Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest and most fascinating news from our garden that I can. You may remember me from such fascinating posts as “Something From Nothing”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’d just gotten scratched behind the ears, which always feels good. I’ve been feeling rather excellent lately, and the weather has changed to the point where I can lie out on the patio rug in the evening, taking everything in.
Yesterday there was a mountain wave. That’s a name for a cloud formation. It generally means that there’s a wind blowing, sometimes a chinook, and the wind was very pleasant. The snow is evaporating, and also melting, pretty quickly. 
There’s still snow on the ground, as you can see. The guy I live with, who is notorious for not following instructions, says that’s you’re not supposed to take pictures looking into the sun, but he does it anyway. Sort of looking into the sun, anyway.
A little to the left, and look how interesting things get.
We did a little walking around to see what suffered during our seventy-degree drop in temperature (in Celsius, say from +17C to -23C). The geraniums in pots, or pelargoniums in pots if you like, don’t look so good.
The cypressus, Cupressus montana, looks fine. The guy I live with says this is from Baja California, which is way too weird for me. Maybe “looks fine for now” is a more reasonable thing to say. Winter hasn’t even started yet, really. 
Most of the plants in the new sand pile look fairly good. I know you’re not supposed to look at plants during the winter, or say anything about their survival until next June or so, but we say stuff, and look at things, too.
We walked around the garden, and then that was done. Not everything is super happy, that’s for sure, but most things look okay.
One thing that did happen today was the arrival, in the mail, of a lot of old seed. The guy I live with says some of it still might be viable, and so he’s going to sow it, and see what happens. Gardeners who ordered seed from Czech collectors might recognize this little packet, made out of cigarette paper. He was somewhat moved when he saw this, reminiscent of happy days, now long past. 
It’s true that twenty-eight-year-old seed might not be viable, but a lot of species from harsh climates have seed that stays viable for a very long time. We’ll see, huh.
So, I was going to say that that was our day, but then later on something fairly dramatic, not to mention scary, happened. The guy I live with had taken a picture of a cloud he thought was interesting
and came back inside to look at the picture on the computer, when he heard a sort of low whistling, like in The Adventure of the Speckled Band, but he knew what it was.
Pretty scary, huh?
So the owls are back. I say “owls” because there was a second one, off to the left (south), making the low hooting sound. I don’t know where they went.
Now that really is it. Since I’ve lost a bunch of weight, I’ll try hard not to be carried off by an owl, which would make the guy I live with very sad, though he said that an owl “couldn’t possibly lift me”, which I guess is okay, though slightly rude.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 