Hello again everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to fill in for the guy I live with after what seems like a long absence. You may remember me from such posts as “Watering–The Movie” (in which I starred, playing the role of me) and “The Happy Elephant”, among others.
One of the reasons for the long absence is the, to me, excessive amount of thunder we’ve been having, which I don’t care for at all. Here I am in a characteristic pose, not enjoying thunder.
The guy I live with says this isn’t really such a characteristic pose, and claims that this is much more like it.
Kind of insulting, don’t you think? Well, the weather has been really scary, so I shake a lot. I get cuddled too, in case you were thinking the guy I live with just ignores me.
There’s also been a lot of planting going on. You can tell by the flags he puts up. These are to remind him to water plants. He’s run out of flags now. The lighting is weird because it was all stormy and thundering when he took these pictures.
The flags, of course, are soaking wet from rain. He plants, puts in the flags, runs around like a maniac with the watering can, and then it rains. As you can imagine, he calls this fairly pointless behavior a metaphor. If it’s stupid, then it must be a metaphor.
Which brings me to my point. Yes, I have one. You may recall the pictures he posted of his baby cactus, and all the chest-thumping over the microscopic triumphs. Not to mention the declaration that treatment with gibberellic acid was the only dependable method, then the declaration that it had no effect, then the declaration that chipping was the only practical method. So here comes another metaphor.
Back in January, the guy I live with sowed a bunch of cactus seed in pots, outside, and put them in the seed frames, and forgot about them. Two days ago he was watering the pots in the seed frames, right before it rained, and this is what he found.
These are seedlings of Pediocactus winkleri, a rare species which really isn’t all that exciting except that it’s rare and supposedly difficult to germinate.
Pediocactus despainii. (He blames “hands trembling with excitement” for the lack of focus.)
Sclerocactus whipplei.
There are also seedlings of P. knowltonii and Sclerocactus glaucus. Imagine the chest thumping and declarations that followed this discovery. But of course, they just came up. All of these baby cactus look kind of alike to me.
He didn’t even know anything was happening until he noticed it. Kind of a Schrödinger’s Cactus thing, if you ask me. Of course, what he now says is “Doing nothing is the best practice”, which I think will lead to nothing but trouble, but we’ll see.
So this is what’s been going on. Practically nothing, if you ask me, except for the constant thunder. Oh, the guy I live with saw a spider “as big as you are” on our walk, and I didn’t like that idea very much at all, but today I got to see it, and it was an exaggeration. No surprise there. It was really, really big, but not as big as me. We aren’t going to show pictures of it, so don’t worry.
I hope this wasn’t too boring. I’ll leave you now, with a nice picture of the sunset. Off to the right, an owl is hooting in the tree, but, like so many other things, you’ll just have to imagine it.
the miserable gardener 