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 happenings at our house. You may remember me from such posts as “The New Way”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’d just had a biscuit, and don’t use napkins, as maybe you can tell.
Not much of anything is going on here; certainly no gardening. This is what it looks like outside, right now.
It was pretty windy today, but not cold, so a bit of the snow has evaporated, and some has even melted.
It’s supposed to snow again tonight. The guy I live with is okay with that.
By the end of the week it will be about sixty degrees F (about 15.5C).
There have been nice sunsets, when it isn’t all cloudy, which it has been, a lot.
We saw an owl the other evening, hooting away, but the guy I live with couldn’t take a picture of it because he had accidentally turned off the display on his camera screen and couldn’t find the button to press that would have turned it on, in the dark.
I got all tough with the owl, growling at it, and it flew away.
He’s been debating about whether to sow all the seeds that aren’t bulbs in pots outside, the way he’s done for over thirty years, or stratify them in the refrigerator like he does the bulb seeds.
He talked to his best friend, who owned a nursery and grew tons of stuff from seed, and she said maybe the refrigerator was better, because there was more control over the seeds, and sometimes, as he’s discovered many times, something happens to the seeds sown outside and nothing comes up.
And anyway, he doesn’t have any peat moss or perlite to make a seed mix along with the coarse sand that he does have, so maybe stratification in the refrigerator is the way to go, this time.
Mostly, he does this sort of thing, while I wander around the back yard loudly lecturing squirrels who try to eat all the suet in the feeder, or I take a nap.
He’s been making jao tze, dumplings. A lot of them.
He found chili oil at the Asian market. Superior chili oil, no less. This is what goes in a dipping sauce for the dumplings you see steaming on the stove.
The main thing in the last ten days or so–and I know most of my readers will find this boring–is that the guy I live with found a misprint in an Urtext.
An Urtext, if you didn’t know, is a printed musical score that’s intended to reflect the composer’s intentions, based on the original manuscript. The instruction was for the violin to play on the C string, which violins don’t have (but violas do). He contacted a person who plays violin and she said he was right.
It was kind of startling to him, but humans do make mistakes, as I’ve noticed.
He said he made a terrible mistake proofreading the columbine book and that bothered him so much that he couldn’t even look at the book after that.
But he also realized that this is what he could have done with his life, proofreading Urtexts and things like that. He would have been “better than excellent” at it, partly because that mistake in the book affected him so much, and also because he is kind of an obsessed nut, if I haven’t made that clear in all the posts I’ve done. (If you think we purebred border collies are obsessed then you’ve never met the guy I live with.)
I suppose it’s sad that a person who’s seventy-one suddenly realizes what he could have done with his life, but he just shrugged that off, since he would have never met his wife, and he went back to thinking about music, Chinese dumplings, and sowing seeds.
So that’s what’s been going on. Not really all that interesting to me, and maybe not to anyone else, but the guy I live with said that was the story of his life.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me all lit up on my evening walk.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 