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 the frightful times I’ve been having. You may remember me from such posts as “Another Scary Day”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I was inspecting the creek this morning, after what happened yesterday.

And what happened yesterday, after three dry days in a row,  was very scary indeed. The first thunderstorm started rumbling some time in the evening, and then storm after storm after storm passed over us.

The guy I live with said you could tell the creek flooded a bit last night. You can see the grass matted down along the creek in the first picture.
The pictures on the weather radar page were astonishing, according to the guy I live with. Storms all over the Denver metro area.
It was still thundering at one thirty in the morning, and the guy I live with made me go outside to tinkle, even though I didn’t want to. I was pretty brave, though.
We didn’t get to sleep until about two in the morning.

Then today, there were more severe weather warnings, after a pretty nice morning.
The guy I live with noticed the watch pocket of his jeans was open, and realized he’d lost his “lucky Irish penny” and was really upset about it. I thought he was going to cry. It wasn’t because he believed in luck or thought the penny was lucky; it belonged to his wife, and he carried it around with him all the time.
He said he could always get another one.

And then this happened:

Not much happened, really, except the guy I live with became suddenly much less calm when his phone started beeping warnings about “baseball-sized hail”. That’s when we both went downstairs. I hid under the drawing table in the studio.
The street flooded and some neighbors’ front yards were flooded, but the water receded and when the storm passed over us, I had my dinner, and the guy I live with had his, and then we went out to look at the creek. (The guy I live with said maybe he dropped the penny there this morning, but I don’t think it’s still there.)

Here I am inspecting the creek.  That’s a lot of water, as I’m sure you’ll agree.The guy I live with said that tomorrow is supposed to be dry and breezy. I can hardly wait.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about thunder, lightning, and rain. You may remember me from such posts as “The Rain Movies”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m in my Upstairs Fort, relatively safe from the thunder that was shaking the house today.
It happened yesterday, too. I got some Rescue Remedy, but things were still very scary.

In other words, it rained yesterday.

This morning, everything looked okay, but all of a sudden, the way things happen here, there was a “special weather statement”, with a warning that a big storm was headed our way. We didn’t get any hail, just rain, but the guy I live with took a picture of part of the garden in case bad things happened.
He took some other pictures, too.
This is Echinocereus caespitosus, though it probably has some other name as well.And then there are the ixiolirions. The guy I live with said last winter, which he complained a lot about, was “wonderful” for all the bulbs here, so he said he won’t complain any more. We’ll see about that.
Ixiolirion tataricum.
And then, well, this is sort of what you might you call an object lesson, the guy I live with spent all this time and effort trying to get buffalo gourd (Cucurbita foetidissima) seedlings, in the propagators upstairs. The seeds germinated, but the seedlings died.
So he sowed some seeds directly into the garden, and look what happened. One left, and one right.
Yesterday, and I know I’m kind of going back and forth, the guy I live with spent some time mowing his neighbor’s lawn. The lawn was getting more and more overgrown, but there were reasons for this. His neighbor’s wife died after a long illness, so he decided to do this, since it seemed like the right thing to do, and it was a lot more work than he thought it would be, since all we have for a lawnmower is this “push mower”.
This is a high-quality mower (Green Mountain Mower), but not really suited for mowing tall grass.
He also pruned the rose bushes, and tied up one climber with the Nutscene twine he got a while ago. He got a refill for the can that holds the twine. (You may remember the issue with the Nutscene and Earl, if you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, when Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, was the narrator. If not, see the post “What The Fescue?”.)
He hurt his back, and was very sore from arthritis and stuff, but the lawn got mowed.
He talked to another neighbor about mowing the back yard, with a gas mower, but then it rained. And rained some more.

Well, anyway, it rained today. I had to stay inside, just in case I might get struck by lightning. I hear that’s bad for you.
When the rain finally stopped, I went on my evening walk.
There was a lot of water in the creek.
I kind of wanted to walk along the creek, but the guy I live with said maybe that wasn’t a good idea, because of ticks, even though I have a fancy flea and tick collar which seems to work. It kind of reeks, though, He got it from Only Natural Pet, though he doesn’t think of me as a pet, but rather as a companion with equal standing in our house, and in our lives.
And there are an awful lot of mosquitoes this year.

I think I’ve covered everything. Really not much to report. Except for all the rain.

Until next time, then.