Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on whatever it is that needs updating. You may remember me from such posts as “The Bulb Frame”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. 
I really love the couch. Sometimes the guy I live with sits on the couch with me, in the evening, reading a book. He said that some time he might read me a story, too. He also says it might be time to consider getting new cushions for the couch, which is why there’s that maroon fleece covering the existing cushions, which are pretty worn out now. The original stuffing was kapok. I’d never heard of kapok but we looked it up on the internet. When the guy I live with was little, practically everything was kapok, bamboo, rattan, or ivory.
“Ivory?”, you ask. Well, yes. Maybe I never showed a picture of this before. It’s on a little wooden platform on the wall; the guy I live with brought it to the house when he and his wife moved in. It’s very dusty, as you can see. (The guy I live with carefully washes it off about once a year.) These pictures are not hugely in focus. 
The fisherman has always been called “Leo Key” but that might not be right, since “Leo” doesn’t sound especially Chinese. It is ivory, except for the eyes in the dog and snake.
Some of the fins on the carp were broken off, but if you look right above the dog and snake you can see that the statue has been broken in half, which the guy I live with said they would say something about if the statue were taken to the “Roadshow”. It was broken in half when it was knocked onto the floor when the guy I live with’s mom was dancing with her then boyfriend in the living room of the house on Oakwood Avenue in Los Angeles, where she and her mom were living while her father was in New Guinea, in 1944.
The statue sat on “the Magnavox”, which was a nice cabinet holding a record player and albums of 78s (the guy I live with said he can still remember the pleasant smell of the cabinet when the doors were opened), and the blue lamp you sometimes see in pictures featuring me. A plate of oreos, some celery, and a glass of milk were set out on top of the cabinet on Christmas Eve, for, you know, the visitors. And that’s what the guy I live with thinks of when he looks at the ivory fisherman.
Not very much has been happening here. The guy I live with said he was totally sick of turkey and would never have any ever, ever again. (I did get some.) He read that cooked turkey shouldn’t be kept in the refrigerator for more than four days (less it if was thawed in cold water, which it was), and so it was with a considerable amount of relief that he decided to dispose of the rest of the turkey. Of course I would have helped him dispose of it.
This is me thinking about turkey.
But the turkey is gone. (Or at least out of the picture.)
The guy I live with took some pictures of the garden, with the phone. Just to show how dry it is here. 
The crocus, Crocus niveus, is still flowering, even though it gets a little below freezing almost every night. This is a special form of it, I guess. There are some others which finished flowering quite some time ago; you can see the leaves off to the left.
He’s still learning how to work the camera on the phone. (Not to mention the other cameras.)
The cyclamen are doing pretty well. 
It’s okay if the leaf stems elongate while they’re growing upstairs. In fact, there’s a cyclamen he grew from seed which is really elongated.This is okay because the cyclamen do go dormant in the summer; when they get planted outside everything will be perfectly normal when the leaves grow again. 
By the way, the seedling cyclamen were grown from pretty old seed, which you can do even though some people say you can’t. The packet of seeds came from the distribution of surplus seeds from the North American Rock Garden Society seed exchange. The seeds get the covering of gravel you see there, then the well-watered pot of seeds goes into a baggie which is folded over (not closed), and then into the closet until the seeds start to germinate. This can take several weeks.
The seedling cyclamen won’t go into the garden for a few years, at least.
My evening walks have been pretty interesting. Sometimes I feel like I’m being watched. The guy I live with says I am.
This is a different owl from the one whose picture the guy I live with posted on Facebook.
If you didn’t see those pictures, maybe I should post them here. You can see this one has a white collar, or ruff, maybe. 
We hear them hooting every night now. The guy I live with said that when I was little and slept in my upstairs fort, I got scared when I heard the owls for the first time.
So that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with a typical picture of me on my walk, being watched by owls. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 