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 news from our garden, as well as what I consider to be some pretty dumb pictures, including pictures of stars, no less. You may remember me from such stellar posts as “There And Back Again” and “Time To Get Serious”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a fairly ridiculous pose. 
Here I am on a sunny morning right after my breakfast, and waiting to go on my walk. It seems to take forever to get ready to go, but eventually we go. I know my head is really bright and all; that’s a metaphor. Oh, and that is my hind leg, not someone else’s.
By the way. Leonardo da Vinci, the guy I live with is not. The ramp up the stairs didn’t work, because it was too steep. But he (not Leonardo; the guy I live with) says if I use my front legs and he holds my hips, I can make it up the stairs at bed time. It worked perfectly last night. 
It’s sunny in the morning here, and sunny on my morning walk, but we can see the clouds building up over the mountains, and by noon it’s totally dark and thundering. I don’t like that very much at all. I do like the coolness that it brings, but that’s not much of a trade, if you ask me.
It sprinkled all afternoon and all during the evening. That’s why my post is called “sprinkles”. The guy I live with thought that you might think of things like chocolate sprinkles, but I don’t mean those. I mean stuff like this:
Well, sometimes the clouds do go away around ten at night, and the guy I live with, for no reason I could think of, went out and took pictures of the sky. I should warn you that this part is going to be really boring. I decided just to post two pictures, fortunately for you, huh.
This is the “Big Dipper”. 
And here’s Mars. The red dot. The guy I live with says there are “people who walk among us” who are from that planet, or even planets much farther away. (That’s the star Spica in Virgo, in the lower right.)
Okay, done with the boring part. Sorry about that. Now for some gardening.
We have a whole bunch of Ipomopsis rubra starting to bloom. They’re biennials. The guy I live with (who was fiddling with exposures or something when he took these pictures) says he’ll call the fire department next week and tell them not to worry.
One year there were 120 of these in bloom, but this year, “only” about half that. He hasn’t gotten the cycle down so that there are rosettes this year, for flowers next year. 
Here’s a sphaeralcea in bud, probably S. fendleri, under the oriole feeder. There are so many orioles here, the guy I live with had to buy a whole bunch more grape jelly, and some oranges. 
And the Rocky Mountain bee plant, Cleome serrulata. To get these, which are annuals, all you do is toss seed onto the ground in late autumn, and up they come, by the zillion. (A zillion is a lot, if you didn’t know.) They form a huge root in a very short time, and grow six or seven feet tall if they’re happy. 
Well, that’s really all I have for tonight. Not much has been going on, because the guy I live with hasn’t felt like working out in the garden much, and you can bet I haven’t, not with all the thunder. It’s supposed to thunder all next week, too. Oh well. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 