Namaste, everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to entertain you, because the guy I live with is suffering from ennui, or something similar. You may remember me from such posts as “Stinker’s Revenge” and “It’s Raining Flowers”, among many other delightful contributions.
Like every red-blooded American male, the guy I live with is obsessed with his lawn. I bet he’s been sowing grass seed every single day for two months, and he just ordered a bag of Cody buffalograss seed from Stock Seed. This is to replace the mostly dead grass in the “way back” garden. The big brown area in the picture below is where he sowed some buffalograss seed, and some blue grama seed, but I think he forgot to use his Horticultural Ruler to measure the depth at which the buffalograss seed was planted. It’s only supposed to be planted ¼ to ½ inch deep. He says he might be able rake up some of the mulch and then the seed wouldn’t be planted too deeply, but I have this idea that that won’t work.
The guy I live with also agreed to get rid of the gravel paths in the front lawn (still in the back yard, though), and replace them with wood mulch, so my paws wouldn’t get scratched. He started doing this, and then watered in the mulch, and of course it all flowed down the path and made a big mulchy pool at the lower end. I live with a genius.
This is what it looked like before the mulch was put down. The guy I live with was a little too embarrassed to take a picture afterwards.
If you study the first picture carefully, and the one below, you may see a pattern emerging here.
Now, to back up just a bit, a couple of days ago we were just lounging around in the kitchen, the guy I live with was typing something on this laptop, and a mouse walked into the kitchen. The guy I live with said “Hey!” and the mouse walked out again. Shortly after that, and keeping in mind the pattern emerging in the two pictures I just showed, the guy I live with suggested that we get a cat.
I couldn’t believe my ears. A cat. My grandpa Flurry lived with them here, and he said they were the most useless, smelliest creatures he’d ever known, and I began to worry that the guy I live with had completely lost his mind. A cat; this couldn’t possibly be true. You can tell what I thought of all this by the expression on my face. Surely he didn’t mean it.
Well, he came to his senses surprisingly quickly. I think he could see by the look on my face that this was a really, really bad idea.
So that was my close call. What a horrible, horrible thing to think about.
Let’s look at some plants before I have to go. The little seedlings of Asclepias cryptoceras are still alive. That’s a big deal to at least one of us.
There are hardly any flowers in the garden right now; it hasn’t rained in a very long time, and the guy I live with thinks dry gardens shouldn’t have many flowers at this time of year (my mommy disagreed, and liked to set sprinklers while he was at work). Here, though, is something slightly out of the ordinary, Stanleya viridiflora.
Cool, huh.
Well, anyway, we aren’t getting a cat, thank goodness, so I can stretch out on my soft Pottery Barn sheets tonight, with the fan blowing cool air up my nose, without having to worry about some stinky creature jumping on me and clawing me to shreds.
I’ll sign off now.
the miserable gardener 