the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, indeed, once again it is I, Mani the smallish purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you some very scary news. You may remember me from such terrifying posts as “Fear And Loafing”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristically quizzical pose.I like to ponder the mysteries of the universe from time to time, and I often look like this when I’m doing so. I haven’t figured out very much yet.

I do know, now, that eating “gross dead stuff” is not something that the guy I live with likes to countenance, and also he says that I eat too much stuff that I find on the ground, but he should know that’s what puppies, which I’m, do. You just have to try practically everything because you never know what might be good.

But anyway, it’s been really dry here, like the whole garden has dried out for almost a month, despite the occasional sprinkle, and the guy I live with says that’s okay, but I have to stay in when he sets the sprinkler, which he doesn’t do very often, but some new plants have been planted, and so they need water, he says. Other than that, hardly anything has been going on, and though I know I can make a post out of almost nothing, it’s kind of a lot of work, especially when we devote so much time to excellent napping.

Well, one thing has happened. Or really three. All related. Last night what I and the guy I live with thought was a bird flew into the kitchen, but then the guy I live with said it was a moth, which is a little new to me. I’ve seen them fly around, but none that big. He caught it, and put it in the “bug jar”, where it barely fit. He posted a similar picture on Facebook, so if you saw that one, this one is almost the same. This is an Achemon sphinx, which feeds on the native grape vines here, and there are a lot of those. They just appear, and then grow. The vines, I mean.

He let the moth go out in the front yard, but then I started barking out on the back patio. There was something in the grape vine. Or kind of on it, really.

The guy I live with said that was called a caterpillar, and it was what the sphinx looked like before it became a moth. I wondered if there were such a thing as a dogerpillar and that I could be one of those, and later get wings, but the guy I live with said no, I wasn’t going to get any wings.

He made me come inside and I didn’t care for that very much.

Then tonight, I was out on the patio, minding my own business, and enjoying the breeze. We haven’t had very many breezes this year, and I wondered how there could be enough oxygen if the air is still day after day. He said that plants give off oxygen, which I didn’t know, but that was good because I’d been thinking I was breathing the same air day after day since it wasn’t moving at all. The stuff you learn when you’re little.

So what happened was there was this plop right in front of me, and I didn’t like that at all. The guy I live with agreed that sudden plops right in front of you can be scary, and this one definitely was. Something fell on the patio, and it was ultra-scary.I really thought it needed to be attacked, because guarding the guy I live with is one of my duties, but he said the caterpillar was harmless, and was going somewhere to make a cocoon, so it could become one of those sphinx moths. He picked it up and put it out in the front yard. I still didn’t like the idea of things like that just plopping down in front of me and it was a little disturbing.

The guy I live with says I’m safe for now, and so I guess I can let you go, since things have calmed down enough that I can sleep.

“Oh, I’m brave! I’m just careful!”

Until next time, then.