the miserable gardener

spring forward, fall back

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, yet again. You may remember me from such posts as “Making A List” and “Three Percent Humidity” among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose, after a nice drink of water.

The guy I live with, who, to his credit, desperately tries to be focused as much as possible (and I’m not talking about camera work here), set alarms on his cell phone to remind him when to give me my pills (which I’m doing very well on, thanks for asking), and this morning he looked at the clock on the stove and wondered why the alarm hasn’t gone off on his cell phone. Then he looked at the clock on the laptop, and it said an hour earlier than the stove clock.

He wondered if the world had come to an end. He says people say it will, all the time, and nothing ever happens, but he thought maybe today was the day.

Then it dawned on him what had happened.

After a while he started in on his latest project. Fixing the steps up to the shed. I wasn’t interested in this so I took a nap. The original steps, put in way back when, were these railroad-tie-like things which had been treated with some chemical, but the wood eventually fell apart, the way wood does when it’s half buried in the dirt. They were ugly anyway. So then he picked up some 4x4s from when the first part of the fence was put up here, last year, and made steps up to the shed. These were ugly steps too. So finally he fixed everything so the steps up to the shed weren’t the ugliest part of the back yard. They’re not quite done, but you get the idea.

“Sheds”, says the guy I live with, “should be very cozy.” You can see that the shed itself is sitting on railroad ties, which were here when he and my mommy moved into the house. That was back in the days when everyone landscaped with railroad ties. They had creosote on them.

When he was little, the guy I live with would brush creosote on wood, which his grandfather showed him how to do, because that’s what they did back in the old days. It had a very pleasant smell.

And back about the time when he met my mommy, when they were both working for the phone company, the guy I live with was climbing telephone poles and a lot of the older ones had been painted with creosote and he’d come home smelling like it, sometimes. It’s hard for me to believe that’s what he did for a living at that time, but he did, and it was a good job, and after he and my mommy were married, she left the phone company to stay at home for the rest of her life, and that meant that there was always someone at home with us border collies, which the guy I live with says made us very spoiled indeed.

They built the shed together. It’s bolted onto the railroad ties so it will never fly away in the wild. The floor is dirt. The guy I live with did most of the work, with my mommy helping, and then after his work was done, she put in the finishing touches. Shelves, the windows, and so forth. By the way, the hornet’s nest is empty, but my mommy wanted to hang it in the shed.

The slug stuff is there because my mommy thought the picture on the box was cool. We don’t have slugs here. The things in bottles and cans haven’t been used in twenty years. This was shown before but since I’m talking about the shed I’ll show it again, just to be sentimental, which we border collies definitely are. My mommy cut this into the shelf she made.Here’s what the new steps look like if you were standing in the shed (which I know you’re not). That’s me doing an inspection.I understand there was some debate about the necessity of a threshold. My mommy said yes, and the guy I live with said okay, if she thought it had to be there. That was pretty much how it worked. Incidentally he said that a threshold was a wooden board so placed as to keep the threshed grain from falling out of the barn. There isn’t any grain in the shed here, but it adds a quaint touch. No one has ever tripped over it which is what the guy I live with said would happen to him the first time he walked into the shed. He would get impaled on a pitchfork or something and then my mommy would be very sad and wish she hadn’t put in the threshold, but none of that ever happened.

That was our day. Or rather, his day because I mostly just hung around the house (“as usual”, says the guy I live with, though to my credit I did chase a rabbit at Tinkle Time last night), except to go out from time to time to see what he was doing. He did take a picture of a flower, Crocus cartwrightianus ‘Marcel’, which was blooming today. I think we need to have a talk about focusing again.

So we have new steps up to the shed now. When all the sand gets swept away, if it ever does, I might show them again.

I guess that’s all for now. Until next time, then.

dumb squirrel movies

Hello again everyone; yes, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to delight and inform you, as usual. You may remember me from such posts as “The Sun, Finally” and “A Futile Effort”, among so many other wonders of the blogosphere.

I fell out of bed again this morning, really, slid out of bed, and so the guy I live with said it was probably time to get up, which I didn’t think was as funny as he did. Here I am about to say something. I forgot what I was going to say, though.

Oh, well, I could say there’s the new arbor, which was built to look exactly like the one my mommy built at the other end of this little garden, but minus the gate, and so it isn’t really done, because it needs wire stuff on each side, trellis-like, if you will. Trellisy. Better word. You’ll notice a gap in the fence my mommy built, a very uncharacteristic gap, which she claimed she planned to fix, but never did, so the guy I live with will have to do it, and not eventually, either.

“There are too many border-collie created neologisms in these posts”, says the guy I live with, whose opinion here doesn’t count hugely, since I do a better job than he does. Even he admits that. The arbor will look better, and done, too, when it’s all trellisy.

Speaking of new things, the guy I live with insists on trying new approaches to garden photography, and so I’m supposed to show some pictures taken from inside the house, a few of which are through extremely dirty windows.

This is from the upstairs bedroom. It isn’t a bedroom but was built as such. The windows are double storm-type windows and can only be cleaned by being taken completely apart, which the guy I live with has no intention of doing. And don’t look at me; I don’t do windows.

Then, from downstairs, in my mommy’s studio. She wouldn’t even consider cleaning the windows because she said the light, which is very intense at this elevation, was perfectly filtered so she could do her drawing.

She also spent a lot of time writing. The guy I live with would go downstairs to say Hi, the way he did, and she would either put down what she was writing, or tell him to go away because she was writing, and she never let him look at any of the things she wrote because I guess she thought he would be too critical, but he wouldn’t’ve been, of course, and so he never looked at any of her stuff until after she died. And even then, he couldn’t bear to look at much of it, and still hasn’t. There were a bunch of poems, some of which he posted last year, and one published online here, but there was also an unfinished novel, which he read some of, and felt heartsick, or more so than usual, so it just sits there as this pile of notebooks gathering dust.

Here’s what it looks like from downstairs. Mostly cactus, through the window.

And the kitchen window, which is clean. Looking northwest.

And then sort of west. The Wardian case type thing on the table has stuff in it that my mommy put there. She was kind of mysterious.

The wrought iron furniture was the guy I live with’s paternal grandmother’s, and originally it was painted white, then green, then black, which the guy I live with was the color he said it should be. His maternal grandfather, though, who was a gardener, said everything should be painted green, but when the guy I live with read Henry Mitchell and that everything should be painted black, he decided that had to be right, but the black paint sort of flaked off, and in some places the green did too, so you can see the three colors all at one time, and my mommy said she liked it best that way, and the guy I live with almost always agreed with her since she had a better eye for that sort of stuff, but of course secretly he wanted to paint it all black again.

That will probably never happen, because then the furniture would “lose its character”, which I don’t think furniture can really have, but the guy I live with says we tend to assign value to things even though they might not have any to other people, which really annoys people of an older generation when they try to tell the younger generation that a particular colored rock, say, was the treasured possession of an uncle whom everyone in the family liked because of his impression of Woodrow Wilson doing an Irish jig on the White House lawn on a Sunday afternoon in August, but no one really cares about that now, and besides, how would you go about telling that story?

The guy I live with, though, has always liked birdbaths, because his grandparents had one in their garden in Los Angeles, though he doesn’t remember ever seeing any birds bathing in it, though a toad occasionally hopped around under it, so there have always been birdbaths here. The one by the back patio definitely gets bird visitors.

And sometimes other visitors.

And now I can effortlessly segue into our feature presentations. Dumb squirrel movies. The guy I live with filled the bird feeders today and the can that holds the bird seed was open, and so, well, you can see what happened.