Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, who is busy readying the garden for a change in the weather. You may remember me from such change-oriented posts as “A Change Of Pace” and “Change In The Weather”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristically pensive pose.
Well, things have been pretty much the same for a long time now, and the guy I live with says that things being the same is one of the ways to define sheer excellence, so long as the things are okay, and things have been okay. A turkey got smoked yesterday. This doesn’t happen very often. I got some; it was good. 
But now they say we’re going to get snow and a low of 9 degrees, which is minus 12.78 celsius, if you measure that way. That’s not really all that cold for us; I can still go for my walks and stuff, but we might not have all the doors and windows open for a while.
Some protective teepees were made to cover things that needed covering. They don’t really need covering, of course, but it makes the guy I live with feel better, you know, like he’s actually doing something, instead of just sitting here helplessly in the face of what he claims will be “awful weather”. 
It isn’t all that unusual for it to get cold this early, though our serious cold usually happens right before Christmas, and when the guy I live with worked outside in telephone repair, that was the coldest time of all, and there was a lot of traffic on the icy streets, people doing last-minute shopping, which he says he doesn’t miss at all, though my mommy was at home, waiting for him, so I’m not sure that everything he says is all that true.
Like the business about Daylight Savings time. I still don’t get why my dinner has to be so late, since I know what the angle of the sun means, and my tummy clock is ticking. He says we go through this every year, but that doesn’t seem right to me.
The reason for the teepees is that he’s been waiting for the snowdrop, Galanthus reginae–olgae ‘Cambridge’, to flower, but it’s been growing very slowly. “Nothing is happening”, according to the guy I live with, but, in fact, a couple of weeks ago there wasn’t anything there, and he thought he’d misplaced the snowdrop, and was getting old and losing his mind, because he remembers everything, but couldn’t remember where the snowdrop was, which was unfortunate, since it was a gift.
But then one day he saw the green poking up. This is what it looked like today. 
The guy I live with says the snowdrop was named for Queen Olga of Greece, who was born in Russia, and who married George the First of Greece, who was born in Denmark. That’s almost as bad as the Daylight Savings business.
Anyway, this snowdrop is to snowdrops as autumn-flowering crocuses are to crocuses. It’ll get a teepee for sure.
While he was out in the side yard (the side yard that’s on the north side of the house, so, the shade garden) he noticed this. Another teepee will go here. 
The label says Galanthus elwesii, so he said this was variety monostictus, but he could be wrong.
You might well ask how this snowdrop went unnoticed when there has been a daily pilgrimage out to Queen Olga’s snowdrop, but it did.
Sometime things go unnoticed here. I’ve noticed that a lot, which is why I’ll leave you with a picture of me trying to be noticed. 
Until next time, then.
You may indeed wonder about the title of today’s post. The guy I live with has been tidying up the garden in order to get it ready for winter (that’s me watching, in the picture above), and there was all this commotion on the north side of the house, in a place where there usually isn’t much commotion at all. (Look to the left of the wren house.)
“Do squirrels eat pizza?” the guy I live with asked me. I know I like pizza, so why wouldn’t squirrels?
There was someone else interested in the pizza, too.
And, in fact, yesterday, the cat was seen to be eating a slice of pizza on the garage roof next door, to the south.
It’s not open now, though, because the weather kind of changed today.
I hope you enjoyed this brief but informative post. If anyone ever asks if squirrels eat pizza, you know what the answer is now.
the miserable gardener 