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 couple of movies. You may remember me from such posts as “The Night Rain”, among so many, many other rain-related posts.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Notice how calm, and, yes, dare I say noble, I look, just lying here on the patio rug, in the sun. This was taken when what was said was going to happen didn’t.

I ought to explain, I guess. It’s been raining here a lot, and I have movies to show you in just a bit. I hear that everyone who gardens likes a good rain movie from time to time.

We got over two inches of rain earlier in the week. The first one was a real downpour with lots of thunder, and the street flooded. We got almost an inch of rain. That was on Monday. He bought me some Rescue Remedy, like Slipper and Chess got, and I think it makes me feel better. On Tuesday we got more rain, and then Thursday night we were both awakened by the “highly unusual” (meaning, it happens all the time now) thunderstorm at three in the morning, with more rain.

The forecast for Friday was for severe weather. The guy I live with became very agitated. But nothing happened. It was a nice day.

Then the forecasts for Saturday and Sunday were changed to severe weather, after about one in the afternoon on each day. The guy I live with looked at the radar page constantly. Saturday’s forecast improved, so he left me for a while (not very long) to go visit a garden with his friend. There were quite a few really bad storms out east that day, and up north in Wyoming. Both places are far away from here. I was reassured to learn that.

The guy I live with often wonders why people wonder why he likes dry weather. Lots of wondering. The alternative here, since regular rain is pretty rare (which is why we show movies of it) is terrible storms. Today they said we might get tennis-ball-sized hail. You might be able to imagine what was said about that. Then later the forecast said baseball-sized. He said that if you think this sounds totally insane you would be right.

It often makes him quite sad that we live in a place which features such terrors. But, he said,  being extremely philosophical, “Here we are”.

So around about noon, “anticipating the end of everything”, he went downstairs with a couple of flashlights, a gallon jug of water, my traveling water bowl, and he got out this little faux lacquered bowl, “just in case”. The bowl has a little plastic bag with some jewelry in it which is very important to him. He said that when he and Chess had to go downstairs that one time he took all those things down there.

This is what it looked like this morning. Not very threatening, as I think you’ll agree. The humidity was one hundred percent. Then they changed the forecast and the guy I live with was hugely relieved. As in super hugely relieved.

So now I can show the rain movies, made last Tuesday, without worrying that we might have much worse movies to show (of me and the guy I live with hiding downstairs).

The guy I live with said something about “popcorn” and movies and he had to explain that to me. I’ve never had popcorn. He said that he and his wife had a disagreement about how much butter went on the popcorn. I guess he preferred a lot. Like almost soggy, with a lot of salt. He said that Slipper was really afraid of all the appliances in the kitchen except for the popcorn popper; Slipper, who was really big, would lean his elbows on the kitchen counter watching the popcorn pop. He liked it so much that the guy I live with couldn’t say “popcorn” without Slipper getting all excited.When Slipper got sick and didn’t want to eat much, the guy I live with would buy something called “white cheddar popcorn” which Slipper would eat, or “suck up like a vacuum cleaner”, and Chess would get some too. I think I should get some, once in a while. Or constantly.

I got carried away. The movies are really too short for popcorn, though the guy I live with said you could think about popcorn while watching the movies. The guy I live with said when he went to movies he liked Milk Duds and Dots and that movies cost thirty-five cents to get in.

This next one is similar to the one posted on Facebook but it’s different. Kind of jiggly if you ask me. This was taken from the upstairs bedroom window, through the screen.

Okay, well, I really rambled a lot this evening. The guy I live with says I’m easily distracted. The other night I got really interested in a Striped Kitty in the garden late at night–again–and the guy I live with said not to, and to come in, which I did eventually, after he reminded me that I’m trained to come when he calls me, and that he had nothing but my best interests in mind when he yelled at me to come inside.

Then there was the really big snake under the birch tree just this afternoon, a snake which I tried to get, and the guy I live with said not to, like he always does it seems, and said that there was a bunny in the garden and that my priorities were all wrong for the day. I did finally chase the bunny out of the garden.

All in all, it was an interesting day. 

Until next time, then.

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 what’s been going on with me and the guy I live with. You may remember me from such posts as “The Upended Breakfast”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I don’t think you can see how hot I am. I’m being stoic. It’s been really, really, really hot. I mean super hot. We haven’t been doing much of anything because it’s been so hot. Last night at eleven o’clock it was over eighty degrees in the house.

