Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all the things that have happened here lately. You may remember me from such posts as “Sunsets, The Lamp, And Me”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see how dry it is here. It’s not like super dry, but it’s pretty dry; we haven’t had much of any precipitation since the snow earlier this month.
We did receive more water from the snow than the average precipitation for Denver, though we don’t live in the actual city.
So I have kind of a long story, which will include an intermezzo featuring snowdrops.
Two Saturdays ago the guy I live with loaded a bunch of computers and printers to take to a place called Goodwill.
The car wouldn’t start. This is a three-and-a-half year old car with 4800 miles on it.
He called someone named “Roadside Assistance”, they came out and did something called “jumping the battery”, and the car started.
The nice guy who came said to drive the car for half an hour, so the guy I live with drove all around.
Then I got sick. Fortunately, the guy I live with knew what this was (clostridium), but my doctor wanted to see me, so we went there; I got an antibiotic (hidden in Brie) and special food.
The next day I didn’t want my breakfast, so he called the doctor, who suggested I get chicken and rice.
I’d never had such a thing. The guy I live with said we had both of those things here already, so I got to try it.
Let me tell you, chicken and rice is totally, totally excellent. I got better, and now I get chicken and rice for breakfast and dinner, with a little dry food, too.
In other words I now have a live-in chef.
Now for the snowdrop intermezzo.
This is ‘Xmas’, about to flower.
You may be able to see the large X on the inner segments. It was named for that, and because it flowers at this time of year.
The main crop of snowdrops, which you can see in the “header”, are starting to flower, too.
If it gets colder later, they’ll be fine.
The guy I live with had been looking frantically for the clumps of Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus which he moved to the North Border. There was one clump, but the others were missing.
He posted a picture of what he said were G. peshmenii on Facebook but just a little while ago he realized these were the missing clumps of G. plicatus subsp. byzantinus.
You can see that these are about to flower; this is the right time for them to flower.
Some of these will be moved into what used to be the rock garden, since they can grow in full sun (they often do in their native habitat).
The guy I live with really likes plants that flower at this time of year, rather than (conifers and evergreens aside) having a completely brown winter garden.
Now back to the events of the past week.
Last Sunday, the fourteenth, the guy I live with loaded the computers into the car again, and the car wouldn’t start again.
He decided to have the car towed the following Monday. He called the car dealer place, and also “Roadside Assistance” again.
He had to do a lot of typing on his phone and one thing he read was that the car had to be in something called “neutral”. He told me the car couldn’t be put in “neutral” without the engine running, and if the car wouldn’t start, that was quite a dilemma.
Earlier, he had purchased this little battery-jumper device because he saw his neighbor use one, and he tried it out. The car started on the second try.
Another nice guy showed up, said it was probably the “autostop feature” that was draining the battery because the guy I live with didn’t drive the car much. The car was towed away.
And then he saw the High Wind Warning with high fire danger on Wednesday. The car wouldn’t be ready until then because it needed extensive testing.
As you can imagine, he freaked out.
He’s been talking to someone about anxiety, which he has, and he had to cancel the appointment because of even more anxiety. Kind of ironic.
So he called a place called “car rental”, then a thing called “Uber”; someone came to pick him up and he went and got a car on Tuesday, so we had a car in the garage.
Some people said this was overreacting, the way people not in a similar situation tend to do, but he explained to me that he has a responsibility to keep me from harm.
The wind blew and blew on Wednesday, but nothing bad happened.
He called the “Uber” place on Thursday, and came back with our car. He was so relieved to have “our metal friend” back.
He learned that batteries on cars these days do more than just start the car and maintain things; they’re basically on all the time.
Then on Friday there was another High Wind Warning. The weather people called this a “particularly dangerous situation” (like they did with the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles), with 100 mph (160 kph) winds blowing off the mountains.
This did not make the guy I live with feel calm.
He did a thing I’ve never seen him do: he watered the garden. He never does that at this time of year, even though people say to.
He didn’t want all his precious leaves to blow away.
He watched videos of the 100 mph winds in Boulder, which is a very windy place to say the least, and waited for them to arrive here, but they never did. He said maybe this had something to do with “orography”.
That day, he tripped over a rock and gashed his cheek. He was afraid he’d have to go to the emergency room and leave me here alone with all these dire wind warnings.
But he didn’t injure himself as badly as he feared, and the next day he put all the computers into the car for the third time, and donated them to Goodwill.
And that’s our courageous story. I’m feeling fine, we have our car back and the guy I live with knows the battery operates differently, all the old computers and printers are gone, and I now get chicken and rice to eat.
Happy Solstice, and I’ll leave you with a picture of me doing some gardening.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 