the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you a post which may best be described as a salmagundi. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Adventures”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. And, I should say, a favorite pose, too.

This next picture is me, yesterday, waiting for the beeper on the oven to go off, signalling that whatever was being broiled is done, and that I don’t have to worry about it any more. I don’t like beeping noises. 

It turned out that the guy I live with had forgotten to clean the broiler pan from the last time, and the oven started to smoke, so he decided not to broil whatever it was he was going to broil. So I was able to come back inside. You can see, though, what kind of a day it was. Dry.

Things changed today. It snowed. The guy I live with said it was the strangest January snow he’d ever seen. It was wet, like a spring snow. Maybe because it wasn’t very cold today. Usually if it snows here in January, it’s cold. He said that maybe for once the snow would be like rain in January, sinking into the ground instead of evaporating.

One thing I should say, as an aside, is that we are not entirely sure why replies to comments don’t always appear on the blog. I answer everything, as maybe you’ve discovered, using the email program, so there should always be an even number of comments, but sometimes there aren’t. Who knows why.

Bunches of other things happened today; most of them not hugely interesting, but so little happens around here that I thought they might be worth reporting.

The guy I live with got a cane in the mail yesterday, from Brazos Walking Sticks. It’s really nice; made from Texas oak, though it might not be. He doesn’t really need a cane, but thought one would be nice, and maybe he could fend off some of the unleashed dogs we encounter on my walks. That sounded pretty unlikely to me. There are quite a few canes here, all of them inherited, I guess, but he wanted his own.

Then there was the ocular migraine. The “light show”. Or, as the guy I live with called it, a”pre-migrainous scintillating scotoma”. The guy I live with said he had had about fifty of these in the last thirty years. They aren’t dangerous; just annoying. Lots of people have these; I think more woman than men get them. They last about twenty minutes. He doesn’t get migraines, with a headache. His doctor said, though, that he should have his retina looked at when he mentioned them, and when he got his eyes examined for glasses he got to see things like his optic nerve, which he said was cool. Everything was okay.

The reason behind this has more to do with the uninvited guest that anything else. His doctor told him to go on an aspirin regimen quite a while ago, and the ocular migraines stopped. When he had the biopsy, he had to give up the aspirin a week before, and then forgot to start again afterwards, and the day he remembered was the day he had an ocular migraine.

So since he’s having “a procedure” next week, he had to stop the aspiring again, and sure enough, he had another ocular migraine. He can hardly wait to be able to take the aspirin again.

Today he shoveled the walk, driveway, and sidewalk, then shoveled the walk, driveway, and sidewalk of his neighbors two doors down, and three doors down, and across the street. He’s supposed to be exercising more, these days, so I guess that was a good thing.

And the snowdrop catalog came in the mail yesterday.

Of course, snowdrops were ordered.

Snowdrops are also being read about. (Not aloud to me.)

Apparently this is an utterly delightful book, full of pictures, and stories of gardeners who were “rather keen on snowdrops”.

Which leads me to the actual snowdrops in the upstairs bedroom. Some re-arranging took place today, then everything was re-re-arranged when the re-arrangement turned out to be unsatisfactory. The snowdrops are growing about two millimeters a day. 

Galanthus elwesii ‘Abington Green’.

Galanthus angustifolius.

Okay, enough of that. I don’t find snowdrops anywhere near as interesting as my walks, which are almost always totally excellent. Today’s were no exception.

This is me, if you didn’t know, on my way home this evening. I didn’t know right then that I was being watched.

This is what being watched looks like.

We walked under the willow, and looked back. You can see the owl if you look closely. In the first two pictures, it’s more or less directly above the piece of branch lying on the canal road.

Then it moved.

I had to be dried off with a towel when I got home. I like that a lot more than I did when I was little; I would attack the towel and make it impossible for the guy I live with to get me dry.

I’ll end this somewhat discursive post by showing another picture of the kitchen, taken last night, when pozole was being cooked on the stove. Pozole rojo con pollo, if you wanted to know. Some people spell it posole. The guy I live with doesn’t. 

Until next time, then.

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

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Lying on the couch, late at night, listening to Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the left hand. Maybe I was sleeping a little. 