On my evening walk last night the sun was blood-red, according to the guy I live with, who didn’t get a picture of it because he said he thought his eyes were going. He had to ask some people who were walking two black Labrador puppies if the sun was really that red, and they said it was. There was a fire somewhere which was turning the sun that color.

And then later, at Tinkle Time, I went out and came upon a striped kitty in the “way back”, where it shouldn’t have been. I barked a lot and didn’t come when I was called, and the guy I live with got really angry with me. I finally did come in, and he lectured me for quite some time. He thought I might have been sprayed, but I wasn’t. The guy I live with explained striped kitties to me again but I still didn’t quite get it.

Obviously I couldn’t go out again, because of the striped kitty, so we went on another walk at quarter after one in the morning. By that time it had cooled off some.

Today he thought he found the place where the striped kitty snuck into our yard and fixed that. The fence is pretty old and some of the pickets have been broken. Some have even been chewed through by creatures trying to get into our yard.

The garden has been really dry. The photographs don’t really show it, but it has been dry. Some plants have curled up and died.

The pool was put back and filled with water. Even if I don’t lie in it, which I guess I ought to, he says it makes things look “summery”. To me that means extremely hot.Looking across what the guy I live with calls “the lawn”. It isn’t a lawn. It is pretty fun to run around the paths and look for things in the grasses. 

The Enclosure, with the medium Big Metal Chicken. The Enclosure is watered about once a week. A peek into the Employees Only section. It looks kind of autumnal because the pea shrubs, Caragana arborescens, are shedding their leaves due to the prolonged drought. The shrubs can become completely leafless in some years. That path goes on for almost another fifteen feet. The guy I live with hardly ever goes back there; he says that gardens should have places where you hardly ever go, like the disused wing of a manor house. The path leading to my Private Lawn. You can see that the grass has dried up to nothing, and the Egyptian onions have mostly gone dormant. There are apples all over the place. I don’t eat apples like the other purebred border collies who live here did. They aren’t ripe, for one thing. My Private Lawn. It’s Cody buffalo grass, which was just mowed and watered. That spot by the solar lamp has always been bare; nothing grows there because of the lilacs. Maybe some kind of native grass would do well there, but nothing else ever has. Looking back toward the house. The solar lamp hanging there had its solar panels wrecked by being left outside for years, so it doesn’t work, but it hangs there anyway. It was a really nice lamp. And another view from farther up the path on the north side of the garden. Looking across the “old rock garden”. That’s it for the garden pictures.

The guy I live with has always liked having lots of birds in the garden, and just yesterday he “rejellified” the oriole feeder and an oriole showed up just a little while later. But the biggest thing is what’s happening at the thistle feeder. The guy I live with says the thistle is being eaten at the rate of about an inch a day.You can see robins stealing grape jelly from the oriole feeder, but also goldfinches at the thistle feeder. They eat and eat and eat. The guy I live with says they probably can’t find much food outside of the garden because it’s been so dry. The thistle feeder was filled just a few days ago.

He learned a while ago that the thistle seed needs to be fresh. Thistle seed was in the feeder for several months and no one showed up. Then he went to the bird seed store, bought new fresh seed, and the goldfinches went through a whole ten-pound bag in about a month. The old seed was tossed into the garden because other creatures aren’t as picky.

Today we hardly did anything. We didn’t get to bed until two in the morning, so hardly doing anything today seemed like the logical course of action. I had breakfast, went on my morning walk, the guy I live with thought about things and moped a bit, then we took a nap. The kitchen phone rang and the guy I live with wasn’t sure what to do. He answered the phone but couldn’t understand what the person wanted. It was so hot that understanding people was pretty difficult.

Then it looked like it might rain but instead it just got dark. Dark and extremely hot. We went on my evening walk and it started to sprinkle, so I thought it best to go back home. And then it rained. It rained for about half an hour. Not a downpour or anything, just rain. There was some thunder, too, so I had to hide.

The main thing, though, was that it finally cooled off to the point where I didn’t think I wasn’t going to roast away to nothing. Like if you left a turkey in the oven for ten hours. Instead it was delightfully cool.

The guy I live with said that eventually it will cool off, to the point where he wishes it would be warm again, but I can hardly wait.

Until next time, then.