Greetings and salutations everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to amaze and delight you. You may remember me from such exceptional posts as “Baby Pictures” and “A Man, A Plan, A Gazoon”, among others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. (This is to make up for the ridiculous shot of me later on.) You also may notice that I look, um, wider than in some of the other pictures of me when I was younger. This, of course, is because I’m totally buffed from all my walks, dragging the hapless guy I live with along the canal road.
So, about the crisis. The guy I live with has been fretting about the North Border, and how awful it looks. A while back I mentioned that he said it was “half disaster and half catastrophe” and now he adds “and also half not what I want at all”. And then today, in the middle of putting up a fence behind the border, which he’s been talking about doing that for about twenty-five years, he moved a whole bunch of plants out of the North Border and now it looks like this.
The kind of thing you don’t see in gardening magazines, for sure.
Since it’s my mommy’s birthday today and he didn’t want to feel desperately sad just staring out of the window, he said, as he dug out plants left and right (a lot of plants he just put in this year), that what he’s going to do is make a huge sand pile there so he has more room for the bulbs he’s obsessed with. He says gardening should make us happy and who cares if some people disapprove of a sand pile right in the middle of the garden. Or on one side of it. I sat and watched him do this most of the day, after he finished the section of fence he was working on. (He ran out of wood.)
Speaking of wood, this business seems to be getting out of control.
He doesn’t know why the yellow jackets are doing this, but, he says, one thing’s for sure, people will definitely wonder about these holes. He’ll tell people they were done by aliens. Of course.
He went out in the dark and wrapped the branch with tree wrap. There were still a few yellow jackets there and the holes they’d chewed were oozing sap. Maybe they’re getting a sugar fix or something.
And here’s a picture of Colchicum speciosum ‘Innocence’. ‘The real thing this time”, according to the guy I live with.
A little later in the afternoon, while I was napping, he was taking more pictures of the yellow jackets, and I came outside to see if he was going to get stung. He took this picture of me and I don’t think it’s very complimentary.
I was just wondering what he was doing, that’s all. No need to make me look like a complete idiot. The guy I live with said I could post some pictures of me and my buddy Slipper to make up for it. This is me with the partly pink nose. I was really cute then. Still am, of course.
Here we are in the kitchen. I’m on the left. You can see how easy it was for my buddy Slipper to look really sad if he wanted to.
And here we are down in my mommy’s room. My buddy Slipper is looking out the window; not an easy task because my mommy didn’t want the window washed because of “the light”. The “throw” on the chair is about the city of Littleton, where he moved after his family left California. The pencil drawings are some she did before she met the guy I live with. She was self-taught. The table on the right is where she drew. The table on the left is part of the set of rattan furniture and it’s really, really old.
Well, I’m just about done. I know this hasn’t been exactly focused, but that’s kind of the way things are here now. Since it’s my mommy’s birthday, and I talked about the two of them sitting on the patio, and since it’s October, here are two pictures she took of the patio table.
She liked to decorate things, in an artistic way.
Let’s see. The guy I live with says the sand might be delivered next week. “By the sand man”, he claims, which makes me think I should take a nap.
I hope you enjoyed this post, except for the one silly picture of me. Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 