There’s a prominent part for the contrabassoon right at the beginning of the concerto. A lot of really low notes. He said at one time he thought about getting a contrabassoon, but he has kazoos, which are more his style.

Naturally, I got a mini-lecture on the music. The guy I live with said the concerto was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, an Austrian pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War. Wittgenstein first contacted the Austrian composer Josef Labor, who was blind, to have him write a piano concerto for the left hand. Paul’s brother was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who considered Labor to be one of the greatest composers ever, though nowadays his music isn’t performed very often.

Of course I could have learned this online, though the guy I live with just knew it, and told me, like he does, all the time. His father was paralyzed on his right side, because of the Korean War, and yet was able to have a career in computer programming for the government, and so maybe you can see why he’s interested in this sort of historical fact.

He looked at me, lying next to him, after all the talk about the Wittgenstein brothers, pianist and philosopher, and said, “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life”. He knows a lot of Wittgenstein quotes, in German or English. I like English whenever possible.

This happened night before last, I think. Last night the guy I live with took a picture of what it’s like to sit at this laptop, even later at night, with Q.I. on the television and a pot of menudo cooking on the stove.

I’ve never had menudo. It’s one of the guy I live with’s favorite things, and he thinks it’s funny that some people say they don’t like it, as though he was going to offer them some. He used to buy a lot of licorice because his wife didn’t like it so he knew it would be there when he got home from work.

The days have been pretty nice, sunny, but sometimes the tiniest bit chilly. Here I am in one of my favorite spots in the yard.

This is a very pleasant warm spot. You can see a little bit of snow by the blue pot there.

Speaking of small thoughts, I have some snowdrop pictures, from the garden, in the frame, and in the upstairs bedroom.

This first one is really late. It should have flowered in November but the soil has been so cold, even frozen, which is pretty weird for here, that it’s been struggling.

‘Potter’s Prelude’

a mystery snowdrop

Some snowdrops flowering in the frame. The soil has frozen there, too, but thaws out during the day.

There are snowdrops being grown as houseplants here. I know how that sounds. It doesn’t affect me very much, because no one would look at me and think that I’m the one doing this, because I’m not. I have other interests. But here are the snowdrops.

The pots are too large. I’m not sure why he thought gallon pots would be a reasonable size, but this is how it is, for now.

The reasoning behind this is pretty simple, though not as “stunningly elegant” as the guy I live with said it was. This blog has described a number of “brilliant ideas” which turned out to be embarrassing failures, so I was skeptical.

Snowdrops can be expensive. You can pay well over a hundred dollars just for one bulb. No, really. The guy I live with hasn’t done that yet. If his wife were still here he would never even consider that, but she isn’t here, and so maybe he might consider spending that kind of money, especially if it was for a rare species.

So, say he did spend that much money for a single bulb. If it was planted out in the garden and died, he would be irked. Gardening is about the only hobby where you spend money and often have nothing to show for it the next year. I mean, if he collected coins, the coins would still be there in a couple of years. But plants die. I know because in the relatively brief time I’ve been here, a lot of plants have died. The guy I live with said he’s probably spent ten million dollars on dead plants. I think that’s an exaggeration, but I get the idea.

Instead of planting snowdrops out in the garden, they’re going to be planted in pots and grown in the upstairs bedroom their first year, so that they make good growth, and then next year, some time in August, maybe, the bulbs will be planted in pots (smaller pots) in the frames, until they begin to increase.

These pictures are only sort of in focus.

Galanthus transcaucasicus, the only snowdrop native to Iran. (Also found in Azerbaijan).

That’s the gardening stuff, and philosophical quote, for today. I’m not sure I can handle a lot of Wittgenstein, even though the guy I live with said that Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, quoted Wittgenstein from time to time. Well, once, anyway.

Whew, huh. Going on my evening walk came as a relief. We saw one of our neighbors, as we often do. Just waking up. 

It was a pretty good walk, as usual. The wind came up, which is unusual these days. The guy I live with has been complaining about the lack of air moving here for months, now, and when it got windy this afternoon, he said it was nice. On the way back, since we’d been talking about thoughts, very small ones, I had to stop and do some thinking of my own.

Until next time, then.