the miserable gardener

for whom the bedclothes

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it it I, Mani the slightly small, though not entirely miniature, purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “My New Toy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Up until today the weather was pretty nice, and there were lots of crocuses in flower, but today it started to snow. That’s me in the picture below, there, just being myself.Here I am again. The lens did funny things, but not funny ha-ha, if you know what I mean.The irises are growing pretty well. The ones he sowed seeds of earlier, that is.There was a snowdrop flowering today. You may think this is early, but it’s actually a month late. It’s an early-flowering one, but late. It’s name is….get this….Galanthus elwesii var. monostictus Hiemalis Group. No, seriously. “Hiemalis” is Latin for winter. It snowed a lot more, and the guy I live with pretty much just sat here, though he did shovel, and I got to go on my walk, later. Here I am, on my walk.Here’s a tree with some leaves that are still there. I guess they don’t know they’re called “leaves”, huh. That’s purebred border collie subtle humor. Guess who I learned it from? Like when a couple of ducks flew right over our heads, and the guy I live with said “Duck!”, and then said that’s where their name came from.

I walked under the kind-of-scary, or possibly just eerie, willow, on the canal road.We went down the creek path, while it was snowing. There weren’t any owls out tonight. You can see the path, right there. We made that all by ourselves. Most people walk on the path at the right, but it doesn’t lead to anything interesting.This path leads under an even eerier willow. We didn’t go under it this time, though, because according to the guy I live with, I heard a strange noise, and wanted to turn around. I don’t think that’s what really happened. I think he was getting cold.There’s still water in the creek, but the level is much lower now. There’s almost never water in the creek at this time of year, but this is my first “this time of year”, so I wouldn’t really know. I do know this picture isn’t in focus, but the guy I live with says it’s “atmospheric”. So that was pretty much my day. I did have an opportunity to spend some time on the bed, and that’s why the title of this post is so funny. The guy I live with put the sheets from Pottery Barn, the ones that the late Chess slept on and loved, back on the bed, and even though they were ultra-wrinkled, and clean, I enjoyed them a lot, too. You can see that I’m doing that, right here.

Until next time, then.

still not much happening

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the not-totally-small purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on what’s been going on here, which is hardly anything. You may remember me from such much-more-action-packed posts as “A Velociraptor’s Day”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Here’s the reason hardly anything has been going on here. The guy I live with is starting to complain about it. I like it, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?He’s been doing stuff like this, to keep himself amused. He got some iris seeds from the Aril Iris Society and started to germinate some of them, using this really arcane procedure. He began talking about doing embryo culture instead of this, and having a bunch of test tubes and Bunsen burners and retorts and even maybe a deal-topped table like Sherlock Holmes had. I could only sigh. Obviously there’s something to all of this, because look at the iris seedlings from the last batch of seeds. “You cut across the micropylar barrier to bypass the need for cold treatment”, he says. I knew that, of course. The seedlings are in propagators, which is why the picture looks the way it does.I still go on my walks. I found something really gross and interesting on the canal road this morning, but the guy I live with wouldn’t let me keep it. He gets to play with razor blades and bleach, like you saw in the picture above, but I can’t have something that a coyote left last night. That doesn’t seem fair.

This is me, walking along the canal road this evening, hoping that I can get the thing I’m not supposed to have, without anyone noticing. It didn’t work out, but the walk was still fun. You can see that there’s no water in the canal now. There’s still some water in the creek, but not as much as there was. The guy I live with says it’s much too cold for me to jump into, which is of course what I want to do. I never get to do anything. I go on my evening walk right after dinner, and it gets dark really fast. You can see what the field looked like when we walked past it, before walking down the canal road, and then back, like we always do. Then we go down the creek path in the field.By the time we got back here, to walk down the creek path, which goes to the right of the trees in the middle there, it looked like this. There were bunches of ducks flying in the distance, right to left in the picture, so to the southeast, but they aren’t in this picture, for some “photographic reason”. The guy I live with super-hoped to see an owl, and even more, get its picture, but there weren’t any owls this evening. It started to get cold, and someone, not me for sure, decided we had to go home, which I didn’t really want to do, but of the two of us, I can see much better in the dark, but I guess that doesn’t count. The guy I live with says he needs to see where he’s going, too.