the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today on what will probably be the last post of this summer. You may remember me from such posts as “Autumnal Equinox”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. 

You can see how well I guard the house from this position.

Kind of a lot has happened since my last post. A lot for us, anyway. The guy I live with and his friend went to the Chatfield Arboretum, which is part of Denver Botanic Gardens, and is sort of close to where we live.
I have some pictures, even though I didn’t get to go.

They also have animals there. This goat had an itch on its tummy, and was scratching itself on the wooden hay-holding thing.

The animals are very well-cared-for. Rather like me.

Here are some more pictures of that willow sculpture I showed a while ago. It’s called “One Fell Swoop”, and it looks kind of scary. The guy I live with said it was cool. 

I guess he’s been in kind of a peculiar mood lately, and there are reasons for that, I suppose.
For one thing, he said he was going to change my name to Runcible G. Codd (the purebred border collie). I think Mani is a perfectly good name, though both of us get annoyed when people pronounce it like “Manny”. It’s Sanskrit, and it means jewel, which I certainly am. But he said Runcible G. Codd was maybe more like me and my personality. I of course completely disagree.
But we’ve been going through a bunch of changes this year. Some little, some majorly huge. 

This is in the majorly huge department. We’re getting a new roof.

The guy I live with put this off for years, especially after his wife died. There was a hailstorm a few months after she died, and he didn’t get a roof then (though the storm missed the house by two blocks, the way storms do), and then there was one in 2014, and two last year. (Only one from the year they moved in, 1985, until 2009, so that says something.)
He felt bad about putting this off, because he usually doesn’t put things off, but did with this, but now we have a new roof and new gutters. The old gutters, especially were really leaky.

Now it will probably never rain again.
One thing, though, just possibly, there will be less fretting when the next severe storm heads our way. There were several this summer, in fact, every time the temperature went below ninety degrees (F) we were under a severe thunderstorm watch, or warning. Maybe this will be the weather of the future, blazingly hot for weeks on end, and then on the one day that it cools off, violent weather headed right toward us.
The guy I live with pretty much detests the weather here, these days, but he said “Here we are, anyway.”

There are some native plants in flower, despite the pretty much endless heat and drought (though it did rain a bit a few days ago). This is Aster ericoides, by the canal. 

For some reason, no one mowed along the canal like they usually do. 

So many things have been different this year, it’s becoming hard to keep up. But the colchicums are still flowering, like they do every year.

And the cyclamen are starting, too. This is a special color form of Cyclamen hederifolium. It’s growing in the upstairs bedroom for now. (It was going to be planted this year but things happened, you know.)

Well I guess that’s it. It’s not as hot as it has been, and that’s nice, and I’m going to ignore the guy I live with if he keeps up this Runcible G. Codd silliness, because we purebred border collies are usually very serious, and this is just too much.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, showing just how dry things are here. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here this evening to bring you a rather creepy post indeed. You may remember me from such creepy posts as “The Missing Grass” and, of course, “Creeped Out”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

It’s hard to say what the weirdest thing is, lately, because the list of weird stuff is pretty long.

It rained. That was weird. We got maybe a third of an inch, and on top of the watering that was done a few days ago, the soil in some parts of the garden is pretty damp.

There are colchicums in flower now. This is ‘Disraeli’.

And you can see how much it rained on like the parking lot by where we walk.

The guy I live with said, “Look, a duck”, but I didn’t see it.

It’s actually kind of a nice parking lot and reminds the guy I live with of the kind of places where he used to work.There’s a place where a bunch of cottonowood roots have come to the surface, like huge earthworms, because I guess the grass is watered a lot.

Well, across from this is like an old sluice, which maybe I’ve showed before. Probably. On the concrete there is a very large, and I mean really extra fairly gigantically large you know what. The guy I live with said that if you get too close to her she goes into this defense mode, because there are babies close by, and I really didn’t want to see this defense mode, thank you very much anyway, and we are certainly not going to show a picture of the creature the guy I live with calls the dark queen, because, well I’ve already been plenty creeped out lately.

He did say that there’s been one there before, maybe not the same one, though it would be weird to think that two you know whats have raised babies there by the sluice.
I almost put my nose right on her. The guy I live with started making loud “nose somewhere else” noises.

Well, so, it rained, and today she wasn’t there. The babies were gone, too. The guy I live with said they were probably moved. Hopefully not any closer to me. 

A couple of the times that it rained we were under a severe thunderstorm watch, or warning, for most of the day. This is what it looked like the last time we were under a watch. You can see the big clouds right at the bottom of the picture. 

With the rain, the garden perked up a bit.

I guess that’s really all there is, today. We’ve mostly just been sitting here, not doing much. The guy I live with’s head might explode trying to work with this new editor. It’s not very easy to use at all. 

I think I’ll leave you with a nice sunset picture of me which the guy I live with posted on Facebook, and which he likes a lot. Of course, because it has me in it.

 

 

Until next time, then.