the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to explain why I’ve been gone for so long. You may remember me from such posts as “At A Standstill”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Or maybe I should say characteristic run, since I was going out to check something. It was really cold.
You can probably see that it snowed here. I forget what day this was; the guy I live with says it’s never going to stop snowing here, and that it’s just more endlessness.

Lots of people who live here go wild every time it snows, talking about “moisture” and stuff like that. He says that’s a holdover from when everyone had bluegrass lawns, and people really wanted the Denver area to look like, say, Virginia, but that since it only snows in the winter here, and doesn’t rain, people pretend it’s the same as rain, even though it isn’t.
Most of the snow here evaporates, in a process called sublimation (I learn stuff, sometimes), and the snow that melts only penetrates the soil maybe half an inch, and then it freezes, and causes more problems for plants.
The way winters were, so I hear, is that they were mostly warm, with occasional cold, or really cold, spells. Winters here lately have been chilly almost every day.

If you look at the post I mentioned, you’ll see that it snowed then, but there were crocuses in flower. There are no crocuses in flower here now. Everything’s been frozen since last November.

Anyway, last week they were predicting super cold for us on the weekend, and the guy I live with was pretty freaked out. We do have super cold here, but I think he was on edge because of the fire earlier, and he started to worry that the furnace would go out. He has a service plan that would take care of that, but he was still nervous.
We got a dusting of snow, and on Saturday we had a high of two degrees (-16.6C), which I thought was perfect weather for a walk, though my evening walk was cut short because the guy I live with thought it might be okay for me not to wear my boots, but it wasn’t. My paws iced up.
Sunday night it got down to -11F (-23.8C), which was cold, believe me. So cold that the guy I live with went outside with me at Tinkle Time, just to make sure, you know. Nothing happened to the plants in the garden. And the furnace worked perfectly well.

A week or so before the cold struck, the guy I live with got a call from his doctor’s office, saying he needed to come in and get vaccinated, but it was for something called “shingles” instead of Covid-19. He was kind of disappointed that he couldn’t get the latter (that will be next month), but it was very important not to get shingles; he knows someone who lost the sight in one eye because of shingles.
And so, naturally, he worried about the car not starting. So he had two worries, all last weekend. I know, because I was there.
The car started up just fine on Monday, and he “took it out for a spin” on the highway, and then went to the doctor’s the next day.
He felt fairly icky the day after the shot, but got better. He also felt “more than stupid” about the worrying, but I know there are what people call “extenuating circumstances”, kind of like when I get nervous and have to hide in one of my forts.

Then it warmed up, sort of, then it snowed again, then it warmed up (again, sort of).
The guy I live with took this picture today.
There are actually two snowdrops in the picture; one by the plastic label, too.

That’s really all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a blurry picture of me, on my evening walk, before it started to snow…again.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you about our latest adventures. You may remember me from such posts as “Ice Isn’t Nice”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.The last few days have been pretty exciting here, but not in a good way.
The first thing that happened was that I had some distress of one kind of another (the guy I live with said I got a string from one of my Lamb Chops caught in my mouth) and had to go out and eat a bunch of grass, twice, after midnight, a few nights ago. I’m okay now (the guy I live with cleaned up all the grass from the living room carpet); it’s a good thing there was still some green grass out in the garden.
But the guy I live with wasn’t very happy about this. I know he wants me to be healthy and happy, and worries about me.

The other thing was a much bigger deal, if you ask me.

Some time after noon yesterday, when it was really windy, gusting up to fifty miles per hour, the guy I live with smelled smoke, and a few minutes later, there was a large column of smoke west of us. The guy I live with thought it might be pretty close, so we went on another walk, to see exactly where the fire was.
I wanted to look for voles along the creek, because the wind was scary, but he dragged me up to the last street on the west side of our neighborhood (I’d never been there), and this is what we saw:
That’s Mount Morrison, where Red Rocks Amphitheater is, in the distance, about five miles away, to the northwest.
There’s a highway between us and where the fire was.
It was so windy, though, that the guy I live with was pretty worried, and kept wondering if we would have to leave. He was making a mental list of stuff to take. The most important thing, besides me, is a little bag of his wife’s jewelry that the coroner gave him.
The neighborhoods to the north of the highway were evacuated, but then he realized that the fire was moving east, and not southeast, so we just waited to see what would happen.
The wind died down at about five in the afternoon, and the fire was pretty much out soon after that. It burned over 400 acres; there were flames a hundred feet high. We have a very good fire department; the main building is close to us. We walk past it on our night-time walks (which we don’t go on when it’s really cold).

So, whew.
Now there’s the business of the weather. It’s supposed to get down to zero this weekend. No degrees at all. The guy I live with is not thrilled. “We need more degrees”, he said.

Other than that, things here are more or less the same.
On my evening walk today, I heard hooting. (This is me, hearing hooting.)The owls haven’t left to find a nest yet. They were just waking up.Look at those feet.
Pretty scary, huh? I tried to scare the owl but it wasn’t even slightly concerned. I think you can see why.

That’s it for today. We’re still here.

Until next time, then.