Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all the thrilling events of the last week or so. You may remember me from such posts as “Chasing Hawks”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Maybe this isn’t so characteristic after all; you can see how muddy my paws are. We worked in the garden today.
The snow is melting, and the weather has been very nice. It may snow again later this week, but right now it’s nice, and, according to the guy I live with, that’s all that really matters.
I feel I ought to say that for someone who worries a lot this “staying in the moment” business is a bit hard to take, but in his defense he says that no one is perfect.
Speak for yourself, I would say. We purebred border collies set a standard for total excellence.
Basically what happened here is that it got cold, and it wasn’t very pleasant to deal with, and now it’s not cold, and nothing really happened to the plants in the garden.
But one very interesting thing happened to me, just the other night. (The guy I live with was there, too, but this really was about me.)
It was late at night, around midnight, which is Tinkle Time for me.
When the back door opened, there was this loud, very strange sound, kind of like a cat screaming really loudly. The guy I live with tried to make a movie of it but the sound didn’t come across at all.
Naturally I started barking, because defending the homestead with a lot of noise is one of my duties.
And then we saw glowing eyes out by the creek.
It was a fox. The guy I live with said there must have been two of them.
I think I’ve never seen a fox before and so this was very interesting, and I made the guy stay up even later so I could spend more time barking at the glowing eyes. By this time other dogs had been let outside so there was a big barkfest after midnight.
So that was the real excitement in the last week. We don’t do much of anything, so our threshold of excitement is fairly low.
Just today I got to do some exploring north of the canal. This was very interesting, too.
Those big piles of trash were dumped there illegally but no one seems to care. This isn’t part of the green belt behind our house.
I wanted to go all the way down into this gulch, which is where the creek is, but the guy I live with said there were too many branches in the way, for him. He’s a lot taller than I am, which is a problem for him but not for me.
I’ve been down here once or twice before.
This is way lower than, say, our back yard, because the creek bed descends quite a bit once the creek goes under the canal.
We often see glowing eyes here, on my evening walk, but those are raccoons.
And that’s essentially it, for now. It got cold, and now it’s warmer, with a lot of mud; I heard and saw a fox.
I’ll leave you with another atmospheric picture of me on my evening walk.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 