the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on my adventures. You may remember me from such posts as “Where’s The Muskrat?”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. It was thundering, and I needed some cuddling.I got it, of course.

It was super gloomy today, like it has been for weeks, here.  The next picture shows how gloomy. (That’s a bird, not a bat, in the picture.) The guy I live with says it’s because of all the subtropical moisture, coming from the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico. Lots of people around us are getting rain, and by that I mean a lot of rain, but we aren’t. Or if it rains here, it does for just a few minutes. Today, it thundered and thundered, and on the weather radar site it looked like a big storm with lots of rain was headed right toward us, but it veered away, like it mostly always does.

It did rain a little. 

One thing that happened was night before last, when Norm the coyote started yelling out in the field. We were able to get a very short film showing how loud Norm was. This film starts out really loudly, so get ready.  Norm was being an extreme loudmouth. That’s me, out by the back fence, telling Norm to pipe down.

Then later that night there was another black-and-white striped kitty out in the corner of the yard, in the Employees Only section. The guy I live with made me come in. I ignored him for a long time but eventually I decided he was serious about it. He was pretty angry with me because I didn’t come right away, and I had to get a bath in the tub, with shampoo and everything. That wasn’t as awful as I thought it might be. I didn’t get sprayed as badly as I could have been, but I also got a lecture.

I had to hear stories of the other purebred border collies who’ve lived here, and were sprayed, sometimes right in the face, and how unpleasant that was for everyone, except I guess for the striped kitties, who got away to spray again another night. There was this one time when two of the purebred border collies were sprayed, and no one knew it until they got into the bed, and then the guy I live with had to go to work the next day, and everyone said they could tell what had happened the minute he walked in the door, at work. The door was over a hundred feet away from his desk, but everyone could tell.

Then yesterday we were taking a nap when all of a sudden there was this loud fluttering noise, a kind of papery fluttering, by the sink. It was a huge dragonfly. The guy I live with caught it with the net, and put it outside. He said not to try to catch it. I watched it fly away.

We had a long film to post here; it took forever to upload. But when it was played back it kept stopping. Neither of us knew what to do. So it was deleted. Another attempt will be made later.

There’s only been a little bit of gardening here, lately, because we’ve been taking naps in the afternoon.

We did go on our evening walk, after the thunder stopped and I had my dinner. You can see that the field has been mowed, and is kind of green. When we had the big rain week before last the creek flooded. I really don’t like that black flag thing, in the left middle of the picture, by the creek, but no one has done anything about it. It’s a piece of landscape fabric, I think, but it’s moderately alarming for it to be just hanging there. We purebred border collies definitely do not enjoy seeing things which are there for no good reason.

On the left of this picture you can see a bunch of branches and twigs which mark the edge of where it flooded, so it was a lot of flooding. Behind the light green bush at center left is the Employees Only section of our garden.The creek is dry now. It almost never has water in it, except when it rains a lot, and then floods. It comes from the foothills a few miles away.

We walked along the canal road, the way we almost always do. I wanted to go into the canal, but the guy I live with said he’d have to go in, too, so we didn’t. He says there are big crawdads in there which could pinch my toes. It started to rain again and I thought we should stand under the willow that hangs over the canal road. It’s kind of scary, but not totally scary, if you know what I mean. The guy I live with likes to take pictures of this tree.

The creek goes under the canal right about where the rust-colored stems of curly dock are.It stopped raining, and eventually we went home. It’s been a pretty good couple of days, I must say. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you a short film about bats and some other stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “The Green Horrors”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Okay, maybe a slightly silly pose.

So it’s August now. The guy I live with said that could be the whole post. It seemed to me that would be pretty ridiculous, especially with all the work that was done in preparation for this post. There were probably about a dozen movies made, none of which turned out to be entirely satisfactory, even the one that took hours to upload.

Fortunately no caterpillars have fallen near me, like they did on the post mentioned above, which took place about the same time of the year, though I am really beginning to dislike having so many flying things land on me, and crawling things crawl on me. The guy I live with said winter would be here before we knew it. “It can snow next month”, he said.

Some work was done yesterday, which was kind of interesting. A small area in the “way back” was renovated, with some expanded shale dug in. This is the first time expanded shale has been dug in; I’d never even seen it before and don’t know what it’s used for. I guess it’s shale that’s been expanded. The digging didn’t take very long at all. Some Yum Yum Mix was added too. This little area was the site of the old compost pile and there are still some charcoal briquets from when the barbecue used to be emptied into the compost pile. One time the compost pile caught on fire and the guy I live with thought that was hysterical. He said he was the only person who thought it was funny.

Anyway, it got later, and eventually the guy I live with noticed that the bats were out. You can see one, there, in the distance. 

This is a bit better. Possibly even a bit scary, especially if you embiggen it.

That’s really all I have for today. There were a whole lot of bats out tonight. It is odd that the high point of summer is next week and yet at the same time it can, as I noted above, actually snow in five or six weeks. The guy I live with has always hated that about living here, but there’s not much that can be done about it, and hating weather seems pretty pointless. Though I did hear something today about the fact that it was sunny all day, which it was. For the first time in weeks and weeks.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me lounging in my fort.

Until next time, then.