frightener of Hawks, Stalker of Coyotes, and Growler at Owls. You may remember me from such posts as “Nothing Again Nothing”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

The guy I live with fiddled with the ISO and other such things on the point-and-shoot, and the picture above is what he got. Not what he wanted, but whatever. It’s still me, as you can see.

There was blue sky the other day. And this contrail.The guy I live with said the plane was probably headed to San Francisco. The spiral pattern was sort of interesting, but the blue sky was extremely interesting.

It got gloomier. The guy I live with constantly complains about how gloomy the weather is, and I guess because it is often very gloomy here. He said some wind might be nice, but that’s become so rare that when it happens there’s a movie featuring it. Mostly the air doesn’t move. Denver used to be a windy place. And now the gloom, according to him anyway, is practically perpetual.

I have some pictures, which are on the same subjects that I’ve posted on before, but they’re different.

I saw a hawk on one of the gloomy days, but also when there was blue sky, and those pictures are better. You might have to really squint to see it, but I didn’t have to, what with my totally superior eyesight. 

I, being viciously fierce and deadly, scared away the hawk with my very presence in the field.

That day when we had sun, another creature ran through the field. 

Maybe you can see that it was limping a little on its right hind leg. The guy I live with said that while coyotes can run free, they don’t get taken to the doctor if something is wrong. They also don’t get to hog the bed at night. 

I’ve been seeing probably the same coyote every day now, on my morning walk, and a couple of times it’s trotted out almost right in front of me, and I really wanted to go after it, but the guy I live with said he couldn’t walk that fast, so I had to be content with sniffing.

Some more major–to him, at least–things have happened. The first one was that he had the “procedure”, which was placement of fiducial markers in his prostate as a target for the radiation, which will start in about a month. The markers are gold, so I guess he’s worth more than he was a week ago. He said it didn’t hurt–much–and didn’t take very long at all. He saw the ultrasound image showing the gold markers, and thought a copy of that would be nice, but I knew what he would do with it. Make me post it on the blog. He’s not squeamish at all, but some people are, and there would have to be warnings.

His friend took him to the urology center because he couldn’t drive home, what with all the drugs he got, and she said when they stopped off at the store he told everyone he was on drugs. She just rolled her eyes. He said it was easy to see why people get addicted to opiates, but he only got one of each pill so that was that. He felt awful when the drugs wore off.

He’s a lot more indifferent to all of this than you might think. He said that compared to having to face the rest of his life without his wife, this wasn’t much of anything. There will be a lot of days when he has to leave the house, but not for long each day.

Even more major, though, was what happened today. He sold his mom’s house. He was really anxious to get this over with, and he was pretty relieved, but when he called USAA to have the homeowner’s insurance policy stopped, the super-nice person on the phone (and everybody there is super nice) said something about getting a check for being a subscriber for sixty-nine years.

The guy I live with’s father got the policy after he graduated from West Point in 1950. So his parents, and the house they moved into in 1961, will begin to fade into the distance.

The thing is, though, like he was telling his friend, he can still hear his wife’s voice, her laugh, her touch, and so forth, and so in a way she is still alive in his memory. That’s kind of weird. He sometimes wonders if that would be a comfort to her.

I bet by now you’re exhausted from all this philosophizing and talk about gold implants and stuff, and can hardly wait to see pictures of snowdrops. It snowed today, so there’s nothing going on in the garden, of course, and the guy I live with said we would probably have snow until May, when it will start to hail.

You may well imagine that I have to listen to things like this all day long, every day, and indeed I do. The long stretches of temperatures in the sixties, even seventies, in January or February, with snowdrops in flower “back in the old days”, have given way to this endless, dreadful winter weather, with frozen soil, and snow that won’t melt. So indoor snowdrops will have to do.

Some of the pictures are better than others.

Still with me? Okay, now back to outdoor things. Some cool owl pictures might make up for the snowdrop talk. My evening walk was snowier than usual. I had to ignore all the complaining at the other end of the leash.

We walked under the willow, like we always do, and then when we came back, there was someone sleeping in the willow. (Almost in the center of the picture.) But it woke up when I got close. 

It looked pretty annoyed that it was awakened before it was ready. I felt like an alarm clock on legs.

You can see how annoyed it looked when we were on the other side of the willow.

 

Maybe this was slightly scary. Just slightly. The owl looked pretty mad, don’t you think? We weren’t making a lot of noise (I might have growled a little), though the guy I live with was probably talking. He usually is.

