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 partly me-related post. You may remember me from such posts as “Expletives Deleted”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
For good measure, here I am again, a bit later.
You can see I have a lot of Lamb Chops with me on the bed. I share this bedroom with the guy I live with, though sometimes I spend time in my Upstairs Fort, which you can see there, and sometimes I sleep in the chair in the living room. The guy I live with said that some of the other purebred border collies who lived here slept in that same chair. The chair is as old as the couch; about ninety years old.It’s covered with a worn-out blanket, or something, in case my paws are muddy, which they sometimes are.

Anyway, I think you can see what it’s like outside, here.
The guy I live with doesn’t know what to do. We’re not used to this sort of thing at all.
We had Opera Day again, yesterday. Don Pasquale.
The guy I live with likes opera, obviously; Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, already told the story of how the guy I live with went to the opera once and Princess Grace of Monaco was sitting in the same row as he was.
He wouldn’t be able to sit for that long, these days. He has trouble with his hip, though the doctor hasn’t said he needs a new one. Yet.

One of the things he’s been doing, besides making hundreds of dumplings, is cooking, so I’m instructed to show some pictures of food, just to prove that he doesn’t spend all of his time staring out the window and moaning.
These are Sichuan-style dumplings with chili oil and other things. (True, they’re really supposed to be won tons, but the guy I live with hasn’t made any won tons, yet.)
None of this is what some people would call “hot” food.
This is vegetarian ma po tofu:
And, finally, fried rice. This was a different recipe from his regular one, and the guy I live with almost gagged at the suggestion of adding a whole tablespoon of salt. He didn’t add any salt.
The fried rice recipe also called for lop cheung, Chinese sausages; there’s a frozen pack of them at the back of the freezer, but the guy I live with forgot to thaw them out. He says they’re kind of an acquired taste; sweetish.

He’s been using a relatively new wok with a wooden handle, but this is the wok that’s been here for thirty-five years. It was his wife’s, and is well-seasoned.
It gets cleaned with a traditional wok brush.
It’s better that he’s cooking all the time rather than eating all the time. (I certainly wouldn’t mind eating all the time.) There are no snacks in the house, for him. No cookies, candy, cakes, or pie, either. (I think there’s some ancient Christmas ribbon candy in the pantry, but that’s just for the sake of appearances.)
He spends a lot of time reading about food, too.

I spend a lot of time thinking about food, when I’m not asleep, anyway.
I sleep on the couch, of an evening (I always liked that way of talking), and then when I get peckish, which is often, I come into the kitchen with with my “biscuit stare”.
You can see that the guy I live with hasn’t put away his Sorels. He rarely has a use for them, fortunately, but he wore them a lot when he worked outside, on cold, snowy days. He slips them on to go outside when the bird feeders need to be filled, which is a lot, because the birds are constantly eating, like I’d like to be.

If you didn’t know, biscuits taste best when they delivered to me on the couch.
I know this sounds a bit spoiled, but the guy I live with said that Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, liked to have his biscuits brought up to him when he was lying in bed. That was spoiled.
I’ve never asked the guy I live with to bring me biscuits in bed. (But it gives me an idea.)

I’ll leave you now, with an elegant picture of me doing the other thing I like to do on the couch, dreaming of biscuits, and warmer weather so we can do some gardening.

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 talk about not very much at all. You may remember me from such posts as “Still Nothing”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. You can tell that it snowed again.
This is what it looked like the night before:
So there’s been snow on the ground for three weeks now, in the driest month of the year. (Winter is our dry season.)
And it’s supposed to snow again tomorrow, and some time next week, too, with no warm days at all. But at least we’re not having “fire weather”.
The guy I live with said it’s kind of claustrophobic, and doesn’t help with his sense of loneliness, but he does stuff to sort of help with that. (He bought a new cordless vacuum cleaner, for one thing. He claims that there are dust bunnies in the house that are the size of horses, and are mostly dog hair, which I find hard to believe.)

Today, besides helping the guy I live with fill the bird feeders, we had Opera Day again, so there was a lot of singing and stuff. La forza del destino. I was asleep for a lot of it.
And he made egg foo young. He said he almost had to take out a second mortgage for the eggs. He made enough patties, or whatever you call them, for a few nights.
I’d show pictures of my food, too, but I ate it all.

There’s not much else to say. Just think of this as a sidelight on our exciting modern lifestyle.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me investigating things on my evening walk.

Until next time, then.