the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today, well, to make another post. You may remember me from such posts as “Seed Time”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This was on my morning walk, just today. You can see how many dogs have been out in the field.

There are some places with no snow at all.
It’s supposed to snow tomorrow, and then maybe next week, when it’s going to be even colder than it is now. I hear quite a bit of complaining about how cold it is, because we rarely have winters like this, with steady cold, as you can see if you look at posts made in January in past years.

We heard hooting on my evening walk yesterday, but the guy I live with couldn’t find out where it was coming from. Some place about a block east of here.

Today we had Opera Day. Yes, again. I got to listen to Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (the elixir of love), though I could tell it was making the guy I live with both happy and melancholy at the same time (because his wife loved the Metropolitan Opera quiz on the radio, on Saturdays).
He went downstairs into his wife’s studio and took a picture of the view out the window, which makes him very sad. He’s posted pictures of this view many times.
Not only did his retirement not go in any way that was imaginable to him, but about six months after he retired he lost all sense of what day it was, and it’s been like that ever since. He has to look at the calendar on the wall here, or at his phone, or the laptop, to figure out what day it is, because a word like “Monday” no longer has the meaning, or “flavor”, that it did when he was working.

Which is why, suddenly today, he realized that he’d forgotten to stratify the calochortus seeds he got some months ago. It turned out there weren’t as many as he thought, so this didn’t take very long at all. The seeds need at least a couple of months in the refrigerator.
I have some pictures of actual calochortus growing in the garden here.
There are some seedpots of calochortus that were sown last year; the seeds germinated after spending time in the refrigerator, and then they were put in pots. There were leaves, and then they disappeared for the summer.
Hopefully just for the summer, and not forever.

The guy I live with said he was going to be very irked if the calochortus didn’t start appearing soon.
You can see that there are a few pots of them, upstairs.
If nothing happens in a few months, I’m pretty sure there will be more than a furtive tear shed. He went to a lot of work, with these.
(Those pieces of wood are to make it easier to slide the flats out.)

And that’s all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me trudging home on my evening walk.

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 bring you a partly me-related post. You may remember me from such posts as “Expletives Deleted”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
For good measure, here I am again, a bit later.
You can see I have a lot of Lamb Chops with me on the bed. I share this bedroom with the guy I live with, though sometimes I spend time in my Upstairs Fort, which you can see there, and sometimes I sleep in the chair in the living room. The guy I live with said that some of the other purebred border collies who lived here slept in that same chair. The chair is as old as the couch; about ninety years old.It’s covered with a worn-out blanket, or something, in case my paws are muddy, which they sometimes are.

Anyway, I think you can see what it’s like outside, here.
The guy I live with doesn’t know what to do. We’re not used to this sort of thing at all.
We had Opera Day again, yesterday. Don Pasquale.
The guy I live with likes opera, obviously; Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, already told the story of how the guy I live with went to the opera once and Princess Grace of Monaco was sitting in the same row as he was.
He wouldn’t be able to sit for that long, these days. He has trouble with his hip, though the doctor hasn’t said he needs a new one. Yet.

One of the things he’s been doing, besides making hundreds of dumplings, is cooking, so I’m instructed to show some pictures of food, just to prove that he doesn’t spend all of his time staring out the window and moaning.
These are Sichuan-style dumplings with chili oil and other things. (True, they’re really supposed to be won tons, but the guy I live with hasn’t made any won tons, yet.)
None of this is what some people would call “hot” food.
This is vegetarian ma po tofu:
And, finally, fried rice. This was a different recipe from his regular one, and the guy I live with almost gagged at the suggestion of adding a whole tablespoon of salt. He didn’t add any salt.
The fried rice recipe also called for lop cheung, Chinese sausages; there’s a frozen pack of them at the back of the freezer, but the guy I live with forgot to thaw them out. He says they’re kind of an acquired taste; sweetish.

He’s been using a relatively new wok with a wooden handle, but this is the wok that’s been here for thirty-five years. It was his wife’s, and is well-seasoned.
It gets cleaned with a traditional wok brush.
It’s better that he’s cooking all the time rather than eating all the time. (I certainly wouldn’t mind eating all the time.) There are no snacks in the house, for him. No cookies, candy, cakes, or pie, either. (I think there’s some ancient Christmas ribbon candy in the pantry, but that’s just for the sake of appearances.)
He spends a lot of time reading about food, too.

I spend a lot of time thinking about food, when I’m not asleep, anyway.
I sleep on the couch, of an evening (I always liked that way of talking), and then when I get peckish, which is often, I come into the kitchen with with my “biscuit stare”.
You can see that the guy I live with hasn’t put away his Sorels. He rarely has a use for them, fortunately, but he wore them a lot when he worked outside, on cold, snowy days. He slips them on to go outside when the bird feeders need to be filled, which is a lot, because the birds are constantly eating, like I’d like to be.

If you didn’t know, biscuits taste best when they delivered to me on the couch.
I know this sounds a bit spoiled, but the guy I live with said that Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, liked to have his biscuits brought up to him when he was lying in bed. That was spoiled.
I’ve never asked the guy I live with to bring me biscuits in bed. (But it gives me an idea.)

I’ll leave you now, with an elegant picture of me doing the other thing I like to do on the couch, dreaming of biscuits, and warmer weather so we can do some gardening.

Until next time, then.