the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about various things. You may remember me from such posts as “Much More Springy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The other day, a friend, whom I hadn’t seen in quite a while, came over to take some pictures in the garden.
I spent some time lounging around, watching the proceedings.
The guy I live with, who’s still somewhat under the weather and super annoyed by it, got some cactus from Cistus Nursery in Oregon; these are going out in the front garden, away from my nose. You can see all the glochids; nasty things.
The cactus may look the same but they’re all different.

For the last year, give or take, the guy I live with has been having a lot of pain in his knees. I mean a lot. So much so that he had a lot of trouble taking me on my walks, and wondered if he’d be able to go up and down the stairs for much longer.
The guy I live with was planning to whine about his knees to the doctor, when he has his annual physical next month.

He ordered a gardening bench, or kneeler, from Garden Talk. He says it’s totally excellent and he could get up very easily after doing some weeding. He’d thought about getting one of these for a while, because even before his knees starting hurting it wasn’t always that easy for him to get up after weeding.
The bench can be turned upside down, too. (Well, almost everything can be turned upside down, but here I mean with a purpose.)
He was also suffering from plantar fasciitis, which he’s had before and said really hurts. He saw an ad on Facebook for shoes specially-designed to help with this.
Here’s a picture of the shoes, and his very stylish compression socks with ladybugs on them, which the doctor said to wear because of the aftereffects of radiation therapy several years ago.
He’s had these shoes for a month, maybe less, and all of a sudden, one day, he said his knees no longer hurt. Not even slightly. He can go up and down the stairs without using a cane or holding onto the rail.
This could be a coincidence, of course, since it’s hard to figure how shoes can make knees better (I don’t wear shoes, so I don’t know), but my walks are now a lot more enjoyable, not hearing all this moaning and groaning, and occasional cries of pain, behind me.

And that’s all I have for today.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today after quite a long absence. You may remember me from such posts as “Practically Nothing”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is mostly what both of us have been doing for the last two weeks.
I had a considerable amount of digestive distress a couple of weeks ago; eventually the guy I live with helped me out of that, and then weekend before last he got really sick.
I mean really sick.
Things are better now but there were a few days when he wondered if he would have to be hospitalized, and worried where I would stay if that happened.
Both of us did a lot of serious napping, especially last week. As you can see, I’m an expert napper.

All the while, the garden smelled like what the guy I live with said was the smell of a 1950s candy counter.
The smell was from this.
The Russian hawthorn, Crataegus ambigua.
Sometimes it can smell awful, but this year it didn’t. Even the house smelled like candy.

We have gotten a little rain, though not as much as we expect in May, and there are other shrubs in flower.

Rubus deliciosus.

Rubus x tridel ‘Benenden’.

Lycium pallidum.

Mahonia fremontii.

The big thing is the fifteenth anniversary of his wife’s death. I know this has been weighing on his mind a lot lately.
Here’s a picture of her, with Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, taken a week before she died.
I know the guy I live with will never get over this, but at this distance in time I guess there isn’t much to say about such things.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me wading through the sea of smooth brome out in the field. We purebred border collies enjoy strolling through tall grass. I suppose eventually this will all be mowed, but until then, this is more fun than walking along the canal road.

Until next time, then.