So that was the last few days. I hope you were able to follow all of this. It wasn’t as linear as I hoped it would be. 

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 yet another didactic post, as well as some news relating to our modern lifestyle. You may remember me from such posts as “Selling Insurance”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

It wasn’t very cold out when my picture was taken, but the snow isn’t really melting as fast as the guy I live with would like. You should hear the complaining. He says that snow is like having a house guest who constantly talks about the same thing and outstays their welcome.

“Quite unlike rain”, he said, gazing out the window, wistfully. I like snow, but the guy I live with has issues with me trying to “fly” when we go on walks in the snow.

“Mind the leash”, he says. He’s old, and what with the hormone therapy, his bones are becoming brittle, and if he falls down, he might break something, and just lie there, while I’m racing around tugging on the end of the leash. I suppose that if that happened, I could drag him back home, though he’s pretty heavy.

Since it snowed, things here have pretty much come to a standstill in the garden, and the guy I live with talks about how boring all of this is. Sometimes he just sits there, rocking back and forth a little. Or stares at the floor.

I forgot to show this curious picture which was taken a few days ago.

The guy I live with said those were marks made by the fiendish hands of Snow Demons trying to get to the surface. They kind of looked like they were made by bird wings, to me, but he said no, Snow Demons. We obviously have widely divergent opinions about snow. 

It turns out that what you do when it snows, when you’re not outside, is to do stuff inside, and when the boredom gets to be too much, you decide to do a thing that you meant to do a while ago but never got around to doing, even though you didn’t really want to do it , but it needed to be done, and then when you started in on it, you discovered things you didn’t want to discover, and had to work out a way to fix them, without using too much colorful language.

The guy I live with re-caulked the bathtub. I watched. It was extremely boring to watch. When he got to one end of the bathtub, right down at the bottom outside corner, he discovered that water from the tub had gotten under the tiles on the floor, and the tiles just came up, so that had to be redone, which made the whole job even more disagreeable.

Once the tub had been re-caulked, plastic had to be taped around the tub so he could take a shower. Like me, the guy I live with is obsessed with cleanliness, and likes to bathe every day. This is what the tub looked like after the plastic was taped around the faucet end. I’m sure you’ll be impressed. It’s kind of like an episode of “The Red Green Show”. You can see that the grout around the tiles needs to be cleaned, too. 

Meanwhile, when the day came for me to go to Day Care and play with my friends, the guy I live with went out with his friend, and they went to a bookstore, where he found this book, which he’s going to give as a present. He looked through it and said the writing was really good like others from the same author. And that if you like things like this, English gardening, Sissinghurst, roses, a sort of romantic, wistful approach to gardening, then you might like, even love, this book. 

So here I am talking about gardening again. Of course I can’t talk about fog, or mist, or drizzle, or rain, at this time of year, when the garden here is covered with snow, hard crusty cold white stuff which the guy I live with is the horticultural equivalent of having to stare at a spot on the wall for three straight days and then write a paper about it and deliver it to an audience of people who think staring at spots on the wall is the most exciting thing ever, but I can talk about snowdrops.

Yes, snowdrops again. There are none flowering in the garden, because of the snow, but there are some flowering upstairs, in what is technically the master bedroom but has never been used as such. It’s just the guy I live with’s room, and has been since he moved into the house with his wife, who had rooms downstairs.

This is a double snowdrop, called ‘Ailwyn’. I see a sad face here.

Since I’m under constant pressure to talk about snowdrops, because the guy I live with would rather be gardening than just sitting here wondering when the snow and cold was going to go away, which leads him to wondering why he lives in a place where such awful things happen, which brings him back to snowdrops, I thought I would talk about the main way to distinguish them, which is vernation. Vernation is the way the leaves are arranged when they emerge.

There are three ways to distinguish snowdrops. Then after that, there are what you might call subcategories to distinguish them, but these are the main ways.

The first type of vernation is called applanate. You can see how the outer leaves are parallel. The second type is called supervolute. One leaf clasped within the other.The third type is called explicative. The outer edges of the leaves are rolled backwards. The species that has this is Galanthus plicatus, which the guy I live with says should really have been described as “G. explicatus”. Plicatus in Latin means “folded”. So there you have it. I hope you were able to stay awake during this lecture.

I’m going to let you go now. I know this was yet another one of my non-linear posts, but I am a purebred border collie, and we do tend to become distracted occasionally. 

Until next time, then.