dumb garden pictures

Here I am yet again. That’s right, Chess the purebred border collie. You may remember me from such wonderful posts as “A Near Miss” and “A Partly Sad Story”.

I take no credit at all for the following dumb garden pictures. I think that the guy I live with needs a new lens. Or he needs to learn how to take pictures. He has this zoom lens that doesn’t take very sharp pictures, except on every third Thursday after a full moon. Here I am watching this process. I’m not sure what’s in focus; maybe nothing is, and the guy I live with thinks this is some sort of metaphor. Whenever something turns out weird, he says it’s a metaphor. This is looking northeast, in the back yard, across what he calls a lawn. You can tell it’s the back yard because I’m in it.

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This is looking northwest, with Rosa kokanica in bloom. It’s had better years, but who among us has not?

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This is looking southeast. There’s the rose on the left.

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This is looking more or less to the west, down the garden path to the “way back” garden. The red thing is a hummingbird feeder.

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Here’s the “way back”. It’s a few feet lower than the rest of the garden, and the green lawn is being replaced so the guy I live with can feel all superior and talk more nonsense about metaphors and stuff. After he gets a new lens, I mean.

The green lawn was supposedly put there for bunnies to eat, instead of them eating the whole garden, but the guy I live with says this arrangement isn’t working, and having a green lawn in a semi-arid climate is something that strikes him as totally bizarre. I kind of like it because he has to set the sprinkler all the time and sprinklers are fun.

He hasn’t mowed the green lawn because he knows you don’t do that when you’re in what they call a “stage two drought”. It looks very rustic.

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So there you have it. The guy I live with doesn’t wear his glasses when he’s out in the garden, so maybe this is the way he sees things and it seems real to him. I think everyone should be allowed to have a few delusions, don’t you?

 

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a near miss

Hello yet again; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, who doesn’t do much these days. You may remember me from such outstanding posts as “A Partly Sad Story” and “Weeding Day’, among others which weren’t enough about me to make them memorable. This post will be mostly about me. Here I am in a characteristic pose, hiding in my fort.

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Today started out nicely, with a good breakfast and walk, and then the guy I live with thought a nap would be a good idea, and it turned out it was. After lunch time the sky got really dark and it started to thunder, so I got scared. Thunderstorms don’t usually pass right over our little neighborhood, they go by it on the north or south, which is perfectly fine with me. I always have to hear about what my life might be like, herding sheep, living in a lean-to out in the middle of nowhere and having to sleep on straw instead of my nice Pottery Barn sheets, with a fan making my side hairs flutter and cool air blowing up my nose, and it has no effect on me at all. Thunderstorms are just plain scary.

This afternoon, though, lightning hit so close even the guy I live with jumped. It struck near the house (it sounded like a gun shot almost, right on the patio), and after it stopped raining, he went out and looked for signs of a lightning strike. He knows about these things. He did say that if I got hit by lightning that my skeleton would be visible for a second or two, and that might be cool.

As I’ve said before, I get to talk about me so long as I show flowers or something gardeny, so here are some flowers. The guy I live with has posted pictures of this before, more than once, but he says that there’s no harm in showing it again. This is Physoplexis comosa, growing in a trough. The guy I live with says this one sowed itself.

There were more physoplexises in this trough but one time my buddy Slipper, who could be extremely naughty, stood on the trough to look over the fence, and accidentally wiped out the original plant. This story has probably been told before, but not as well. The guy I live with says the plural of this plant is physoplexes, but I like the other way better.

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It has these funny little dealibobs on the end which the guy I live with says are for picking up radio transmissions from other planets. I’m not sure he’s telling me the truth.

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So that was my day. We made it through the day like we make it through every day, with lots of napping, and plenty of cuddling during the scary parts. I didn’t get to see my skeleton.

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