the miserable gardener

Hello everyone; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here today to bring you something completely different, which I hope you will find entertaining. You may remember me from such illuminating posts as “Show And Tell” and “Things From Afar”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m lying in the living room on a nice sunny morning, wondering why I’m not getting more biscuits and why the guy I live with isn’t getting ready for our morning walk. Could he have forgotten? I did get another biscuit (whew, huh), and got to go on my morning walk, a few minutes later. It’s a beautiful day today, by the way.

I have something quite special for you today. Namely, some movies. I wanted to say “some films”, but the guy I live with said that might be too pompous, and we wouldn’t want that.

The titles were something we had to discuss. I thought “The Mice Movies” would be better, since the movies we have for you aren’t of just one mouse, but the guy I live with said no, the word mouse here can be a synecdoche, and so I guess we’ll go with that. He vetoed “Mice: The Movie”, for reasons which may be obvious.

Anyway, here they are.  There’s a pile of sunflower seeds on the edge of the patio, and it attracted some visitors. The guy I live with lay on the kitchen floor, with the camera resting on the metal threshold, which you can see in the lower right. I was lying in my fort and got all excited when the guy I live with lay down in front of it, so I got out to see what he was doing. The clattering sounds are from my toenails on the kitchen floor. I don’t know why the camera amplifies the sound of the highway and stuff so much, but it just does.

I even have some “deleted scenes” for you, those being practically obligatory these days. In the first one, the photographer begin to snicker, which I found most undignified. (You can hear him doing that in the feature film, too.)

In the second, the guy I live with said I spoiled it with all the clattering and heavy breathing.

I hope you enjoyed the movies as much as I did making all the noise to accompany them.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest and greatest news from our garden. You may remember me from such magnificent posts as “A Winter Wonderland” and “Of Seeds And Soil”, among so many, many others.

Here I am with my characteristic nose.The guy I live with was sitting on the back patio, admiring his work, and I came up to get cuddles, with you can see I got.

I got really close, like I like to do. That’s my nose, there. “His work?” you say? Why yes, the guy I live with had a bunch of pea gravel delivered this morning, after our walk.It took him and hour and a half to move all the pea gravel, and that included a short break to drink some water. When he does decide to do something, it gets done.

This is what got done.If it looks like that’s a pile of pea gravel in the middle of the lawn, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. The guy I live with said it was “time to get serious” about making the little bed he decided should go here instead of looking at the dead grass all winter. Granted, blue grama is nice in the summer, but he thought looking at a pile of pea gravel would be more interesting.

It’s already planten now, with a white-flowered beavertail cactus which he kept tripping over in the place where it was before it was moved here. He could have just not tripped over it, but he figured moving it would be more practical.You might be wondering about “planten”. The guy I live with and my mommy saw that word on a sign at a nursery and so used it from then on. “Are the plants I got planten yet?” Like when they saw Anacyclus depressus for sale with a tag that said “Mr. Atlas Daisy”, it became Mister Atlas from then on.

Some other things. In case you thought sowing seed outdoors didn’t work, well, look here.

And here’s a tulip. The label says Tulipa dubia, but that’s a yellow tulip, and the guy I live with, being a total tulip snob, now buys his tulips as bulbs which were grown from wild- collected seed (or wild-collected bulbs from which seed was used to propagate the bulbs), but he doesn’t really know which species it is, which is none too impressive for a total tulip snob. He could look it up in the tulip book, if that weren’t so much effort. (Opening the book, looking at stuff, etc.)

He says it’s “the tulip version of Audrey II”. I think it was just colder last night than the tulip wanted, and so it’s having a good lie-down.That’s definitely all I have for today. Now I have something else in the lawn that I have to walk around.

Until next time, then.