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.
In this next one you can see the squirrel doing a funny kind of tap dance. I guess squirrel hind feet aren’t built to balance on trash cans.
I think that’s enough for time. I know I kind of ramble. You would too if so many exciting things happened where you live.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 