the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you our latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “More Boring Stuff”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It was forty-five degrees today. (That’s 7.2 Celsius.) Pretty toasty in the sun, and let me tell you, the sun here is very warm, because we’re closer to it than most people are.
The snow is melting, slowly.

This is what it looked like night before last, at about midnight, when it was Tinkle Time. It was cold.
We’ve had an issue with rabbits getting into the garden, and the guy I live with was pretty upset with me when instead of going outside for the last time at night, to tinkle, in the freezing cold, I spent a long time chasing a rabbit around the back yard. (I didn’t catch it, but it was good exercise.)

It’s going to get warmer and warmer, but then maybe snow a little at the beginning of next week.

It was so nice today that the guy I live with raised the plastic sheets that were covering the snowdrops planted in pots.
Very stylish-looking, isn’t it? The guy I live with thought he might start a blog called Elegant Garden Design, but I wasn’t really sure about that idea.
The plastic was just to help keep the soil from freezing when it got very cold, because that slows down the snowdrops, and he mainly wants them to increase.
The soil is frozen solid where that two-by-four is; the wood is so he can kneel down to look at the snowdrops. I worry every time he kneels in the garden, because he might not be able to get up. (The other pieces of wood are there so he can lift the plastic without having to kneel down, or were to keep the plastic from blowing away.)
But see the little white dots? This is what they are.
And in the front yard, there are snowdrops that have escaped from the main flock in the shade garden:
The guy I live with said that some plants use glucose to create heat so they can push through the snow. This is called thermogenesis.
There’s still not enough energy in the zillion snowdrops in the shade garden to be able to get through the snow, but maybe some warmer temperatures will help with that.
I don’t know why that cage is still there. It was to protect some colchicums several months ago.

Crocuses can do thermogenesis, too, but this poor thing got frozen first. This is Crocus laevigatus. It’s normal for it to flower in late December.
There still could be some more flowers, but the guy I live with says probably not, which is okay.

Someone is coming out this weekend to give a quote on a new furnace (another form of thermogenesis, maybe), and now that it’s become nicer, the guy I live with said he’s “firm in his resolve” not to let the nice weather make him think we don’t need a new furnace. The thing is fifty years old, with some corrosion and all sorts of weird wiring.
And I’ll get to watch all of this.

So that’s our news, I’ll leave you with a picture of me in what I think you’ll agree is a pretty relaxed mode.

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 the horses, and some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Small Thoughts”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
At least the sun is shining. But it’s really windy and not very pleasant to be outside.
And it’s supposed to get colder next week.

This is driving you-know-who right up the wall. Nothing but cold, cold, cold, when it would normally be pretty warm here, at least from time to time.
So the guy I live with decided to have the furnace checked. I worry about things like whether or not I’m going to get my dinner, even though I get it on time every afternoon, but the guy I live with worries about a lot more things than that. Probably because he has no one else to talk to, here, except me.

The furnace-checking person came today, and he was really nice. The guy I live with traded stories about working outside and going into all these peoples’s houses.
I watched the whole thing from the door to the crawlspace, a place I’d never really seen. The guy I live with went in there, too, and they talked about the awful crawlspaces they’d been in. Ours is pretty nice, actually.

So the upshot is we’re getting a new furnace, later this summer. The guy I live with is a lot less worried about having to pay for a new furnace than he is with the idea of living with a fifty-year-old furnace if it winters are going to be this (and here I have to delete the adjectives used by the guy I live with) cold for so (again deleting adjectives) long.

But when they were down there, the guy I live with saw something he didn’t recognize. He turned it over, and brought it out of the crawlspace.
This is a horse. I know, because I’ve seen one. They’re pretty big and scary.

The guy I live with only vaguely remembered his wife drawing this, because his memory was of “the other” horse drawing. This one:
Now we have two pencil drawings of horses. I’m not sure what the guy I live with is going to do with them; there’s no room to hang them on the walls.
He thought he’d given the second drawing to someone, but obviously not.

Sometimes he offers things to people and they never come to get them, which I think is very weird. Maybe they forget, or maybe they hope the guy I live with will drive all over town making deliveries.

I suppose we could offer them for sale at our roadside dumpling stand.

I guess that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me hiding behind the sansevierias on the Italian green marble table in the living room. The guy I live with is “into” sansevierias. (Even if they’re now in the genus Dracaena.)
Well, I’m not really hiding; I like to sleep under the living room window, just like other purebred border collies who lived here did.

Until next time, then.